Heyo, new guy on the forums, but been playing Pathfinder for a while.
So, a quick question.
What's with all the hate towards Polar Ray?
d6/level + d4 dex drain that allows no save seems pretty good to me. I don't consider the touch attacks too limiting considering most monsters have touch ACs below 20. For a single target kill spell, I'd say it's pretty good.
Be kind. =D
20d6(assuming you are even level 20) averages out to about 70 points of damage which is not a lot at that level. 2 points of dex drain is not going to matter much in the grand scheme of things, and you still have to bypass SR which most monsters at high levels seem to have. At that level you could be doing a lot more to help your team out. An empowered scorching ray which is only a 4th level spell can put out an average of 63 points at level 11. I know it does not do the dex damage, but going from a level 4 slot to a level 8 slot should get someone more than 7 extra hit points of damage and about 2 points of dex drain.
Polar Ray is pitifully weak for an 8th level spell. For example, let's compare it to another 8th level spell: Horrid Wilting. Horrid Wilting and Polar Ray do the same damage: 1d6/level(max 25d6). Polar Ray only has medium range and requires a ranged touch attack to hit. Horrid Wilting has long range and requires no attack roll. Yeah, it does allow a save for half, while PR does not, but the save is Fortiude, meaning that Evasion doesn't apply, so monsters will take at least half damage, guaranteed (barring extremely unusual things like Mettle). Also, PR is cold damage while Horrid Wilting is untyped, so resistances and immunities to cold don't apply. Finally, the biggest advantage is that HW affects as many creatures as you can fit in a 60 ft. radius, and unlike most area spells you pick who you hit and who you don't. Polar Ray hits only a single target... Yeah, it does some Dex drain, but that really isn't even worth mentioning. HW is so far superior to PR that they don't even belong in the same league.
If that isn't enough to convince you that Polar Ray is a crappy spell, take Scorching Ray, a 2nd level spell, and buff it up to 8th level with metamagics. Just adding Empower and Maximize to it (which only brings SR up to 7th level, not 8th) and it still does way more damage than Polar Ray, plus it has 3 attack rolls, so you don't risk losing the entire spell on one bad roll. Empower Spell alone makes SR do 18d6 damage, with a mere 4th level spell slot, which is as much as PR does for an 18th level caster!
Fill an 8th level slot with empowered contagious ray and see what happens!
Another example is from the APG. Not as good as an example as Horrid Wilting, but just another one.
Stormbolts
It's a 30ft burst from you of electric damage that deals 1d8 per level and you can exclude targets. Fort save for half. But on a failed save the targets take that 1d8 electricity per level and are stunned. Stunning is much better than 1d4 Dex damage. One round of stunning can be all you need to win a fight.
Why the hell did they nerf it anyway? It was once 1d10/level (so at 20 it'd be 110 damage rather than 70.
The only real use I can think of is for disabling dragons and other low Dex creatures, but really, that's a pretty situational use and there are still other, much better options. It would take a bare minimum of 3 PR's to drop a dragon's dex to 0, and potentially as many as 10. The dragon will also likely respond by casting heal or taking some other measure once it realizes what you're doing. So... yeah, it's just a poor choice of an 8th level spell slot in any case.
Why the hell did they nerf it anyway? It was once 1d10/level (so at 20 it'd be 110 damage rather than 70.
Actually, they buffed it. The spell was first introduced in the 3.5 PHB IIRC, and it's always done 1d6/level damage. Pathfinder added the 1d4 Dex drain to it.
Why the hell did they nerf it anyway? It was once 1d10/level (so at 20 it'd be 110 damage rather than 70.Actually, they buffed it. The spell was first introduced in the 3.5 PHB IIRC, and it's always done 1d6/level damage. Pathfinder added the 1d4 Dex drain to it.
Must have been errata'd. My 3.5 PHB states 1d10. (It also states that the HD limit for shapechange is 2/level, Max 50, which *obviously* got changed even before pathfinder)
The maximized scorching ray does 72 damage (if all 3 rays hit) in a 5th-level slot, versus polar ray doing an average of 70 points of damage from an 8th-level slot.
See also energy drain (average of 5 levels for a 9th-level spell) versus a maximized enervation (4 levels for a 7th-level spell).
