The Order of Wild Magic (Wild Mage Feedback)

[Disciprine Come From Within]

So, I've run a character all the way to the epic realm of wild magic, and I think it's at this point I can justify writing my feelings of the experience. To start, the class concept has been a lot of fun and a generally enjoyable romp of adventuring and random chaos. Kudos to the idea, the Baldur's Gate feel, and to the roleplay the chaos provides. It's been a laugh.

For all the fun, the class does feel a bit rough around the edges in some areas. I'm more than aware I jumped into playing it more than a year after the initial creation and the months of bug fixes into the effects of the surges. I can say that I've experienced no surge related bugs in my entire time playing the class which goes to show how well the script was refined. I actually feel bad even posting the things I found as a negative of the experience because of how much fun I had in general. But, I do think it needs to be raised.

The fun of the wild mage is in the general chaos of the surges that happen. The 5% chance per spell in general feels right and it's what Baldur's Gate used as well. What ends up coming off disappointing is when you want to really hammer on the chaos. The replenished spells is a fun little cookie for 5% surges and I like the fact that you're given a set amount of individual surges but as I was playing I kept yearning for a time when I could just have some period where I could just let everything go full crazy. Chaos Shield was a fun gimmick at level 9, but it's fun dropped surprisingly fast. Maybe if it allowed an improvement to surges but didn't allow replenished spells as a trade off, it would work out.

At 21 when I acquired Fatidical Manipulation, I ended up feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Here was an opportunity to play with the wild magic list and actually choose some of the chaos and it just ended up feeling like a single use -surge with a smaller die roll. For all the time it takes to get to it, I think that's what makes it feel sort of underwhelming. Some of the surge effects are very powerful but all the way to 28, it's still not a specific choice, just better options. I kept finding myself yearning to play with the choices and see what chaos comes from it, but unless I'm willing to rest after every use, I can't do that. It has the potential to be a really fun RP tool and it can add even more chaos to adventures, but with only one use, you're encouraged to play it safe with the choices rather than get crazy and creative. I think that works against the nature of the Wild Mage. The ability either needs some method of multiple uses or something more in it's effects off the table. Maybe a long cool down timer to it's effect? Maybe around 6-15 minutes? Maybe have it tie off -surge uses but not replenish spells? Maybe you get more uses of it as you level up epic Wild Mage? Maybe it functions as a double surge but you pick one of the options and the other option is always bad?

Part of the other underwhelming factor was how some of the surges by nature didn't do anything. Sparkling, Sparkles, Glow, Butterflies, and Laughing are 6 ways of basically having nothing happen. And that's sort of okay since Baldur's Gate also had it's own. But that on top of the incidents that cause surges to vanish can sometimes make the party a bit too normal with a bad string of having nothing happen. I'm not sure what could be done. Maybe replace the "Surge Vanished" with one of the random "nothing happens" surges instead and think up some more silly punishment surges? I actually liked when bad things happened with the surges, and even wished surges like Volcano and Lightning Storm worked on the caster as well.

Since the character was played on the surface, there is the potential that playing the Underdark may have had a more interesting experience with the wild magic effects of the class. I actually wondered a bit why there isn't any surface based wild magic area effects, though I could see how other magic classes would see it as a negative.

I guess to TL:DR, I really enjoyed the chaotic nature of the Wild Mage and felt a little underwhelmed at epic since the chaos never felt like it got turned up to 11.

[Cortex]

When played right (and assuming surges don't crap on you), you can emulate being a sorcerer with a better selection of spells, and choose one surge range to screw people with per day. Chaos shield coupled with -ward from epic abjuration is also amazing.

[ActionReplay]

Great feedback, glad you enjoyed the class.

Its funny because what you are asking for is pretty much how Chaos Shield used to work, or at least similar. It would give you X Rounds (Scaled by Caster Level) to wreck havoc where every spell you cast would produce a Wild Surge during that duration. You would also take damage I believe for each spell you cast during this and it would increase the damage.

Needless to say it was fun, for a while, but kind of useless as it just killed the Caster 8/10 times. At the moment Chaos Shield in its current state its pretty underwhelming, it can be useful for sure in certain combinations but it doesn't add much. If anything is to change I would look over that one again as I did before.

[Disciprine Come From Within]

Did Chaos Shield damage the caster as a cost for surges replenishing spells? Or were the surges only positive effects? I could easily see how you could die to surge backlash damage when it takes 3-4 evocation spells to handle some groups. Depending on the damage of the backlash and if you were getting hit, that could be murder.

[Iceborn]

You'd get all surges, all the random surges during chaos "shield".

There were two things that could happen:
1) You would try to go all out, cast two spells and chicken/silence/ASF/zombie/wolf/blind/stun/paralyze yourself, virtually leading to nothing.
2) You would somehow dodge or pass the saves on all the negative effects, and then it'd be a coin toss on whether what you wanted dead was dead before the spells, the backlash, the surges, or your enemies managed to kill you first.

So, losing control. Nice in concept, not so much in practice.

[Disciprine Come From Within]

I did notice there are quite a few ways to disable yourself with the surges. Some of them can be countered by proper protections and others can't. And I think it's okay if you're stopped by the surges. That's part of the cost of the randomness. The backlash sounded like the bigger problem and I guess that was to compensate for replenished spells via surging. Is there a way to simply prevent spells from replenishing instead?

In all honesty, the spell replenishing nature is a double edged sword to my feelings. On one hand it's really fun to have more flexibility in spellcasting at the cost of randomness and on the other, it makes the surges secondary to the spells when I feel it should almost go the other way. And on that note, the surges are generally either helpful for the wild mage or detrimental but I didn't see that many surges that worked on everyone. Those are the kind of surges I think hit home the chaotic nature of the class the most. Some of them like #46 "Caster temporarily forgets how to cast spells!" would be funnier if it was a mass spell failure on the caster. Has the same detrimental problem for the wild mage, and everyone around him/her, friend and foe alike. Maybe that can't be done based on how the negative spell failure is applied. I'm just picking it as a specific example.

[Dinosaur Space Program]

There is an in-game cookie last I checked (though it was ages ago) that ups your chance of surging by a set percentile. Dig around and maybe that will be your cup of tea!

[Disciprine Come From Within]

I wonder if it's that thing I have in my inventory already that someone said only Wild Mages could use. Wouldn't surprise me if it was.

[Poolbrain]

I wonder if it's that thing I have in my inventory already that someone said only Wild Mages could use. Wouldn't surprise me if it was.

You haven't discovered all there is yet to the Wild Magery!