Wizards and their keywords

Plane Sailing · Jul 15, 2008

Out of interest, I thought I'd tot up the number of powers available to wizards with the various keywords - to get an idea of which damage bonus feats are the best bets for them.

here are the results

acid: 4
cold: 14
fire: 14
force: 10
lightning: 5
necrotic: 4
poison: 5
psychic: 4
radiant: 2
thunder: 4

So Astral Fire could help with a total of 16 powers.
Burning Blizzard could help with a total of 18 powers.
Dark Fury could help with 8 powers.
Raging Storm could help with a total of 9 powers

At Paragon Tier
Inescapable Force could effect 10 powers
Lasting Frost could work with 14 powers (with limitations)
Lightning Arc could work with 5 powers
Resounding Thunder with 4 powers
Solid Sound with 14 powers

At Epic Tier
Font of Radiance with 2 powers
Irresistable Flame with 14 powers

Interesting, eh? When it comes to Wizards it looks as though there is a lot more mileage in some feats than in others.

(It might be worth observing that there is one fire, one cold and two force at-wills amongst the statistics above. By their very nature, these are going to come into play more often)

As an experiment, if I weight the number to include a nod to frequency of use along the following schedule
daily = 1
encounter = 2
at-will = 4

Then the results come out like this:
acid: 5
cold: 23
fire: 23
force: 21
lightning: 8
necrotic: 6
poison: 5
psychic: 6
radiant: 4
thunder: 9

It might be interesting to do the same for Warlocks (and possibly others).

What do you think?

NMcCoy · Jul 15, 2008

Does this include paragon path powers?

Ander00 · Jul 15, 2008

If you include the spells from Dragon #364, the psychic keyword actually comes up fairly often (9 times, I believe, or 10 times if you also count the Blood Mage's Destructive Salutation), making Psyhic Lock a more worthwhile investion.

cheers

Goumindong · Jul 15, 2008

Plane Sailing said:
As an experiment, if I weight the number to include a nod to frequency of use along the following schedule

+damage is not a very useful attribute for most of these powers. What needs to be established is not simply how many spells use them. But how many of these spells have the capacity for multiple damage rolls.

E.G.

Dark Fury only applies to 8 spells. But many of those 8 spells contain repeating components. Blood Pulse is the favorite example, a single application of blood pulse can hit 2-5 times in its application. And depending on how you read the power that can be anywhere from 2 to 50 damage rolls or +4-100 damage in the paragon tier.(High end damage on low end damage approximation would be about 8 extra damage in the paragon tier)

The same goes for things like wall of fire, Necrotic Web, Black Tentacles, Cloud Kill, Wall of Ice, etc etc.

I.E. Going from 3d6+int to 3d6+int+3 is not every impressive.

Going from 2d10+int+1d10/round to 2d10+int+(1d10+3)/round starts to look a lot better. Your ongoing damage has increased 50%.

yu gnomi · Jul 15, 2008

Blood Pulse doesn't have Psychic keyword so Dark Fury is no help to it.
(unless there's errata I don't know about that is)

Ditto for Bolstering Blood.

Plane Sailing · Jul 15, 2008

NMcCoy said:
Does this include paragon path powers?

No, I just looked at the basic powers available to all wizards.

Ander00 said:
If you include the spells from Dragon #364, the psychic keyword actually comes up fairly often (9 times, I believe, or 10 times if you also count the Blood Mage's Destructive Salutation), making Psyhic Lock a more worthwhile investion.

I'm just sticking with the core books at the moment, to get a handle on what the designers planned as a baseline.

AtomicPope · Jul 15, 2008

Nice job.

Goumindong · Jul 15, 2008

yu gnomi said:
Blood Pulse doesn't have Psychic keyword so Dark Fury is no help to it.
(unless there's errata I don't know about that is)

Ditto for Bolstering Blood.

My mistake on Blood Pulse, the second mystery power I was referring to was Evards though, not Bolstering Blood(which isn't a power)

Wolfwood2 · Jul 15, 2008

Plane Sailing said:
Out of interest, I thought I'd tot up the number of powers available to wizards with the various keywords - to get an idea of which damage bonus feats are the best bets for them.

here are the results

acid: 4
cold: 14
fire: 14
force: 10
lightning: 5
necrotic: 4
poison: 5
psychic: 4
radiant: 2
thunder: 4

So Astral Fire could help with a total of 16 powers.
Burning Blizzard could help with a total of 18 powers.
Dark Fury could help with 8 powers.
Raging Storm could help with a total of 9 powers

How does that look as you trade up powers at higher levels? The level 1 encounter and daily powers essentially aren't a factor anymore once you trade them out for higher level powers.

Plane Sailing · Jul 15, 2008

Wolfwood2 said:
How does that look as you trade up powers at higher levels? The level 1 encounter and daily powers essentially aren't a factor anymore once you trade them out for higher level powers.

A good question that I don't have a good answer for.

However, it did prompt me to make a slightly more useful breakdown of keywords by encounter/daily powers

Code:

acid	   1 encounter	3 daily
cold	   6 encounter	7 daily
fire	   6 encounter	7 daily
force	   5 encounter	3 daily
lightning  3 encounter	2 daily
necrotic   2 encounter	2 daily
poison     0 encounter	5 daily
psychic    2 encounter	2 daily
radiant    2 encounter	0 daily
thunder    2 encounter	1 daily

Plus of course your at-wills

Force: 2
Fire: 1
Cold: 1
Thunder: 1

Cheers

Wizards and their keywords

Plane Sailing

Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!

NMcCoy

Explorer

Ander00

First Post

Goumindong

First Post

yu gnomi

Explorer

Plane Sailing

Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!

AtomicPope

Hero

Goumindong

First Post

Wolfwood2

Explorer

Plane Sailing

Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!

Similar Threads

Pets & Sidekicks