Wizard Guide

Welcome to the *Wizard Guide*! This player curated guide aims to help you make the best Wizard you can **statistically**. Contributions to the guide are welcome. If you disagree with a large portion of the guide, you are instead encouraged to create your own guide. Make sure to tag it with the appropriate class guide category, so that users can find it.

### Character Creation

For the start of the guide, we're beginning at character creation. If your character is already created, or you're more interesting in role-playing rather than optimizing, you can skip ahead to the Group Role section of the guide for advice on what your role in a group is.

Let's look at the races available to the Wizard and what their starting racial statistics look like. Attributes with this  icon before them are important for the class.

The statistic bonuses of a race are only a small part of determining the best race for your character. Now, we need to look at the *Racial Passives* and *Racial Actives* for each race.

#####  Racial Passives

 **Archai**

Wizards are the most elementally focused class, and so it follows that the most elementally focused race, the Archai, are one of the best picks for them. Their **Elemental Attunement** provides bonuses to spells that match the elemental attunement of the Archai, which is chosen at character creation. This passive aligns well with the Wizard's Focus trait, which provides stacking benefits each time the Wizard casts spells of the same school. The Archai's **Living Reservoir** reduces all mana-drain effects by 20%, which can help keep an Archai Wizard in combat longer.

 **Dark Myr**

From an optimization stand point, Dark Myr are perhaps the worst fit for the Wizard. Their passives are more exploration based, and Wizards get little benefit from them.

  **Elf**

Elves don't have a lot of fitting racial passives for the Wizard. The only sub-type of elf worth considering is the Ashen sub-type, so to save time that's the one we'll consider. **Lucent Ancestry** and **Nimble** provide little to no benefit to the Wizard, due to the lack of Nature spells and abilities modified by agility. We don't know what Spell Rating does at this stage of development (Aug. 2020). However, we don't know if Wisdom is a primary stat for Wizards, so **Sagacious** might be somewhat useful once we know more about it. **Deep Recitation** is a potentially useful trait, but it doesn't outweigh the other wasted passives.

 **Gnome**

Befitting the most caster focused race in Pantheon, Gnomes are a strong pick for the Wizard. **Enigmatic Brilliance** grants more Mana from each point of Intelligence, one of the Wizard's primary attributes. **Ethereal Being'**s 3% dodge chance helps keep the Wizard alive, and **Incantation Mastery** gives you a 20% chance to avoid being Silenced. Lastly, **Constant Scholar** increases the rate at which skills improve and is a great universal trait.

 **Human**

Until we know whether or not Charisma is a primary stat for Wizards, Humans are, at best, an O.K pick. Their **A People Inspired** trait provides 2% spell haste and **Shield Specialization** increases Shield Mastery skill by 10 points which can help keep the Wizard alive.

##### Summary

Exceptional: Archai and Gnome. Archai's elemental attunement is hard to pass up for such an elementally focused class like Wizards. Gnomes are a strong second and are the best choice if you're looking to do lots of Tradeskilling.

Decent: Human. Spell haste is always nice, and as a class likely to draw lots of unwanted hostile attention, the bonus to Shield Mastery might prove handy.

Poor: Dark Myr and Elf.

### Group Role

**DPS**. The role of DPS can be summarized easily: kill the party's targets. But each class that falls under the role of DPS has access to a range of abilities that do more than deal damage. DPS classes need to pay attention to the flow of combat and be ready interrupt important abilities or crowd control adds with roots, snares, stuns, mez and knockback abilities. Another important skill for all DPS (indeed, all players) to master is proper aggro management. A DPS needs to know how to deal the most damage the most efficiently, while not drawing agro away from the main tank and stressing their healers by taking unnecessary damage.

Wizards are one of, if not the most damage-focused classes in Pantheon, but that doesn't mean they're simple glass cannons who mindlessly belt out damage spells. Wizards are capable of forcing mobs into many different states with their spells. These states not only synergize well with some other classes' abilities, but they often have penalties all their own which can be useful to guide the course of combat in your party's favor.

**Utility**  is a broad category. It can perhaps best be thought of as a sum of all abilities that do not fall under the other categories (Tanking, Healing, Damage Dealing, Crowd Controlling, Supporting)

   While Wizards don't have the most broad range of utility, they provide a very valuable form of it thanks to their File:WIZ order of gatewalkers icon.png Order of the Gatewalkers passive ability, which enables the Wizard to learn teleportation spells.