U68 Preview 1: Wild Mage Sorcerer Archetype

[EvilDragon]

what about being extremely chaotic?

• for every spell...
  • all spells you cast are based on your character level, but...
  • all spells randomly become divine-primal-arcane randomly. This is determined at the first time casting a spell for each week. (Sorry to devs for extra DB saving... if they're willing lol)
    • rolls 1d12
      • 1-2: Your spell becomes all Arcane-Primal-Divine at the same time... Check below.
      • 3-6: Arcane - now checks arcane failure on non-robe
      • 7-10: Primal - now checks Druidic oath, even if you are not a druid
      • 11-14: Divine - intervention blocks casting
      • 15-20: Doesn't change
    • determined type resets on weekly server maintenance reset. You have a trouble cleric spells being arcane while you're wearing armor? well, another luck on next week.
  • spell schools are also chosen randomly, but considerably.
    • but maybe not. spell schools are something hard to control, and not really interesting with this random chaos imo.
• for every offensive spell cast...
  • all saving throw spells check different type: if a spell checks Will+Fortitude (Phantasmal killer), it has a chance to be Reflex+Reflex.
  • damaging spells do different damage type: fireball do negative damage, blade barrier do fire damage, harm do light damage
    • Being that positive/negative and repair/rust for livings/constructs are chosen smartly by the game would be nice, but well, maybe excluded or having low chance might be better...? or omnitype of 'healing' for positive+repair type? I know devs are not a fan of this sort of hardcoding lol. not sure about this smart thing.
  • maybe... what about that these become determined on first casting for each week...? as how I described above.
• for non-harmful spells (buff, heal)
  • also heals nearby enemies (for chance? always?)
  • maybe only happens for every 10s??

 

[EvilDragon]

Also, I think 'Chaotic' should be literally chaotic that isn't 'Chaos aligned'
so..

• Chaos Bolt: Does chaos damage
• Chaotic Bolt: Does random damage type. Little bit higher damage die.

This should be like this.

 

[Lotoc]

The problem is that if they include an immunity strip, this becomes too powerful, if they don't it makes the line kinda worthless. (Imagine fighting demons with a 90% chance your spells won't be able to damage them)

Demons DO take chaos damage. the only stuff immune to chaos damage has blanket spell or magic immunity. Like the last boss of VoN5 or the pillars.

Chaotic damage is not defined by the function of chaos hammer, the fact that the main sources of alignment damage people know are the fourth level alignment spells which specifically function in a way only those spells specifically do really makes people think of alignment damage the wrong way.

 

[Oliphant]

Has anybody figured out an epic+ build where caster multi-classing actually makes sense? Caster multi-classing is an intriguing concept that DDO has sadly lacked, but just giving the caster levels is not that enticing ever since they made spell damage dice scale with level.

I think you can grab some low-level healing from CLR/FvS/etc and benefit from the caster levels for heroic playthroughs, but I'm really struggling to come up with end-game builds that wouldn't be better off as pure sorc (probably w/ Savant capstone).

You get all the elemental forms you need for Druid at level 17. I think most caster level stuff will get capped out at some point on the path to legendary. Fun variant.

 

[PraetorPlato]

Has anybody figured out an epic+ build where caster multi-classing actually makes sense? Caster multi-classing is an intriguing concept that DDO has sadly lacked, but just giving the caster levels is not that enticing ever since they made spell damage dice scale with level.

I think you can grab some low-level healing from CLR/FvS/etc and benefit from the caster levels for heroic playthroughs, but I'm really struggling to come up with end-game builds that wouldn't be better off as pure sorc (probably w/ Savant capstone).

Druid 17/3 splits are really good. Keep 9ths, get crit.

 

[LurkingVeteran]

Druid 17/3 splits are really good. Keep 9ths, get crit.

But the new multi-classing feature that I was talking about requires Mixed Magics in T4, which is not possible with 17 X/3 Sorc splits.

 

[LurkingVeteran]

Has anybody tested Mixed Magics? The text seems a bit unclear if it gives you other caster levels from sorc caster levels, or sorc levels from other caster levels, or both.

It's also unclear if this will work with SLAs in the other class trees, but I assume it would as written. This seems like the only useful aspect as some SLAs can be pretty good early on for leveling (e.g. Close Wounds SLA with FvS 2, False Life with Wlk 1, Shout from Bard tree with Brd 3). None of these benefits scale into epics though and Savant capstones are just too hard to pass up.

 

[erethizon1]

I feel like this doesn't fit well for a core 5 that someone can pick up at level 12. it's very rare to be MRR cap at heroic levels, and definitely for people with few to none past lifes.

I like the effect and idea though, maybe another effect is in order.

I hit the MRR cap at level 10 each life and stay there forever, because I do wear robes (which cap me at 70 MRR from levels 10-16 and cap me at 50 MRR for 17 and above). What usually kills me in high reaper is magic because of the low MRR, so I would welcome an MRR cap boost like this quite a bit.

 

[DBZ]

Can boost mrr cap with gear

 

[Dementedleo1974]

Do you need to wear a ring of white gold to make it work? ?

I'm not a believer... ?

loved those books

 

[AbyssalMage]

This seems interesting, but honestly, RNG is not high on the totem pole of what I would want to play. Seems like it would be fun to mess with, but honestly, I'll see what the PL passives are and decide whether or not to run this

The class can "turn off" the RNG through AP in their tree. Worse case scenario you do a 6/6/8 life with duel wielding x-bows to 20.

 

[LurkingVeteran]

Okay, I think I got one. WM 8 / Warlock 7 gets you two Cha-based PK where you may (depending on how Mixed Magics actually works) be able to stack caster levels for Heighten and SR checks :-D

Since Weird is now an SLA you can still pick that one up as well. Unfortunately you are now a strict subset of an AM-PK build, but hey... this could be the meme build of U68.

 

[LurkingVeteran]

Ok, I got another. Savant who trades Capstone/SL9 spells for AM T5. This build was possible before but now it's slightly less bad. If DDO had a working force line, that could have been a viable split.

Maybe you could find it worth it to splash 4 sorc for web on some hybrid melee builds, but Color Spray is already pretty good on those.

EDIT: This is not to say that I don't think this enhancement is a good idea. It's fun that it opens some possibility of caster multi-classing. It's just that D&D 3.5 already had the feat Practiced Spellcasting which compensated for up to 4 caster levels if multi-classing. That was fairly balanced there, in a game with much smaller opportunity cost (losing progressive spell dice, hyper specialization of caster main stat). In DDO it seems to scale rather poorly. Something more may be needed to keep this viable in epics.

EDIT2: It might be that the random Wild Surge effects are super good and this might make wild mage (5) splashes popular. We'll see.

 

[Tilomere]

Okay, I think I got one. WM 8 / Warlock 7 gets you two Cha-based PK where you may (depending on how Mixed Magics actually works) be able to stack caster levels for Heighten and SR checks :-D

Or you can just make a 20 warlock, and have pact, T5, and core6 instant kills, all charisma based, plus high level AoE instant kills.

 

[Tilomere]

I don't see how the economic pressure to delete every single multi-caster in the game to sell xp solutions and +1 hearts up to this point is relieved to somehow suddenly allow them to exist. I think if we went back to a subscription model they could exist.

Even if you do find something, the last 15 years shows they arer required to delete it from the game. That's why my vote is to just make this a pure 20 sorc build.

 

[Strype McClaine]

Its honestly far far too late for this to matter in the discourse;
But I think making wild magic a sorcerer archetype is a mistake, especially with the lore around the wild magic in myth drannor.

I don't know if this would be an unpopular opnion or not...
With the exception of Faedark illusionist, the rest of the universal trees are obsitensively for martial characters with caster stats, or to provide new martial play styles.
I'm just dissapointed that Wild Magic could have been a universal caster tree, and could have made more interesting unique builds. And wild magic would manifest in weird places, grant chaos spells at levels, rather than just SLA's