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<blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5142971" data-attributes="member: 52073">Rephrased, then: optimized gishes get both of those.&nbsp; The point of the duskblade is to give you a passable gish that works out of the box without jumping through hoops.The bard isn't a gish, really, it's a support caster at best; gishes are meant to buff themselves up and enter combat and cast offensive damage/debuff spells in melee.&nbsp; The bard boosts other characters as much as itself, and focuses on skills over casting.If the duskblade has too many slots, then all full casters certainly have too many.&nbsp; If you're making a partial caster, you have one simple choice: Do you give them fewer spells overall, as with the bard, paladin, and ranger, or do you give them around the same number but shifted towards the lower levels?&nbsp; Due to the duskblade's channeling ability, the latter was almost mandatory; besides, you'll note that the duskblade is the only class to take that approach, and is also the only partial caster that anyone uses for a standalone gish--when was the last time you saw someone take paladin or ranger to even mid levels and use its casting as an integral component of their build?My point was that this existing weakness was exacerbated by the warmage's lack of access to some of the best blasting spells.&nbsp; A warmage with even the five spells Dandu mentioned on its list can begin to match a sorcerer at blasting (though obviously nothing else), but as long as it's limited to orb of X and metamagic'd fireballs, it's going to suck.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Eldritch_Lord, post: 5142971, member: 52073"] Rephrased, then: [B]optimized[/B] gishes get both of those. The point of the duskblade is to give you a passable gish that works out of the box without jumping through hoops. The bard isn't a gish, really, it's a support caster at best; gishes are meant to buff themselves up and enter combat and cast offensive damage/debuff spells in melee. The bard boosts other characters as much as itself, and focuses on skills over casting. If the duskblade has too many slots, then all full casters certainly have too many. If you're making a partial caster, you have one simple choice: Do you give them fewer spells overall, as with the bard, paladin, and ranger, or do you give them around the same number but shifted towards the lower levels? Due to the duskblade's channeling ability, the latter was almost mandatory; besides, you'll note that the duskblade is the only class to take that approach, and is also the only partial caster that anyone uses for a standalone gish--when was the last time you saw someone take paladin or ranger to even mid levels and use its casting as an integral component of their build? My point was that this existing weakness was exacerbated by the warmage's lack of access to some of the best blasting spells. A warmage with even the five spells Dandu mentioned on its list can begin to match a sorcerer at blasting (though obviously nothing else), but as long as it's limited to [I]orb of X[/I] and metamagic'd [I]fireballs[/I], it's going to suck. [/QUOTE]

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