Basic Magic Bless/Wish Challenge

[edk926]

So as a thought exercise, I created a little challenge for basic magic. The rules are as follows:

You have 30 spells total. You cannot use the Charm/Shortcut to Power Perk. That would defeat the whole idea. You must take these following two spells as a part of the 30: Bless and Wish.

Noting that Bless requires 2 spells from 10 colleges and Wish requires 1 spell from 15 colleges (and Lesser Wish and Enchant), it basically means you should have just enough other spells to meet the prerequisites.

Tech Level doesn't matter. Assume you have any advantage requirements for the spells. If it helps any, pretend this is a beginning character, and you may eventually learn more spells. So you can plan ahead and pick the beginning of a chain you love to have in the future.

I figure everyone would use Lend Energy and Recover Energy for one of the Bless requirements. Many would probably also take Teleport for one of the 11th to 15th Wish requirement. Other than that, I really don't know.

[ericthered]

A lot of context is needed here. What does this wizard do? Kill monsters and take their stuff? send bands of dwarves to kill dragons? Sell lucrative charms and spells to the wealthy of a large city? Advise a king on how to run his realm? Protect the royal court from sinister supernatural influences? Travel the road as a begger administering moral tests to random passerby and punishing or rewarding them?

That said, the bulk of the question is what are the best two spells of each college, and which of those pairs are the best 10. I have some opinions on this:

Fire: create fire is a flexible spell that does double duty as an attack and battlefield control. Its mana-hungry, but you're capable of casting wish and bless, so that's probably not a huge deal. Its probably the only direct damage spell you'll see only going two prereqs down. Its weak against heavily armored foes, but you can't have everything. Whether seek fire or ignite fire is better is context driven, but I suspect the ability that can't be replicated by mundane skill is stronger.

Movement: Great Haste is a powerful spell, but expensive. Apportation is a very flexible spell useful in all sorts of situations. I'm not sure what the followup to apportation ought to be, but there is no shortage of candidates: dancing object, levitation, and wall walker are all very nice.

Protection and Warning: Either go for reverse missiles (requires your movement spell to be Apportation) or for mystic mist. They are very different spells, but both can be used to great effect.

Illusion: Complex Illusion is very flexible and versatile, though illusion shell may be just as useful. Some contexts could use illusion disguise. An all cases, simple illusion is the prereq.

Meta-magic You qualify for some of the more powerful spells in this category. There are a lot of neat options, but I suspect Delay and either link or hang spell will see the most use, allowing you to store up magic for later. These slots really have some stiff competition though.

Enchantment Note that you get two spells here on your way to wish, so you've used up these slots, but that might free up some spell slots to grab fun abilities.

Earth: Most elemental groups require seek element and shape element before they allow you to do anything else, limiting our selection. In this case, seek earth is actually a very flexible spell, letting you find treasure, people armed with metal weapons, deposits of minerals, and a lot of other information. Shape Earth is a pretty useful spell too, especially in its "Stone mode".

Gate: Teleport has been mentioned. I think second spell from this college is likely to be useful. My top picks are teleport other, timeport, planar summons, or blink. In some cases beacon may be the best use of this slot. All of these spells are game-changing, and worth considering with your left over spells. If you're feeling weak on combat, blink and planar summons are the strongest combat enablers.

Healing: Its been mentioned: Recover energy is awesome.

That's nine of the ten double spell categories. I think most of the other options are rather "meh". You need to take 7 more spells from 6 more colleges, and you need to take 3 of those before you pick up your gate and meta magic packages. Then you spend two spells on bless and wish, leaving three spells left over to grab awesome abilities from the meta, gate, and enchantment colleges. Or to pick up a few combat spells.

[edk926]

I didn't put in any real thought on the kind of Wizard.

BTW Complex Illusion requires Sound, so if you take it, you can use up one of the single spell slots here.