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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5655461" data-attributes="member: 996">I believe I said that, yes.It's pretty clear that the Wand wizard was meant to be secondary striker.  You could do some decent damage and single-target condition-inflicting.  An 'area interdiction' build (concentrated on AEs) also incidentally put out a lot of damage - not as concentrated as a primary striker, but occassionaly /quite a lot/.Having actually played a wizard who took Scorching Burst, Ray of Frost, Force Orb and Acid Arrow (I didn't really /want/ to, for the obvious reasons you put forth, but I also didn't want to clone the wizard in the prior campaign, so I very carefully took /only/ spells she hadn't - since she'd picked the /obvious/ good ones..), I can say they're not nearly as bad as you might think.  If you're intent on laying down area hurt, you can lay down quite a lot of hurt.  The advantages of area attacks turned out to be myriad - they often ignore cover and ignore concealment completely, for instance.  While you're sweeping minions, you can pile on to real monster you can catch in the same area.  The accumulated damage can really add up.   Force Orb turned into one of those 'make the DM groan' spells.  It was a little odd.  You could target objects with it, for instance, and it was enemies-only.  So when enemies were clustered around the fighter, I could hit even more of them with Force Orb than Scorching Burst, with Wand of Accuracy it rarely missed, so the secondary attacks were pretty dependable, and the primary damage was high.   Even Lightning Bolt (one of the most demeaned wizard spells on-line) turned out to be a great encounter spell, letting you hit three widely-separated targets late in a combat, after the enemy had been whittled away or smartened up and wasn't clumping up for your AEs anymore.  I was always dissapointed when we got down to one enemy, but then, Ray of Frost helped keep it from getting away.  Man, that was a fun character.  I really exected to suck, and rocked instead.The condition-inflicting end of it, yeah.  There were vanishingly few of those.  Most either hit multiple targets - area denial - or inflicted a nasty condition, or both.  It doesn't take a zone to deny an area.  Just the realization that gathering in /any/ 3x3 area is begging to be schorched is often enough.  Sure, it's 'soft' control, so it doesn't always scatter the enemy, but, when it doesn't, it inflicts a lot of aggregate damage on them. The optimal choices were really limitted at first - Orb lockdown was just too optimal - but, there were plenty of viable options, if you didn't let your expectations hold you back from trying them.</blockquote>

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