Wild Mages

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i don't know if they stack. I think one of the spells may say something about that but i never worried about it.

When you cast NRD there is always going to be a wild surge effect. Even if it is jsut that you cast your spell normally. Otherwise you have a %5. Sometimes that %5 seems like more. From what I was reading in another thread about spell memorization it's probably the same type of thing with the random number generator. But NRD is a wild surge every time without fail. Every spell you cast also has it's level modified from -5 to +5 and it's random and sometimes you'll get a lot of good ones and sometimes a lot of bad ones. So there is some randomness to every cast but not all of them are wild surges.

Even that 5% can be bad though If your say in the middle of killing Irenicus or Yagashura and get a bad result. But you put on that chaos shield just before just to be careful and you could end up with some cool affects. Such as having all your spells replenished after you've just blasted away most of your offensive spells already in a time stop.

 

@Aldeth

No need to have CS up, unless you know you're going to use NRD. Otherwise the 5% chance is just too low to waste level 2 slots on CS, and have to rest every 5 battles because you've run out of CS. And it is much more fun to just let a completely random surge happen every now and then - it really spices up the game, compared to playing with any other class.

Besides, as far as the rolls are concerned, low=bad and high=good isn't exactly consistent. Some of the high surges aren't that good, while some of the low ones can be beneficial. In many cases it depends on whether it's an offensive or defensive spell, since the effect is applied on the "target". So for example a surge that "heals target" is great if you get it while casting Mirror Image, and quite bad if when casting Magic Missile.

This leads to your next question - how random is it? I don't really know, as I've never figured out the math, but I think it is pretty random, because you can get quite high surges very early on in the game. Case in point: the first time I got the Summon Cow effect (hilarious the first time you get it) was in Chateau Irenicus, level 1. Looking it up in the table, it's at #88, and I didn't have Chaos Shield active. So, it can go quite high quite early.

@Minh So: Nope, never played the wild sorcerer. But I did play the Wild Mage a lot

 

OK, it seems like the wild surges are a lot more to be concerned about than the +5/-5 for each spell you cast. For a lot of spells, that shouldn't matter at all. For example, if I summon something it doesn't matter at all. A time stop does the same thing if it's cast by a 20th or 30th level sorcerer. Same thing with breach, or pierce shield. Even spell effects that are level dependent have caps on them. Like a fireball is capped at 10d6. So once you hit level 15 all your fireballs will be the same. Come to think of it, there are very few spells that are entirely dependent on level. Dispel magic springs to mind. I don't think there's a cap on incendiary cloud. Lower resistance is level dependent, but I don't use it all that often. That's about the list of spells that I can come up with that I both use and are completely dependent on level.

 

20th. Any spells you don't see a cap on stop at 20.
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Unless you have the spell-50 mod.

The real advantage of a wild mage at high level is the extra spell per level without having an opposition school. The level adjustments are only useful at low to mid levels.