Evocation specialist (Is it worth the time?

[Seth1221]

All the time I hear that evocation sucks and is the worst school. And here my player wants to play an evocation specialist - a massive damage dealer of sort. Don't get me wrong if she wants to than I'm more than happy to comply but I was thinking about any alternate ways or a way to boost her damage dealing spells.

I'd be more then happy to hear about any useful feats and prestige classes or a different way to create an interesting offensive wizard. Thanks in advance!

[Temotei]

A warmage is an option (Complete Arcane). They focus on offensive spells, have d6 hit dice, and are lightly armored.

Sorcerers are probably better blasters than wizards, due to their ability to sling spells more consistently.

Conjuration, especially with the orb spells, has a lot of spells that act like evocation spells, only better. If you have the sources with orb spells, recommend conjuration to the player.

If evocation is what they want though, it's not a bad option. It's still better than most fighters, barbarians, and monks.

[sonofzeal]

Blasting can work - if you put the effort in. Simply tossing out blasty spells is not putting the effort in. Metamagic and Metamagic reducers are your friends.

Conjuration has many of the best blasts though (especially the famous Orb spells), and Transmutation has Disintegrate. Could you friend consider a Conj specialization and take a lot of the Conj blasts?

[Seth1221]

Blasting can work - if you put the effort in. Simply tossing out blasty spells is not putting the effort in. Metamagic and Metamagic reducers are your friends.

Conjuration has many of the best blasts though (especially the famous Orb spells), and Transmutation has Disintegrate. Could you friend consider a Conj specialization and take a lot of the Conj blasts?

That's what I was going to propose to her at first. We have the spell compedium so no problem there.

Unfortunately I don't have the source with metamagic reducers.
What about the DC for spells - any ideas how to further increase it (besides spell focus and improved spell focus?)

[sonofzeal]

That's what I was going to propose to her at first. We have the spell compedium so no problem there.

Unfortunately I don't have the source with metamagic reducers.
What about the DC for spells - any ideas how to further increase it (besides spell focus and improved spell focus?)

Metamagic reducers are a mixed lot and scattered all over. Arcane Thesis is an excellent one for Blasters though, if a bit cheesy. Sanctum Spell and Incantatrix are probably less useful.

[Kylarra]

Having fiery burst or storm bolt reserve feats is useful for all day blasting, albeit at a low rate.

If they just want blasting, perhaps DFA or warlock would be more to their taste?

[Godskook]

Depends on level.

Before 4th level spells, you pretty much have to plan on only using 1-2 spells per fight, which means your entire contribution to the victory has to come in those 2 spells. Blasting spells just won't cut it yet due to the still low damage outputs. Hell, even Benign Transposition out-damages them at this stage, and has the added advantage of being a battlefield control of sorts.

Late-game, builds like the Mailman are possible, so at that point, have a ball.

In the mid levels, it comes down to how well the player in question understands tactics.

[tyckspoon]

Basically she's gonna need a lot of feats. As a short list, making direct damage really worth the time is going to take Maximize, Twin Spell, Energy Substitution (or Searing Spell/Piercing Cold if she prefers sticking to a single energy type) and Arcane Thesis for one or two of her favorite spells to make that stuff practical to use. Practical/Easy Metamagic for Twin Spell wouldn't hurt either, as well as Metamagic School Focus (Evocation). The Residual Metamagic tactical feat, maybe an appropriate element reserve feat for the caster-level bump and something to do when utterly exploding something isn't appropriate.. Spell Focus + Greater, because direct damage Evocation is probably the tactic most reliant on having very high save DCs.

Class wise? Doesn't matter too much, actually. Any prestige that offers bonus metamagic feats or improved metamagic capability will help (Incantatrix is *still* the gold standard here, but that way potentially lies ludicrous cheese), but straight Wizard also works, largely because of the bonus feats. None of the classes that are actually meant to be blasters that I can remember are really worth taking.

[Seth1221]

Hmmm I read the incantatrix PrC and I must say that he is something I'll probably present it to my player (I like my players to grow in power so a little cheese is fine in my book)

And so the blaster becomes interesting again... Never thought I would see the day

[absolmorph]

Evocation is the worst school of magic, but it's still magic. The main reason it's the worst school is because most of the good spells are easily recreated by other schools. And blasting is suboptimal because non-caster classes tend to focus on dealing HP damage, so you end up having a party focused on a single defense (HP) with a caster that will inevitably start out-damaging the non-casters, which not only cuts into their fun but makes it more repetitive.
A blaster caster is, by no means, actually bad. It's just doing something other people can do, and are focused on doing.

[Seth1221]

Evocation is the worst school of magic, but it's still magic. The main reason it's the worst school is because most of the good spells are easily recreated by other schools. And blasting is suboptimal because non-caster classes tend to focus on dealing HP damage, so you end up having a party focused on a single defense (HP) with a caster that will inevitably start out-damaging the non-casters, which not only cuts into their fun but makes it more repetitive.
A blaster caster is, by no means, actually bad. It's just doing something other people can do, and are focused on doing.

True, true. However this party will consist of wizard, rogue and cleric (buff/healing oriented) hence there isn't really someone who will deal big amount of melee damage (excluding the rouge when a sneak attack will occur).
Secondly - I can always brought up enemies with evasion, spell resistance and/or energy immunity from time to time to remind the wizard that she has to rely on others

[AslanCross]

Suggest ways to have the blaster do more than merely ladle out d6s. There are some Metamagic feats that debuff on top of the damage, like Blistering Spell or Fell Draining.

Evocation is not the only damage-dealing school. Conjuration has better damage-dealing spells, and heck, Transmutation has disintegrate.

To get past pesky immunities and resistances, the Silver Pyromancer from the Eberron book Five Nations can turn fire damage into sacred damage. It will lower caster level since it requires at least one level in cleric and doesn't give full caster progression, but its level 1 class feature allows you to use your TOTAL CHARACTER LEVEL as your caster level for fire spells.

[absolmorph]

True, true. However this party will consist of wizard, rogue and cleric (buff/healing oriented) hence there isn't really someone who will deal big amount of melee damage (excluding the rouge when a sneak attack will occur).
Secondly - I can always brought up enemies with evasion, spell resistance and/or energy immunity from time to time to remind the wizard that she has to rely on others

Searing Spell+Orb of Fire/Energy Substitution and a different Orb spell gets around that. Or Magic Missile.
Also, if your rogue can't use one of their biggest class features (one of the only things that allows them to keep up their damage), then encounters need to change. The blaster will outpace the rogue in damage without the rogue getting Sneak Attack consistently.
Of course, the rogue can get SA more with either a dip in Swordsage (to get the Island of Blades stance, which will allow them to get flanking (and, thus, SA) as long as they and an ally are adjacent to the same creature (not necessarily opposite of each other). They can also get Assassin's Stance (a level 3 stance requiring 1 Shadow Hand maneuver; Clinging Shadow Strike is nice for a rogue), and deal and extra 2d6 for SA. Tangential, but probably useful advice for the rogue. And the ToB maneuvers and stances can be found in a downloadable PDF here. I don't know of any place you can (legally) see the swordsage online, sadly. There are other ways to gain the stance, though (Martial Spirit to get the maneuver required to take Martial Stance, which would allow the rogue to get the stance at level 1 with a single bonus feat).

[Math_Mage]

Considering that the 'elegant optimization' thread is right over here, I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Mailman yet. Take a look and see if the optimization level is appropriate for your game.

True, true. However this party will consist of wizard, rogue and cleric (buff/healing oriented) hence there isn't really someone who will deal big amount of melee damage (excluding the rouge when a sneak attack will occur).
Secondly - I can always brought up enemies with evasion, spell resistance and/or energy immunity from time to time to remind the wizard that she has to rely on others

The party feels like it really needs another melee person to complement the rogue and feed off the cleric's buffs. In fact, if the cleric were amenable to melee and the wizard more into buff/debuff, the party balance would improve significantly. Depending on how your DM-player dynamic is, you might want to suggest that.

[ericgrau]

Metamagic the daylights out of your spells, grab energy substitution or an archmage level to change the energy type, and again some feat or another archmage level to shape your spells. Even before that point varying your spells a little makes avoiding energy resistance a piece of cake.

There's no reason why you can't control too. For example evard's tentacles is great for clustering enemies so you can fireball them. For that matter fireball is as much crowd control as it is damage, as the total damage it does to a group would be enough to kill any one creature twice over and much better than melee could do picking them off one by one. But the damage to a single target is unimpressive compared to melee. Even with a more dedicated spell like scorching ray.

Contrary to what's been said you want a wizard for a blaster because spell level is important; unlike control spells low level damage is pretty meh. Also because the metamagic on the damage spells is pretty straightforward and easy to decide on in the morning. One of the hallmarks of the sorcerer is spontaneous metamagic like heighten spell and still spell for the situations that you want to decide on later.

Oh, one last thing. Frankly all the talk about evocation being the worst is a load of baloney. Not only is it a quite common offline opinion that evocation is the best of all schools, there are plenty of people who with only a moderately reasonable level of optimization end encounters in only a couple of rounds by nuking the piss out of them. Now I dunno about best, but it's far from worst. And, no, well known cheesy substitute spells don't count.

[Seth1221]

Thank you guys for all your help! I will present some of the ideas to my player but my guts tell me she will take the evocer/incantatrix/archmage set. I will tell you the decision as soon as I know it myself:).

[Seth1221]

The party feels like it really needs another melee person to complement the rogue and feed off the cleric's buffs. In fact, if the cleric were amenable to melee and the wizard more into buff/debuff, the party balance would improve significantly. Depending on how your DM-player dynamic is, you might want to suggest that.

I don't worry about them. We've been playing together for quite a few years and I know that they can take care of themselves in battle.
Cleric will probably buff himself and stop the enemies from harming the rest while the wizard will do some nice damage and rogue will take care of any pesky spellcasters far behind enemy lines

[magic9mushroom]

That's what I was going to propose to her at first. We have the spell compedium so no problem there.

Unfortunately I don't have the source with metamagic reducers.
What about the DC for spells - any ideas how to further increase it (besides spell focus and improved spell focus?)

Easy Metamagic is Dragon #325 I believe. Incantatrix is Player's Guide to Faerun. Practical Metamagic is Races of the Dragon. Arcane Thesis is Player's Handbook 2. Metaphysical Spellshaper is Book of Erotic Fantasy (avoid this one like THE PLAGUE, because it's stupidly broken).

For the DC of spells, there is Tainted Scholar, but you'll want to avoid that one because it does it by setting the character's effective Int for casting to a number which can easily be raised above 100. This results in nigh-endless spells/day and DCs in the 40s or 50s (in other words, unless you cheese your monsters they won't ever make their saves and will be easily crushed by save-or-lose). For Wis-based casters there's Owl's Insight (+1/2 caster level to Wis as an Insight bonus). Other than that, there isn't much besides Spell Focus.

[Iceforge]

I have lots of fun with my specialist in evocation in a campaign a friend is running, but they all play rather unoptimized builds and it is CORE only (as in phb1 for characters, no, not even the DMG or MM1 for character creation).

EDIT: Yes, magic9mushroom, easy metamagic is in DR325

EDIT2: For all feats for DnD3.5, go here

[Math_Mage]

EDIT2: For all feats for DnD3.5, go here

That index is unfortunately not comprehensive. I seem to remember quite a few regional feats that didn't make the list--Greenbound Summoning, for example (which, by the by, is stinky cheese that should not be used ever, but I digress). However, it's still a great resource.

[magic9mushroom]

I have lots of fun with my specialist in evocation in a campaign a friend is running, but they all play rather unoptimized builds and it is CORE only (as in phb1 for characters, no, not even the DMG or MM1 for character creation).

EDIT: Yes, magic9mushroom, easy metamagic is in DR325

EDIT2: For all feats for DnD3.5, go here

Crystalkeep is nice, but is notably missing Complete Mage, Complete Champion, Heroes of Horror, Heroes of Battle, and some of the later Dragon magazines.

[Shpadoinkle]

I'd like to second the warlock reccommendation.

[magic9mushroom]

I'd like to second the warlock reccommendation.

Why? After all, reserve feats give any caster an unlimited blast.

[PhoenixRivers]

Why? After all, reserve feats give any caster an unlimited blast.

A horribly sub-par blast. There are a couple good reserve feats. The ones that blast?

Aren't.

[magic9mushroom]

A horribly sub-par blast. There are a couple good reserve feats. The ones that blast?

Aren't.

I know. But Eldritch Blast doesn't do any more damage than them unless you get into Eldritch Glaive and other similar cheese.