Specialists better than specialized wizards?

[green slime]

This takes me back...

In 1e we had wizards and illusionists, the latter being *true* specialists - own spell lists with some unique spells and flavour.

In 2e rather than extend the model to provide additional true specialists, we got the hodge-podge which is 'specialist wizards' - slight bonus in one field, lose access to other field(s), which sadly 3e continued.

I think that 1e had a much, much better model, and it seems that with beguiler, warmage, true necromancer etc. 3.5e has recognised that and is making patchwork responses to improve the situation.

It might be nice if a (hypothetical) 4e did this for real as a baseline, but I won't be holding my breath.

Cheers

Agreed

 

[Pinotage]

The UA specialist variants are quite alright to make them more specialist than just with the PHB.

Bye
Thanee

These days I'd probably find it quite hard to play a specialist without the UA variants. I really like them - they give the specialist something extra.

Pinotage

 

[wayne62682]

I find this too.. a player in my group has a Wizard (Necromancer) and she's basically a regular wizard with a Skeleton familiar (UA variant), and nothing else really to make her *feel* like a Necromancer. She didn't like Dread Necro though because of the limited spells (and becoming a Lich at 20th), but we finally convinced her to look at some Cleric levels and True Necro from Libris Mortis.

I like the new "Specialist Classes", don't get me wrong, but they do their job much better (although in a different way) than taking a regular specialist Wizard. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that I think WotC should remove specialist wizards altogether in 4th Edition and have "Wizard" be the general class, with each of the specialist classes being considered Core for purposes of being the "Specialist" variant (e..g Warmage == Evoker, Beguiler == Illusionist/Enchanter, Dread Necromancer == Necromancer, etc.)

 

[Victim]

I'm not sure I'd like to see normal specialist wizards totally phased out though. I think it's useful to have a midpoint between the flexibility of the wizard and the total specialization of a warmage or beguiler. And IMO wizards basically need the bonus slots from specialization to apply their flexibility - it's not just how many spells they can cast per day, but also the chance to bring a broader array of spells.

And those specialist classes would take up a bunch of space.

 

[Nyaricus]

This takes me back...

In 1e we had wizards and illusionists, the latter being *true* specialists - own spell lists with some unique spells and flavour.

In 2e rather than extend the model to provide additional true specialists, we got the hodge-podge which is 'specialist wizards' - slight bonus in one field, lose access to other field(s), which sadly 3e continued.

I think that 1e had a much, much better model, and it seems that with beguiler, warmage, true necromancer etc. 3.5e has recognised that and is making patchwork responses to improve the situation.

It might be nice if a (hypothetical) 4e did this for real as a baseline, but I won't be holding my breath.

Cheers

I hope 3.5e continues the trend so we can get base classes for all the schools of magic - nevermind 4e!