“So what do you do?”
“I blast things with magic.”
“And?”
“Sometimes I blast them even harder.”
“…And?”
“Once in a while I blast them twice.”
“…You’re hired.

This started out as kind of a joke, but I took it all the way to fruition (or a first draft at least) for the fun of it. The D&D Next playtest spurred discussion about the merits of the super-simple fighter whose mechanical options seem to come down to “It hit it with my sword” fighting alongside a wizard with dozens of spells. More than once people have half-jokingly suggested a wizard who just zaps things, and I finally decided to make a 4E Essentials wizard subclass that is basically a magical version of the Slayer fighter. Then, after I’d gotten a good chunk of it done, I found out that the Elementalist sorcerer in Heroes of the Elemental Chaos was a lot like that.[1] I decided to finish it anyway, but to go even simpler and drop the stances I’d been planning to put in. I also realized just how inefficient the original Essentials class format is, so in terms of format this wound up being a hybrid of 3.5 and 4e. The end result is all of 2 pages, though that’s partly because I cheated a little and just gave the class wizard utility powers. It’s kind of a dumb joke, so although I made a reasonable effort to color inside the lines, I won’t promise it’ll work as-is.

Blaster Wizard (PDF)

While looking for a Touhou picture to go with this post[2] I also realized that at some point I’d like to play a magic user who specializes in assaulting foes with energy in dazzling colors. (Marisa would’ve been better to illustrate that than Reimu, but I don’t have all day to dig through Safebooru.) In 4e terms that would probably be some kind of sorcerer, maybe a chaos sorcerer, though I don’t know that I’ll have an opportunity to play 4e proper again any time soon.

[1]To my irritation this is easy to miss, as there’s just the one sentence about it, which appears after a paragraph about how the elementalist uses the standard PHB style class progression table and can take other sorcerer powers from PHB2 and Arcane Power. (But apart from that HotEC is one of the best 4e books yet, as is Heroes of the Feywild.)

[2]It being a series of shmups, basically every character in Touhou is a blasty type magic user of some kind or other.