Amara wrote:When I say no preparation, I do mean that. If the party is ambushed and the wizard has no time to prepare his spells, he's pretty well screwed. Granted, he'll have whatever wasn't spent from the day before, but that's not necessarily going to help him much.
If the wizard has expended all his spells for the day, then the sorcerer probably has too (he does get more, but they're weaker so he'll need more of them, and it probably evens out). Both of them have no spells until they've slept for 8 hours; I think the Wizard only needs 15 minutes, or maybe an hour, to prepare spells for the day. So during that brief window of time, the sorcerer has an advantage. But this pales compared to the four extra hours per day that a non-mage can get just by being an elf.
Of course, if the DM makes a habit of that, that's probably the point that the wizard then makes a habit of sleeping in a rope trick.
Make that a Leomund's Secure Shelter; Rope Trick doesn't create a floor in my game, just an endless rope stretching through space, so while it's good for a brief hiding-place while you wait for a guard patrol or something to go by, it's impossible to sleep in. (And don't start with trying to rig up a suspended platform or anything; monkeying with the spell like that will almost certainly cause it to fail. A 2nd-grade spell does not let you entirely vanish from the universe for eight hours while you replenish the spell slot that created it; I'm annoyed enough that a 4th-grade one does, but since it's contemporary with Polymorph and Dimension Door and such, I figure I'll let that one slide.)
Admitted, this is one of the places I feel pathfinder handled the sorcerer better. The idea of having multiple arcane bloodlines, and giving bonus bits of power based on which yours is was fantastic. (Dragon? Dragon like traits. Potential breath weapon, late game you could get wings, etc. Fae? Traceless step and abilities like a touch attack that denies your opponent a turn by making them collapse in to laughter.)
It's a neat idea, but frankly I prefer for base classes to be simple and not require that amount of reading to comprehend their basic capabilities. Save the shopping through a list for Feats and Spells and such; doing it for a base class's features strikes me as too much work just to get the barest
outline of the character.
I know there WAS a bloodline progression setup for 3.5, but as I recall it was treated as class levels and was a bit cumbersome. Hmm. I swear I remember reading something else with the idea of considerations made for non-draconic arcane bloodlines. I'll need to look back in to it. There was likely something I missed.
No idea what you're thinking of; what I know on the subject is just Draconic and Heritage feats that let you give your sorcerer a bunch of little bennies for being more nearly a dragon or having fiendish or fey or whatever ancestry. Which are cute, but not nearly sufficient to equalize the classes I suspect. At least not at low levels. By the time you're up to level 15, the fact that the wizard has 9ths and the sorcerer only has 8ths probably makes little enough difference (unless the gm is soft on what you can accomplish with Wish). But at level 5, the Wizard just makes the sorcerer look like a drooling moron.
As far as prestige, I'll probably always adore arcane trickster. You CAN do it with wizard, but it works so much better with sorcerer from my experience.
Perhaps once you start playing that's true, but a sorcerer takes one extra level to qualify, and even for a wizard it requires a minimum of level 8 (barring tricks of the kind I'd probably veto) to get enough levels of wizard and rogue to meet its prereqs. So waiting one more level on top of that is painful to my way of thinking.