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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pogre" data-source="post: 2810169" data-attributes="member: 6588">The Power Gamer’s 3.5 Wizard Strategy GuideThe Power Gamer’s 3.5 Wizard Strategy GuidePublisher: Goodman Games96 pages$19.99Also available as a pdf.This is a playtest review. Those wanting my general impressions may skip to the Summary at the end of the review.Following on the heels of the excellent Warrior Guide in this series I was excited to purchase this book. The stated goal of this book is similar to the Warrior Guide: Build the perfect magic-using character to kick butt in D&D. The book is advice on making the right choices on maximizing a magic-using characters effectiveness. Although not quite the indispensable treasure that the Warrior Guide is, this book mostly succeeds.The Chapters are organized along the lines of player choices made when creating a magic-using character. Chapter one details the best way to arrange ability scores. Chapter two deals with appropriate races. Chapter three covers skills the magic-user should emphasize. Chapter four outlines feats and which ones work best for wizards. Chapter five discusses classes and archetypes. Archetypes are an important element to this book as they define the kind of mage a player wishes to play and the associated appropriate choices.Chapter six describes the various appropriate spells by archetype. Chapter seven catalogues the equipment a wizard should carry and goes into the various worth of assorted magic items. Chapter seven again, an amusing editing gaff both in the table of contents and the chapter headings, discusses the role of the caster in combat. Finally, the appendices give a number of spreadsheets including spell saves vs. target DCs, caster check vs. target’s spell resistance, and average spell damage by die type.The introduction of the book outlines a number of difficulties in creating a power gamer guide about spell casters. The main problem is the multitude of factors involved in assessing spell caster performance. Warriors generally require an analysis of how to bring the most damage, the fastest against most opponents. Not easily accomplished with wizards as they can fulfill various roles in the party. The four archetypes outline this difficulty – blaster, controller, saboteur, and support specialist. In a nutshell, should your wizard concentrate on buffing everyone for a combat or launch the fireball, which will do more overall damage to the enemy? An admittedly more difficult analysis than – what is better short sword or long?Despite the difficulties, the book does a fair job of dispensing advice. The advice of this guide is more stylistic and more arguable than the Warrior’s Guide, but still solid. There is a very interesting discussion of the relative worth of the various metamagic feats in chapter four for example. The relative worth of familiars for the various archetypes is covered in chapter five. A solid discussion of the two blaster archetypes, front-end blasters and back-end blasters, is also found in chapter five. Front-end blasters generally need a touch attack or ray attack and back-end blasters usually require a save from their respective targets. Although the book advocates some choices, it cannot or does not do so conclusively – in short there is a lot of “it depends” language littered throughout.My favorite two pages in the whole book are found in chapter six – a huge chart covering what certain spells cause in average damage at caster levels 1 through 20. The only drawback is the chart does not adjust damage for the difficulty of the saving throws. Therefore, a higher level spell listed as having the same damage as a lower level spell would in actual gameplay cause more average damage. This is a minor nitpick though, as I find the chart a very helpful comparison. Another helpful pair of charts is the best offensive and defensive buffs by level.I was surprised at how valuable I found the equipment section. Detailed discussions of which magic items are most helpful to each wizard archetypes are enlightening. Even more helpful to DMs is an example list of effective equipment lists for magic-users by level. I certainly will use this when creating NPCs in my game and scale it down a bit – it uses average PC wealth as a guideline.I do have a couple of other minor quibbles with this guide: First, the authors mention a few things outside of the phb. Technically Dark Elves are in the core rules – see the MM, but I would say the cast majority of core rules games would not have them as a player race. The second quibble is really a matter of personal preference, but I found the attempts at humor in this book falling short of the Warrior’s Guide. SummaryThe Wizard Strategy Guide attempts to show how to build the best kick butt magic-using characters possible. It mostly succeeds, but falls short of its predecessor. The book rates an 8.5 out of 10 or so, which converts to a 4-star review in ENWorld terms. I would not hesitate to recommend the book to anyone playing an arcane caster but it is not indispensable as the Warrior Guide.December 27, 2005Keith Pogue (AKA pogre)</blockquote>

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