If I understand the Wild Mage surge chart correctly, you cast Reckless Dweomer to cast a higher level spell, then roll on a D100 and if your roll is higher than your level + Chaos/Improve Chaos shield, the spell casts normally.

Therefore, when you are level 25, you can have a 50% chance (lvl 25 + 25 from Imp Chaos shield) of casting a higher spell.

This would make me think that Wild Mages start becoming powerful after level 25 or so because they start being able to casts Reckless Dweomer with a 50% or higher chance of success?

Actually, by casting Limited Wish, if you haven't cast any 2nd, 3rd, or 4th level spells, you can recover 4 casts of 1st level spells, provided that your Wisdom is high enough.

So, from that standpoint, at level 14 you can cast it with a 29% chance of success, and hence if you can get a Limited Wish off successfully you get 4 casts back; hence it may be possible for this to happen sooner.

Things can get even sillier once you can use Project Image or Simulacrum and have the clone cast the spell.

Actually, you can get a taste of this power earlier, as Reckless Dweomer isn't limited to spells that are high enough in level to cast; this is especially powerful in the classic edition because of the next point.

Or, if you wish to go further, and are playing the classic version, put multiple Chaos Shields inside a sequencer. Multiple casts of the spell don't normally stack, but for whatever reason they do when multiple copies are placed in a sequencer. (My guess is that all 3 effects are applied at the same time, before any of the effects can apply the immunity to further casts of the effect.) Just be aware of the stored surge bug; if you use the Reckless Dweomer to cast a Sequencer or Contingency (something which, from what I hear, the enhanced edition doesn't let you do unless you're playing an old version), the next spell you cast will always cause a wild surge.

(Note: I don't know of the EE has any other changes that would break anything I mention here.)

But 29% chance of success is quite low though isn't it? Especially given that you can blow yourself up or lose all your gold :)

It's still barely high enough that, on average, you will get more spells back than you use them.

Also, can't you just reload if something goes wrong?

(Personally, I think the "lose all gold" effect is bad game design and shouldn't have been in the game, particularly since getting it at the wrong time in Chapter 2 can make it hard (maybe impossible?) to get the money you need to progress. I personally think that effect, and the sex change effect, should be removed from the table and replaced with other effects.)

Also, I believe the table does have a few effects that are something to the effect of "spell works, except that...", which provides more of a chance of getting the effect you want. (In particular, looking at the table, a roll of 73 is quite favorable as it gives you the spell *and* you get all your spells back.) Therefore, the chance of something that could reasonably be considered a success is actually higher.

the big prob at low levels is the result of polymorph so Wild mages become powerful once they have a way to deal with that result

a certain half elf gets a belt to resist it but the cape of wolf can be given to any one... is just sitting in a well guarded cave [without fighting is possible] and at that point your mage can just turn back into a human once per day /rest + sure she can also turn into a wolf but thats not really the point