Wiz: Wizard Enhancments

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Updated Fri, Feb 13, 2009 by Darkgolem

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.

Enhancement types:

There are five different types of enhancements for wizards.

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.
Tomes and Deadly Tomes: These grant and increase the chance and amount of damage done by critical hits with spells.
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.
Skill Enhancements: These raise a wizard’s ability with certain helpful skills.
Metamagic Cost Reductions: These reduce the cost of metamagic feats.
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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Energy of the Scholar: Available at every level, each additional level of enhancement increases bonus spell points by 10 * the level of the enhancement.

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.

As an example, if you wish to be better at crowd control spells, first decide what enhancements affect those spells. In the case of crowd control spells, the following enhancements affect these spells:

·   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.

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? Tell us on our forums!

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Wiz: Wizard Enhancments

Pimping Your Mage

A Guide to Wizard Enhancements

Enhancement types:

How enhancements affect wizard spells and functions:

Specific Spell Enhancements:

Evaluating Enhancements:

Thinking It Out

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