Is my Wizard good to go?

[abgrundtief]

Hi! Okay after a while studying the Charactersystem i made following wizard: Wood Elf, Scientist (1 Lore, 1 Mechanics), Attributes are: Mig 19, Con 3, Dex 19, Per 16, Int 18, Res 3 and Lore 3, Mechanics 2. Spells i chose: Chill Fog, Fan of Flames, Jolting Touch and Slicken. It sayed i need to spend all my Attributepoints or they vanish, so i spend more to Perseption because Mig, Int and Dex does not go further up, it's a cap/limit. What do you think, is my Wizard good to go or should i reconfigurate something, i am at the very beginning (gathering the berry). I'm also not sure if i should exchange mechanics with athletics, because i could bring a member into party with mechanics? But i am absolute beginner, no idea.

[Baldurs_Gate_2]

Well, perception and res are more important than dex. With lvl 5 you get alacrity, that provides 50% attack speed anyway and with that low res, enemies will tend to just ignore your tank and attack your wizard. I would not dump anything, just go with 14/10/10/16/16/12 (old vailla).

Chill Fog is good, the other spells not so. Eldritch Aim / Wizard Double / Parasitic Staff would be my picks. There is no weapon, that is stronger than parasitic staff (except citzal lance, another wizard spell) and you get is with lvl 1. Oh and pick arcane veil + hardened veil at lvl 2+4, so you get a high deflection boost for a limited amount of time.

One character should put everything into mechanics. Athletics is not really necessary, you can just drink a potion or let a paladin / priest / druid heal you. Stealth is good for the first chapter, after that it falls off in a group. Lore is always good for confusion / paralyze scolls (8). Survival max 10 for the lvl 2 accuracy bonus.

[psychotron666]

Poe discourages big time min maxing. I've never dumped a stat below 8. 3 con and res on a wizard and you're just gonna be constantly dying and enemies will always target you first.

[abgrundtief]

Ty Guys, i changed now to Mig 19, Con 8, Dex 13, Per 10, Int 18, Res 10. I have a good feeling with that for now. In addition i put the difficulty on "path of the damned", more enemies = more loot. :D I hope i will not regret this decision, but the first enemies i slayed relatively easily. :D

[psychotron666]

If you're doing path of the damned, perception is infinitely more useful than might, imo. Hitting things reliably becomes a big problem on potd, and you can have all the might in the world and it'll mean nothing if you can't hit anything reliably.

This is just my opinion, and I'd maybe wait to hear from more than just me, but personally I'd rather have 10 might and 19 perception than the other way around

[Dixon Sider]

You want max preception for a wizard. Each point in perception gives your spells an increased chance to hit. And spells are not affected by all accuracy buffs, so this is extremely huge for wizards. No point im maxing DEX like that IMO. I would dump CON to a reasonable level and go glass cannon with him/her. Wizards have the highest damage potential in the game because of how well AoE fares.

I would go 19 preception, 19 int, 10 dex, 10 resolve, and (20 - CON) STR

Put your constitution at wherever you feel comfortable. 10/10 split is fine. I would probably go as low as possible for CON myself because I normally build glass cannon wizards in RPGs

Am I also correct in assuming these numbers you have posted are not including the +1 from origin? For some reason it seems like the origin stat is missing. Id put that in perception if that is the case

[Gilmoy]

Chill Fog and Slicken are always good.

Fan of Flames and Jolting Touch are risky, because you must be in melee range to use them well. Do you plan to solo the game? If you play with a full party of 6, your Wizard should be non-melee and stay back. Then you'll almost never use any touch-range spell, no matter how good it is. Fan of Flames is a very nice AoE damage spell, and it's good fun to give your front-line fighters Lore 2 for Scroll of Fan of Flames as a gimmick, but your Wizard usually has other priorities.

Concelhaut's Parasitic Staff is strong, but your Wizard with low Deflection and Endurance is a fragile target in melee. Wizard Double, Arcane Veil, etc. are also strong, but a back-rank Wizard rarely gets targeted anyways. You could play a melee Wizard gimmick with 2 defensive spells + a weapon spell, but that costs 3 spells per fight, and it requires a fight big enough to last about 8 full attack cycles to make it worthwhile.

Path of the Damned gives all monsters +15 to all defenses (Deflection, Fortitude, Reflex, Will). That's equivalent to giving all of your characters -15 Accuracy.

19 Might gives you +27% damage and healing, but a Wizard won't be casting many Healing spells.

19 Perception gives you +9 Accuracy. How does that compare to +27% damage? I'll sketch a solution. In PoE1, every attack has a fixed 100-point wide window of hit result, which is 15- miss, 16-50 graze, 51-100 hit, 101+ crit. You roll d100 and add (Accuracy - defense), so Accuracy slides the window rightward (or leftward), resulting in different distributions of the 4 possible results. Then take the dot product with { 0 for miss, 0.5x for graze, 1.0x for hit, 1.5x for crit }. For Accuracy = defense, you get 0.675 expectation per attack, which applies to your damage, and also your spell durations.

The effect of +9 Accuracy depends on where you already are. The greatest absolute gain occurs when you lose 9 points of miss at the low end, and gain 9 points of crit at the high end, in which case your expectation increases by +0.135 = 0.810. That's a relative gain of +20%, and it applies to both damage and spell durations. When you're L7 and casting L4 Confusion to flip (on average) 2 of 7 monsters in the AoE to your side for (5.0 + 40%) = 7.0s, a relative gain of +20% spell duration (from more crits and fewer misses) is enormous. Your party probably doesn't rely on your Wizard's relatively low damage, but it does gain disproportionate benefit from your Wizard's crowd-control spell durations. So +20% spell duration is surely more valuable than an extra +7% of your Wizard's damage.

For Path of the Damned, consider the bad interval [-50, 0] of (Accuracy - defense). At the low extreme of -50, your window is 65% miss, 35% graze = 0.175 expectation. +9 Accuracy converts 9 points of miss into 9 points of hit, for +0.090 expectation, which is a relative gain of +51.4% damage(!!). At the high end of -9, the expectation goes from 0.585 to 0.675, which is a relative gain of +15.4%. Other intervals can be computed similarly, but we can already see that +9 Accuracy will always(?) gain back about half of the +27% damage bonus you could get from 19 Might, and in some edge cases it gains back far more than that. So it's a viable choice.

Then a Wizard (and Priest, Druid, Chanter, etc.) surely benefits more from +spell duration% than from a little more +damage%. For a primary DPS character, or a Healing spellcaster, the same math might favor Might instead, or a split of Might and Perception.

You can use similar analysis to compare Talents that add +5/+6 Accuracy vs. +20%/+25% damage. +6 Accuracy will give at most +0.090 expectation, which could be as much as a +15% relative increase in expected damage. So they're approximately balanced, which makes your choices very interesting. Anyways, Path of the Damned will probably encourage you to spend several more Talents on +Accuracy and +defenses, just to counteract the monsters' difficulty bonuses.

[mr.raider2]

I am really, really not a fan of min maxed builds. Crappy Resolve hurts early game when you get hit a lot, crappy con hurts all through the game. It easy to say wizards should not get hit, but on PoTD you will still get hammered by AoE attacks.

My favorite wizard stat spread is M15, D15, C9, P15, I15 and R15. I like dex13-15 on wizards, and always put the best dex boosting gear on my wizards. If your wizard can get his first spell off at the beginning of battle, and it's a massive AoE disable like confusion, Arkemyrs HEx, it will trivialize most battles. I'm a big believer in first strike kills. If you think dex is too high, drop it to twelve and put it in per, int and might.

Nothing wrong with your spell selection. It makes no difference what spells you take at character creation. You can copy spells from grimoires, and you and Aloth can pick different spells and pass them to each other. Be prepared to swap spells in your grimoire as needed. Confusion spells don't work on vessels. Spirits are cold resistant, etc....

[Aria Athena]

I think it's fine really. You need high Might and Intellect and then you can do whatever with a Wizard. They can cover with self- buffs most of their weaknesses, casting 5 of them takes usually 2 seconds. I personally like having high Dex, but I'm also a fan of the melee Wizard. I would probably leave Con at 8, at least for the first couple of levels if nothing else, but even with 3 Con and 3 Res a Wiz can be very tanky if need be.

[abgrundtief]

Ty for all your information, i think best thing would be to end struggling with thinking about the stats and with all new informations just make a wizard i feel it's good to go with and then start the game, i am too much of perfectionist i think, maybe i just go from PotD to hard-mode and it will be fine for sure for my first playthrough. ^^ Because... between hard-mode and PotD is no difference in number of enemies, right? I just want the most enemies possible. :)

[Dixon Sider]

Originally posted by abgrundtief:

Ty for all your information, i think best thing would be to end struggling with thinking about the stats and with all new informations just make a wizard i feel it's good to go with and then start the game, i am too much of perfectionist i think, maybe i just go from PotD to hard-mode and it will be fine for sure for my first playthrough. ^^ Because... between hard-mode and PotD is no difference in number of enemies, right? I just want the most enemies possible. :)

Go PotD, you will like the game more. You may get stuck at times, but it will feel much more rewarding.

[LordFragee]

If you have no planned to play solo, then you can stick to your attributes, f.e. you can have a cipher, which can reduce the stats of your enemies - so you mage will still hit