Fighters vs mages at high level.

[silentspace]

Not true. A 30th level fighter has 16 fighter feats and 11 or 12 regular feats. He can be excellent at melee, range, grappling, unarmed fighting and be very well rounded in several styles of combat. This is the fighter's advantage over other combat types who focus everything on two-weapon fighting or jump into a prestige class.

Please forgive me. I should have said one to four things.

 

[silentspace]

Just want to say that personally I love fighters and barbarians. They are by far my favorite classes to play. Its just that I don't think they can stand up against a 30 level wizard. Unless you have a very poorly built wizard and do the combat under special circumstances. Which would never happen, since the wizard would make damn sure to plan for such circumstances.

 

[moritheil]

I think you want something like a Fighter/Spellthief, with possibly a few levels in Occult Slayer or the like.

 

[Selenim]

I'm no epic lvl expert but having some cover or concealment while closing in for the kill would help if you're going for a melee kill. Use the terrain to your advantage.

PS Salut confrère québécois

 

[Thanee]

In high levels as a fighter "duelling" a wizard the basic premise is:

As soon as the spellcaster gets a single spell off (this includes triggered spells), you can consider yourself dead.

Therefore the fighter needs to completely shut down the wizard from round 1 on.

Bye
Thanee

 

[boredgremlin]

Phaw, wizards arent that great. You just have to enforce the rules on metamagic so they cant go higher level then 9, or 10. One thing about the epic casting feat that often gets missed is that it only gives you one extra level of spells. The first time you take it gives you 10th level. You have to take the feat again to get 11th and so on.
Figure a smart fighter allready took the feats to up his saving throws and scared up some cloaks of resistance. Probably epic cloaks at that point, he is in pretty good shape. Hp wise the wizards damaging spells dont keep up. Epic enhance spell upps the level of the spell by 4. So even a 30 dice fireball will be an 11th level spell. With the fighters saves enhanced he has a good chance to make his reflex save So all he needs to worry about is instant kill spells. And those are pretty much all fortitude saves. The fighter has a good chance of killing him. Lol add a couple of permanently silenced items, and a field of metamagic. So if the mage dispells the metamagic he still has the permanent silence items. Once he gets close this keeps the wizard either silent and running away or wasting who knows how many turns getting rid of the permanent items.
Lol and making the mage retreat for another day is winning. So if he teleports home the fighter wins by default.

 

[Jack Simth]

An epic wizard does need to take the feat repeatedly to get higher-level spell slots, this is true; however, with the feat progression, by 30, an Epic Wizard will have 3 epic Wizard bonus feats and 4 epic character level feats, assuming no PrC's that alter it. If, for some reason, 4 of them went to Improved Spell Capacity, that wizard could have a Quickened Time Stop, perhaps a Heightened Trap the Soul. Combined with a starting Int 18, all bonus stats going to Int, Inherent+5 Int, big enhancement bonus to Int, et cetera, that Wiz's Trap the Soul could be nearly impossible to resist, barring such things as a Paladin that went with Uber charisma, of course.

 

[boredgremlin]

Ahh but the wizard cant afford to take them all for higher level spells. He also needs silent spell and still spell. Otherwise he can easily be silenced, hit with a rope of entanglement, etc. Additional magic item space is also a good one for anyone, including mages.

The 30th level fighter starts with a +17 fort save, should be at least +5 CON at that point (+22), great fort +2 (+24) epic fort +4 (+28), cloak of epic resistance +10 (+38) and the fighter has a 50% chance of beating aven a 48 DC fort save.
Even assuming every epic feat was spent on improved spell capacity, except for the improved highten spell of course its only a 15th level max. DC25, greater spell focus +4 (+29) Lets say a +10 INT mod (+39). 39 total DC.
With a +38 fort save for the 39 DC the fighter needs anything but a 1. Not exactly irrisistable. And this figures the wizard skipped all the other good epic feat options. Not too likely. A smart will built fighter will take nearly all the feats to up his saves though. So the suped up fighters saves are a lot more realistic a turn then the suped up wizards save DC's. They will be high but not that high. The mage has to attack the fighters will. That will be 6 pts lower base and probably with 4 or 5 pts less ability mod. So the fighters will save will likely be a +28, a 39 DC fort save requires an 11. So he only has a 45% chance to succeed. Not great but by no means certain doom.

 

[Testament]

Its over already. A level 30 Wizard will slaughter a level 30 fighter in any smackdown situation, since he'll be invisible, flying and 150 ft away the instant a fight starts (Chain Contingency keyed to go off whenever he's attacked). Then its a maximised twinned Enervation (8 negative levels instantly) with a quickened spell in there for good measure.

If PrCs are allowed in this challenge it gets worse. Incantatrix/Archmage, enough said.

 

[Thanee]

Of course, the wizard will disable the fighter with spells, that have no save, so the fighter stands absolutely no chance to resist, unless he's in an Antimagic Field, which is what I said above. IMHO, that's about the only thing to help, and even that can be brought down, so unless the wizard is also dragged inside and disabled immediately, that doesn't help either.

Bye
Thanee