3.5e Wizard build SOS!

[Gimblegamble]

Welcome welcome, everyone! I have been looking for a 3.5e community to look for some advice, and I believe I may have found it. As a person who played entirely 5e until being invited into a long-running 3.5e campaign, I feel like I'm proverbially having my first pint in this edition's whole gig.

Either way, without knowing what a Prestige Class was, I was tasked with creating a level 17 character - being the masochist I am, I chose Wizard, and after three solid weeks of poring through an ungodly amount of sourcebooks (and, perhaps, a look enough at Treantmonk's guide to Wizards only long enough to snag parts of a build), I mashed together what can only be described as a reasonably well-informed third-grader's scrapbook project who only told their mother it was due the next day after all craft supply stores have been closed for hours past.

Regardless, we're level 17, and I have no goshdarned clue what I'm doing with my character in the future. Whatsoever. No ideas on what PrC class to take (pour one for Incantatrix which was promptly banned by the DM - even my smooth-brained, weaning-off-5e self understood how powerful that one is), and if anyone could provide some insight as to what I should be doing next, you will receive brownie points delivered on my behalf equal to the amount of times I make my DM sweat.

Note: Our DM is quite lactose intolerant - cheese is not permitted (and neither is what I've heard the 3.5e-equivalent of substitution dairy, hence the banning of both BoXD and BoED sourcebooks in our campaign).

Here's my current build - honestly, I have absolutely zero clue where to go from here at all. We plan to hit epic levels.
My character is a shapechanging, certainly evil Yuan-Ti. The flavor isn't necessarily important aside from his affinity for Polymorph & Shapechanging spells. Fun fact: I only realized the potential brokenness of such spells after creating the character when my DM said to pick 30 'forms' my character would know since I'm walking into level 17 and such spells require you to be 'familiar with' the creautere. Boy, that was a fun time...more sourcebook trawls, yay...
Race - custom-homebrewed Yuan-Ti without CL. Purely for flavor reasons, has little impact on mechanics.
Classes, Feats, the kitchen sink, and possibly even the entire sewer system underneath:
-23 Intelligence factoring in racial improvements & ASIs, ups to 28 with a Headband of Intellect +5.
-Class: Wizard. No familiar - I snagged the Sudden Shift ACF? I believe it was?
Level 1: Wizard 1. Specialist Transmuter, axed Enchantment and Evocation. Scribe Scroll Feat, SF: Transmutation.
2: Wizard 2.
3: Wizard 3. Spell Penetration Feat.
4: Transmuter 4. Rounded off 15 Con with an ASI.
5: Master Specialist 1. SF: Spellcraft Feat.
6: Master Specialist 2. Ability Enhancer Feat.
7: Master Specialist 3. GSF: Transmutation.
8: Fatespinner 1.
9: Fatespinner 2. Minor Shapeshift Feat.
10: Fatespinner 3.
11: Fatespinner 4.
12: Paragnostic Apostle 1 - Mind over Matter. SF: Conjuration.
13: Paragnostic Apostle 2 - Penetrating Insight.
14: Paragnostic Apostle 3 - Mind over Body.
15: Archmage 1 - Mastery of Shaping. Iron Will taken (prereq for Reserves of Strength)
16: Archmage 2 - Arcane Reach.
17: Archmage 3 - SAB, Shapechange.

Spells are a whole new can of worms. I think I chose a decent spell list with the minor omission of forgetting literally every single fog cloud / solid fog derivative, of which I have kicked myself enough to qualify it as a workout.

My current item loadout is a Black Robe of the Archmagi, a Ring of Wizardry 3, a Headband of Intellect, +5, an Orange Ioun Stone, a Metamagic Rod of Quickening up to 6th-level spells, and a sentimental stuffed teddy bear. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'm looking to be a healthy mix of a debuffer / controller / buffer. I'll leave damage to our Rogue & Paladin. I didn't come in building a Wizard with the intention of dealing too much damage.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, whether that be in terms of feats, spell recommendations, item recommendations, PrC help, future build tips, or even your ideal pizza order. After typing this, I realized I haven't had dinner.

Thanks for reading,
-Gim

[gijoemike]

Oh there are so many questions. Wizard is the most difficult class to play and you have never played 3.X before? And starting at lvl 17 to boot?


The first thing we need to know is the list of house rules your DM uses. You stated he doesn't like cheese or substitute cheese. He has banned BoVD and BoED. That is a start but he has also disallowed Incantrix. Psi-crystals and psonics in general allowed?

Has he banned persistent spell for 24 hour buffs? Has he somehow limited planer binding or minion mancy with necromancy school. I noticed you didn't ditch necromancy.

Is spell pen a entry feat for a later class?

How much money do you have to build this 17th level character?

[Bad Wolf]

Well if it's your first game, I'd really recommend playing something a little more simpler like a Sorcerer, especially if you're playing into epic levels. Wizards can be complex even at lower levels. But if you're stuck on that, alright?

Firstly, the Abrupt Jaunt ACF you mention is only open to Conjurer Specialists, so you can't take that. The Transmuter option gives you a burrow, fly, or swim speed until the end of your turn/next turn (if cast as an immediate action).


4: Transmuter 4.

What is this referring to? Yaun Ti doesn't have any racial substitution levels, and most wizard acfs happen at 1, 5, or 10th levels. Dont recall anything that happens at 4th level.

Hmm. Fatespinner and Paragnostic Apostle aren't bad, but is there a reason you're not taking Master Specialist past third level? You get some pretty good benefits for specialist wizards.

So something like Wizard 3/Master Specialist 10/Whatever 7. Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil would fit in perfectly, but if your DM banned Incantatrix they definitely wouldn't okay it.

[Maat Mons]

Minor nitpick, there's no such thing as a Headband of Intellect +5. It comes in +2, +4, and +6.

The best pizza is unquestionably cheese deep-dish pizza.

With regard to the suggestion of going with Sorcerer, it is simpler in play, but it's also higher-stakes to build. Only go that route if you have someone very knowledgeable closely advising you on your spell selections. Wizard has more bookkeeping, but it's nowhere near as big a problem when a Wizard scribes or prepares a bad spell as it is when a Sorcerer learns a bad spell.

If you go epic, the Epic Spellcasting feat is incredibly powerful. It can be cheesed pretty hard though, so I don't know if your lactose-intolerant DM will allow it.

What are your limitations on items? Can you only buy "off the shelf," or can you commission custom items? Actually, I should be more specific when I say "custom items." Can you combine multiple items into one item? Can you re-slot items?

[pabelfly]

Wizard is a hard class to play. You need to know the mechanics of a lot of spells and you need to prepare them in advance of casting for that day.

I'd second Sorcerer as a start ppint if you can change it. Sorcerer has a smaller list of known spells, so are easier to learn, and gets to decide what they cast as needed.

[Rebel7284]

Do you want to play Dungeons and Dragons or Excel Sheets and Pivot tables? Cuz playing a 17th+ level wizard is how you get the latter.

- Craft Contingent Spell feat is extremely good for any wizard, especially one that banned evocation and thus doesn't have contingency proper.
- Boccob's blessed book + all the good spells is important. Note that you can either pay other wizards to copy spells off of them or buy scrolls to put the spell into the book yourself. I believe that for low level spells, the former method is cheaper. Regardless, no reason to keep to the spells you learn at level up.
- Combat at higher levels is extremely rocket tag and lethal, get as many immunities as you can from spells and items.
- There is no such thing as "too paranoid" for a high level wizard, always be prepared.
- Epic spellcasting feat completely throws all balance out of the window and D&D becomes a storytelling game with occasional auto-succeed and auto-fail rolls.

[Emperor Tippy]

Specializing is for insects. Generalist is a far superior choice.

Mindbender qualification is a matter of a couple of skill points, and Mindbender 1 gets you Telepathy (100 ft.) for effectively no cost. Even if you don't take Mindsight (and you should), that is a straight up good choice.

You want to take Spontaneous Divination at level 5, its an Alternate Class Feature from Complete Champion that trades your 5th level feat for the ability to spontaneously cast any divination spell that you know by sacrificing a spell slot of an equal level spell. What this means in practical terms is that you need never prepare any divination spells ever again and, if you invest the money is scribing all of them into your spell book, spontaneously cast every Wizard divination spell in the game as needed.

If your DM allows it, take the Transmutation Domain Wizard (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/variantCharacterClasses.htm#transmutationDomain) variant.

Four levels of Fatespinner isn't bad, I mean it again costs you nothing and is thus better than straight Wizard but its also not that great.

With PA, you want Mortal Coil as it gives +1 CL to Shapechange.

Take more Archmage. Mastery of Shaping, Mastery of Elements, Spell Power, and Arcane Reach are all great abilities. I would trade out Fatespinner levels for Archmage.

Reserves of Strength depends a lot on your DM and whether they allow it in the first place. And how far they allow it to break CL limits. If you can only exceed them by the 1/2/3 from RoS then its an alright but not great feat, if you can totally ignore them then it becomes quite good.

[Fizban]

EI chose Wizard, and after three solid weeks of poring through an ungodly amount of sourcebooks (and, perhaps, a look enough at Treantmonk's guide to Wizards only long enough to snag parts of a build), I mashed together what can only be described as a reasonably well-informed third-grader's scrapbook project who only told their mother it was due the next day after all craft supply stores have been closed for hours past.
I forsee-

Regardless, we're level 17, and I have no goshdarned clue what I'm doing with my character in the future. Whatsoever. No ideas on what PrC class to take (pour one for Incantatrix which was promptly banned by the DM - even my smooth-brained, weaning-off-5e self understood how powerful that one is), and if anyone could provide some insight as to what I should be doing next, you will receive brownie points delivered on my behalf equal to the amount of times I make my DM sweat.

Note: Our DM is quite lactose intolerant - cheese is not permitted (and neither is what I've heard the 3.5e-equivalent of substitution dairy, hence the banning of both BoXD and BoED sourcebooks in our campaign).
That. Exactly that result.

To put it bluntly: instead of spending three weeks pouring over internet char-op guides (or even just sourcebooks without any internet feedback), you should have spent 5 minutes asking your DM what sort of things they are and are not okay with. Because even if you didn't recognize any of it at first, you would still have a list of things to look for, and to not bother wasting your time with. And if the DM can't be bothered to or just flat out can't actually tell you what is okay in general (only reacting to things one at a time when you bring them up), they have no business telling you to make a 17th level character out of nothing, or indeed, running a game that starts at 17th level out of nothing or progresses into epic levels. Not if they expect it to be anything other than flying by the seat of their pants into just making things up territory.

Except you end that paragraph with "brownie points for making my DM sweat." Which means that you're intentionally feeding into the toxic char-op attitude. You don't want to make a character that will fit in the game, you want to make a character that is more powerful than the DM expects it to be, specifically by getting something past them. Your DM has banned things that are obviously too powerful, so you want the forum to tell you things the DM isn't aware of and/or combine them in ways that the DM isn't prepared for, because you don't have the knowledge to do it yourself. Which is explicitly what the DM has signaled you should not do, by the fact that they did in fact ban something they know is too powerful.

Even if the DM has said they totally know everything and want you to come at them bro because this is DM vs player time, 9/10 times they are not as awesome as they think they are, and deliberately calling upon The Internet to succeed in such a game defeats the entire purpose by making it DM vs The Internet rather than the actual player. But if they had said that so specifically, I'd think you would have mentioned it up front, rather than the rather weasily phrase of "make them sweat." The player is never supposed to make the DM sweat. The DM runs the game, for the players (and for the DM, for fun, because it's a game). The DM takes on 4x or more as much responsibility, and has absolute control over the literal rules and game/level/encounter design of the game. You can't make the DM sweat, and if your DM is "sweating," it means the player needs to back off. Because the players still have their own responsibility to the game even if the DM turns out to have bitten off more than they can chew.

Treating 3.5 like it's some badly written spaghetti code un-patchable MMO where the DM is barely allowed to do their job of patching the game, is why this edition has a bad look. If your character steps over the line, they can should and must get nerfed back into position. And people who are deliberately antagonistic are not fun to have in a cooperative team game where one person, the DM, has the explicit job of of losing on purpose (but hopefully, with style).


Here's my current build - honestly, I have absolutely zero clue where to go from here at all. We plan to hit epic levels.
My character is a shapechanging, certainly evil Yuan-Ti. The flavor isn't necessarily important aside from his affinity for Polymorph & Shapechanging spells. Fun fact: I only realized the potential brokenness of such spells after creating the character when my DM said to pick 30 'forms' my character would know since I'm walking into level 17 and such spells require you to be 'familiar with' the creautere. Boy, that was a fun time...more sourcebook trawls, yay...
Evidence that your DM is fully in over their head. A list of forms does not significantly reduce the power of Shapechange at all, particularly not if it's that long (you should know this if you've read the guides on Shapechange, ie: infinite free Wishes as a starting point)- but at least they've used a plain flat number rather than making up some sort of formula based on stats or skills that provides only a false sense of limitation.

My advice for the DM would be to be very sure of how their high level game is supposed to function and fix Shapechange to match, before having someone read a dozen books and build a character around it. Sending someone to make a list of 30 forms guarantees that they will research more, and more powerful forms than if you just said "sure, within reason, and have your changes ready so you don't slow things down."


Note: Our DM is quite lactose intolerant - cheese is not permitted (and neither is what I've heard the 3.5e-equivalent of substitution dairy, hence the banning of both BoXD and BoED sourcebooks in our campaign).
Considering that "cheese" doesn't mean anything on its own, this statement is useless. We know you've mentioned Incantatrix and they've said it's banned, but this build using more than 5 books, and the single spell of Shapechange itself, both easily qualify as cheese on their own.


Race - custom-homebrewed Yuan-Ti without CL. Purely for flavor reasons, has little impact on mechanics.
Classes, Feats, the kitchen sink, and possibly even the entire sewer system underneath:
-23 Intelligence factoring in racial improvements & ASIs, ups to 28 with a Headband of Intellect +5.
I'd be more interested in the starting ability scores and generation method and racial modifiers rather than the final number, since it tells more about the game.


-Class: Wizard. No familiar - I snagged the Sudden Shift ACF? I believe it was?
Presumably this is to supplement Minor Shapeshift (Reserve) and Alter Self for an array of smaller, fluffier shapeshifting bits below an actual casting of Polymorph or Shapechange. The problem is that at 17th level and with Shapechanges available, none of the rest matters. A 17th level Wizard does not fight foes or personally handle situations where 4th level Polymorph or even weaker abilities are suitable. You cast Shapechange. If you're going to need it longer than 170 minutes, you cast it again or use an Extend rod so it lasts 340 minutes. That's it.


Level 1: Wizard 1. Specialist Transmuter, axed Enchantment and Evocation. Scribe Scroll Feat, SF: Transmutation.
2: Wizard 2.
3: Wizard 3. Spell Penetration Feat.
4: Transmuter 4. Rounded off 15 Con with an ASI.
5: Master Specialist 1. SF: Spellcraft Feat.
6: Master Specialist 2. Ability Enhancer Feat.
7: Master Specialist 3. GSF: Transmutation.
8: Fatespinner 1.
9: Fatespinner 2. Minor Shapeshift Feat.
10: Fatespinner 3.
11: Fatespinner 4.
12: Paragnostic Apostle 1 - Mind over Matter. SF: Conjuration.
13: Paragnostic Apostle 2 - Penetrating Insight.
14: Paragnostic Apostle 3 - Mind over Body.
15: Archmage 1 - Mastery of Shaping. Iron Will taken (prereq for Reserves of Strength)
16: Archmage 2 - Arcane Reach.
17: Archmage 3 - SAB, Shapechange.
If you actually wanted to focus on "shapechanging," I'd say you should be using Master Transmogrofist. A class which has its own in-built limit on "chosen forms," and modifies the function of the normal shapeshifting spells. But at this level, as I'm sure the guides told you, you're choosing between all the OPness of Shapechange right now, or delaying it until 21st level in order to get the Transmogrofist's capstone. This actually gives the character something to work towards, and if Shapechange is nerfed into something almost resembling usable, gives you a specially more powerful version with the tradeoff of the delay and lost caster levels. But most of Master Transmogrofist is about playing the game from 7th to 17th, pre-and-without Shapechange, all of which this game is skipping entirely.


Spells are a whole new can of worms. I think I chose a decent spell list with the minor omission of forgetting literally every single fog cloud / solid fog derivative, of which I have kicked myself enough to qualify it as a workout.
If you want advice on spells to pick you'll need to provide the list of what you already have.


My current item loadout is a Black Robe of the Archmagi, a Ring of Wizardry 3, a Headband of Intellect, +5, an Orange Ioun Stone, a Metamagic Rod of Quickening up to 6th-level spells, and a sentimental stuffed teddy bear. Nothing more, nothing less.
Though 3.5 buffed the Robe of the Archmagi making it drastically more efficient, you're still going to be missing a giant pile of passive and "necessary" items the char-op community will foist upon you. A purely DMG list, that's a rare fish. I myself would question why you're packing Ring of Wizardry 3- you've already got plenty of slots to burn with your Rod of Quickening, there aren't any significant 3rd level transmutations that aren't exceeded by higher level spells (or "necessary" items), you just said you skipped all the uber fog spells so it's not for Stinking Cloud (which is outdated at this level anyway), etc. You've loaded up on Spell Penetration feats and the Robe, but char-op is going to tell you that SR is garbage and you can beat it just by packing, wait for it. . . a particular spell, if you even bother casting spells that allow SR in the first place.


I'm looking to be a healthy mix of a debuffer / controller / buffer. I'll leave damage to our Rogue & Paladin. I didn't come in building a Wizard with the intention of dealing too much damage.
If you're expecting the fact that you're not technically dealing damage or "kills" to protect you from accusations of being OP because the guide said that's how it works, you may be in for a rude awakening. People aren't stupid, and if you're playing a "god" wizard, the more spells you stack, the easier it is to see that all foes are either defeated by you easily leaving the rest of the players playing no-risk mop-up (not fun), or are so powerful that none of the other characters could possibly touch them without the ridiculous increases and decreases in numbers that come from you and only you (not fun). The game has to walk a fine line between foes that can both threaten and be threatened by single characters and the entire party at once, and it's the DM's job to preserve that line.


So again, the biggest and most important piece of advice I can give, is to turn right around and go ask your DM instead of The Internet. They are supposed to know what your character does. The DM has explicit authority to approve or decline characters (as well as all the game elements you're calling on to build them), and the direct responsibility to know what all characters are capable of in order to actually run a game which works with those characters- and by extension it is the player's responsibility to directly inform the DM of what the character is capable of if it isn't immediately obvious (and even then really). To ask The Internet for help making your character as powerful as possible without the DM realizing it is to directly undermine the basic agreements that make the game work.

And if I am to be told I'm reading too much into the "make them sweat" line- maybe reconsider such lines in the future. You don't have to ask for people to start filling your cup with the firehose around here, and if you ask for more you will get more than you bargained for.

[MeimuHakurei]

A widely held opinion and one I agree with is that 3.5 has such a wide range of power levels and associated campaign styles/feels is that I'd say you should show your DM your character and see what he thinks of it. As well as comparing it to what your party members can do. As a spellcaster - especially a Wizard - however, I have to say that how you play the character at the table is hugely impactful on their overall performance.

Don't worry about over-/undershooting the intended balance range at first unless it's a oneshot, if the others get along with you, you should be able to come up with a solution.

[daremetoidareyo]

There’s 3saves, choose spells that can target each type of saving throw, preferring ones that at least have a halved effect on a successful save.

[Anthrowhale]

Instead of taking Iron Will directly, you can acquire it as a bonus feat from an Otyugh Hole (Complete Scoundrel) in your backstory.