A Practical Guide to Races
A Practical Guide to Class Features
As a wizard, you have a bunch of alternative class features. Some are useful. Some are not.
Specialization and you
One of the first choices you must make as a wizard is to specialize or not to specialize. Specialization is the designer's way of being too lazy to write classes for necromancer, illusionist, and so on, and pretending that a fireball cast by an evoker is somehow different than a fireball cast by a necromancer. Except no one uses fireball, but that's a different story. As you probably know, specialization gives you extra spell slots - one per level, in your school of specialization. Something which is usually glossed over is that it locks half your spells known (from leveling anyway) into being spells of that school. This can be good or bad based on which school you select. You can also be a focused specialist, getting even more spell slots of that school for trading out a generalist spell slot of each level.
Of course, there's the widely known drawback of selecting two to three schools to ban to be a specialist. So let's go over the schools.
Abyssal Specialist (Drow of the Underdark). This is just weird. It's not really a school, so you can't ban it. You specialize in spells with the fear, compulsion, chaos, and evil descriptors, and only have to ban one school for vanilla specialization. HOWEVER, this specialization wins at life if you have some way of making all your spells evil or chaotic (more on that later), as then you are effectively a generalist but with 1 or 2 banned schools and the option to take feats which boost the DCs of all your spells such as Malign Spell Focus and Spell Focus: Evil. You can build an entire build around the Master of Evil, or the Master of Chaos (already done).
As for your DM not allowing evil, just explain you'll be on drugs and casting evil spells, but not actually backstabbing your party and/or slaughtering innocents, and that should be enough to maintain an evil alignment.
Abjuration: This school is all about protection (supposedly) and dispelling/redirecting/messing with magic. At high levels, it rocks the house with things like energy immunity, superior resistance, mind blank, and disjunction. Don't give this up unless you have another caster who can do it, or your campaign won't reach 5th level.
Conjuration: This school does everything, and I mean everything. What it doesn't do with its spells you can use the planar binding or summon monster lines to replicate (usually). Lots of low level save or sucks, lots of higher level callings. Take it, specialize in it, don't give it up. Also, teleports.
Divination: You can't give this up, but it only costs one school to specialize in. It consists primarily of information gathering stuff, but information is power, so abuse away!
A small note on divination: Yes, you can try all kinds of cheesy tricks with contact other plane and the rest, but this school really comes down to "What is my DM going to give me?" In an nutshell, this school is "ask the DM for a hint" and many DMs will simply take the "a higher power can block this spell" shortcut out. So ask your DM.
Enchantment: On the plus side, you can get a large army of minions who live to serve you. On the downside, this school is easy as hell to block, dominates and charms can be dispelled, and it attacks will. There's good stuff here, but it's hard to make work on all enemies. Charm powers are dependent on arguing with your DM over the rules.
Evocation: The noob trap school. Full of options that look cool but do nothing. Look, by now everyone knows blaster spells are a waste of time and spell slots, because your spell damage is not keeping up with the monster's Con bonuses and monsters get free bullshit hit dice. You can ban this school, no sweat, and get by with the shadow evocation spells from Illusion.
If you are dead set on writing "I'm an evoker" on your character sheet, then go right ahead. If you feel like dumpster diving through splatbooks for awesome spells, you can make a decent evoker. If you're in it for pure power however, you can do everything an evoker can as a conjurer. I hate to say this, but as a conjurer your blasting is better and you can actually do other things. If you want to raise walls of flame, ice, and force and screw up the battlefield that way, then you can make a boss evoker whom the bad guys go after first.
Illusion: This is one of my favorite schools. However, the dreaded DM nerfbat hangs over your head like the sword of Damocles. Namely, the "interacting with an illusion" rules. If your DM is reasonable on the issue, go for it. If the DM rules that looking at the illusion is considered "interacting", then that's bad. However, this school is still full of solid things such as the invisibility line, the shadow line, and mirror image and friends. Is almost completely shut down by true seeing if you do not invest to protect this.
Necromancy: Debuffs, save or dies, limited protections, and undead minions. A solid school. Cool flavor, and some very powerful effects (spirit possession, undead immunities, killing people you hate).
Transmutation: This is a hard one to rate, for several reasons. It has the polymorph/draconic polymorph/polymorph any object/shapechange line of spells, which are fricking awesome when you dig through whatever version of the errata is the latest one. This chain is also banned by many DMs because you can do overpowered stupid shit. Aside from the shapechanging shenanigans, this school offers Fortitude save or dies (usually but not always resisted by the same things as necromancy), some no save screw yous, and buff spells. None of the really good stuff in here is at low levels, and the flight can be duplicated somewhat by illusion, however, take a good long look at the self-buffs before discarding this school.
Domain Wizard: This is an idiotic version where you get to take a domain like a cleric and get bonus spell slots. If it is available, take it. As always, conjuration and transmutation are among the most useful domains.
Getting Familiar: or not
The familiar: the sole core wizard class feature (besides the bonus feats, and let's be honest, who uses those?) The pros of the familiar are that it gives you bullshit bonuses (mention goes out to the hummingbird from some Dragon mag which gets you an initiative bonus, the rat which gives a +2 Fort save bonus, and the raven which can speak and thus use wands) and can be imbued with the ability to cast low level spells when you hit higher levels. It can also scout. The downside of the familiar is that it is easy to murderize, and you lose xp when it dies. But hey, you can trade it for cool stuff!
Immediate Magic (PHBII): Abrupt Jaunt is made of win. The others suck, mainly because they depend on wizard level, are outclassed by spells, are useless, or all of the above.
Aligned Spellcasting(Dragon 357):Crucial for the Master of Evil builds mentioned earlier. Give all your spells an alignment subtype. Stack on Spell Focus(Evil) and the gang for the win!
Eidetic Spellcasting (Dragon 357): No Scribe Scroll, but no spellbook. Not bad if your DM is a Gygaxian dickbag, but the standard action to Gygaxian dickbags is not to play with said dickbags.
WIP