Warmage homebrew based on "surge" abilities

Well, as we all know, Warmage blows goats for pocket change. And I was bored tonight. So, I just threw together some ideas to make Warmage (hopefully) more fun and playable through level 20. I probably need to reshuffle the levels variaous things are gained. What do you guys think?

Warmage
"I am the boomstick!"
HD: d6
BAB: Poor
Saves: Good Reflex, Will
Skills: 2 + int modifier (same as in book)
Spells/day progression: Same as in book

Level 1: Warmage Edge; Armored Mage (light)
Level 2: Mana Burst; Spellmight +1
Level 3: Advanced Learning
Level 4: Sudden Sculpt
Level 5: Sudden Substitution
Level 6: Advanced Learning
Level 7: Sudden Empower, Spellmight +2
Level 8: Armored Mage (medium)
Level 9: Covering Fire
Level 10: Sudden Enlarge
Level 11: Advanced Learning, Pinpoint Bombardment
Level 12: Spellmight +3
Level 13: Sudden Widen
Level 14: Piercing Spell
Level 15: Sudden Maximize
Level 16: Advanced Learning
Level 17: Spellmight +4
Level 19: Sudden Quicken
Level 20: Burst Mastery

Class features:

Warmage Edge: As in C.Arcane

Armored Mage: As in C.Arcane

Mana Burst (Ex): A Warmage learns to channel his energy into the casting of important spells to add extra punch. He gains the ability to perform a Mana Burst as a free action whenever he casts a spell, paying a certain price to enhance that spell. The Warmage may use this out of turn to modify immediate action spells, also. Even though it is a free action, a Warmage can only apply one burst effect per spell he casts. The Warmage’s burst points are equal to his class level and replenish daily.

Spellmight (Ex): The Warmage adds a +1 bonus to his caster level for a spell he is casting. This bonus rises by +1 for every 5 levels thereafter. Spellmight costs 1 burst point to use.

Advanced Learning: As in C.Arcane.

Sudden Sculpt: The Warmage can apply the Sculpt Spell metamagic feat spontaneously to an area spell, with no increase in spell level or casting time. This ability costs 1 burst point to use.

Sudden Substitution: Used with an energy spell, this ability changes the spell’s energy subtype to either Fire, Cold, Electricity, or Acid (the Warmage’s choice upon use). This ability costs no burst points to use, but consumes the Warmage’s ability to otherwise use another burst effect on that spell. Alternatively, a Warmage who has not modified his spell with a burst effect can choose to use this ability after the spell has been cast, damage rolled, and the enemy/enemies resistance (if any) was applied as an immediate action, if it seems as though the original energy type was resisted. The Warmage can thus get a second try at bypassing his foes’ protections. Using this option is an immediate action and costs 2 burst points to use.

Sudden Empower: The Warmage can apply the Empower Spell metamagic feat spontaneously to a spell with variable numeric components, with no increase in spell level or casting time. This ability costs 2 burst points to use.

Sudden Enlarge: The Warmage can apply the Enlarge Spell metamagic feat spontaneously to a spell, with no increase in spell level or casting time. This ability costs 1 burst point to use.

Sudden Widen: The Warmage can apply the Widen Spell metamagic feat spontaneously to an area spell, with no increase in spell level or casting time. This ability costs 3 burst points to use.

Sudden Maximize: The Warmage can apply the Maximize Spell metamagic feat spontaneously to a spell, with no increase in spell level or casting time. This ability costs 3 burst points to use.

Sudden Quicken: The Warmage can apply the Quicken Spell metamagic feat spontaneously to a spell, with no increase in spell level or casting time. This ability costs 4 burst points to use.

Burst Mastery (Ex): Upon reaching level 20, a Warmage is so competent with channeling his raw mystical powers, he can now freely add the caster level bonus from Spellmight to any spell he enhances with any other use of Mana Burst.

Pinpoint Bombardment (Ex): The Warmage is able to carefully aim his attacks to avoid harming allies. For every 4 class levels he has, a Warmage may choose to leave one 5 ft square safe from the area of effect of area spells he casts.

Piercing Spell (Su): A Warmage can enhance his spell to penetrate energy resistance and even ignore a creature’s immunity to energy. When casting an energy spell, the Warmage can choose to use this class feature. If penetrating energy resistance, any targets or effected creatures of your spell are treated as having all energy resistances 10 points lower than normal (to a minimum of 0). If surging past an immunity, the creature takes full damage from your energy attack, even if it is of that energy subtype. This ability costs 2 burst points to lower resistances, or 5 burst points to ignore immunities.

Covering Fire (Ex): Anytime the Warmage casts an area spell that allows a saving throw for half or partial effect, enemies who fail that saving throw must also roll a Will save, with an equivalent DC. Failing this Will save forces a creature to drop prone due to the pinning barrage. For one round, pinned creatures cannot move from their space (but can still be forcibly moved by others) nor stand. Otherwise, pinned creatures are not restricted in the actions they may take.

I personally like the Mana Burst ability a lot, since it gives the warmage more versatility in combat. However, i think the class is much stronger than the original class. You basically have everything the warmage has, plus more sudden feats, and covering fire, piercing spell and pinpoint bombardment. Unless the warmage is considered underpowered, (i have no idea since i never really play spellcasters) i think you should tune it down a bit. Hope that helps ^^

The Warmage is an odd case. They're considered grossly underpowered, in that they fail to be anywhere near the best at their small chosen niche (blasting the living hell out of things) compared to other full casting arcanists. And their chosen niche is widely considered the absolute weakest usage of spellcasting -- direct damage. Add to that the fact that in D&D, enemies with 1 hp fight just as hard as those with 200, possibly harder, and the game tends to reward "focus fire," where you do large single target damage to eliminate foes systematically from the combat (and as an added bonus, cost their side actions per round, so the damage you take goes down) over area attacks. A well built melee class can do equal or more damage than an evoker or warmage to a single target (largely thanks to Power Attack), and can do it all day long without using daily resources. For these reasons, the Warmage's niche (which again, thanks to splat book spells and options for Wizards and Sorcerers, he's not even the best at) is considered a waste to pursue, from an optimization standpoint.

On the other hand, Warmage is still a full caster with at least some versatility in his spell list, so it probably seems kind of silly to say they need help.

What should be understood is, if you don't give a base caster class lots of actual good class features to keep them in, then the character will just go into a full casting prestige class for better benefits anyway. I wanted to make Warmage 20 at least somewhat viable. At the same time, I tried to make the Warmage better and more versatile at the one thing he was supposed to be good at -- blasting the crap out of things. Which, as I explained above, is not generally considered optimal. The only class features that are outright not a boost to being able to damage things are Pinpoint Bombardment (since it also helps battlefield control spells) and Covering Fire (which basically tacks on some battlefield control to any area spell he casts), both of which only benefit area attacks, so to use them, you're already forfeiting the superior strategy of focus fire. So, hopefully doing these things will not make the Warmage overpowered, but simply able to compete with Barbarians, Sorcerers, and Evokers for damage dealing.

That's my reasoning.

I'm actually wondering if I should give them more class features. The ability to spend one burst point to spontaneously cast ANY evocation spell on the sorc/wiz list with an appropriate level slot seems like a cool idea. That way, they have a means other than Advanced Learning to snag useful Evocation spells from Spell Compendium and other splat books if needed.

And of course, making an "Extra Burst" feat for +4 points/day is probably worthwhile.

>> Armored Mage (medium)
I get why light. Armors carry a lot of useful enhancements, but given this class is not designed for melee, I see no reason for this improvement.


>> Good Reflex
Ditto.


Piercing Spell is stupid (too many essays covering this one to warrant elaboration).
Overcoming SR, OTOH, could be appropriate.
Upping the damage would do what you want and make more sense than super fire/ice/acid/force/lightning (see the War Mage PrC; Dragonlance, Age of Mortals).


Mana Burst points, btw, are per-day, right ?

nonsi256 said:

>> Armored Mage (medium)
I get why light. Armors carry a lot of useful enhancements, but given this class is not designed for melee, I see no reason for this improvement.

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*Shrug* The original Warmage class gets it, I just left it in.

nonsi256 said:

>> Good Reflex
Ditto.

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They're tossing out so many reflex save spells, it made sense they should be good at it.

nonsi256 said:

Piercing Spell is stupid (too many essays covering this one to warrant elaboration).

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Link to one. Please. There are other ways for other casters to ignore immunities already in the game. There are feats for Fire and Cold spells to ignore the immunity of all but creatures with that elemental subtype, for the low low cost of +1 spell level. The Evocation Focus Caster Wizard can ignore the immunty of any creature once/day around level 14 (forget the exact level). Furthermore, everytime I think of something "stupid" happening because of such an ability -- like burning a hole through a Fire enemy -- I just think of Dark Schneider doing it in the anime "Bastard!" and smiling. So, on both mechanical and fluff grounds, I have no real problem with the class that's the master of fiery/freezy/shocking/caustic/cacaphonic death bypassing immunties.

nonsi256 said:

Overcoming SR, OTOH, could be appropriate.

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Spellmight can already partially help with this, though. Maybe I could add something to further help.

nonsi256 said:

Upping the damage would do what you want and make more sense than super fire/ice/acid/force/lightning (see the War Mage PrC; Dragonlance, Age of Mortals).

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That's what Sudden Empower/Maximize and Spellmight is for.

nonsi256 said:

Mana Burst points, btw, are per-day, right ?

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Yes. Sorry, I thought it said that. I will add a line in.

Very nice modification. In my group's games, we tend to use Warmage as a class for newbies who want to play spellcasters, since you don't have to prepare or choose known spells. We also basically let them use any Wiz/Sorc evocation that does direct damage, just to keep them on par, and replace the Sudden x feats with generic Bonus Feats selected from Metamagic, Sudden Metamagic, Reserve, and a few other feats (Spell Focus, Spell Pen, stuff like that). We've concluded that Warmage is fun to play because it's simple, easy, and gets to deal good damage, but (as you noted) underpowered due to lacking the versatility present in other spell lists.

My only complaint about piercing is that it doesn't handle resistances and immunities under a single unified mechanism. I guess I'd rather see it as "For 2 points, you reduce their resistance by 10 points. If they're immune, this means that you do 10 points of damage and their immunity absorbs the rest. For every additional burst point you spend, ignore another 5 points of resistance or immunity."

hollowleg said:

Very nice modification.

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Thanks!

hollowleg said:

My only complaint about piercing is that it doesn't handle resistances and immunities under a single unified mechanism. I guess I'd rather see it as "For 2 points, you reduce their resistance by 10 points. If they're immune, this means that you do 10 points of damage and their immunity absorbs the rest. For every additional burst point you spend, ignore another 5 points of resistance or immunity."

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That would make things a little more complicated than I'd like. Also, you seldom see resistances above 20 or 30. Beyond that, it's basically just immune. So after a certain point, paying the points would do nothing more against resistance enemies and only dig out slightly more damage against immunes. I mean, I think 5 points is already asking a lot, that's 1/4 the daily allotment for a level 20 Warmage, 1/3 at the level you first get the ability! Considering a Warmage can already cast lots of variant energy types with each spell level, and i gave them the ability to freely turn other energy spells into whichever they want, it'd be hard to justify ever using Piercing Spells with your modification. Almost all the Warmage's class features run off of the points, to have to pay 1 point for every 5 damage is just plain not worth it.

Finally, 3.5 is inherently a game of absolutes. The fact that creatures even get total immunity in the first place, instead of continued progressively higher resists is an example of that. So too is that as I mentioned, there are already "counter-absolutes" in the rules to completely negate immunity. If you don't want a game of one-ups manship like "Ha! I'm Immune!" "Not anymore, now I can ignore your immunity!" that's fine. But the problem is a lot deeper ingrained than this one homebrew class feature. I'd say it starts when designers actually think making a day-long spell that makes you completely immune to an energy type is not only ok, but "weak" enough for spell level 6 (see Spell Compendium for reference) slot, for example. Get rid of the other absolutes, and then Piercing Spell can also be changed. As the game stands, I think it's both fair and necessary to let Warmages in on the absolutes game.

I rather like this. It makes the warmage a little more interesting, imho.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think you're right that the mana burst powers could be re-ordered (swap Substitution with Enlarge?). Or maybe even add a few more, tier them, and let the character select from appropriate lists (eg, all the +1 metamagics would be the same tier, and up to level X he could only choose from that list; up to level Y he could choose from either the +2 or +1 tiers). This might allow for a little differentiation between warmages (though there don't seem to be enough metamagics for this, now that I think about it! )

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I'll likely be yoinking this...

the_orc_within said:

I rather like this. It makes the warmage a little more interesting, imho.

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Thanks! That's what I wanted, to make Warmage effective at his job, and make blasting mroe interesting. One of my friends called it "toolboxy," I think that made-up word perfectly describes what my goal was.

the_orc_within said:

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think you're right that the mana burst powers could be re-ordered (swap Substitution with Enlarge?).

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Possibly. I think Empower in particular is too generally useful to be available as early as I have it now. It also kind of completely outclasses Spellmight (until level 20 when Spellmight is free, of course) in many cases. Move that down a few levels, move more quirky but occasionally useful options like Enlarge up is my idea right now.

the_orc_within said:

Or maybe even add a few more, tier them, and let the character select from appropriate lists (eg, all the +1 metamagics would be the same tier, and up to level X he could only choose from that list; up to level Y he could choose from either the +2 or +1 tiers). This might allow for a little differentiation between warmages (though there don't seem to be enough metamagics for this, now that I think about it! )

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Another good idea. I should point out, not only are the metamagic feats limited overall in number, I also think only certain ones are appropriate for a Warmage to gain. Not including Extend Spell was entirely intentional, for example, that's really not their thing. Most of the metamagic feats they get should either be directly related to blasting or area spells. I did add in Quicken though, because tossing out two flaming deaths in a round is fun.

Making lists to customizably choose from would definitely allow me to feel less angsty about adding in even more options that I'd like to give them, since then no one warmage would have ALL of those options. Aside from the spontaneous evocation (from the sorc/wiz list) idea, and my friend's suggestion to do full damage to objects, each for 1 burst point, I was also thinking the Split Ray feat fits a Warmage well, albeit a tad specific in what it can do (As I'm sure you've noticed the trend by now, it would cost 2 points, since it's +2 spell levels normally). Maybe teirs is a good route to go for some of the sudden abilities. Because Sudden Substitution is 0 points normally, and the immediate action switch energy type option is unique solely to the class, I'd probably keep that as a feature for all Warmages, though.

the_orc_within said:

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I'll likely be yoinking this...

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Awesome!

I know it is an old thread, but I really wanted to give you some more feedback and credit for this:

I think this is wonderful work!

Particularly, I like the flavor the class gets with the specific abilities (covering fire, pinpoint bombardment). Most of all, however, I like the flexible application of metamagic -- I've always been thinking that traditional metamagic rules are somewhat limiting, and ever since I first read the spontaneous metamagic variant in UA, I have been adapting class abilities to make use of it.

I had used the concept of spontaneous metamagic for a couple of campaign-specific prestige classes, including a battle mage prestige class (which is surprisingly similar to your variant). Perhaps this is why your warmage class variant has a prestige class feel for me now.

Given the terribly narrow spell list of the warmage, I don't think this variant would be unbalancing to the game overall.

I also think that it might be a good choice to add further powers to a menu list, as you have considered in your post above. Is there a final version of the class?

I really think this is a great fix and enrichment of the warmage.