POLL: Build your own sorcerer! (normal mode)

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@kmonster:

Charm person - are you saying that when the charmed guy goes hostile again you don't get XP for him? I had not noticed that. Also there are a TON of humanoids in this game, and charm > orb, for the same reason that mass dominate > wail.

Pro:Arrows is surely better than A's.Scorcher. Unlike Stoneskin, it isn't limited to absorbing only a certain amount of damage.

Good point about CL not hitting allies. But I have trouble getting it to hit more than a few enemies. Acid fog has **no save** (free extra damage) and a handy slow effect.

Oh, I forgot about the 50% miss chance with I.Invis when I was voting. I think people dislike the spell because it used to be horribly broken, and now with the patch it puts you in a quasi-invisible state where enemies can see you, but you can't go invisible again with another spell.


@crucis:

Disintegrate and Dominate Person both affect a single target. Despite the "Person" in the name, Dominate works on nearly anything.

Wail vs Mass Dominate. I know that HoF enemies have Fort saves bonuses, but I have *not* noticed that NM enemies have Will save bonuses. The saves types seem to be overall more or less equal in NM, though of course different monsters have their different srength and weaknesses. So, given a group of ten random monsters, Dominating six will let you easily kill all but one, who will be badly hurt. "Wail"-ing six will leave you facing four full-health enemies.


@Mudde:

Ghost Armor is good for anybody who melees. You don't *need* to be going for a freak-AC decoy to *want* more AC, and Ghost Armor stacks with almost everything. The duration is 5r/l, which is pretty good (of course, now somebody will come along and say that the manual is wrong as usual, and the real duration is either 30 seconds or 12 hours)

 

I like Charm Person, but I don't count on it providing me with a reasonably useful ally. Al you can really count on is a non-hostile "enemy", although sometimes you are lucky and the charmed one will fight. Either way, charming a person is useful in that it a) takes an enemy out of the fight and b) very often causes many nearby enemies to turn on the charmed one (whether he's fighting or not), taking them out of the fight for a while as well. Stunning an enemy with a Chromatic Orb is great, but it doesn't affect more than that enemy. Other enemies don't start shooting him, nor does the orbed one start fighting his friends.

I think that many people underestimate the value of a measly Charm Person spell, particularly in HOF, where Fort saves are uber-high, but Will saves are normal. (And also consider that your spellcaster might have both SF and CSF: Enchantment by that time, so that chances of a successful Charm are higher.)

CL is particularly useful against enemies that have already engaged you in melee, since it's also an enemies only spell. It may not affect a lot of enemies, but it does do a good job of discriminating between friend and foe in a messy melee environment.

OTOH, Acid Fog (which is a spell that I do like), like other fog/cloud spells, is particularly good for creating kill zones.

I guess that I never realized that ImpInvis was "fixed". I remember trying it once in its non-fixed state and it felt so much like cheating that I swore off ImpInvis.

I don't doubt that, JT. I guess that it's the "single target" nature of the spell that I dislike in a spell of a higher level. I'm not fond of all or nothing spells. At least with spells like WotB or Mass Dominate, even though it's all or nothing on each individual target, with many targets, you almost always get a few "hits".

JT, you don't have to sing the praises of MD to me. I've been one who thinks that it's the best level 9 spell.

My only point is that if I had one L9 spell to choose in NORMAL mode, I'd be tempted to go for WotB, because it would be attacking enemies whose Fort saves hadn't been heavily bumped up by HOF.

Please note that I did NOT say that NM bumps up Will saves. The difference between WotB/NM in NM vs. HOF is only about the relative difference between Will and Fort saves in the two modes. Will saves do not change, but Fort saves do. HENCE, WotB should be relatively more effective in NM (compared to MD), since your enemies' Fort saves are much closer to their Will saves in NM. WotB should kill relatively more eemies in NM than in HOF, due to the lower Fort saves in NM.

No debate that Ghost Armor is nice. But is it worth losing a casting of Fireball or Skull Trap, since as a L3 spell, that's the tradeoff.

 

That's what I experienced. But because of the dynamic XP calculation it doesn't matter.

 

I agree with crucis on most points. Ghost armor is an ok spell, but mirror image and stoneskin are much better in normal mode and fireballs usually does more than half of my casters total kills through a typical run through normal mode.
One ghost armor gives one of your chars a better AC while one fireball can end up killing almost all enemies and severly wounding the others and even thougher enemies die after a few of those.

Wail has one big advantage against MD in that it kills the enemy casters who usually have high will saves. In HOF MD is better but quite early in HOF your caster gets to pick more lvl9 spells so that you can have both.

Dominate person don't work on almost every enemy, at least not for me. Many enemies are immune to that. It can be very useful against some though.

Evocation spells are always the best spell type for me in normal mode. I usually play with one evoker-type caster and one enchantment-type caster and the evoker-type is almost always more useful. Because of that my enchanter-type usually takes a few evocation spells like fireball. In HOF-mode OTOH the enchanter starts shining!

CL can be useful but it has a too low total damage output for a damaging spell in that lvl.

Like many other I don't use Im. Invis. much and thats mostly because it was so cheesy before the patch that I'm still feeling bad about it now even though it's fixed. It should at least change it's spell name to something that I don't associate with cheating for me to start using it.

[ March 27, 2007, 13:04: Message edited by: Mudde ]

 

Mudde, one thing about WotB is that affects enemies in a 30' radius around the caster and that may not be enough to get those spellcasters with their lower Fort saves. Still, a spell that can wipe out 30-50% or more of your melee enemies is still a good deal.