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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grog" data-source="post: 921668" data-attributes="member: 6183">In his own stronghold? Not likely. A party would have to be suicidal to split up their group in the stronghold of a powerful wizard.Anyway, we've drifted quite a ways from the original topic. The bottom line is, just because a wizard may sometimes chase the PCs when they run away does not mean he'll do it every time. It depends on the circumstances.I never said that. What I have said, repeatedly, is that having the party wizard acting as an archer instead of a wizard isn't useful for a party of adventurers. In fact, it's likely to be very detrimental to them.If you wait until the cloud giant becomes a problem to use Hold Monster, then the party has already expended far more resources than they needed to.This is the point I'm making. Wizards aren't meant to be archers. They're not very good at it. Sure, by using enough feats and enough spells, a wizard can turn himself into a mediocre archer. But by doing so, he's substantially weakening the whole party.When a PC isn't doing what he or she does best, it hurts the whole party. Sure, you could have the fighter check for traps, but he's not very good at it, and he'll probably miss more traps than he finds. Similarly, a wizard acting as an archer isn't doing what he does best. A 12th level wizard archer is going to be roughly as effective as a 6th level fighter doing the same thing. Probably a bit more so, since the 6th level fighter probably won't have a +4 bow and arrows. So we'll say he's about as effective as an 8th or 9th level fighter.Sure, he can perform as a 12th level wizard too (minus the feats and spells he expended to be an archer), but every round that wizard fires his bow instead of casting a spell, he's only contributing the resources of an 8th or 9th level fighter to the group instead of a 12th level wizard. This harms the group as a whole.And as for having lots of weak encounters, if they're so weak, the wizard probably wouldn't have to do much of anything. An EL 7 or so probably won't be able to significantly harm a 12th level party regardless of what the wizard does or doesn't do (unless we're talking about girallons or dragons or something, but that's a whole other topic). In a weak encounter, my wizard can cast a weak spell. Or use a weak magic item. Or twiddle his thumbs. Doesn't make much difference. But you can't expect to still be fighting EL 7's at 12th level - it's just not going to happen very often, barring unusual circumstances.As I said, we'll have to agree to disagree here.</blockquote>

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