Focused Specialist Evoker

[AMFV]

One of my favorite things to do is watch folks here at the Playground optimize something with a limited or somewhat weaker resource set. We've recently had a thread where everybody was discussing Evocation and it's merits. The last time I built an Evoker type character I notably made an Elven Generalist. But we're optimizers, we don't quit and go home when the going gets tough.

So the goal here is to optimize as much as we can. The limitations are as follows (and I'm sorry, I'm very, very sorry) We are to specialize in Evocation (Focused Specialist), banning both Transmutation and Conjuration, the third school banned is your choice.

The goal here is to have a character that is functional throughout the game. So basically I'm looking for builds and spell choices at levels 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20. This is quite a bit of work, so I'll be doing my own as well and we can all compare. But this is an effort to see what we can cook with only Top Ramen and spices.

[dextercorvia]

There are a few gems in evocation, but I keep thinking of ways to work around your limitations (Spontaneous Divination, Uncanny Forethought, Mage of the Arcane Order) rather than to optimize the concept.

Let's see, if we are blasting, then we need a way of dealing with energy resistance and SR. SR can be handled with a sufficiently high caster level. So, I'm thinking Circle Magic, and a Sanctified One of Kord dip handles the rest. Sprinkle in Energy Substitution Fire.

[Tvtyrant]

One of my favorite things to do is watch folks here at the Playground optimize something with a limited or somewhat weaker resource set. We've recently had a thread where everybody was discussing Evocation and it's merits. The last time I built an Evoker type character I notably made an Elven Generalist. But we're optimizers, we don't quit and go home when the going gets tough.

So the goal here is to optimize as much as we can. The limitations are as follows (and I'm sorry, I'm very, very sorry) We are to specialize in Evocation (Focused Specialist), banning both Transmutation and Conjuration, the third school banned is your choice.

The goal here is to have a character that is functional throughout the game. So basically I'm looking for builds and spell choices at levels 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20. This is quite a bit of work, so I'll be doing my own as well and we can all compare. But this is an effort to see what we can cook with only Top Ramen and spices.

Do you want us to send them to you or simply post them? Is cheese allowed? What counts as cheesy or violating the spirit of the contest?

[AMFV]

There are a few gems in evocation, but I keep thinking of ways to work around your limitations (Spontaneous Divination, Uncanny Forethought, Mage of the Arcane Order) rather than to optimize the concept.

Let's see, if we are blasting, then we need a way of dealing with energy resistance and SR. SR can be handled with a sufficiently high caster level. So, I'm thinking Circle Magic, and a Sanctified One of Kord dip handles the rest. Sprinkle in Energy Substitution Fire.

Well we could definitely make a Blaster, that seems to be the way it's going to go. I've mostly been wracking my brain trying to figure out any way to build something with this that isn't a blaster (since I like things that seem out there, although I'm not sure how possible that is).

Metamagic seems to be our order of the day for the blasting in any case. Although we're not quite as good at it as Sorcerers, but there must be some way to optimize that in ways that Sorcerers wouldn't expect...

Right now I'm leaning towards something with Sneak Attack like Magelord, or something that focuses on a few spells, to make those gems really shine.

Do you want us to send them to you or simply post them? Is cheese allowed? What counts as cheesy or violating the spirit of the contest?

Well there's not really a winner so, it's more of a self guideline than anything else. As far as cheese goes, I normally present only things that I could see myself presenting to a table, and how cheesy I'm willing to go varies a lot. Normally I exclude things which I think are not flavory cheeses, but I'm fine with some very flavorful things. So cheese is your option basically.

[ArqArturo]

These are the the things I would to consider optimizing evocation fire damage, more specifically, for a Warmage (whom I think it's the master of evocation, but a Wizard/Sorcerer will do in a pinch for a better/faster spell progression).

Spoiler: For Fire-based damage

Show

• You want to start with Empower Spell (which you will use later, and the most important part, Energy Substitution (Fire), this is the first step for fiery goodness. Be aware that you are still years away to bring down the pain with it, and be mindful that fire is a very popular element, so play the game carefully.
• Once you have that, take levels in Elemental Savant and procure Searing Spell. Yes, you won't deal that much damage, but fire immunity and fire resistance won't be much of an issue.
• To top it all off, take levels in Silver Pyromancer. Congratulations, your fire spells are now either half divine or fully divine.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Fire Elf is more than fitting for this, so I'll go with that.

Martial Wizard to get Improved Initiative instead of Scribe Scroll. You still get a bonus feat from Wizard at 5th, so you can still trade it for Spontaneous Divination or a Domain Power in CC. I'm going to recommend the Planning domain power to get Extend Spell at Wizard 5. We'll also say he visited the Otyugh Hole in CS to get Iron Will without spending a feat on it, and jump into Incantatrix at 6th level. That gives us a fourth prohibited school, so let's ban Transmutation, Conjuration, Necromancy, and Enchantment. This Wizard only has Abjuration, Divination, Evocation, and Illusion. At 1st and 5th level he still has access to Enchantment.

Let's get two flaws for two extra feats at 1st level. I'll go with Noncombatant and Cold Blooded, the Resistance to Fire 5 he gets from his race more than negates the drawbacks of that. Let's also get an animal companion instead of a familiar.

1st level: Fire Elf Wizard 1; Int 20; Improved Initiative, Precocious Apprentice (Scorching Ray), Fiery Burst, Wild Cohort; two magebred warbeast riding dogs with trip.
Spells prepared (2+3/2+3/1): 0th- Sonic Snap x2, Dancing Lights, Detect Magic, Ghost Sound; 1st- Ray of Flame, Ice Dagger x2, Color Spray, Silent Image; 2nd- Scorching Ray.
Combat Options: His two dogs are probably more powerful than the rest of the party combined. He can use Fiery Burst to create a 5-ft. radius (four squares) burst of fire within 30 ft. that deals 2d6 damage at will, Reflex half, as long as he doesn't cast his Scorching Ray. He can set something on fire with Ray of Flame, and if he runs into fire resistance/immunity he has cold and even sonic damage. He also has all the standard Elf weapon proficiencies.

5th level: Fire Elf Wizard 5; Int 21+2; Improved Initiative, Precocious Apprentice (Scorching Ray), Fiery Burst, Wild Cohort, Item Familiar (Headband of Int), Extend Spell; still two magebred warbeast riding dogs with trip.
Spells prepared (3+3/4+3/4+3/1+3): 0th- Sonic Snap, Dancing Lights x2, Detect Magic x2, Ghost Sound; 1st- Magic Missile x3, Color Spray, Silent Image x2, Power Word: Pain; 2nd- Ray of Ice, Seeking Ray x2, Ray of Stupidity, Luminous Armor, Mirror Image, Invisibility; 3rd- Fireball, Great Thunderclap x2, Ray of Dizziness.
Combat Options: His two dogs are still extremely powerful at this level. He can still use Fiery Burst, but it deals 3d6 and he can use it as long as he doesn't cast Fireball. Great Thunderclap is a superb crowd control, Ray of Stupidity automatically disables any animal it hits and can wreak havoc on low-intelligence opponents, and Ray of Dizziness is a no-save debuff.

10th level: Fire Elf Wizard 5/ Ruathar 1/ Incantatrix 4; Int 22+4; Improved Initiative, Precocious Apprentice (Scorching Ray), Fiery Burst, Wild Cohort, Piercing Evocation, Extend Spell, Persistent Spell, Piercing Evocation, Split Ray, Leadership; still two magebred warbeast riding dogs with trip, and a Bard cohort with optimized Inspire Courage for +7 to attack and damage plus buffing spells. He now has Handle Animal as a class skill thanks to Ruathar!
Spells Prepared (3+3/5+3/6+3/4+3/4+3/2+3): 0th- Sonic Snap, Dancing Lights x2, Detect Magic, Ghost Sound x2; 1st- Magic Missile x3, Shield, Endure Elements, Silent Image x3; 2nd- Seeking Ray x2, Ray of Ice, Luminous Armor, Arcane Turmoil x2, See Invisibility, Detect Thoughts, Gust of Wind; 3rd- Great Thunderclap x2, Rainbow Blast x2, Magic Circle against Evil, Anticipate Teleportation, Legion of Sentinels; 4th- Fire Shield x2, Channeled Pyroburst x2, Greater Invisibility, Assay Spell Resistance, Greater Resistance; 5th- Greater Fireburst, Prismatic Ray, Ball Lightning, Wall of Limbs, Wall of Good.
Spells already cast and when necessary made Persistent via Incantatrix abilities: Detect Magic, Shield, Luminous Armor, See Invisibility, Detect Thoughts, Magic Circle against Evil, Fire Shield x2 (hot and cold), Greater Invisibility, Anticipate Teleportation; Endure Elements, Greater Resistance.
Combat Options: His two dogs are falling behind, but they should still be able to contribute with the Bard cohort buffing them. He shouldn't need to worry about his personal safety much thanks to those buffs, his Fiery Burst reserve feat is 5d6 damage with Greater Fireburst prepared, his Rainbow Blast ignores energy resistances with Piercing Evocation, and between his wall spells, Great Thunderclap, and others he should still be able to throw out one or two useful crowd controls every encounter.

I'm getting tired, but we can see that evocation is still viable, though it takes a bit more effort. For this particular character, max out Incantatrix and then maybe max Ruather, then probably get Paragnostic Apostle. Ideally you could pick up Arcane Disciple to get access to a domain's spells even if they're from a prohibited school.

[Owl Prowler]

A Spellwarp Sniper can do well with a specialist evoker, although it puts less of a focus on AoE spells. It's also a shame that a focused evoker will almost by default give up necromancy, because that significantly reduces the usefulness of the Lord of the Uttercold feat, which is quite useful for overcoming energy immunities.

[AMFV]

A Spellwarp Sniper can do well with a specialist evoker, although it puts less of a focus on AoE spells. It's also a shame that a focused evoker will almost by default give up necromancy, because that significantly reduces the usefulness of the Lord of the Uttercold feat, which is quite useful for overcoming energy immunities.

Well for this particular game you could keep it around. Since we're already banning two good schools that leaves a lot of room to ban other schools. Abjuration could be banned, Illusion could be banned.

[Owl Prowler]

Well for this particular game you could keep it around. Since we're already banning two good schools that leaves a lot of room to ban other schools. Abjuration could be banned, Illusion could be banned.

Whoops! I don't know why, but that fact completely flew over my head when I initially read the first post. I think that I was so horrified by what I was reading that my brain just decided to shut down rather than try to comprehend the phrase "banning both Transmutation and Conjuration."

In that case I see no reason not to go the blasty-necromancer route. Use your undead minions as battlefield control in lieu of conjuration, and blast around them with uttercold evocations.

[dextercorvia]

To top it all off, take levels in Silver Pyromancer. Congratulations, your fire spells are now either half divine or fully divine.

Sanctified One is going to Beat Silver Pyromancer. Silver Pyromancer requires turn undead, which will cost you a caster level, and loses another one at 1st level. Sanctified One can be gotten into as a single classed Wizard.

[Psyren]

The goal here is to have a character that is functional throughout the game.

This is quite honestly a pretty low bar. Even Warmage is functional, and they don't have access to half the toys even a minus-three-schools wizard would have.

[A.A.King]

Sanctified One is going to Beat Silver Pyromancer. Silver Pyromancer requires turn undead, which will cost you a caster level, and loses another one at 1st level. Sanctified One can be gotten into as a single classed Wizard.

Sacred Exorcist would be used to gain Turn Undead obviously. Yeah, you'd have to waste one 5th Spell Known on Dismissal, but you're a wizard so boohoo.

[dextercorvia]

Sacred Exorcist would be used to gain Turn Undead obviously. Yeah, you'd have to waste one 5th Spell Known on Dismissal, but you're a wizard so boohoo.

While that saves you the Casting Level, it comes on really late. You are spending the first 14-15 levels subject to Fire Resistance/Immunity.

[ArqArturo]

While that saves you the Casting Level, it comes on really late. You are spending the first 14-15 levels subject to Fire Resistance/Immunity.

This is where Searing Spell comes into play.

[AMFV]

This is quite honestly a pretty low bar. Even Warmage is functional, and they don't have access to half the toys even a minus-three-schools wizard would have.

Well it depends on your party, I would define functionality as providing something useful to the party, so a Warmage in a party with an Ubercharger (or even a much reduced Ubercharger) loses a lot of his functionality. Mostly the goal would be to optimize as much as possible while staying in constraints of the concept, which would have been a better way to word it.

[Fax Celestis]

How about something like FC Wizard 2/Duskblade 3/Spellthief 1/Spellwarp Sniper 5/Uncanny Trickster 2/Enlightened Fist 7, banning Conjuration, Transmutation, and Illusion? Master Spellthief gets your CL up, Uncanny Trickster lets you spellwarp up to 7th level spells, and you get to turn AoEs into rays and rays into touches and touches into channels.

Not really a "wizard" build though.

[Psyren]

Well it depends on your party, I would define functionality as providing something useful to the party, so a Warmage in a party with an Ubercharger (or even a much reduced Ubercharger) loses a lot of his functionality. Mostly the goal would be to optimize as much as possible while staying in constraints of the concept, which would have been a better way to word it.

Warmages are seriously underrated. Even with damage already covered, even without considering any PrCs or even their Advanced Learning feature, Warmages still bring more than blasting/numbers to the table. Shatter, Stinking Cloud, Gust of Wind, Black Tentacles, Wall of Fire, (Greater) Shout, Cloudkill, Prismatic Ray/Spray/Wall/Sphere, Acid Fog, Blade Barrier, Disintegrate, Earthquake, , Waves of Exhaustion, Sunburst, Scintillating Pattern, Elemental Swarm, Implosion, and Wail of the Banshee are all on their list. Then you throw in Advanced Learning and they get to pick up utility stuff like Floating Disk, Resilient Sphere, Wall of Force/Forcecage, Contingency, Wind Wall, Tiny Hunt, the Hand spells (including splat versions like Slapping Hand,) Blacklight, or Great Thunderclap. All else being equal, I'd much rather have a warmage on my team than an ubercharger, who are pathetically easy to shut down or mitigate.

[AMFV]

Warmages are seriously underrated. Even with damage already covered, even without considering any PrCs or even their Advanced Learning feature, Warmages still bring more than blasting/numbers to the table. Shatter, Stinking Cloud, Gust of Wind, Black Tentacles, Wall of Fire, (Greater) Shout, Cloudkill, Prismatic Ray/Spray/Wall/Sphere, Acid Fog, Blade Barrier, Disintegrate, Earthquake, , Waves of Exhaustion, Sunburst, Scintillating Pattern, Elemental Swarm, Implosion, and Wail of the Banshee are all on their list. Then you throw in Advanced Learning and they get to pick up utility stuff like Floating Disk, Resilient Sphere, Wall of Force/Forcecage, Contingency, Wind Wall, Tiny Hunt, the Hand spells (including splat versions like Slapping Hand,) Blacklight, or Great Thunderclap. All else being equal, I'd much rather have a warmage on my team than an ubercharger, who are pathetically easy to shut down or mitigate.

Well in that case you place a high bar on "being functional" since you compare it to Warmage's and that means that this is the bar that you would have to reach. Also Warmage's are better at ray spells (a big part of evocation). In any case we should simply try to find as optimized a character as we can produce under the conditions.

[Fax Celestis]

Warmages are seriously underrated. Even with damage already covered, even without considering any PrCs or even their Advanced Learning feature, Warmages still bring more than blasting/numbers to the table. Shatter, Stinking Cloud, Gust of Wind, Black Tentacles, Wall of Fire, (Greater) Shout, Cloudkill, Prismatic Ray/Spray/Wall/Sphere, Acid Fog, Blade Barrier, Disintegrate, Earthquake, , Waves of Exhaustion, Sunburst, Scintillating Pattern, Elemental Swarm, Implosion, and Wail of the Banshee are all on their list. Then you throw in Advanced Learning and they get to pick up utility stuff like Floating Disk, Resilient Sphere, Wall of Force/Forcecage, Contingency, Wind Wall, Tiny Hunt, the Hand spells (including splat versions like Slapping Hand,) Blacklight, or Great Thunderclap. All else being equal, I'd much rather have a warmage on my team than an ubercharger, who are pathetically easy to shut down or mitigate.

Plus they can go into something like Wyrm Wizard for some extra utilities. Or use runestaves. Or, if you can pick up a language-dependent spell somehow (Advanced Learning->Eclectic Learning for message, for instance), you can walk into Dracolexi, a seriously underrated PrC (I mean it, check out what osvith, ssearth and valignat do) and then start doing such shenanigans like having power word: pain as a cantrip.

[Starmage21]

Sonic is still the least resisted energy there is. Unfortunately, they pulled Sonic from the 3.5 version of Energy Substitution/Admixture. They did NOT remove Sonic damage from the Archmage's version of substitution: Mastery of Elements.

I suggest that our Evoker candidates focus on sonic damage, either by creating sonic versions of standard spells (a fairly non-cheesy venture). I think that pretty much Slaad are the only major monster type that regularly includes sonic. The rest occurs on a case by case basis.

[Psyren]

Well in that case you place a high bar on "being functional" since you compare it to Warmage's and that means that this is the bar that you would have to reach.

You misunderstand - I didn't say Uberchargers aren't functional. Pure damage is plenty functional, albeit easily countered.

My point is merely that your standard in the OP is easily met even by a wizard who has banned three schools (two of them being the two best ones.)

[AMFV]

You misunderstand - I didn't say Uberchargers aren't functional. Pure damage is plenty functional, albeit easily countered.

My point is merely that your standard in the OP is easily met even by a wizard who has banned three schools (two of them being the two best ones.)

Yes, but it would be a fairly unique experiment, as I said, when I responded initially, it's possible I wasn't exactly clear or as articulate as I could have been, the main goal is to get as optimized a Wizard as possible, can we still produce a problem solving Batman Wizard with said restrictions? What would our role be? How can one build this to do those things while staying in the spirit of the challenge?