Wizard Spell Update

[AtomicPope]

The purpose of this thread is to stringently define a Wizard's Role as a Controller. This thread is not a haven for those who see all Wizard spells are balanced and equal with all other powers and wish to air their disagreements. As a DM I'm curious to see everyone's ideas on how they will give Wizard's a slight boost while attempting to maintain game balance. I'd also like some feedback with suitable examples and suggestions as support.

My own ideas for house rules are pretty straight forward:
1) All Close spells will only Target Enemies. This allows Wizards to "effectively" do more damage to enemies by ignoring the concern for friendly models.
2) All Area of Effect damage-only Encounter Spells will cause Ongoing damage equal to 5pts per tier. I'm leery about increasing damage so I might decrease the total number of D6's by one. The purpose of Ongoing damage is to allow Spell Focus and other such abilities to come into play more often.
3) Area of Effect damage-only Daily Spells will cause Ongoing damage equal to 5pts per tier + Intelligence Modifier. This will effect spells such as Acid Wave (minor boost), Fireball, and Meteor Swarm. Fireball becomes obsolete too quickly because it is exactly the same as Combust yet is a Daily power instead of an Encounter Power. This minor edition gives the lower level Daily a slight boost over the Encounter power.


An example would be Level One Burning Hands. Changes to the spell would be as follows:
Target: Enemies within Area
Hit: 1D6 + Intelligence Modifier + 5 Ongoing damage

The decrease in damage is to compensate for the Ongoing damage for balance sake. Over time a Wizard will normally do a bit more damage (except against Hobgoblins but they're the exception, not the rule). The change in target obviously allows Wizards to spend their time controlling enemies that are swarming the party.

 

[Raunalyn]

One of the things I was concerned about with 4e was how bad they nerfed the Wizard. Most classes in 4e do a net damage that is more than a wizard can do. The advantage to a wizard, though, is the ability to do extensive damage to a large group of enemies at once. Notice that all of the defender, leader and striker roles do damage, for the most part, to one enemy at a time.

I was thinking about doing something a little like school specialization in 3e. Wizards would specialize using their Wizard Spell Implements instead. So, to put this into effect, you would need to make more wizard spells and keywords, and have the implements do an additional +2 to hit or +2 to damage when using a power with the proper keyword. For example, a mage who specializes in fire magic and uses a wand for his implement (I'm just using a wand as an example of an implement a fire mage would use), then he would get a +2 to damage from powers with the Fire keyword ONLY. All other spells would be as normal. This allows for greater versatility with mages, and gives them a little more oomph.

New implements would need to be made, of course. Maybe a skull for necromancers, an orb for illusionists, etc. Not sure, though...the idea is still kind of rolling around in my head.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

1) All Close spells will only Target Enemies. This allows Wizards to "effectively" do more damage to enemies by ignoring the concern for friendly models.

This seems to be a fairly common complaint, and one I agree with: controllers harm their enemies more than non-controllers. My solution, which you might want to consider, was to make a Sculpt Spell feat: You can ignore a number of allies (including yourself) in a spell's area equal to your Int mod if you spend a minor action to "activate" the feat before casting the spell. The wizard gains this feat automatically at 1st level.

There's a Spell Accuracy feat based on Wis that does mostly the same thing at Paragon tier, but I feel the wizard should get this immediately (as the best class for controller powers should be a controller), and it requires a minor action so (A) you can hit allies if you want to for whatever reason and (B) there would be an advantage to Spell Accuracy.