Sinistrad |
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Suggestion: Errata the following descriptors to be associated with an elemental descriptor for the purposes of spells, feats, archetypes, traits, and class abilities (or add the elemental descriptors to spells with the listed energy types):
Sonic, Electricity -> Air
Acid -> Earth
Cold -> Water
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Reasoning: Many archetypes, feats, and even traits in Pathfinder allow the player to pick an element in the form of one of the classic 4 elements:
Fire
Air
Earth
Water
The player then gains some benefit when casting spells that have the chosen elemental descriptors.
However, this runs in to a couple problems.
1. The disparity in number of spells available per element is fairly large. (I didn't separate Divine from Arcane here.)
Fire: 39
Air: 14
Earth: 20
Water: 14
(Source: http://www.pathfinder-srd.nl/wiki/All_spell_lists#Spells_by_descriptor)
2. The bonuses for choosing an element generally take the form of DCs, damage per die, and/or caster level. But, because only fire is both an element and an energy type, the vast majority of the element-specific bonuses won't work on any direct damage "blasty" spells except fire.
Only for fire do all three--DCs, damage per die, and caster level--affect damage spells significantly, often having a multiplicative effect. Only fire takes full advantage of all three. And only fire can benefit from every feat/trait/class ability/archetype cumulatively.
This means that nearly all of the options that offer elemental specialization present something of a false choice. You may want to make a "stormcaller" that focuses on electricity spells, but you'll find that the huge breadth of options available to fire specialists are extremely difficult to take advantage of when you're not doing fire damage.
Fire damage spells are already generally "better" in terms of damage caps vs. spell level vs. AoE size, and are generally speaking the best choice for metamagic focused characters. It seems a bit unbalanced to then also restrict the usefulness of elemental specialization to mostly fire by separating the other energy types from their element. Even with all the same bonuses, electricity spells--for example--cannot match every parameter of an equivalent level fire spell (lightning bolt vs. fireball). And while the line AoE shape does have advantages, the superior coverage and range make fireball more desirable in general.
Energy immunity is a factor of course, and focusing on something other than fire means your target is less likely to be immune. However, most things with an immunity also have a vulnerability, and any fire specialist will have the benefit of that vulnerability in most cases where they're forced to use something other than fire damage. And, that vulnerability is likely to more than make up for the damage lost from using a sub-optimal element for the build. If the situation is reversed, the player can still target vulnerabilities, but their optimal damage is much lower. So, even in this case, a non-fire build is sub-par by a fair margin.
By allowing the other energy types to be associated with their element, it only brings them closer to matching fire without exceeding fire due to the breadth of available fire spells and their top-tier damage caps and AoE options. There's a lot of fun things that can be done with the other energy types, but having so many of the elemental options not function for those energy types makes those options feel very sub-par.
In conclusion, using errata to associate energy types with an element would go a long way to make a wider array of builds more viable without them being more powerful than the options currently available to fire specialists.
Thanks for reading! :)
-Sinistrad
Umbrutei Seikumori |
Suggestion: Errata the following descriptors to be associated with an elemental descriptor for the purposes of spells, feats, archetypes, traits, and class abilities (or add the elemental descriptors to spells with the listed energy types):
Sonic, Electricity -> Air
Acid -> Earth
Cold -> Water=====
2. The bonuses for choosing an element generally take the form of DCs, damage per die, and/or caster level. But, because only fire is both an element and an energy type, the vast majority of the element-specific bonuses won't work on any direct damage "blasty" spells except fire.
All of this!! Absolutely all of this. Please for the love of Kelizandri.
Cyrad RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16 |