Energy Substitution Please!

[harshax]

This feat is a personal favorite of mine and I'd like to see it in the game. D&D and its ilk has always heavily favored fire spells. It would make the Elemental Focus feat much more useful.

Wizards have a hard time in this game. The lack of variety with scrolls and their vendors makes playing these characters fairly difficult. Energy Substitution would help a lot. Chapter two has some serious challenges for most wizard evokers:

There's only two or three wizard spells that are effective against the primary adversary in Chapter 2: snowball, acid arrow, shocking grasp

The wizard class is the hardest character to run with any degree of satisfaction. Limited spells per day and spell selection from the world at large have almost forced me to play sorcerers with mods that let them scribe scrolls to their spellbook, just so they have more to do during combat. It feels like the only playable arcane spellcaster is the Arcane Trickster because of how easy it is to flank in this game. Arcane Trickers and Magus seem to be the most functional arcane casters in the game. The ten-minute adventuring day is very much a problem if your primary character is a wizard and you want to contribute to combat.

While not Pathfinder Canon, I think it woud be better for a wizard to be allowed to scribe 4 new spells every level, in order to give them more versatility. Versatility is the only reason you play a wizard at all. Having Wizards get 4 spells while all other classes (even those that stack spell caster levels) get 2 gives the class a playability feature that is sorely lacking for this class.

[CBAnaesthesia]

Originally posted by harshax:

This feat is a personal favorite of mine and I'd like to see it in the game. D&D and its ilk has always heavily favored fire spells. It would make the Elemental Focus feat much more useful.

Wizards have a hard time in this game. The lack of variety with scrolls and their vendors makes playing these characters fairly difficult. Energy Substitution would help a lot. Chapter two has some serious challenges for most wizard evokers:

There's only two or three wizard spells that are effective against the primary adversary in Chapter 2: snowball, acid arrow, shocking grasp

The wizard class is the hardest character to run with any degree of satisfaction. Limited spells per day and spell selection from the world at large have almost forced me to play sorcerers with mods that let them scribe scrolls to their spellbook, just so they have more to do during combat. It feels like the only playable arcane spellcaster is the Arcane Trickster because of how easy it is to flank in this game. Arcane Trickers and Magus seem to be the most functional arcane casters in the game. The ten-minute adventuring day is very much a problem if your primary character is a wizard and you want to contribute to combat.

While not Pathfinder Canon, I think it woud be better for a wizard to be allowed to scribe 4 new spells every level, in order to give them more versatility. Versatility is the only reason you play a wizard at all. Having Wizards get 4 spells while all other classes (even those that stack spell caster levels) get 2 gives the class a playability feature that is sorely lacking for this class.

I don't agree that arcane casters are weak in general, except maybe early game (which is when casters should still be relatively weak). I do think there should be greater access to arcane scrolls though, for sure.
There are a ton of Wizard spells that are effective in Chapter 2 that you didn't list, just not a ton of effective damage spells. Lots of CC and debuffing available though.

[harshax]

My point is valid if you are primarily an evoker. Not absolutely accurate, as you've pointed out, but valid nevertheless.

[Shadenuat]

There's nothing valid about your "point". There are multiple energy sources on every level, including fairly early Dragon Breath spell that has 6 or 8 different options.

And Evoker easily dominates this game starting level 5.

[nym_moondown]

I think we lack lot of spells in general. With a low selection spontaneous casters are stronger than non spontaneous ones. Hope they will add more spells (many, many, more spells) in future releases. A lot of iconic spells also are not in the game. :(
To be specific I would like to have more illusions, divinations and even other schools field control spells...there aren't many by now at least.

[Evangeline]

I get what you PnP nerds are saying :P but I'm already drowning in spells. As a complete noob to D&D it's a lot to digest and confusing. What spells are best, which ones to learn, when to use them, this one is ray, this one is touch, this one is ranged touch...

It's a bit much already.. So I vote for no more spells :3