Before start reading: this whole thread will be a spoiler regarding the master of caed Nua so stop reading here if you dont wanna get spoiled or havent beaten the master yet.
Let me start with my opinion about Wizards in Pillars of Eternity and my backround, i loved playing Wizard in baldursgate 2 in fact they were the strongest characters in the game as they could solo anything without taking damage if played correctly.
However in this game Wizard is extremely weak because it feels like the developers ripped all the good spells and gave it to druid and cypher
dont get me wrong i love cypher a lot i have the grieving mother in my party and she got great utility with good single tagrte and decent AOE
whereas Druids got a lot of AOE's which are flat out better in terms of damage than what Wizard have. Those points combined with the resting mechanic is what makes wizard extremely supbar to cypher who always have enough focus to cast until there is no tomorrow without resting after each fight.
But this weakness regarding wizards in this game is just one side of the coin the other side is the extremely cheesy spells for instance Slicken and Gaze of the Adragan.
I have tried the adra dragon with my melee oriented team first which is supposed to be the toughest encounter in the game and while i have almost beaten him I simply thought about *this could be ridiculous if Slicken works on him* as slicken tend to make every bigger or halfway challenging fight into cheesy cake walk. And guess what ... that lvl 1 spells downs the dragon on the floor. I mean cool now wizard finally have a use making the most difficult enemy into stomp fest but why doesnt the dragon have any magic imunities like it should be?
But to top the Slicken cheese i thought "hey if Slicken works then Gaze of the Adragan might work too" and well.... yea it worked it turns the dragons defense into zero, nada after that i critted him for like 160 damage with my rogue the deathblow even did 262 damage which is kind of unreal that this works
TL;DR
Mage is outperformed in AoE and Singletarget by Druid and is outperformed by Controle spells and general usability by Cypher
it seems that Wizard use is limited to cheese because of those two spells Slicken and Gaze of the Adragan which seem to be extremely broken while the other spells are weak to the point where wizard will be replaced by druid or cypher.
My suggestion:
give Wizards some general utility like Contingency spell from Baldursgate 2 or fire power like skull trap used to be and take the cheese away, the cheesiness and otherwise weak spells killed the fun for me,
Please dont see this post as rage or flame i meant it to be honest feedback.
BUG REPORT:
My last point is a little Bug report in the treasure room behind the dragon if you loot the boxes save and load the game the loot is back in there infinite money can be made.. not sure if this is intended.