How would you make an illusionist as an actually intimidating

>>55084579
Fear and temptation. Have him force the party to face their worst fears, or show them things they want to see, and say they can have it if they surrender.

>>55084579
Your pic makes me think one of the great powers an illusionist can have is in tricking others to fight for them - not by direct mind control, but through long-term manipulation and small illusions giving them far more allies than one might reasonably expect.

Defensively, an illusionist will have a huge advantage, as they can hide pitfalls and trap, or make perfectly clear areas look impassible.

You could make good use of misinformation by giving your illusionist a secondary skill and using their illusions to make it look like they're actually a master at it.
For example, they pretend to be a blaster-caster and throw an enormous fireball at the party, but they mostly miss - only one guy gets hit. What they actually did was throw a small fireball at that guy, and made it look huge.
This would probably work even better with non-magical techniques, so the party isn't even expecting a wizard

Illusionists are essentially chess masters on a smaller scale, have him turn the allies against each other, make NPCs betray them, give conflicting descriptions of where he is and what he's doing

>>55084579
Something something Mysterio.

>>55084579
Your thumbnail pic looks like Mitt Romney

>>55084579
You know what happens when you resist an illusion?

nothign much.

You know what happens when you resist something you think is an illusion and isn't?

You die.

Illusionists rely on one of the most difficult trick a GM must master: the Unreliable Narrator. It's horrible, but you MUST NOT give the game away. You must lead them on, lie to them, falsify their senses, and judge when they have and have not interacted with the illusion. It works best if you have a good idea of their will saves, so that you can make private rolls. I recommend makign a habit of fiddlign with your dice while reunning, once or twice every hour, get them used to you randomly rolling non-useful numbers so that you can hide their actual saves and the enemies doings in your fidgety behavior.

Start informign people about everythign in notes. Add in some pointless noites as well, but when they make perception checks, when you passive roll for them to notice things, long before they ever meet the illusionist. get them used to these habitsd, and then when your illusionist shows up, all the subterfuge is something they won't think anything of....until it's far too late.

PF necromancers get a lot of mileage out of Shadow Evocation and Shadow Conjuration, but an illusionist who can actually USE evocation magic (especially wall of force, and the other wall spells) can really fuck a person's day up. Likewise, necromancy is actually one of the msot effective spell lsits for an illusionist to have, because the debuffs will help push their illusions though (especially curses and touch of idiocy).

>>55084579

When you literally can't trust your own eyes, WHO CAN YOU TRUST? An illusionary floor above a giant pit of spikes is utterly lethal. So is a trick as simple as "Oh, you know this place? It's a giant fucking deathtrap."

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>>55084579
Just do what this chick does and create a Cosmo Entelecheia for them, though using illusions might make it a bit harder than normal.

>>55084579
If your party isn't slowly crawling through the lair tapping everything with a 10ft pole you're doing it wrong.

Generally, illusionists are high charisma characters too. They know how to navigate social interactions and grant other people their desires and in return those people pledge loyalty to them. The illusionist themselves are rarely the direct threat, it's the peons/creatures under their control that are.

Also, as others ITT have mentioned, the environmental traps or general sneakiness could come into play. Depending on your flavor they could be variants of bards or rogues.

>>55084579
Have a bunch of traps disguised with illusion magic. Make the task of getting to the illusionist long and make it very clear that he is an illusionist. At the end describe the dude as "floating in the middle of a wide chasm" and the players will assume that it's an illusion and they can just run up to him. The thing is that he's wearing a ring of flying and they all fall to their deaths

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>>55087732