Orca wrote:Is it that complicated making a good level 1 wizard? As much Int and Con as you can afford, learn/prepare Color Spray or Sleep, make sure you've got an arcane school which lets you prepare another spell and the Improved Initiative feat and, well, you're set.
Making a 1st level Wizard in Pathfinder is very complicated, because while to actually get by at 1st level all you need is to be able to cast Color Spray and/or Sleep, you have to pick a bunch of shit like specialist subschool, arcane bond, and archetype that won't matter until level 6 or 7. Like, if you choose the Manipulator subschool of Enchantment school focus then at 8th level you get +2 to the save DCs of
charm monster when you cast it at short range. But
at first level, the subschool doesn't really do anything (it gives you a beguiling touch which charms creatures for
one round, which is pretty much useless - at 4th level that touch actually lasts long enough for you to get your target to accept you casting another spell on them and actually matters).
I haven't gone through all the crazy options and shit. I genuinely have no idea whether you can milk enough out of Arcane Bond that you wouldn't rather get a fucking Wizard Cohort at level 1 by grabbing the Instructor Archetype.
It's all nested too, so parsing any of this shit is really hard. Imagine for the moment that you decided to be a Familiar Adept and an Enchantment (Manipulator) specialist. So at 5th level your Familiar gets to use your first level school ability. And that
would be Dazing Touch for being an Enchantment specialist, but it got replaced by Beguiling Touch by the Manipulator subschool. So after being function called three times (in addition to the function call to have a familiar in the first place), you find out that your familiar gets to deliver a touch attack of save against a 2 round Charm Monster once you get to 5th level. Which is pretty good. But is it better than the other options you could have after making 3 or 4 function calls in a different direction? I have
no idea. And I doubt anyone else does either.
It certainly doesn't help that these different options kick in at different levels, so that Beguiling Touch for the Manipulator Subschool starts being a thing you care about at 4th level, while the super prescience ability of the Foresight subschool kicks in at 1st level, and the Necromancy Command Undead ability requires your level to be equal to the hit dice of your total minions and thus becomes a thing that matters from level 2. Doing an apples to apples comparison is pretty much impossible. You
nominally get abilities in standardized levels, but since there's no rhyme or reason about which abilities are level dependent and which are not, and some abilities are useless at the level you get them and others go obsolete very quickly and some are simply terrible and others are crazy good and so on and so forth... it's a fucking mess and no one has ever untangled it all.
-Username17