D&D Essentials Wizard: Schools of magic, free Magic Missile, Spellbooks with Encounters

D&D Essentials class previews

Introduction
Cleric - Fighter (Knight) - Fighter (Slayer) - Rogue -Wizard
Druid - Paladin Ranger (Hunter) Ranger (Scout) - Warlock

It’s time for another preview of the new class builds that will be included in the Essentials book Heroes of the Fallen Lands. Today it’s the wizard’s turn, and we get to see the overview of the new builds, the heroic advancement table and, unlike the cleric preview, even some of the at-wills. For a general look at the Essentials line information we have seen so far, you can check out my post from last week.

The preview starts with developer Bill Slavicsec goin out of his way to explain that, really, Essentials is not a stealth edition change, and that Essentials material can be played along with PHB material, and PHB material can be played along with Essentials as well, and whatever they release in the future will play just fine with boty PHB and Essentials. I’m sure that the 4.5 doomsayers will still find a way to read this as the end of the world (and the edition!), but it does look like the guys at Wizards of the Coast have no interest at all in repeating the PR fiasco of the 3.5 edition reset.

Anyway, on to the juicy bits...

Bill Slavicsek goes out of his way to explain that, really, Essentials is not a stealth change of edition, and Essentials material can be played along with PHB material, and PHB material can be played along with Essentials as well, and whatever they release in the future will play just fine with both PHB and Essentials. I’m sure that the 4.5 doomsayers will still find a way to read this as the end of the world (and the edition!), but I’d say the guys at Wizards of the Coast have no interest at all in repeating the PR fiasco ot the 3.5 edition reset.

Anyway, on to the juicy bits... the Essentials build for the Wizard is called the Mage, and it has an undeniable old school flavor. To begin with, schools of magic are back, as is specialization, and there are three sub-builds for wizards that choose to focus on either Evocation, Enchantment, or Illusion. As with all Essentials classes, Wizards have their own advancement table, with new class features to be gained as they level up. The table also specifies the required experience points for each level, as well as the feats and powers gained, which further contributes to the nostalgic feeling, even though they are all pretty much the same as the general 4E character advancement. Not only that, but you also get a table listing the spells you can prepare each day on your Spellbook for each level, which will also appeal to old timers but doesn’t actually deviate one comma from how it worked in Player’s Handbook.

But old schoolers aren’t the only intended audience for Essentials - according to the previews we have seen so far, they aren’t even the top priority. That honor goes to newer, unexperienced players, for whom the character creation process has supposedly been streamlined. How does that work out? We still have only a fraction of the class description that will be in the book, and the rules framework remains pretty much the same, but some improvements in presentation can be appreciated. I think that the class personality, as well as their place in the world, are better portrayed here than in previous books. You get just enough background to know what wizards and their schools are about, without getting to the point where you want to skip the blocks of text (and I’m not particularly tolerant, in that regard!). Brief paragraphs explaining flavor and function precede not only class features, but also (in an unprecedented and welcome move) powers.

Interestingly, only a brief mention is dedicated to the controller role, and the description of each build focuses more on the look and feel (evokers are all explosions and destruction, enchanters lack damage but disorient or control enemies) than their strategic contribution to a party. Players accustomed to 4E should still be able to figure out that evocation has a bit of Striker and enchantment is more pure Controller, whereas someone new to the game would probably know this intuitively, even if he couldn’t associate it with these words. Anyway, even if a player knows absolutely nothing about the rules, I think these descriptions provide sufficient material to choose a build or power just by how it looks.

To conclude, here’s a quick rundown of the mechanical details for the new wizard:

- Intelligence is still the primary ability score. There are three secondary abilities, and my guess is that they match the different specializations as follows: Constitution for Evocation, Wisdom for Illusion, and Charisma for Evocation.
- The Spellbook class feature now also lets you store multiple encounter powers. Apart from that, it works as before, except that the part about rituals has been cut. There seem to be no rituals in Essentials.
- Wizards still get Cantrips, though it remains to be seen whether they are the same ones as in PHB or not.
- Each mage chooses one school of magic to specialize on, and it determines a series of features to be gained at levels 1, 4,5,8 and 10. At least one of these features (likely the one for level 1) boosts spells related to the chosen school. It’s likely that several of the higher level features provide out of combat functionality that would otherwise be handled by rituals.
- Magic Missile is given for free as a class feature. It has the same text we could see in this month’s Errata, except that the Evocation keyword has been added. I wonder if more old spells will be updated to receive additional keywords for different schools.
- Three more at-wills are shown, for different schools of magic. I think there should be a total of 6 at-wills 2 for each school. We have Arc Lightning, which is a clone of the Invoker's Divine Bolts (pretty cool), Beguiling Strands, which is a less damaging version of Thunderwave with a larger, friendly area and no reliance on Wisdom, and Hypnotism, which can either force an enemy to attack your target of choice, or slide it a bunch of squares.
- Effects that would usually depend on secondary abilities in at-wills now have fixed values. This is likely intended to simplify character creation.

Overall, this looks very similar to the classic 4E wizard. The powers look cool and effective, and not different from the ones we would expect from any other book. In particular, they seem to be well balanced with existing stuff. As for the features, we’ll have to wait until we know more details, but I can’t help the impression that you get a bit more than a regular wizard - not that it was difficult, since PHB wizards got almost nothing in the way of features, anyway. However, the emphasis on benefits affecting a limited set of powers, and pseudo-ritual effects could mean that there’s still room for the original wizard builds - it’s still too early to know. The Spellbook improvements are completely awesome, though, even if they probably don’t affect a character’s effectivenes by much. Spellbooks easily make Wizards the most complex class in Essentials, even if you can easily ignore the feature (as the players in my campaign do) without a significant loss.

So far, so good. I’m still looking forward to the new books. Only a couple of months to go...

Introduction
Cleric - Fighter (Knight) - Fighter (Slayer) - Rogue -Wizard
Druid - Paladin Ranger (Hunter) Ranger (Scout) - Warlock