Wizard strategy?

[Incompetent]

It looks like the Wizard page on the wiki is badly out of date at the moment, and the Wizard has been buffed massively in the meantime: no combat penalties, conversion bonus and extra burning on top of his traditional advantages. The conversion bonus in particular sounds broken to me, or at least verging on broken, if it applies to all conversions rather than just glyph conversions.

What's been people's experience of playing the Wizard with the current setup?

[The Avatar]

As general strategy, I gear all my early exploration towards the glyphs, leveling up on the way if possible. Once I have all of them I convert the ones I don't want and keep the rest. If I am feeling confident (I would not recommend this for new players), I convert my potions to leech the extra CP of my remaining glyphs. Then I use my glyphs (particularly BURNDAYRAZ) to spike and regen fight higher level monsters. For deities I go EM or MA. If I go EM, I use Greenblood to facilitate easier spikes and then clearance for extra fireballs for the boss. If I use MA then I save all of my glyphs (converting potions and junk instead for CP leech), and use refreshment to spike the boss, and use excess piety on mana or weakening. There is also the unique Punchomancer™ strategy which is (I believe) a human or orc wizard who preps lots of junk (patches, sword, shop scroll, etc) to leech CP for great damage while keeping ALL of your glyphs.

[Incompetent]

Hmm, that all sounds pretty sensible. I'm a fan of EM generally for mana spikes, and oddly it's one instance where prepping her can actually make her stronger. Mystera Annur's Refreshment is another classic, especially for Elves. I'll have to give the Orc Punchomancer a try though, sounds fun (especially if you find a PISORF, or better yet a Binlor altar).

Having tested it, I think I see how the game avoids infinite loops with Halfling/Gnome conversion: the conversion value is drained out of the glyphs, so you don't actually get any extra CPs on balance - it's just that you can have your cake and eat it by extracting the CPs from the glyphs without losing the ability to cast them. This wasn't completely clear from the description. Still, I'm sure you could have fun with Spirit Pact + junk conversion.

[TheSchachter]

[Lujo]

Then you also have the traditional Orc wizard who uses all the wizard CP antics in conjunction with the Crystal Ball (and Stone Heart if you can find it) for a lot of pissorf (with precast cydstep and potentially a getindare hit too). EM should be good for this due to greenblood stacking and clearances. In general, while refreshment is good, EM generally has more to offer Wizards than Mystera.

But yeah, generally, pick glyphs up asap and roll from there.

[Sidestepper]

Wizard went from bottom of the heap to top tier. I like him better than Monk. When I'm getting flustered, I just dust off Mr. Wizard. He has a TON of powerful archetypes. Here a few of the more focused ones:

1) The Punchomancer. Orc or Human, get all the glyphs at level one, and convert junk items to drain out all of the CP. You'll have a character doing 120-150 damage by level ten, AND have all of the glyphs. This is probably the most well rounded of the power strats. Because he can do anything, there isn't any one obstacle that can stymie him. Punchomancer works all the way up to VGT.

2) The Acid Caster. This is more of an Earthmother thing, but I originally invented the strat for Wizards because it they do it best. Prep EM, play an elf, drain your CP right away for massive mana, and then spam Greenblood, aiming for 8-10 stacks at 1st level. When the stars are right, you can get a level one bosskill.

3) The half-elf-gnome. Gnome wizard, prep JJ, and go nuts with Boost Mana. Don't even touch the other boons. You end up with a mana pool of 20 or more, but also with a pile of potions. It's like playing an elf and a gnome at the same time. It's like a magical variant of the infamous Dorkling, except that the devs let us keep it. The gnome-elf works for almost any class, but Wizards and Warlords do it best.

4) The orcish knockback wizard. This could have just as easily been called the Punchomancer. It's a venerable strat that exploits orcish base damage and Wizardly mana reduction. Like all knockback strats, it really needs map manipulation to excel, but since Wizards get an extra glyph and start out knowing where all the glyphs are, the odds of finding WEYTWUT or ENDISWAL are pretty high. Take More Glyphs if you want it to increase reliability.

[Lujo]

When I read your description of the punchomancer I immediately thought, wait, isn't this like... Wizard?

I'm not sure what advice I'd give to a newbie trying to play the wizard. This seems like it might be be the issue, low kingdom unlocks, no sense of parched being something to aspire to, no popcornbowling/lvl catapult skills, no crystal ball, no mad EM skills, mystera not all that usefull for wizards apart from Weakening, quite prossibly no goblins or orcs and very, very limited item pool (the starting pool is notorious for having very little items useful to casters). Most likely no gods or experience with them.


What you do is:

1) Do venture cave and/or Den of Danger runs with whoever until you find the "Graveyard" subdungeon. It's large and fully explored and consists of a flooded-sort-of graveyard with 5-6 tombstones. One of those will spawn a lvl-5 Zombie.
2) Level up and kill that zombie. He drops a pair of boots. Pick these up and take them out of the dungeon. You can do this on any run with any character. At the end of the run or when you exit the dungeon, you will have the option of lockering the boots.
3) Locker them - they are likely the most powerful item you will find in a long while. Next time you start with a wizard prepare these boots. If you have the boots you need only 2 more mana to have 15 mana and that's 3 fireballs per full pool.

Then what you do on vanilla wizard runs with teh boots is:

1) Search for the glyphs first thing you do in a dungeon. Use wheytwut to move monsters that are in your way out of your way (alternatively use endiswall or even pissorf to make passages).
2) While you explore use wonnafyt and wheytwut to create a "popcorn bowl" - simply summon + slow or teleport + slow low level monsters to somewhere and don't fight them. Since you're exploring for glyphs anyway you'd waste the mana that you can use to do this.
3) Level up fighting monsters above your level and popocorn bowl the remaining lvl2's and lvl3's. Reach lvl 6-7, get enough xp to get really close to the next level and heal up.
4) Step next to the boss and start fireballing him. That's 3 fireballs if you have 15 mana more if you have more (if you're an elf with an inventory full of glyphs you can convert the health potions for more mana and all that).
5) When you run out of mana, kill a slowed popcorn monster, level up, throw more fireballs, eat some more popcorn, thrrow more fireballs, etc etc.


That's the basics of the basics. Everything else becomes available after you've unlocked more stuff. If you're having trouble - look for those boots so you can locker them. If you're not finding them, lockering a pendant of mana isn't bad either.

@Sidestepper: I was on a very Crystal Ball crazy playthrough before the wizard got buffed and he was absolutely destroying everything. Before either buff (the dmg penalty didin't affect Pissorf, and the conversion goodness just made him stronger). The damage penalty was a problem early in the kingdom development because there is too little spell support* and it made wizard too weak compared to the inital classess and that would lead to a lack of familiarity and no experience later when you unlock enough stuff that makes him wtf tier. An early kingdom wizard used to be terrible, but the later kingdom wizard was bloody murderous even with the penealty (well, with the old CB but still).

*Apart from gods, but the wizard is probably the strangest spellcaster when it comes to god prefferences. Binlor is arguably the better choice than Mystera for him, that's how weird.

[Blovski]

A sort of mini-tip for Mystera users (not just for wizards but often applicable to them) is that if you convert from Earthmother (or TT or JJ) to Mystera, the 0cp glyphs from deity still work on refreshment. Similarly, the lower CP glyphs from extra glyphs still count full for refreshment.