Quote Originally Posted by King of Nowhere View Post
I don't know the wizard mechanics 100%. he probably can't do two twinned in the same round. not sure exactly how much damage it is, but at least 160 if he can reliably hit touch AC. which is more hp than most humanoids of our level have. if you can one-shot an enemy of your level without giving him any kind of defence, then I see a problem. of coure there are some defences, but those bring out the magic escalation. more specific: if it's not a number about yourself that you can passively increase, but it's a spell you need to have on to do some effect, then it's escalating too much - and it's practically guaranteed that we'll forget about it.
The most basic defence against the orbs is a decent touch AC; something any character that's of even moderately high level should be concerned about anyway. 160 hp will drop most humanoids of your level, true, but actually landing 2 orbs should be far from guaranteed on AC alone. What are these guys even doing that their touch AC isn't at least 16 by your level? Ring of protection and even a little bit of dex; done. Adjusting for the highe level than I estimated it's more likely a +11 on those orbs vs AC 16 is 80% to-hit. Good but not guaranteed. Dex types should be more like 20+; less than even odds. For two orbs to hit on a single twinned casting is only 2 times in 3 for the former and 1 in 4 for the latter.



As for it not being hard to get touch AC above 20, you have a different concept of what is hard than we do. most of us, especially most npcs, are limited to dex + ring of protection. very few things in the campaign go above 15. powerful rogues have 20. I have 30+, but I devoted my build specifically to be hard to affect with magic.
I think you are assuming a level of optimization higher than we want to havehave.
No, it looks like we're in the same ballpark. All you need for the other few points is for your armor to have the ghost ward property; making its enhancement count toward your touch ac. Ring +armor enchance +dex should get you in the low 20s by anything approaching high level. There're a dozen other ways that pop to the top of my head but that's the really obvious one that's nothing approaching high-op.

On forcecage: I don't think the wizard has forcecage, but most humanoid opponents have some trinket for short distance teleportation, or they have casters with disintegrate. so yes, an encounter of our level would have the means to deal with forcecage, even if some individuals probably would not.
Forcecage was just one of the more egregious examples. It's hardly the only spell that can just straight-up shut down an encounter. Which was my point, btw, there are -so- many ways to just end an encounter with a single spell if you presume that none of the appropriate defenses are going to be in place. Touch AC is a thing and two items; one core, on MIC; gets it to relevant for high level play long before you even consider active defenses; like ray deflection, orb of invulnerability, or even just scintillating scales for the dragons.

You overcome a high-level caster using high level spells to crush encounters by forced attrition. He can pull this stunt -once- in a given day. Point out to the DM that he can have -two- big bad monsters in a given encounter. One gets nuked and then you fight the other without the nuke. Bait the nuke with illusions or at least dummy targets. Have a hard encounter come to the party at the end of the day when the nuke's already been dropped. Actually use the defenses available against this particular trick.

I mean, you can nerf the orbs but another spell will simply take their place. You can nerf incantatrix but it's barely even a factor for this problem.

If this is -really- the problem you think it is then kill the sacred cow: advize your GM to target the rods. If any of your enemies are remotely intelligent (and I heard dragon) then targetting a known source of strength for their enemy is an obvious strategy.

I get your concern about the escalation problem but there's only two -good- solid answer to that and they're both gonna make somebody unhappy: the GM asks the wizard to change his character and stop doing the problem thing or he leans into the curve and becomes a high-op monster that -can- deal with anything that any player throws at him. The former is a whole hell of a lot easier.