joellercoaster wrote:I like the idea of the Wizard class. Specialist in magic, but not in a magic school - see where the game takes you, travel the world, meet lots of interesting monsters and cast interesting spells on them. Crawl by design gives you lots of scope for adaptation.
But, for whatever reason, I'm not getting along with Wizards even though their starting book is great.
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But what about you? What do you play when you want to cast spells as your bread and butter, but don't want your build to decide too much what those will be up front?
I had this exact same problem with Draconians. I wanted to play a spell casting Dr who didn't have to choose how to specialize before I knew the color, or what sort of books I'd find, so I started playing Wz. And proceeded to kill lots of draconians, for whatever reasons I just couldn't make it work.
So I eventually tried a Transmuter, and wow! It worked great, Evaporate and Sticks to Snakes give an equivalent of Conjuration and Summoning, then the forms are buffs with various uses (water-walking, cold resistance, speed, etc ...). And you can use the Tm spells to train up Fire, Ice, Poison and Necro, so you have lots of ways to branch out if you get a powerful book (and you can train a spell Skill to get Sif to give you books with those sort of spells too).
You are going to use Unarmed rather than being purely a spell-slinger, but it doesn't mean you
can't have your spell-slinging be your bread and butter (at least by mid game). I have often managed to stop training UC at 5, and 10 works just fine even I you don't find the magical offense you want to use early. UC5 isn't very powerful, but with Evaporate and S2S to provide support and the forms to boost, you don't need more against most opponents until you start going deep into the Lair.
For a pure spell-slinger, Air Elementalist works too. The spells you get there are basic utility all casters will want eventually, so you can start by using it as your main weapon and witch to something else whenever the situation presents itself, your level in Air magic won't be completely wasted (and your Conjuration can be used on other elements).