Hi,

Our party consists of a slayer, a warrior (tank) and a bright mage. The last one is really unhappy - he was supposed to be damage dealer, but his spells do at most (with all the boons, successes etc) about 13 damage, whereas the melee guys routinely deal 13 and as much as 19 dmg (with reckless cleave, troll-feller or way of the sword cards).

The famous fireball deals lowly 6 dmg (average) in splash, wich usually means 1 net dmg point, and is difficult to cast. Is it supposed to be this way? Are there better spells in the on demand expansion?

thanks for help!

Well, this game has done something I cannot grasp with spellcasters. Any spellcaster won't be fully developed until they reach rank 5 and they have access to the most powerfull spells. So, your Bright Wizard PCs will evolve slowly through the different characters rank, each time becoming more powerful and beign able to deal more damage as he has acces to better spells.

This is not entirely true for non-spell casters. The warriors in your group already have the best combat action cards available in the game. This means that now they do 19 damage, but it also means that at rank 3 they will still do 19 damage, may be 20 or 21, but not much more.

Cheers,

Yepes

Skie said:

If your campaign revolves around how much damage a person can do, then whoever does the least amount of damage, will ALWAYS be unhappy, even if his career is much more balanced and diverse in his ability to interact with a regular campaign.

Bright mages have a lot of things going for them beyond how much damage they can do. Here is my random assessment:

1. Reckless cleave and way of the sword cards are broken. They are not balanced and are way overpowered. Other cards simply do not compete with them, especially in then hands of the characters who are SUPPOSED to clean house such as a Slayer Wait until they discover thunderous blow and troll-feller strike and then you'll see how REALLY broken they are. Lost cause. Tell your player to deal with the fact that he's going to have to figure out how to be special in other ways.
2. Bright wizards are the only wizards who have social influence cards.
3. Bright wizards start with an attuned item (who else starts with a magic item?)
4. I presume by "Warrior" you do not refer to Chaos Warrior, but instead to a Swordmaster?
5. Aqshy, Lore of Fire, Bright Order: When you perform a Bright Order Spell action that deals damage, for each 1 additional power you spend you may increase the damage caused by that Spell action by 1.
6. The Bright wizard can close critical wounds on his companions! Big deal in a combat-oriented party.
7. Wizards are not precluded from taking non-spell action cards.
8. The Bright order Print on Demand has a few more spells to choose from. Reality dose though: Players will not find satisfaction in special abilties for long… they need to look outwards.
9. Fireball: You may have this ignore some armor (the same way that the firesword pierces). What would you as the GM like to see this spell do?

So, I look at it this way:

* Slayers and Swordmasters are one-trick battle ponies. Since that's essentially all they're good for, I can see why they would do that much damage.
* Bright wizards are /actually/ well-rounded. If he did as much damage as the Slayer or the Swordmaster, he would be MORE broken than those two classes because of all of his other abilities.
* Unless you throw some other types of interactions at your players besides combats, you're never going to have everyone be happy at the same time.
* If you wanted to break him better, that fiery sword spell could be ramped up to DR7 like the swordmaster (the Amythest wizard has a spell like this with DR7).

Which campaign are you running? That may be a better way to look at how to satisfy a character's actions.

jh

Thanks for your replies, food for thought!

I'm not running any specific campaign - my own adventures mixed with some of the published ones. But the point that the bright wizards has social abilites is a good one! And I think the player forgot about the item…

The points about way of… and cleave are something that I've noticed myself (I've played a swordmaster and I was appalled with the damage he could dish out). The easiest way of repairing that is changing the bonus damage on way… cards on Final Strike to +1 dmg for each card (instead of token) recharging. But I don't know yet how to change the other melee cards… That's for a different thread anyway.

Thanks!

Your mistake is thinking that the Bright Wizard is a "damage dealer". Bright Wizards are certainly the most offensive-oriented of the colleges of magic. However, wizards in WFRP are not the same as wizards in MMOs or D&D. They have many many skills and spells that are used for non-combat uses, as Emirikol mentions.

A combat focused PC will almost always deal more damage to a single target than a wizard. However, the wizard has more versatility. Don't think of WFRP wizards as a DPS "class".

Skie said:

Are you sure you're calculating damage correctly on the spells? I'm looking through the Bright Order spells and can't find anything I'd categorize as a "famous fireball" but only does 6 damage on average. Looks like about double that on average to my eyes.

Rank 5 "Fireball Barrage" has a _minimum_ damage of 5 + Intelligence. So that's realistically a minimum of 10, and probably much higher due to the ridiculous dice pools late game characters can have. 5 or 6 red/green/blue dice, 3 yellow and 10 white (which would be below-average for a Rank 5 wizard) can hit the 5-success line about 50% of the time even if you aim the spell at 4 targets and thus have 5 purple to roll. So that's a 50-50 shot at around 18 damage per target. 2 boons or 1 chaos-star will pretty well clear the floor of henchmen in medium range regardless of targeting, so you often don't want to officially aim at all the targets.

Do you have the Errata'd version of the Bright Order talent? It lets you spend extra power to increase the damage output on spells, at 1:1 ratio, and that's huge on a multi-target spell. Even on something less grandiose, it can make a big difference, such bumping up a Rank 1 Flameblast by 3 or 4 damage.

My group is experiencing some of the same tension yours is, by the way, but it goes both ways. Our Bright Wizard and our big melee hitter both continually gripe about how the other one out performs them in combat. The wizard's damage is lower so he's upset, but the dwarf has to run into melee so he complains about the fatigue and taking a lot of hits that the wizard is able to avoid. I keep trying to tell them that since they're both on the same team it doesn't matter who does more damage, but they don't want to hear it. It's funny, sad, and frustrating.

A slayer is a slayer and a sword master is an actual sword master, they don't grow that much in power. Wizards are like all wizards in the beginning not good for that much, bright wizards are good for more than most of the others, but still, it's an apprentice. Later on you will however discover that rank 2 or 3 or even 4 makes you extremely powerful, wings of asqy lets you fly various spells do A LOT of damage and remember that you can channel more power into them to do even more kaplewy, soon your bright wiz will leave them behind as you obliterate hordes of beastmen on your own (often in a single round).

Are there any chaos spells that you can tempt him with? Or spells from another order? If the wrong book should fall into his hands….