Help me try to build a melee wizard.

I've had this sort of half successful experiment going on for a while, and it's starting to bug me enough that I thought I'd ask for help over here in the OT section where it won't spam any of the regular discussion.

I want to see how possible it is to build a melee wizard.

The idea so far, is to load up on as many cheap hits and annoying dodges as possible, such that enemies are hopefully always kept at just an arm's reach away. I've had some luck with this in SP already, but I feel like something's still missing.
so far I've got this:

Kerfluffle
Level 19 Elf Wizard

Sapphire Warstaff​

Sapphire Warstaff​

Reflex Stone​

Reflex Stone​

Wand Of Rapid Air​

Blasting Rod​

Witchy Robes​

Greenguard Boots​

Perilous Agility​

Electroporter Novice​

​

4 x Able Bash​

1 x Resistant Hide​

4 x Long Spark​

2 x Flanking Move​

2 x Penetrating Zap​

1 x Dimensional Traveller​

1 x Spark Inductor​

1 x Dangerous Maneuver​

2 x Bash​

1 x Whirlwind​

1 x Spark Generator​

3 x Force Blast​

1 x Hard To Pin Down​

1 x Little Zap​

1 x Squeamish​

5 x Reflexive Teleport​

1 x Teleport Self​

2 x Potent Spark​

2 x Whirlwind Enemies​

​

I'd have liked to add more traits, but I'm limited by orbs. I'd have liked bad ones, even, but squemish doesn't really work here because I'm trying to use a ton of attacks that target things directly. I'd also have liked pathfinder to just load up on various teleports every now and then, but that's just wishful thinking? Moves with cantrip that would allow me to approach as well as retreat would be nice (instead of my flanking moves), but I'm not finding the right items yet, if they exist.
I could care less if she's slippery, since I expect her to teleport all over the place already, and I don't really want to be running away with her. Part of the shock value here, is the surprise generated from a wizard getting all up in your grill instead of keeping a safe distance, but then being too damn squirrely to hit, afterwards. I don't care if her hits are weak, since I expect her to just bonk away at people a chip at a time with things like penetrating and hard to block.
The whirlwinds are there primarily as a panic button for when things go horribly wrong.
Ideally, it would be fun to get the Ironwood Staff Of The Magus involved here somehow (I have two of them) but that's going to limit my choices for armor and boots, and this build is sort of hanging on the hopes that at any given time I've got about two or three reflexive teleports in my hand. Another tool I have at my disposal is Spiked Boots, but I really like the boots she's got, enough to even put up with the handicap. I'm toying with just swapping the boots since that gives me the orbs for ironwood, and removes the issues with squeamish.
Ideas?

 

I have run a melee wizard in a warrior/wizard/priest party where the cleric uses a bunch of Mass Frenzy, and it actually doesn't work too bad. Some tips from my experience:


-Players generally won't expect your wizard to melee them, so additional movement is less important than on Warrior/Priest melee characters. So bring a human or a dwarf (you'll need the extra HP anyway).
-Having a priest to mass frenzy helps give the wizard unexpected melee output.
-Getting some parries/ducks on a human or dwarf skill is really helpful.
-Ironwood Staff Of The Magus: Equip at least one, or two if you can make due with blue tokens on your other slots. This item rocks.
-Short Perplexing Ray: Gives your wizard something to do while in melee range.
-Boots with armor. You'll still probably want to get a tokenless robe with Resistant Hide, so get yr. armor on yr. boots!
-No token staves: Heavy Oak Staff, Trembling Staff, or Jade Battlestaff can be free up some tokens so that your melee wizard can still get some nice token arcane items.
-Smoke Bomb: If you're going to go all melee and mostly forgo shooting with your wizard, then a bunch of smoke bombs can help keep him and the rest of your team safe. Plus, then you can flavor your melee wizard as a ninja.

 

That human skill that gives a parry and an AoA would be amusing, that's for sure. Superb Command?

Sounds like you're recommending the slightly slower armored version over the crazy fast version that's designed to use dodges. I was counting on the teleporting over distance to give me my my ninja cred. Hadn't really considered smoke bombs. Good food for thought.
I wonder if I won't just run both side-by side in a few test runs against Cardstock II and see what they're like.
I was a huge fan of the jade battlestaff, and only upgraded because sapphire was evidently it's bigger brother. I usually swap them in and out depending on my level.
I've got both Madman's Maul and St. Olf's Fiery Pike, and I've been looking for an excuse to use them. this might get amusing.

 

Kerfluffle
Level 19 Elf Wizard

Sapphire Warstaff​

Sapphire Warstaff​

Reflex Stone​

Glittering Pin​

Blasting Rod​

Reflex Stone​

Witchy Robes​

Spiked Boots​

Perilous Agility​

Electroporter Novice​

​

(physical)​

4 x Able Bash​

1 x Lunging Bash​

2 x Bash​

1 x Lunging Hack​

(zaps and bolts)​

3 x Force Blast​

1 x Little Zap​

2 x Penetrating Zap​

1 x Spark Inductor​

1 x Spark Generator​

4 x Long Spark​

2 x Potent Spark​

(defense)​

1 x Resistant Hide​

5 x Reflexive Teleport​

(crowd control)​

1 x Whirlwind​

1 x Whirlwind Enemies​

1 x Wall Of Fire​

(movement)​

1 x Spin Around​

1 x Dangerous Maneuver​

2 x Flanking Move​

1 x Dimensional Traveller​

​

Blair
Level 20 Human Wizard

Ironwood Staff Of The Magus​

Ironwood Staff Of The Magus​

Bloodfoot Wand​

Bloodfoot Wand​

Mirror Of Melting​

Sarigo's Rod​

Ochre Robes​

Spiked Boots​

Superb Command​

Electroporter Novice​

​

(physical)​

***2 x Nimble Strike***​

1 x Lunging Bash​

1 x Lunging Hack​

1 x All Out Attack​

(zaps and bolts)​

2 x Penetrating Bolt​

2 x Surging Bolt​

1 x Spark Generator​

1 x Spark Inductor​

2 x Obliterating Spark​

1 x Little Zap​

(crowd control)​

2 x Improved Telekinesis​

1 x Winds Of War​

2 x Path Of Knives​

5 x Stone Spikes​

2 x Boiling Armor​

(defense)​

1 x Resistant Hide​

1 x Officer's Harness​

2 x Desperate Block​

3 x Parry​

(movement, mostly as cyclers)​

1 x Spin Around​

1 x Shuffle, Team!​

1 x Dimensional Traveller​

​

Cruton
Level 19 Human Priest

Madman's Maul​

St. Olf's Fiery Pike​

Battered Holy Mail​

Eeygonnic's Shield​

Bertha's Big Clogs​

Oquith's Foul Incense​

Oquith's Choking Incense​

Oquith's Foul Incense​

Perfect Tactics​

Novice Devotion​

​

(physical)​

2 x Fiery Stab​

2 x Raging Strike​

2 x Stab​

2 x Violent Overswing​

(heals)​

2 x Twin Heals​

1 x Light Heal​

1 x Altruism​

(defense)​

***7 x Cause Fumble***​

1 x Surging Shield Block​

2 x Wounded Block​

1 x Unreliable Block​

1 x Officer's Harness​

3 x Reliable Mail​

(buffs)​

***4 x Mass Frenzy***​

1 x Righteous Frenzy​

1 x Inspirational Thinking​

1 x Lateral Thinking​

(leftover junk)​

1 x Walk​

1 x Wavering Faith​

​

So for starters, I've got the original, modified slightly. Then the human with two of those staves. No smoke bombs as of yet, or armored boots. We're starting out virtually naked. :/ If I had to explain why, it's because if you look at both of their lists, they really don't have many melee attacks since those doesn't come on arcane items, so I'm ripping them from my boots, now. I'd hate to waste that much Mass Frenzy on a gimmick that only has 4 physical attacks in the entire deck. Hopefully, the trick won't be to reduce damage, but to avoid getting hit in the first place, which is where all the fun comes from.
I'll likely upgrade the human to armored boots after I learn my lesson.
I'm going to experiment a bit with blocking terrain to keep them focused. Then the icing on the cake is my batsh** crazy cleric bringing up the rear with a huge pocket full of Cause Fumbles. I sort of imagine her cracking the whip over their heads like some sort of slavedriver, with all that mass frenzy. If I need even more I'll swap some stuff. I wish I could go extreme with unholy wellspring but I can't quite figure out how to swing it. This is going to be just silly.

 

Let us know if/when you test it in multiplayer

I am so excited to see it hopefully work!

 

Ooh, I like this idea a lot. Looking forward to see what comes of this.

I second the recommendation for Smoke Bomb - it really helps in clearing difficult terrain. Running just 2 copies of it in my wiz deck has helped tremendously in terms of utility.

 

Well, testing them out in Cardstock II was something different, that's for sure. Naturally, trying to judge how a live person would react to them compared to the AI leaves me in a bit of a rut, but they were surprisingly effective, and in many ways not for the reasons I'd guessed.
For one thing, I'd have to say the party's real hero was the cleric. She didn't land a single blow, but those cause fumbles are really something else when you stack enough of them. At some points, the enemies had to battle their way through about 5 block cards of one form or another before they were allowed to even touch me. I feel justified in this experiment more by creating her build than anything else. It's a real shame she can't heal a little better, somehow, but those dinky twin heals came with the territory. We were also pretty much perma-frenzied because of her.
The elf definitely demonstrated that she was both extremely hard to hit and super squishy (awesome or terrible, take your pick). Using her dodges to spit in the enemy's eye and move onto a VP was pretty much her role, and it worked surprisingly well. The trick with this sort of character seemed to be to deprogram myself from trying to kill people and simply focus on potshots that gave me VP control. I'm the sort of player who usually says "The enemy can't take the VP if they're dead", so going back to this technique after not playing an elf for about a month felt really threatening, since enemies weren't dying at the rate I'd have liked. Bouncing back from a whirlwind was a cinch, however, as was avoiding tile atttachments, or anyone using melee attacks. There was never a moment where I felt that I needed, say, encumbrance effects to keep her safe
The Human wizard was quite dangerous, but I think I may have chosen the wrong enemy AI to test her against. this is because counter to what I'd set out to accomplish, her real strength came from the Path of Knives she carried, which sort of defeated the plan of focusing on a wizard who tries to get up close and personal. She absolutely murdered other wizards, though. Usually she had the enemy wizard for any team dead by turn 2. the exception to this of course being that freaking pesky elf wizard in the final battle. The twit just loves hopping around so much that PoK killed her, otherwise she'd probably have beaten my entire team. I'm reasonably positive that I can count on a human player not being that suicidal, so this leaves me feeling very unsatisfied, because I mostly won that last battle due to silly AI being silly, and not even with any of the tricks I set out to test.
For this reason, I'm tempted to actually just give in a little bit and admit that at least in the department of Arcane items, it's really hard to follow an effective theme that seems "melee". I figure that stone spikes and a path of knives are at least piercing and slashing damage, so I'll satisfy myself that at least the build can still qualify as a predominantly "physical damage" theme. Considering so many wizards like to go for that resistant hide, this is at least one more reason why she probably makes such a good wizard killer.
We won on our very first try, with no defeats, so I must have done something right. The problem with that is that in success, I didn't get very many opportunities to learn and get a feel for their reliability before the whole test run was complete, so I guess I'll bang away at it bit by bit daily. There was clearly still room to improve. If I had to pick my favorite wizard, I couldn't yet. In fact, they seem to have a synergy that might actually weaken them a bit if I just used one of them and something else, like a slowpoke dwarf warrior or something.

Edit: going at it again I pretty much proved to myself that the enemy elf team has the advantage in almost every way. Hard to block spear attacks completely shut down the point of bash and cause fumble. Ice and rockfalls poo poo my nimble strikes, etc etc... I won again, but only after a retry and some frustration. I hate that I had to take advantage of WWE to save my butt once. I'd change up my gear just for these guys, but that defeats the purpose of fine-tuning something reliable. :/

 

Has anyone created a custom map that's designed to simulate PVP maps yet? It might be more useful for me to test against that. If a common PVP map were simply reproduced and the enemies had a few of the more common PvP builds, that would be great. Maybe a simulated dwarf packing a couple vibrant pains, a vampire priest, and one of the nastier wizards that you never see the AI using in singleplayer. The more true-to-life the better.

 

That would be a really useful playtesting tool for the rest of us too. I particularly like playing against Adventure 2 from Cardstock II because of the WW/WWE wizard. Just to test out how frequent I can draw Immovable on Turns 1 and 2.

 

I really hate that wizard. She's always the first against the wall when I play that map.

 

You said it. She (along with the WW wizards in MP) made me knuckle down and swap out gear on my Dwarf Warrior party, just to deal with WW. I now stock 2 Immovables per warrior as a standard thing.

 

Aldones i tryed make something akin to what you said. try this custom map,and change the type of enemys at your will

 

Dude, you rock.
I'll try it out now.

Edit: Holy smokes. 6 enemies. I'm intimidated now.
Edit 2: That was some nice, rough stuff.
Weird how that elf wizard NPC seems to get confused when she doesn't have a huge open field to run around in...
I can definitely work with this. I'm willing to bet a few other cautious MP hopefuls like me would absolutely love this sort of practice simulation. It's much like learning the ropes of a MOBA against bots before leaping into the real thing cluelessly. You want the map to be authentic and enemies to be a little too hard, so you're not learning to be lazy right off the bat.

 

Glad to help you can change the ai to your liking. in the morning (its 1am here atm) if you want i make some more with diferent maps to spice things up a bit

 

AS promissed
Emulator 2 and Emulator 3, diferent maps, change the ai at your leisure (note:emulator 2 only was room for 5 and emulator 3 for 6)

Edited: Btw usul i do some close maps, if you want a open field also i can do that

edited2. just tryed emulator 3- i got pwnted, realy nasty to have 6 enemys whom all have mass frenzy , and its bit close map,so fell free to reduce the number of enemys if you want try 3, 4, 5 etc