Pimping Your Mage

A Guide to Wizard Enhancements

By Darkgolem



Enhancements provide many useful functions for a wizard.  Most
often, they modify the way A wizard’s spell work, or makes a wizard
more effective overall in the various roles an arcane spellcaster can
fill.  Wizard enhancements, to a lesser extent, affect a wizard’s
more mundane functions within a party.  To best pick enhancements
for your wizard, you should understand what roles you most often
fulfill within a party, and choose enhancements that best enhance the
spells and skills you use to fulfill that role.
style="font-family: tahoma;">

Enhancement
types:

There are five
different types of enhancements for wizards.
style="font-family: tahoma;">

1. Wizard’s
   Intelligence:  These add to a wizard’s intelligence score, adding
   to both available spell points, and the difficulty class (DC) of spells
   the wizard casts.
2. Tomes and
   Deadly Tomes:  These grant and increase the chance and amount of
   damage done by critical hits with spells.
3. Spell
   Augmentations:  These enhancements increase the amount of damage
   done by a particular damage type, and the amount of reconstruction for
   repair spells, for spells of a listed level or lower.
4. Skill
   Enhancements:  These raise a wizard’s ability with certain helpful
   skills.
5. Metamagic Cost
   Reductions:  These reduce the cost of href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=264">metamagic
   feats.
6. Energy of the
   Scholar:  A bonus to spell points.

How enhancements
affect wizard spells and functions:

Since enhancements
can affect skills, spells and the costs of casting spells directly, the
use a wizard puts spells to affects the best enhancements a wizard
should use.



Improved Heighten:  This
enhancement is one of the most widely applicable to a wizard’s
spells.  By reducing the cost of the heighten spell feat, a spell
caster can more often heighten spells; making the wizard more effective
at crowd control, charm, debuff and similar spells that require high
saving throws.



Improved Maximize and Improved
Empower:  These enhancements reduce the costs of maximized and
empowered damage spells.  A spell caster who concentrates on
damaging opponents in specific, important combats benefits from these
enhancements, reducing the costs of the feats mentioned, allowing
further spells to be cast by saving spell points.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Wizards Intelligence:  Most
useful for a wizard, this enhancement increases spell points available,
the dc of the wizard’s spells, providing a benefit toward a wizard no
matter what role the wizard functions.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Spell Augmentations:  If a
wizard should choose to get one of the spell augmentation enhancements,
he or she can specialize in the damage types of the augmentation taken
when picking spells, allowing the wizard to do additional damage
without extra costs.  This is excellent way for a wizard to be
able to have href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=209">damage
dealing as a viable means of approaching some combats, since
normally the damage done by spells often is too low to be efficiently
used.  These also apply to repair spells (the reconstruction
enhancements).



Tome and Deadly Tome
Enhancements:  These enhancements are a middle ground between
being able to do more damage overall with damage types, and doing a lot
more damage in key combats.  The cricital hit bonuses provided by
these enhancements do not stack with items, and often it is more
efficient to have an item which provides the appropriate critical
bonus.  These also apply to repair spells (the tomes of repair and
tomes of incredible repair).



Skill Enhancements: 
Concentration and Diplomacy, Search and Repair can be increased with
skill enhancements.  These are nice benefits, but usually should
be considered only when all other desired enhancements are taken, and
the wizard has an extra “slot” for one of these enhancements.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Energy of the Scholar:  These
enhancements add a flat bonus to spell points.  A must-have of
enhancements, these make any wizard better at whatever functions a
wizard should choose to act in, being more able to cast damage, crowd
control, or other times of spells more often.
style="font-family: tahoma;">

Specific Spell
Enhancements:

Wizard’s
Intelligence:  Gained at levels 2, 5 and 8, the bonus intelligence
(+1, +2 and +3, respectively) stacks with other intelligence
enhancements such as human intelligence.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Tomes of Energy:  These provide
increasing chances of critical bonuses to the named energy types, in
addition to repair spells.  Available at levels 3, 7 and ll, these
grant a 5%, 10% and 15% chance of a 1.5 multiple critical with damage
and repair spells.  They overlap with other bonuses to criticals
from items and other enhancements.  These tomes are available for
acid, darkness (negative energy), fire, force, ice, lightning and sound
damage types, in addition to repair spells.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Tomes of Deadly Energy:  These
are available at levels 4 and 8.  They do not increase the chance
to have a critical, but instead increase the multiple of the critical
by 2 or 2.5. They are available for the same damage types (and repair
spells) as tome spells.



Improved Empowering and Improved
Maximizing:  Improved empowering is available at levels 4, 7 and
10.  Improved maximizing is available at levels 7 and 10. 
Improved empowering provides a 5%, 10% and 15% reduction in the costs
of spells when empowered.  Improved maximizing reduces the cost of
maximized spells by 5% and 10%.



Improved Heightening: 
Available at levels 3, 6 and 8, these enhancements reduce the cost of
heightened spells by 5%, 10% and 15% total.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Energy of the Scholar: 
Available at every level, each additional level of enhancement
increases bonus spell points by 10 * the level of the enhancement.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


Skill Tactics and Skill
Resources:  Both skills increases are available at levels
1,3,5,7,9 and 12.  Skill tactics increases diplomacy and
concentration up to +8, while Skill resources increase repair and
search the same amount.



Spell Augmentation:  These
enhancements are available for cold, fire and electricity damage types,
named glaciation, combustion, and magnetism respectively.  They
provide up to a 40% increase in damage for up to 6th level spells at
12th level.

Evaluating
Enhancements:

Enhancements are not
alike in ability to fill various functions.  To decide which
enhancement to take for a particular role you wish to fill, look at the
spells you need to fulfill the role you have your sites set upon, and
compare the appropriate enhancements in how they assist you in your
roll.



href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album07&id=Metamagic_Feat&op=modload&name=Gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> size="-1"> src="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/album07/Metamagic_Feat.thumb.jpg"
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 250px; height: 188px;" align="left"> size="-1">As an example, if you
wish to be better at crowd control spells, first decide what
enhancements affect those spells.  In the case of href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=221">crowd
control spells, the following enhancements affect these spells:
style="font-family: tahoma;">


·    Energy of
the scholar:  You can cast these spells more often.  Casting
6th level spells, with energy of the scholar 12, you can cast up to 3
more spells.

·    Improved
Heightening 3:  You reduce the cost of heightened spells by
15%.  With 1000 spell points at level 12 (which is about right),
if a wizard casts all heightened spells, that wizard would be able to
cast 32 heightened spells with this enhancement, as opposed to 28
without.

·    Wizards
Intelligence:  Every two points of intelligence increases the dc
of a spell by 1 (meaning that approximately 5% more enemies will be
affected by crowd control spells), and increases spell points by 10 +
your caster level.  So wizard’s intelligence will add at least 22
points at level 12, or as much as 44.  Adding the 5% increase in
efficiency with your spells, this amounts (if you will pardon the rough
math estimation) to about 90 points, or 2 (6th) level spells plus a
part of another.



None of the other enhancements
affect crowd control spells.  That being the case, exclusively
casting crowd control spells, a wizard will benefit most from energy of
the scholar and improved heightening.  However, you should apply a
more practical view of spellcasting to examining enhancements.  In
the above example, most wizards will cast plenty of spells aside from
those which benefit from the heighten feat, even when specializing in
crowd control.  In those cases, a wizard benefits more from
wizard’s intelligence rather than improved heightening.
style="font-family: tahoma;">


When choosing damage enhancements
and tome enhancements, remember that energy spells vary in
usefulness.  For example, there are no fire spells above level 4,
making the combustion enhancement for 5th level spells no better than
the same enhancement for 4th level spells.  It’s important to
compare and examine similarly named enhancements closely before
choosing one.

Thinking It Out

By understanding the
roles you wish to fulfill with your spells, and what enhancements best
help you fill those roles, you can better pick your enhancements for
your wizard.  Examining how specific enhancements help you in
detail will help you compare the enhancements, helping you better chose
what enhancements are best for you.

---

How do you pick out your enhancements?  href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=1409">Tell us
on our forums!