Wizard

This article is about the player role. For the powerful enemy, see Wizard of Yendor.

The wizard is one of the roles in NetHack. Wizards can be either neutral or chaotic, and can be humans, elves, gnomes or orcs.

Wizards are relatively poor fighters with low HP and strength, but are the best spellcasters in the game. All categories of spells are unrestricted to them. They can also write unidentified scrolls and spellbooks (with a magic marker) more easily than any other class. Wizards with high intelligence are granted reduced-hunger casting. Wizards cannot use twoweapon. Wizards special spell is Magic missile, they have no bonus or penalty for emergency spells.

The wizard rank titles are: Evoker (xplvl 1-2), Conjurer (3-5), Thaumaturge (6-9), Magician (10-13), Enchanter/Enchantress (14-17), Sorcerer/Sorceress (18-21), Necromancer (22-25), Wizard (26-29), Mage (30)

Wizards can get Expert in the weapon skills of dagger, quarterstaff, and dart, as well as the attack, divination, escape, and matter spells. They can also become Skilled at Cleric, Healing, and Enchantment spells.

Intrinsics

• Exp level 8: teleport at will if the wizard had teleportitis
• Exp level 15: warning
• Exp level 17: teleport control

Skills

Wizard skills
Max	Skills
Basic	Weapons: short sword, mace, spear, trident, shuriken Combat: bare hands, riding
Skilled	Weapons: knife, axe, club, polearms, sling Spells: healing, enchantment, clerical
Expert	Weapons: dagger, quarterstaff, dart Spells: attack, divination, escape, matter

It takes 6 skill slots to reach Expert in daggers, and 20 slots to max out all the spellcasting skills: 3x2 slots for the Skilled spells, 4x4 slots for the Expert spells, minus the 2 points already in attack and enchantment. This means that a level 30 Wizard who chooses to enhance all spellcasting skills to maximum should have 3 slots free to spend on other skills, such as unrestricted artifact weapon skills.

As part of skill slot management, a Wizard should defer enhancing any spell skill until there comes a point when doing so would provide an in-game benefit. The benefits from enhancing a spell skill are that it lowers spell failure rates, and (depending on the spell) sometimes augments the effects of a spell. When advancing spell skills, it is a good idea to check which spells you have in each school, and make sure that at least one of your spells would benefit from being enhanced, before using up the skill slot.

It is important to note that a great many spells enjoy augmented effects when advancing from Basic to Skilled (notably, fireball, cone of cold, remove curse, and detect monsters), but only two spells enjoy augmented effects when going from Skilled to Expert (namely, jumping and protection), and of these two, Wizards can only become Expert in jumping. Therefore, for spells other than escape spells, a Wizard gains no benefit from advancing to Expert unless there is a currently known high level spell (e.g. finger of death, cancellation, polymorph) whose failure rate would be lowered by such advancement.

In particular, there is almost never any need to advance divination spells to Expert, since all divination spells have the same effects at Skilled as at Expert, and none of the divination spells are of very high spell level. The skill slots saved thereby are valuable to have available for weapons, especially early in the game.

Starting equipment

• quarterstaff
• cloak of magic resistance
• three random scrolls
• two spellbooks.
  • The first is always force bolt,
  • the other is random from the list of spellbooks level 3 and lower.
• three random potions
• two random rings
• random wand
• 20% chance of magic marker
• 20% chance of blindfold
• ?% chance of musical instrument

Strategy

• Wizards should dump their quarterstaff as soon as they find any kind of non-cursed dagger unless trying for the Staff of Aesculapius via wishing.
• They can and should reach expert in dagger. They need not enhance even their attack spell till this is done.
• They should sacrifice as soon as they find an altar, as their first guaranteed gift is Magicbane which is an excellent weapon, and in addition is an athame with which you can engrave Elbereth in the stone in one move, without dulling. It is also great as wielding it catches 95% of all curses, great when confronting a spellcaster. Actually at high levels and after the quest, spells are much better for attack than any weapon. So keep Magicbane wielded at all times, and use spells for attack.
• They should try to read any non-cursed spellbook as soon as they find it. They will be warned of any chances of failure. They also have higher intelligence which makes it easy to read spellbooks. Combining the two they can start reading uncursed level 1 spellbooks at XL1.
• Because there can be so much variation in the starting equipment, it makes them a common class for reroll scummers.