for example:
1rnd if i start : ...
1rnd if the opponent starts: ...
2rnd :
3rnd : ecc...
Start by providing the target level and which books are available.
all the manuals are available, the wiz spell lvl can be 9°... wizard lvl 17...
the opponent wizard/sorcerer is 16 lvl.
rnd 1: if i start, i win
rnd 1: if opp starts, they win
there are so many insta win spells/stratagies at that level, its crazy.
and which is the best strategies/spells with a 5 lvl wizard ?
Level 5 gets trickier. Best anti-melee spell at that point is Mirror Image.
Killing someone in combat is a bit tricky, even. Putting an int penalty will probably take out all of your opponent's spells, which is a win button in a wizard duel.
Curiously, the best spell to shut down casting at that point is only on bard's and cleric's list.
Curiously, there aren't that many _sure_ ways of defeating other, especially if escape is allowed. You're probably fighting an astral projection, too.
Level 5 gets trickier. Best anti-melee spell at that point is Mirror Image.
Killing someone in combat is a bit tricky, even. Putting an int penalty will probably take out all of your opponent's spells, which is a win button in a wizard duel.
Curiously, the best spell to shut down casting at that point is only on bard's and cleric's list.
Curiously, the best spell to shut down casting at that point is only on bard's and cleric's list.
lol...what a strange matter of fact...isn'it ?
Escape is not allowed, i'm talking about a pure formal wizards duel. No pre-casted spells.
The best "turtle" for this is probably a Prismatic Sphere, since it takes a boatload of spells to bring it down (unless they have a Rod of Absorption or use a Disjunction). You could also just use Meld into Stone or Shapechange to be inside the ground somewhere. That way, they have to actually find you before they do anything to you, and the ground blocking Line of Effect makes that non-trivial.
One particularly nasty combo to kill them with is Forecage + a beholder's antimagic eye ray. If you interpret Forcecage as inheriting the properties of Wall of Force, as many seem to, it is not supressed in the AMF. So the wizard/other caster is stuck in an AMF inside of a Forcecage. You have to use the "barred" version for this. Then you can kill them at your leisure... unless they have some way to counter an AMF, of which there are a few.
Of course, since the other guy probably has Celerity also, it probably comes down to initiative. Actually... I'm not even sure how to resolve it if someone casts Celerity to interrupt another caster's Celerity.
*Without pre-cast buffs, there are very few ways to achieve this. The only ones I can think of are a Weapon of Legacy with the Cunning ability, or some feat from one of the Fiendish Codex books that has some really heavy RP fluff attached to it.
I guess there are some things one needs to know - we've been really general in speaking of what to do, but basically you _must_ win init. If you somehow lose and survive to the next round, you generally follow the same tactic as you would usually...
That being said, in low levels, invisibility+move is a decent start - there's a lot you can do without breaking invisibility.
In here, knowledge is power, too. Save-or spells are at best 95% reliable. A simple combination of dimension lock+cloudkill+wall of stone or a forcecage may kill, at least, a cliche'd opponent. Making the opponent forcibly hit a prismatic effect repeatedly works. A simple 5x delayed blast fireball kills anything not immune/resisting.
So, a mageduel - let's presume 3 rounds buffing, with leaving the plane and leaving the combat area either horizontally or vertically being a forfeit, and limited to... what? I'm tempted to say, core only and no XP loss, but that's really up to the OP.
Mageduels aren't unplayable, but they're best handled as a sport.
So it just comes down to who goes first, literally. It's not that hard to kill an unbuffed wizard, if you can insure that you can go before he does.
It is also a pretty stupid scenario, and one into which no high level wizard should ever realistically enter, but it seems to be a popular one people like to use...
You seriously don't see a mage caring about prestige? I mean, actual role-played non-theoretical mage?
*shrug* I think complete arcane's magefair duels went by 3 round buffing time. Reading's a bit of a pain these days. It went to some length on non-lethal mage duels.
You seriously don't see a mage caring about prestige? I mean, actual role-played non-theoretical mage?
It depends on how "serious" the campaign is, and how high-magic the world is. I don't consider Forgotten Realms to be very serious... at least not the canon version. How could you take it seriously, with epic level NPCs around every corner, and gods coming down and duking it out on the prime and meddling directly in the affairs of mortals?
I guess if the campaign has wizard schools, then duels are almost a given, and they'd probably want a way to formalize it to limit their lethality. But if you're a powerful mage, you should also have powerful enemies that aren't out to just humiliate you in front of your peers. They could take advantage of your weakness (i.e. being unbuffed) to make an attack on you.
I'd imagine that the duels would likely take place between low level, up-and-coming mages who don't really have anything better to do, like saving the world, and don't have to worry about a demon lord trying to steal their soul while they have their defenses down.
Between 17th+ level mages, they should be pretty much non-existant. How many "duels" do you see in modern warfare? High level mages are like the super-powers of the real world. Like rhinos, they don't play games. They probably rarely attack each other directly either, because they can not be assured that they'll survive a fight against an equal, unlike their odds against most other creatures. In this way, I see them operating more like deities (long, indirect machinations against each other, rather than direct confrontations.... again... unless you're in FR... There, they just slug it out on weekends like a couple of street drunks.
)*shrug* I think complete arcane's magefair duels went by 3 round buffing time. Reading's a bit of a pain these days. It went to some length on non-lethal mage duels.
You seriously don't see a mage caring about prestige? I mean, actual role-played non-theoretical mage?
It depends on how "serious" the campaign is, and how high-magic the world is. I don't consider Forgotten Realms to be very serious... at least not the canon version. How could you take it seriously, with epic level NPCs around every corner, and gods coming down and duking it out on the prime and meddling directly in the affairs of mortals?
I guess if the campaign has wizard schools, then duels are almost a given, and they'd probably want a way to formalize it to limit their lethality. But if you're a powerful mage, you should also have powerful enemies that aren't out to just humiliate you in front of your peers. They could take advantage of your weakness (i.e. being unbuffed) to make an attack on you.
I'd imagine that the duels would likely take place between low level, up-and-coming mages who don't really have anything better to do, like saving the world, and don't have to worry about a demon lord trying to steal their soul while they have their defenses down.
Between 17th+ level mages, they should be pretty much non-existant. How many "duels" do you see in modern warfare? High level mages are like the super-powers of the real world. Like rhinos, they don't play games. They probably rarely attack each other directly either, because they can not be assured that they'll survive a fight against an equal, unlike their odds against most other creatures. In this way, I see them operating more like deities (long, indirect machinations against each other, rather than direct confrontations.... again... unless you're in FR... There, they just slug it out on weekends like a couple of street drunks.
Well, I can actually see a few circumstances where this kind of information might be useful. For example, my DM has had a longstanding tradition involving a Plane created by a military style academy that is solely for the purpose of duelling and proving grounds, referred to simply as The Arena. Its got a Valhalla-esque property that no one ever dies as long as they passed away in combat, they just reappear somewhere else. So people habitually go there for duels for prestige only, and keep fighting till someone kills them, with 2 rounds of prep time each time. (Obviously that's different, but I still get the concept.)
That said, I understand precisely what you mean. My DM has been running the same world for 10 years, so there are quite a few epic characters running around - however - unlike Faerun, this is settled by the fact that these epics basically only keep to themselves and have (like you said) Deity like status. If this wasn't the case, things would just get ridiculous way too fast.
It is also a pretty stupid scenario, and one into which no high level wizard should ever realistically enter, but it seems to be a popular one people like to use...
That's because for each round of pre-casting, the potential fight becomes exponentially more complicated, and people are lazy. Really, a competent wizard of high enough level to cast teleport doesn't get out of bed in the morning before re-casting personal defenses, which means they don't get out of bed without exhausting a quarter of their higher level spells for the day, and they don't get into bed anywhere that isn't a personal sanctum that their character has spent months, if not years, building into a tower of ultimate personal protection.
My frame of reference: I (as a recognized caster specialist nut) have participated in a single proper wizard duel in my years of playing this game. It was an attack by a dicefreaks cosmic entity because my DM was pissed off about my level 45 wizard outright killing a level 70 game boss who was supposed to be a recurring threat, so he went and found a ridiculously powerful caster to try to beat me down. After I pulled out a Word document the size of a small book explaining what he would have to get through just to attract my attention from within the tower I was currently inhabiting as being a credible threat, my DM decided to sack half his guy's spells, SDA uses, buffs, etc. for the day and declare that I was facing him, and started a wizard duel. (Unfair - it most assuredly would have taken nearly all his resources, but so be it.)
The duel took 4 hours real time to play out, and the cosmic entity agreed to a truce when the DM realized he'd gone through every SDA, SLA, and whatever else he had, was out of buffs and was struggling with a steadily increasing series of debuffs, and I had nearly triple his remaining spell slots, an increasing pile of buffs, and a character setup that virtually assured I could take anything he had left and still win. Now, it took me many, many hours over several different games and a number of characters to design the character, the towers, the artifacts, and the epic spells that I used to do that, but that was the final demonstration for my group that given sufficient thought, magic > everything except really good roleplay. These days I DM, but only after promising my group not to combine clever, chessmaster bosses with epic spellcasting.
TL:DR, there's a reason greater deities don't just up and go after each other, and it's not because they're deities. It's because, under NO circumstances, does anyone with a grain of sense up and go after an intelligent spellcaster.
Incidentally, this is why, while the Iron Tower challenge is interesting, it's unwinnable short of poor work by the DM or crazy good role-playing. I've put together five different builds and run the challenge against myself and only touched Dispater once... never even got close to actually killing him.
Wait, you actually touched Dispater? Wow, that's a lot better than the 200 odd pages of attempts I managed to make it through.
He was just running it himself (he was controlling both). No one has even come close in the real Iron Siege.