Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Build Discussion Wizards specced Illusionist

I'll keep it short... is this subclass a complete waste in game? Finding that most of the illusionist spells, well.... either aren't in game or don't do much? Is there really a benefit to subclassing as an Illusionist? What is their kick/advantage? Please educate me.

All wizard subspecs outside evocation and necromancy are pretty trash, and necromancy is not far behind after they gutted Dance Macabre.

The problem with Enchantment/Illusion spells as well is that they face really crappy dice checks, if they fail they still eat up a spell slot, and most of them are mutually exclusive because all of them are slapped with concentration. Try landing Phantasmal Killer on any mob of note like a boss, which seems the exact target the spell is designed for as a recast spell, but it barely ever lands.

Most spells are garbage, that's why it's basically Chain Lightning, Fireball, Magic Misslies/Art of War, Hypnotic Pattern and Ottor's Irresistible Dance. Ice Storm is not bad either as an opener since it can cause aoe prone and rearrange the enemy turns. Spell balance is really poor. Circle of Death has less range and less damage than Fireball at the same spell level, much like most necromancy spells which seem to have lower damage and lower range under the assumption the summons make up for it, but they don't because summons don't scale, neither in HP or with magic gear effects and attack roll bonuses or damage. AoE spells are doing more damage than many single target spells.

Divination is widely regarded as one of if not the strongest spellcaster schools.

Evocation is fine.

Transmutation if you only plan on leaving the wizard in camp.

Everything else is only flavor.

Abjuration wizards are fantastic.

Enchantment 10 is also very, very powerful of going single class Wizard for some reason. But yes, Illusion is garbage.

Divination is fantastic for a dip (and multi class wizards are the way to go in BG3 imho)
Evocation is great for a dip, also good if you go single class.
Abjuration and Enchantment are great for single class only
Transmutation is good for a camp wizard
Necromancy I’ve not tested enough to have an opinion
The rest are garbage

Just my opinion but seems I’m not alone in them XD
I do strongly disagree with Zenith regarding enchantment spells, they are fight warping/ ending effects, hit a hold person and the target is as good as dead, even a tashas can totally swing a fight, they’re far more effective than raw damage. There are also ways to push your spell save DC, and if you’re an enchanter you should do so, in which case my experience is their hit percentage is more than adequate considering their power.

I dont understand this thread.

Necromancers arent obliged to use only Necromancy spells, Illusionists arent obliged to use only Illusion spells, etc.

Literally the only advantage you get for spells of your type is that you can learn them cheaper from scrolls. Thats it.

Which ironically means if you want to learn all spells you better dont learn your own school at levelup, lolz.



So picking your School is really just a smaller part of being a Wizard, and really all about the extra features you get.

Like the Necromancer getting more and stronger Animate Dead summons etc, the Invoker or Evoker getting party friendly area damage spells for free and getting stronger Cantrips, etc.

Saying that any type of Wizard is trash is however absurd, because they all get the same spells. This is not like previous versions of D&D where specialist wizards would lose access to certain schools, to get an extra spell of their own specialization per spelllevel. Everyone is a specialist now, and everyone can cast all spells.

And yes Evoker get stronger Cantrips. Bo-ho. Damage dealing isnt the main task of any spellcaster, thats what we have fighters etc for.

In BG2 this was different. There we got Improved Alacrity, which turned especially sorcerers into the most brutal deliverers of spike damage. Of course right now Haste is still bugged in BG3, so you can actually cast two spells per round. And maybe Larian even likes it this way and it will thus stay this way.



Since you just praised six schools, "the rest" is - Conjuration and Illusion.

The more astute among you, dear readers, will note that he did not, in fact, praise six schools.

This is simply not true. In fact, I wouldn't even say evocation or necromancy are all that outstanding.

Out of all the wizard subclasses, I'd say divination is the most busted. By miles, in fact. Potentially 9 portent dice a day is insane. Combine it with the lucky feat and counterspell and laugh as every fight you get into you gain the ability to just say "NOPE" to like 90 percent of the actually dangerous things that enemies can do. In fact I'd go so far as to say that divination really needs a nerf.

After that, abjuration. I don't know why they made the changes to abjuration that they did, tbh. And to be fair I haven't done a full playthrough of it. But it seems like it mitigates TONS of damage. Up on par with abjuration I'd place enchantment.

THEN evocation and necromancy. Evocation just seems like the most straightforward, "friendly" option but is not that fantastic imo. Necromancy...ehh, even weak summons can be very useful in this game, but the level 2 ability and level 10 abilities just seem not to matter much in this game.

Conjuration....I dunno, I'd actually place it relatively on par with evocation and necromancy, or a bit below. Would probably be more useful if there weren't so many easy ways to access a teleport.

Transmutation and illusionist do need more love. But I mean, it's the sad reality for illusionists that they usually get screwed over in video game adaptations.

I am playing tactician and there's literally no point in the game where I have to worry about saying NOPE to a mob, because the mobs die in 1-2 turns. You take alert feat, and then your evocation wizard and sorc clean up the room with the martial focusing the high HP targets the aoe spells your casters don't kill, and both casters do zero friendly fire so they can target the entire group of mobs with a single spell cast. And in the rare case I might worry about a NOPE moment, counterspell is there, and warding bond on 2 of the casters giving them universal resistance, and the martial and shadowheart with life domain are pretty much immortal on their own due to the high AC stacking of this game.

I don't care about the dice you seem to be concerned about. The magic missiles and fireball/chain lightning builds don't care for dice rolls, they do tons of damage pretty reliably and without restrictions and the martials do even more while being tankier. All this talk about needing to land CC's and denial roles tell me people are running party comps that do mediocre damage and don't have companions respecced to have optimal stat allocations and feats instead of their gimped baseline odd number starting stats and bad subspecs like trickery cleric. Even on ACT 1 my party including the casters is rocking 18-19 AC and by ACT 3 that goes to 22+ with a metric ton of saving throw bonuses dished out to the party. This includes Shadowheart's Healing Word as a bonus action applying Bladeward and Bless for 50% physical DR and 2d4 to saving throws and attack rolls with the Arcane Tower staff, and 3d4 to spell attack rolls to the enetire party and ally NPC's almost over half the size of an entire room in radius.

By Act 3 I also have freedom of movement on all allies, 2 warding bonds, and well fed, so I'm pretty much immune to all conditions with half my party sitting at universal resistances and 110+ HP.

Long rests are so plentiful in this game because the crates fill you to the brm with components. I finished a playthrough and still had enough food for 30+ long rests. Also sitting on 30+ spell scrolls I could have used on Shadowheart and my martials to make fights even easier.

Or it could be telling you that there are multiple ways to breeze through this game, and the particular way you found is not the only one.

We're talking about the usefulness of the various wizard subclasses. I think the difference is that when I think about them, I'm evaluating them on their own. I'm not thinking of "Evocation wizard, but also dependent on my character taking this feat, and using this equipment, and my companions being optimized, etc, etc, etc." I'm thinking of the single most broken mechanic allowed to any of the subclasses in isolation. And that is by far and away the massive number of portent dice. Spell sculpting, frankly, doesn't even actually seem that great. The vast majority of the time I'm able to cast aoe spells into melee anyway by being a bit mindful about placement and fiddling around with where exactly I target the spell. That's why I consider it a nice "friendly feature" but not anything groundbreaking.

To me the hardest encounter in the game is Steelwatch Foundry with all the Banites in the second floor and having the goal of not letting a single Gondian die. No one but evocation or sorcs can do that as trivially. Unfortunately for all other encounters in this game, it's basically "Burst this big target in 2 turns, and because we powercreeped the hell out of martials and sorcerers, it's possible to even 1 turn the hardest boss in the game without even excessive optimization like prebuffing". You have the odd encounter like Cazador with his mist form, but when you realize all you need to do is free Astarion to remove the countdown mechanic, he too becomes a trivial fight. The Thorms have their respective gimmicks, as does Grym, but all of them easily exploitable and rewarding burst on top. Raphael is a joke when each pillar dies easily and stuns him on top, and by then you can just pop a sphere of invulnerability on Hope, park your casters in it, and watch Hope remove half the mobs with her divine intervention and then your casters clean house while your martials cut down pillars and raphael. Or alternatively, if you don't want to see the RP of Raphael transforming, you can just one turn him with a martial anyways with elixir of cloud giant strength and Balduran's sword.

Burst is too often the correct answer in this game. If both our spells and mob abilities were less power creeped with damage and enemies used more debuffing/rot conditions and lasted longer that we needed to think about CC, area denial, debuff cleansing, it might be better. But it's just not. Most things die within the first 3 turns even in the hardest difficulty.

I mean, I totally agree there. In fact in any future playthrough of this game, I'm either going to have to actively restrain myself from using things I consider OP, wait for Larian to nerf them themselves, or look for mods to remove them for me. I think the sad thing is that Larian made humongous portions of the game outright *less fun* because of their powercreep.

Everyone who says you can pick a specialist wizard with a dip is wrong. A dip is taking 1 lvl in a class. Wizards get their specialisation at lvl 2.

In 5e a "dip" is 1 - 3 levels in a class (prior to 5e a 'dip' was 1-2 levels), a "munchkin" is 3 or more classes of any levels.

I've always heard munchkins as super min maxed players and I hate them. They tend to piss off DMs by trying to rules lawyer too.

Ive never seen anyone ever use 'dip' as meaning anything other then taking just a single lvl. Maybe other groups use the word differently I guess?

Never heard of taking 3 lvls as beeing a munchkin either though, Only know 'Munchkin' as the problem player. And met a fair few of them. Luckily they can easily be identified by their weird builds, although you should check if theyre not just a powergamer. The difference (while sometimes small) can make a big difference in how the player is around the table.

I find it funny though how a topic about Illusionists quikly derailed into wizards in general. And everyone is universally shitting on the Transmuter. And I understand why because their subclass specific features are kinda garbage. Or are so open to interpretation that you have to sit around the table with the DM to even use it. However noone mentions the fact that Transmuters have (by far) the most spells in dnd. So if you just look at the lvl 2 features which makes the spells cheaper to learn can save you a metric arse-ton of cash over the length of a campaign. And generally alot of the spells are quite good as well so people want to pick them up. Like haste, slow, fly, polymorph, etc.

Then again some (like polymorph) are so horribly nerfed or straight up missing in bg3 that im not to sure if its worth taking even for that. I also havent really run into cash problems in the game so how much the savings are worth in terms of 'value' is abit questionable in bg3...

This isn't a commentary about tabletop transmuters. This is a commentary about BG3's implementation of trasmuters. Some things just don't translate as well into a video game. Like illusion; illusionists get notoriously screwed over going from tabletop to video game, just because a huge point of the illusion school is the creative flexibility you can bring to the spells in tabletop that just can't be done in a video game.