Woah! Stuff has been happening in the thread since I left it!
Spellwarp Sniper onto Fireball makes for an easy ray with awesome range - combine with Arcane Thesis and friends to make it Megatron's Fusion Cannon. Also, Elven Spell Lore for changing energy type to something else. Um...that alone should have you putting holes in things at stupid long range, and with metamagic reducers, be keyed off of 3rd (or possibly even 2nd with the right tricks) through 6th level spells. That's just off the top of my head - there are two really nice pyro's floating around keyed off of Snowcasting of all things that do some ridiculous status effects on top of nice damage, and neither really loses any versatility for it.
Complete Scoundrel is one of those books I know very little about, so I overlooked that. That's an interesting idea. My first thought was to look for other spells that would have an area that would be better than Fireball. The first thing I noticed was my range would be cut
much shorter.
What's the easiest entry into this class as a Wizard (possibly Focused Conjurer)? I'd need a way to get that +1d6 Sneak Attack, but I don't want to drop caster levels. The only thing coming to mind is Martial Stance for Assassin's Stance, but I think I'd need to be something stupid like level 10 to qualify, IIRC.
I just wanted to touch on the fact that a LOT of things are resistant to fire, far more than are weak to fire. But there are metamagic feats that let you change the energy of magic and the Admixture Metamagic Feat that lets you combine them for double damage. If you go with magic it's something to consider when you inevitably end up having to fight Fire Elementals or Salamanders or something.
That's definitely something worth remembering. In addition to the fire stuff, though, I figure the character would be casting offensive stuff that I could try to sell to the DM straight-faced as being fire or ash. They'd include:
- Wall of Smoke
- Incendiary Slime
- Stinking Cloud
- Solid Fog
- Cloudkill
That obviously doesn't handle
everything, but the character is meant to mainly be themed on fire, smoke, and ash.
Yeah, I'd definitely want to get Searing Spell, or take levels in Silver Pyromancer, or something like that to bypass that problem.
Searing Spell is probably the easiest option I've seen to overcome this, so far. It's good enough that it'd be worth taking Easy Metamagic on that feat, IMO. That, or if I had two favorite spells, I might skip EMM in lieu of taking Arcane Thesis with my two favorites, and then figure they'd both be Searing for free.
