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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Al'Kelhar" data-source="post: 5951916" data-attributes="member: 7884">Thanks for the feedback.My thought behind magic missile was to take it back to its original concept even further, by allowing higher level casters to fire more than one. Although in the hands of a reasonably-optimised Wand arcanist it can do reasonable guaranteed damage, it can never do more than what's really a token amount against a single target. It can sweep a room of several minions, or can knock down several bad guys who are close to death, but otherwise it's still just a nuisance. For example, a 6th-level Wand arcanist with 20 Int, 18 Dex, Dual Implement Spellcasting, and +2 and +1 wands, does 14 points of force damage each to 2 targets.I tinkered with arcane bolt on the same basis. Really, arcane bolt is a slightly souped up magic missile. So you get slightly more of them (from 9th level), and you can fire two at a single target, thus doing a bit more damage. As some added minor bonuses, arcane bolt also pushes 1 square (if you're a Wand arcanist) and does full damage to insubstantial creatures. But it still spreads the damage around, so it's not very powerful at all. And by the time you've got a lot of arcane bolts, you're likely to have swapped the power for a higher level one anyway.Nevertheless, I was really trying to re-enliven the "machine gun wizard" from previous editions, and I reckon the Wand arcanist with magic missile, arcane bolt, and wizard's fury fits the bill nicely.There's a typo in the document sorry - the "Orb of Readiness" should read "Tome of Readiness", of course.I really like the idea of a wizard who can just touch someone and they burst into flames.Thematically, fire powers often seem to do ongoing damage, so I thought I'd try to beef scorching burst up a bit by giving it this feature. However, I didn't think I could just add ongoing damage without making scorching burst too powerful, so I decided I'd give the Wand arcanist the option - do full damage immediately, or do less damage immediately, but do some ongoing damage as well. The ongoing (save ends) damage is based on Dex, so is usually going to be less than the up front Int-based damage, but since it will burn for more than one round in 45% of cases, it can be a damage buff. And that's really the attraction now.Also, I like the idea of a wizard that sets things on fire. Did I mention that?I thought I might do another version of the document that sets out my thoughts and reasoning behind my suggested changes, if that would help.Cheers, Al'Kelhar</blockquote>

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