Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition: Wizard Preview

About a quarter of the revised wizard class for Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition has now been added to Dungeons & Delvers over on Big Geek Emporium. The preview only showcases most of the Pyroturgy selection, as it is intended to provide a feel of how the new class will function, as well as how Talents and Spells are divided.

Major changes from the 1st Edition wizard:

• There is no inherent class-based penalty for wearing armor, so long as you have the Strength for it. This restriction never made sense, anyway. Given the changes to armor, we've been at the least slapping gambesons/light armor on all our wizards.
• Willpower and spell save DCs are modified by Wisdom, which makes much more sense than Intelligence. Intelligence is used for other things, like Researching spells.
• Arcane focus has been replaced with the wizard's staff. Everyone gets one, it has to be a staff, and it grants a bunch of benefits that make it far more useful than before.
• With a scaling Attack Bonus, wizards will be able to contribute in other ways during combat. This will be especially useful given that monster Defense isn't designed to compete with the fighter's Attack Bonus, the Ganging Up bonus, lack of Sustain spells, and increased Drain costs for many things.
• The increased Drain costs is because there are several ways for a wizard to offset Drain costs, such as by using his wizard staff and material components. There are also some Talents that can mitigate Drain costs in specific situations, and improve Willpower recovery.
• Instead of classic Dungeons & Dragons spell schools, spells are divided into different categories as further explained in this post. Spells can belong to more than one category.
• Some spells got removed, pretty much all of them got modified, and there's a bunch of new stuff for wizards to play with.