Hi everyone,
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me what I knew of the Wu Jen, and I was like, oh that spontaneous cha casting class from complete arcane? Never seen them in play. After looking them up, I found out they are not spontaneous casters, and they are int based. So I was pretty wrong.
Then I told him I'd look at it, and tell him what I thought about it.
At first I was very unimpressed, the Taboos are horribly stupid (Now you can't wear the colour purple or you'll lose all your spells). And the spell secrets are so-so. Getting free extend on things like rope trick is good, but not mind-bogglingly overpowered.
But apart from that Mr. Wu Jen has some things going for him:
He gets a lot of good buff spells, and some decent Battlefield control spells. As well as getting a minor selection of spells where his caster level increases by 2 (if you select water you get a lot of good BC spells there).
Free metamagics on some spells is nothing to sneeze at, even though it can be done with Arcane Thesis it is still useful for those spells you only want to apply one metamagic to.
Unique spells. Yes I bolded this one, because some of his unique spells are pretty good. Body outside body is godlike for gishes. Creeping Darkness is wonderful Battlefield Control that can follow opponents and have a decent duration. Giant size is again a wonderful gish spell, giving you an obscene amount of strength, that can be combined with fire shuriken to put the hurt on your enemies, should they be vulnerable to fire. Ice blast can potentially fatigue big groups of enemies. Magnetism can make you able to disarm multiple opponents, and is a decent de-buff lasting all battle for low levels when you need to conserve spells.
Also a Wu jen gets a nice compilation of spells, while most of them resemble arcane spells, he also has stuff that resemble divine spells, and even bardic spells.
The main thing he has going against him is that with every new book, Wizards get more spells, and the Wu Jen doesn't, but how big of a downside is this when you have the useful spells from core anyway?
So what do you guys think of this special ol' caster, do you think he should have his own handbook?