Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Virel" data-source="post: 2038480" data-attributes="member: 24633">In 1st ed AD&D we had a fair number of Illusionist and it was my favorite class. When UA came out the balance tipped more in favor the magic-user. When 2nd ed came out with that combined spell list for magic-user/wizards, it was the death of the Illusionist class. The Illusionist was just another subclass with the same spells a typical wizard would cast. Many of the best Illusionist spells which were the heart of the class were eliminated or watered down. In my campaign, Illusionist are still around and players will still play them a little. Out of 28 active characters, in three different adventure groups, spread among ten players, we have two Illusionist. Keeping the 1st ed spell list as written in 1st ed for the Illusionist was the key. Several spells are very powerful etc but the trade offs are balanced. However, even in 1st ed AD&D the Illusionist was often at mercy of the DM on how the DM would interpet spell effects etc. My group had the EGG view that Illusions can cause damage etc and the Illusionist was quiet effect, in fact the very high level ones were the crunch masters with spells like Chaos (only fighters and illusionist are allowed saves), Cromatic Orb, Weird etc with the Magic User being the most flexiable.As for 3e, I think it has better balance on the specialist than 2e because you can pick your opposition schools. This could allow an Illusionist to throw a real fireball on occassion to mix it up.When my co-DM runs adventures, I'm playing a 1st level Illusionist and we are using the 1st ed Illusionist spell list as writtenin the PHB & UA.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification