Bastion of Good limitations


Rules Questions

Grand Lodge

3 people marked this as FAQ candidate.

Recently, I ran with a group through 2-25: You Only Die Twice. Near the end of the session, a situation came up in which my Bastion of Good ability was targeting a caster that summoned a Wall of Fire, effectively splitting the party in two. Being a Life Oracle 4/Sacred Shield 3, I moved to the upwind portion of the fire as my move action so people could move through the wall at half damage, and began wanding myself to heal through the intense damage I took all night long through lifelinks.

My table agreed at the time that my Bastion ability would halve the damage from the Wall of Fire, as it was an ability originating from the target of my smite. Recently, my GM and I have discussed the validity of this based on whether or not the Wall's damage constitutes an 'attack' as the specific wording is as follows: "...any attacks the target makes against allies within 10 feet of the paladin deal half damage..."

If a lingering spell constitutes an attack, my Bastion of good ability saved us an easy 70hp in healing, and about 20 minutes worth of table time. If not, then we fudged a bit, and the battle would have been dramatically prolonged as all of our melee fighters would have been trapped inside a building with no way out other than by taking damage that I'm not sure I could have healed through. In which case, I suppose the Question that needs to be asked is: What constitutes an attack that would activate the bonus granted by my bastion of good ability?

Shadow Lodge

I believe I played my sacred shield paladin (lvl 6) through a similar situation. I can think of four villain casters in pfs with wall of fire on their spell lists off the top of my head, and more with blade barrier, etc... This will come up. I didn't activate "bastion of good" in my situation because I didn't want the rules argument at the table, and I had plenty of other valid options in the combat.

If "bastion of good" works or doesn't work on lingering attacks is quite important to the balance of a sacred shield build.

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