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Illusionist - is it as weak as it seems?
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<blockquote data-quote="David L." data-source="post: 7139276" data-attributes="member: 6888749"><p>Here's the problem I'm having with it in my game. I have two wizards in my party. One of them is a necromancer, and the other is an illusionist. The one who is playing an illusionist has been playing 3e for years and this is their first time playing 5e. They were adapting one of their 3e characters that I really liked the concept of - a wizard who dreams of being the classic fireball-chucking archmage, but absolutely sucks at evocation spells. They instead use illusions to make people think they can cast the classic awe-inspiring wizard spells. So the bottom line of the idea is that he's supposed to be really good at illusions, specifically. However, 5e doesn't really allow for that. Until 10th level (yes, you do get malleable illusion at 6th, but it takes a few more levels before you can really do anything reliably awe-inspiring with it that other wizards can't do well enough), the illusionist doesn't really get to do anything that any other wizard can't. Granted, it would take other wizards an extra casting, but that's a far cry from how a lot of the other specialization abilities feel. Pretty much every other specialization lets you do things that make you immediately distinct from other wizards. In our last session, the party's other wizard basically kept taunting the illusionist by casting his own minor illusion whenever the illusionist did, and even though he couldn't do both sound and sight at the same time... No other wizard school's abilities allow that sort of toe-stepping. I never played 3e myself, but I did used to play AD&D and back then, the illusionist was the <em>only</em> specialization. And while I love 5e, it really kind of pains me to see this reversal of fortune... I've been scrounging through the rules to try and find some sort of options to allow for the illusionist to actually <em>be</em> good at illusions, but I'm coming up completely dry. The only real option I seem to have available to me is to let him convert a bunch of rules from 3e, and that just seems so backwards to me. How could WotC have dropped the ball so hard on such a classic character type?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="David L., post: 7139276, member: 6888749"] Here's the problem I'm having with it in my game. I have two wizards in my party. One of them is a necromancer, and the other is an illusionist. The one who is playing an illusionist has been playing 3e for years and this is their first time playing 5e. They were adapting one of their 3e characters that I really liked the concept of - a wizard who dreams of being the classic fireball-chucking archmage, but absolutely sucks at evocation spells. They instead use illusions to make people think they can cast the classic awe-inspiring wizard spells. So the bottom line of the idea is that he's supposed to be really good at illusions, specifically. However, 5e doesn't really allow for that. Until 10th level (yes, you do get malleable illusion at 6th, but it takes a few more levels before you can really do anything reliably awe-inspiring with it that other wizards can't do well enough), the illusionist doesn't really get to do anything that any other wizard can't. Granted, it would take other wizards an extra casting, but that's a far cry from how a lot of the other specialization abilities feel. Pretty much every other specialization lets you do things that make you immediately distinct from other wizards. In our last session, the party's other wizard basically kept taunting the illusionist by casting his own minor illusion whenever the illusionist did, and even though he couldn't do both sound and sight at the same time... No other wizard school's abilities allow that sort of toe-stepping. I never played 3e myself, but I did used to play AD&D and back then, the illusionist was the [I]only[/I] specialization. And while I love 5e, it really kind of pains me to see this reversal of fortune... I've been scrounging through the rules to try and find some sort of options to allow for the illusionist to actually [I]be[/I] good at illusions, but I'm coming up completely dry. The only real option I seem to have available to me is to let him convert a bunch of rules from 3e, and that just seems so backwards to me. How could WotC have dropped the ball so hard on such a classic character type? [/QUOTE]
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