Divination Wizard

[joe15552]

From the builds I've seen on forums, most people choose sorcs or PM's for casting a good Power Word Kill. Looking through the pure wizard builds, I just don't see any legendary divination focus. Is this because a wizard with legendary divination focus and a few energy drain caster levels still cannot be effective with Power Word Kill?

Or are wizards with legendary divination focus just fine with Power Word Kill?

Also, does anyone know if Divination Specialization would help make Power Word Kill more powerful for Wizards?

Never played hells, so I dunno.

[fallenwizard]

Generaly Power Word: Kill is used in abyss on specific enemies that will be killed by ignoring the HP count and these monsters are immune to other death magic.

In purpose of counting wether or not they are killed Epic Spell Focus is the highest you need to kill Elite versions of these enemies. Which means Legendary Spell Focus Divination is rather useless to spent a feat on. Also lack of Divination on forum wizard builds might be that they are made before Abyss came out. I recall seeing only 4 wizard in abyss, dont know if they have posted those builds or not.

[simpetar]

Dec 13, 2011 20:15:02 GMT fallenwizard said:

Which means Legendary Spell Focus Divination is rather useless to spent a feat on.

In general LSF: Divination for arcane casters is more common for tanks (namely Staff Masters and Bane Knights): it grants them 50/+16 soak from Premonition. Other than that, Divination repertoire is somewhat lacking: Contingency epic (useful, comes in the package with ESF), Premonition, PWK, PW: Stun (easily handled by bard special item), Clairvoyance / Clairaudience (handy, but again mainly SMs and BKs use it), and the only DC based Feeblemind (never actually seen anybody use it). Most arcane casters chose ESF or even GSF from an item + draught, to kill elite abyss monsters. Although there *are* some higher tier paragons who would require LSF and possibly even draught, they are rare and mostly minibosses.

simpetar

[joe15552]

Well, I am just going by the in-game documentation. It may be out of date, but it says that each divination focus adds +1 to the CL when determining the HP of creatures affected by the spell. In the full class summary, it says that specialization adds an additional spell foci to the specified school. According to that in-game documentation, if a wizard is specialized divination, and has legendary spell focus divination, then they are getting +5 CL for determining the HP of creatures affected by the spell. Add in a few Energy drain levels, and we are rockin +8 CL. Is that useless overkill?

[chirality]

I would say yes. What Fallen is getting at (I think) is that even the Elite versions of most PWK target mobs can be killed with just ESF Div (and as simpetar mentions, with draughts even only GSF could get that job done). The CLs themselves don't seem to offer very much for anything else; even less so for Div DCs as simpetar's breakdown points out.

With LSF + wiz spec you may be getting quite a large HP cap for PWK but I don't see that as being very useful--PWK is very limitied in application and as Fallen says ESF is enough for the primary PWK targets in Abyss. As simpetar says there are some mobs that such a build could PWK, where others may not be able to. But I don't see that as being enough of a bonus to warrant speccing in such an other-wise useless school for a wizard. Also consider the fact that not only would you be speccing in Div essentially "just" for PW spells, but also your barred schools would likely be of more use in and of themselves than Div in the first place.

I certainly have never tried it, and maybe someone out there has and could tell you, but my feeling is that even such a "powerful" PWK wouldn't be much better than other insta spells for most non-Abyss purposes. It may well be that you could kill a lot with it; I don't know, but I would be skeptical that it could ultimately be more efficient and "better" than the myriad other tools in a wizard's repertoire.

Premo is amazing and Contingency likewise, but I don't see where LSF let alone LSF + Spec would be worth it for a wizard.

[simpetar]

I can think of 3 different viewpoints:
1. How PWK works in abyss was quite clearly explained, I think. You need no focus to PWK normal mobs, SF for Greater XY, GSF for Superior XY, and ESF (or equivalent) for Elite XY (and possibly LSF+ for extra rare thrilladelic bummer mobs). HPs are ignored in this case, only focus rank (and spell penetration) count. Note that PWK can pierce some monsters that have Immunity: Death Magic (and is designed to).

2. In LL areas HPs count, as does SR and Death Magic immunity. It just acts like other instakill spells, such as Wail or Circle of Death, with the difference that it is Divination. You can definitely use it, but it will be limited: only few monsters have that little HP to be killed at Uninjured. But in LLs we are talking about hundreds and thousands of HP, so taking additional foci is usually dropping spoons of sweet water into the ocean. Besides, most things that you can solo kill with PWK will die in massive scale to Wail or CoD.

3. As for hells, see the note about monster HP above, and multiply it. Yes, you can PWK a Badly Wounded narzugon (or now that we talk about it, you can even PW: Stun one), but you will be a kill stealer.

simpetar

[joe15552]

Thanks for the help!