The Order of the Stick

Is V poorly optermized? I just thought they foolishly locked themselves out of teleport

Teleport, plus some other incredibly useful spells, for the sake of specialising in Evocation, which is quite possibly the one worst magic school.

What kind of particularly useful spells?

And what does Evocation even do?

Evocation is generally about blasting things with lots of damage. It's spectacular, but one of the strange truths about the Wizard class is that it's at its least effective in an overall sense when it's a firehose of damage dice being sprayed at enemies. There are a vast number of utility and control spells in the Wizard list that can instantaneously neutralize enemies, negate combat entirely, or otherwise render battles pointlessly one-sided.

edited 8th Sep '16 9:16:18 AM by Fighteer

I'm not sure what the other Conjuration spells are, but Teleport spells can be potentially game-breaking all on their own. It's half of the Scry-and-Die combo, a brutal tactic by which players bypass a dungeon entirely by scrying on the bad guy, preparing a bunch of spells optimized to combat him, then teleporting straight to his location and shoving magic nukes up his ass before he even has a chance to get off the shitter and grab his weapon.

Xykon actually mentions it by name here.

Even discounting scry-and-die, there have been many points over the course of the story where the plot could be easily solved if V could just pop the Order to their destination. Up to and including the double-edged race against time that they find themselves in now.

edited 8th Sep '16 9:21:03 AM by TobiasDrake

It's kind of inkeeping for V's early characterisation to seek the biggest and baddest damage output of magic. V has this delightfully shallow awe for magic.

edited 8th Sep '16 9:22:23 AM by Whowho

Evocation is all about blasting your enemies with elemental damage, like those fireballs V used to love. Thing is, said damage just does not compare to the many, many instant win buttons that can be found in other magic schools.

For example, you could cast three lightning bolts to kill a tough monster, if it fails all saving throws. Alternatively, for the same cost in spell slots, you can cast three other spells, each of which has an effect that would either kill or severely impair the monster if it fails any of the three saving throws.

'd to hell and back. That's what I get for tabbing out while typing.

edited 8th Sep '16 9:22:37 AM by Kayeka

Yes, ironic arrogance has been a long-running character flaw for V. She believes that magic trumps all else which isn't untrue but she believes it for the wrong reasons, being a poorly-designed Wizard focused on hitting things with damage spells rather than the substantially more effective "Batman Wizard".

She's got one of the strongest game classes but is so overconfident about it that she plays the class in a remarkably suboptimal fashion.

Conjuration magic includes teleportation spells, summoning spells, and a handful of damage spells, most of which are area-of-effect (limiting V's options in fighting larger numbers of weaker enemies).

To be fair, it's not the worst choice of specialization in terms of optimization (if V had picked Divination, everyone here would absolutely facedesk repeatedly), but it heavily limits the options available (especially when there isn't a meat shield to take hits).

edited 8th Sep '16 9:24:35 AM by TotemicHero

Yeah I find in any tabletop RPG, utility is the most valuable resource.

IIRC, Conjuration also has Dimensional Anchor, the spell that shuts down other mages' attempt to Teleport out of danger.

Not only does V not have any teleport options, but she has no means by which to prevent her foes from just quitting the field if things go south and coming back harder in the future. Which is going to become increasingly more of an issue as she rises in level.

edited 8th Sep '16 9:27:32 AM by TobiasDrake

Nope, Dimensional Anchor is not Conjuration, but Abjuration, like most anti-magic measures. (Remember, V has used it multiple times independent of the Soul Splice.)

Of course, V did cast one Conjuration spell during the comic - the Evard's Tentacles of Forced Intrusion (the standard version is just called Black Tentacles) spell he threw at the chimera in Dorukan's Dungeon, but that can be filed under Early-Installment Weirdness.

edited 8th Sep '16 9:38:51 AM by TotemicHero

What I'm taking from this conversation is that V is kind of a shitty wizard because, while high on intelligence, she doesn't have the wisdom to use it well. Flash over substance and all that.

Haley seems WAY too happy...and Elan doesn't seem to mind
There's a LESSER invisibility?

Regular invisibility lasts 1 minute per caster level and abruptly ends if you attack someone. Greater invisibility doesn't have the exit clause but lasts 1 round per caster level. So Haley would have 16 or so rounds of invisible attacks if V hadn't also used the Extended Spell metamagic feat to double the duration, as opposed to 16 minutes of invisibility that would be interrupted as soon as she fired her first shot.

With approximately 32-34 rounds of invisible Sneak Attacks from a flying, level 16-17 rogue. Haley truly is pointy death incarnate. All from one spell. And that is how a Wizard can do better things with their spell list than just chucking fireballs.

edited 8th Sep '16 10:57:58 AM by TobiasDrake

Warning: rules geekery follows

Let's see... 32 rounds x 3 attacks per round (assuming Haley uses the Full Attack action) = 96 attacks. Assuming a ~5% miss rate for various reasons (normal misses are offset by critical hits, so it's nominally a wash, but whatever), and assuming Haley can't use her full attack in every round due to needing to move occasionally, let's call it 90 hits over the duration of the spell.

Each attack does 1d8+3 (+3 longbow) + 8d6 Sneak Attack (or 9d6 if Haley is level 17). (The icy burst power is negated by the targets' cold immunity.) That averages out to 35.5 damage per hit, or 3,195 damage over the course of the spell. If you get picky and say that only the Sneak Attack dice count as being a benefit of the spell, since Haley could have made those same attacks without it, then you can only count 28 damage (average result of 8d6) per attack, or 2,520.

Extended greater invisibility takes up a 5th level slot and has dealt, in our example, ~720d6 worth of damage over its duration. Compare it to a typical 5th level Evocation spell like cone of cold, which deals a maximum of 15d6 damage in a frontal cone. Yeah.

About the only thing I'd worry about here is whether Haley carries enough arrows to make all those attacks.

In a less Watsonian sense and a more Doylist sense, one major reason V can't teleport is because it's something of a Story-Breaker Power, as noted above, allowing characters to bypass almost all of the risk of traveling to a location and making defenses that are not specifically designed to beat it useless.

edited 8th Sep '16 11:21:23 AM by Fighteer

Actually, as Rich pointed out in one of this D&D articles, specializing in Divination is actually kind of a no-brainer if you think you will prepare at least one Divination spell per level. It does lack for higher-level spells, though.

V mentioned that, prior to the change to 3.5, Teleport was part of the Transmutation school, instead of Conjuration.

God, the wizards must have rioted when those changes were announced...

Transmutation does seem like a bit of a weird place to put Teleport.

Well, if The Big Bang Theory is to believed, teleportation works by destroying the target and rebuilding an entirely new and identical copy somewhere else. I think that fits the bill.

edited 8th Sep '16 1:26:33 PM by LSBK

That model of teleportation tends to be unpopular due to continuity of consciousness, or the problem of the soul. There's usually some mumbo-jumbo about converting a thing into energy and transporting that energy and then reconstructing the thing from the energy, etc. etc. in order to reassure audiences and characters that what arrives at the other end is you, and not a clone of you that sprang fully-formed into existence immediately after you were vaporized.

Even if the technology existed, I think that concern would probably prevent teleporters from ever being a popular method of transporting living things for precisely that reason. I know I'd be reluctant to step into a machine where it can't actually be proven that it's not just going to kill me and replace me with an identical copy.

edited 8th Sep '16 1:28:03 PM by TobiasDrake

Or, you know, dimension hopping. That's also a pretty popular one.

There are also fundamental physics problems with replicating you that precisely, never mind the fact that converting something the mass of a human body to energy would have ridiculous power requirements (you'd have to be a Class 2 civilization to even attempt it) and would create an explosion the size of a small city.

Quantum tunneling at a macroscopic level is an absurdity, as the probabilistic mechanics that make up quantum physics simply don't apply at our scale.

Folding space-time in some way is the only method of teleportation that is remotely possible according to our understanding of physics, but doing so has other issues — namely that it violates causality.

Now, there are some promising hypotheses that information can be transmitted faster than light via quantum entanglement, but that's certainly not going to let you pop over to Mars for coffee.

edited 8th Sep '16 1:33:14 PM by Fighteer

Also, any device capable of vaporizing a thing at one location and building an identical version of it at another location without transporting anything between them, isn't a teleporter. It's a 3-D printer with a needlessly destructive and/or murderous prerequisite for its use.

If you don't actually need to move any components of "me" to build the "me" that steps out of the teleporter, then there's no reason you can't just make a me at that location without disintegrating the me at this end. At that point, you're just cloning.

edited 8th Sep '16 1:31:55 PM by TobiasDrake