Increasing Spell Damage


Homebrew and House Rules


One of the things that I find rather annoying about Pathfinder is that many of it's damage dealing spells pretty much still do the same amount of damage as they did back in 2nd Edition AD&D. In 3rd Edition, this was more or less okay, as saving throws had also changed in ways that allowed you to build a caster whose spells were much more likely to succeed.

The problem I see now, however, is that enemies have a lot more hit points than they used to. Even if the enemy doesn't save against a spell like fireball, the damage tends to be fairly light.

Now, I know there are specialized builds that abuse metamagic reducers, bloodline arcana, and crazy caster level boosting to deal reasonable damage- I just don't think such extremes should be required.

In my friend's Pathfinder game, we have an Ifrit Fire Sorcerer, whose Charisma is 22 (I think) for sorcerer purposes. Our last session was particularly twinge-worthy, watching him try to hurt things with flaming d4's (burning hands).

The GM and I had a talk about it, and he agrees- damage spells are too weak, especially if the party encounters higher CR foes.

The problem, as we both see it, is we don't know how much better spell damage should be, compared to enemy hit points.

Ideally, since spell slots are limited, a spell should have a noticeable impact on an encounter. Damage spells rarely do so, a fact that is pretty much common knowledge, to the point that people are often advised "not to blast".

I don't know how to make damage spells more viable without resorting to heavy optimization. We discussed increasing the damage dice, trying to make metamagic easier, or introducing items (like 4th Edition's implements) that improve the caster's abilities.

We got nowhere. The spells need to be better against monsters, but not so good that enemy casters become an even worse threat than they already are.

If anyone else has thoughts on this dilemma, I'd love to hear them.


As far as I can tell, the metamagic feats like intensify and maximise were intended to address this issue. I don't think they work well enough for the level increase.
However, I'd use these as a starting point for making your own versions of these instead of changing the actual spells to start with. Either reduce the level increase or increase the effects first. This way it's easy to readjust them as you playtest the results.


You could always augment the existing Metamagic feats to suit your need/want.

Take the Intensify Metamagic - for +1 spell level, it increases damage dice by up to five, capping at caster level or 10. Make it scale a bit - for +2 levels, it caps at 15 dice or caster level ,and for +3 levels, it caps at 20 dice, or caster level.

Gives the feat a little more worth and flexibility, as well as fitting what you're looking for.


It would be cool if there was feat progression that let you do specific things with spell damage. Not unlike Power Attack and Deadly Aim do for melee and ranged attacks.

Might be cool to see something like: Mana Burn lower the DC of your spells by 1 but increase damage by 2 (by 3 if it is a fire spell) and increase this penalty by 1 per 4 caster levels increasing the corresponding damage by 2 (or 3) each time.

This way you can have an add on- because static addition tends to be preferable to dice rolls- AND when you do succeed on your saves you get a nice little boost.

I might add a descriptor that you select a type damage and it can only be applied to spells that allow a save?

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I've seen my share of blasting mages and they seem fine as is. There's plenty of ways to build a good blaster. It just takes more effort to do so, contrasting with the God Wizard, which takes almost no effort to optimize at all.

To build a blaster wizard, focus on effects that increase your effective CL. Spell Specialization is absolutely amazing. Some classes have ways of increasing CL as well. A 1st level arcanist with Spell Specialization can cast burning hands that do 4d4 damage, which will kill most things he encounters at that level, even if they succeed on their save. At later levels, get metamagic feats like Intensify, Maximize, and Empower.


As you are homebrewing the rules, why not just double the max damage dice or number (capped to 20dX; burning hands to 10 missiles of 1d4+1, burning hands to 10d4, fireball is up to 20d6 instead, shout to 10d6, greater shout 20d6), increase damage dice by 1 die size for smimilar spells (Delayed blast fireball would do 20d8) or more powerful spells (slay living goes to 12d8 +2 per level on fail save), etc.

Or, allow Intensify Spell to be chosen multiple times, create a feat that increases the damage dice by 1 dice, or doubles static damage - if +1 per 2 levels, its now +1 per level, or +1 per level to +2 per level. Just remember, whatever you allow the PCs to do, the monsters can do too.

With these kind of tweaks, you should be able to find a good balance. We used to drop the max and just go with level up to 20.


The issue isn't damage DICE, it's damage BONUS. When you play a melee character, it isn't about whether you're rolling 2d6 or 1d4 at higher levels: it's about whether you're adding 24 to each hit after the roll. That's what burner spells don't get. Adding level to damage, adding +1 for every die rolled, adding ability mod, whatever. That's what would make these spells scale and do good damage.

This is why so many of the optimized sorcerer builds take Orc and draconic bloodlines, if not the sole reason why they do so.


Then they should make those aspects of those bloodlines into metamagic feats to allow everyone to be able to do that. Perhaps certain spells (or spell levels) add 1/2 level, higher level spells add full level, or add main ability modifiers instead. I agree, combat classes get to add their level or certain ability modifiers to their damage. Spellcasters, or even other classes like rogues, should be able to do the same with primary class features. Spellcasters should be able to add level or ability mods to their damage, Rogues could add Dex oe level to to sneak attacks, monks add Wis or level to unarmed strikes, etc. I'll be interested to see if they address anything like this as options in the Unchained book.

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Puna'chong wrote:

The issue isn't damage DICE, it's damage BONUS. When you play a melee character, it isn't about whether you're rolling 2d6 or 1d4 at higher levels: it's about whether you're adding 24 to each hit after the roll. That's what burner spells don't get. Adding level to damage, adding +1 for every die rolled, adding ability mod, whatever. That's what would make these spells scale and do good damage.

This is why so many of the optimized sorcerer builds take Orc and draconic bloodlines, if not the sole reason why they do so.

That logic doesn't quite work with spells because spells work very differently from weapon attacks. That's why the formulas differ significantly.


While it's true that an optimized blaster is fine, the problem I want to solve is exactly that: it's trivial to make a "God" Wizard, but not so trivial to make a good blaster.

Spells that deal hit point damage are easier to deal with and synergize well with what other party members are doing. Trying to make encounters challenging when faced by grease, web, stinking cloud, slow, sleet storm, black tentacles, and so on, is not so easy.

I can tell my GM has problems with this, and I think he'd be much happier with a game where blasting was encouraged, as opposed to the long arguments and time lost poring over the rules whenever someone casts a 'control' spell.

Now onto the suggestions-

Making metamagic easier was the first thing I considered, as this is a mechanic the game is already (supposedly) balanced around. It would be easy to reduce the metamagic costs of empower and maximize, for example.

Unfortunately, there's still the opportunity cost of the feats themselves to consider. I want a solution for the baseline, so that casters wouldn't feel dumb preparing the occasional damage spell.

But that solution has to be one that won't wreck the game when Enemy Wizard #45 makes his debut.

I've considered adding a 'pool' mechanic to casters, giving them an amount of points that they can use to augment their spells, so that they can "hotshot" spells for more damage when it's needed, but not all day long. Unfortunately, some classes already have a pool mechanic, and that might create an extra layer of complexity that just slows the game down.


For your specific case, given that low-levels concern you: I'd give the Ifrit an option to swap his +2 Cha for Sorcerer effects bloodline-thing to +1-2 caster level for all evocation spells (or all fire ones, whichever you prefer).

For the more general case: I like dipping into 3.5 here. Allow Arcane Thesis and Searing Spell/Piercing Cold (allowing you to still do something when elemental resistance/immunity eventually covers the world). On the flip side, I strongly dislike Dazing Spell.


In 1st edition AD&D, hit dice were capped around 9 or 10, and spells had no caps (fireballs didn't stop at 10d6, for example). 2nd edition kept the HD cap and introduced the spell damage cap. 3rd edition (and Pathfinder) drastically increased the number of hit points (by both removing the HD cap and increasing the number of hit points gained from constitution) but did not similarly increase spell damage.

To bring the spell damage back in line you could therefore either reduce hit point totals (not recommended) or just remove the spell caps.


Jeraa wrote:

In 1st edition AD&D, hit dice were capped around 9 or 10, and spells had no caps (fireballs didn't stop at 10d6, for example). 2nd edition kept the HD cap and introduced the spell damage cap. 3rd edition (and Pathfinder) drastically increased the number of hit points (by both removing the HD cap and increasing the number of hit points gained from constitution) but did not similarly increase spell damage.

To bring the spell damage back in line you could therefore either reduce hit point totals (not recommended) or just remove the spell caps.

Removing caps outright gets... silly. Very silly.

Up them, sure, but pulling them can go wrong very quickly.

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Several options that you have:

1st: Take a hint from the 3E Warmage. Allow the blaster caster to add his Primary Caster Stat to the first round of damage of a spell per target.

This gets you a scaling additional damage bonus.

2nd: Add damage dice to all spells by level. For instance, 1st level spells do 1d6 + Damage as spell listed. 2nd level spells do +2d6, 3rd level +3d6, etc. This means that a Cone of Cold ALWAYS does more damage then a fireball of equal caster level.

3) Allow casters to throw evocations at +1 CL/2 levels. Both damage and spell penetration will scale much more quickly, with blasting magic. It will make the evocation school quite strong very quickly.

4) Follow the numerous class guides on doing the following:
Taking the right bloodlines
Increasing effective caster level
Reducing metamagic costs
Choosing the right metamagic.
Picking the right damage spells to use.

==Aelryinth


Removing the caps is something worth considering, but it still doesn't help at lower levels. A level 5 Wizard casts fireball and likely deals 17-18 damage, save for half. That's devastating against CR 2 foes (~20 hit points), effective against CR 3 foes (~30 hit points), reasonable damage against CR 4 foes (~40 hit points), but CR 5 (~55 hit points) and CR 6 (~70 hit points) enemies aren't terribly fazed.

And this is a spell taking up the caster's highest level slot! I don't think that's good enough, but I'm having difficulty figuring out what would be good enough. My 'feeling' at this point is that a character using their highest level spell slot against an enemy of equal CR to their level, should generally deal damage close to half their maximum hit points...or at least 40%.

Similarly, cure spells should negate most of what a monster can dish out each turn. Right now, a CR 3 baddie does ~13 damage with one hit, and a level 3 Cleric's cure moderate wounds only heals 12 on average. I've seen a lot of fights lately where that's very underwhelming.

EDIT: Aelryinth, I've seen #1 used before. It's great at low levels, but rapidly falls off at higher levels. #2, OTOH, is simple and elegant, a lot like Sneak Attack progression. I'll pitch that to my GM.

#3 isn't bad either, but not all spells are affected equally, since not everything scales neatly with CL. So I'm not sure about it.

And again, yes, I agree, one can optimize to be very good at blasting- but something about that seems backwards to me. Blasting requires optimization and is weak out of the box...but simply making the enemies in an encounter completely worthless and driving your GM up the wall is so easy one can do it by accident!

You can't reverse this trend, but it'd be nice if flashy evocations sucked less without having to map out your traits, feats, and magic items for 20 levels.

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Lynceus wrote:
While it's true that an optimized blaster is fine, the problem I want to solve is exactly that: it's trivial to make a "God" Wizard, but not so trivial to make a good blaster.

I see that as a problem with the God Wizard, not the blaster.

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Lynceus,

the +1 cl/2 levels to evocation/blaster spells is effectively the same as adding +d6's to spells, with the caveat that you hit your damage caps earlier. The maximum is less then just adding dice...

BUT...it means that at level 10 you're throwing a CL 15 magic missile that will probably punch the SR on just about any foe you're facing. Your Cone of COld is already 15d6. You maxed your fireball at level 7 instead of level 10.

It's an accelerant for damage, but the big thing is that it punches SR on enemies more reliably then other direct spells.

You can also bring in things like:

Heighten Spell: Heightened Spell automatically applies to Meta'd Evocations (i.e. an Empowered Fireball is a 5th level spell for all purposes).

Increase the damage cap of spells, as others have mentioned, so accelerated Caster level keeps applying. It's effectively a free Empower Spell if you do.

+Caster Stat to damage is a nice minor damage bonus, because it applies per target and can be doubled, tripled, Empowered, etc. It works particularly well for spreading out a nice fistful of damage on multiple targets of magic missiles, for instance. At high levels, it makes low level spells still excel at Concentration disruption.

Bring back the Banespell Metamagic (+1). +2d6 to a particular foe type, -2 to saves on the spell, +2 to hit. Particularly useful for sorcerers. A nice low-level damage kick for a favored spell.

Keep in mind that even in Pathfinder, by level 10 a well built blaster can explode through CR-level enemies with the right combo of enhanced spells.

Allow the sorc to trade his bloodline for the Elemental or Draconic bloodline of his choice that allows +'s to damage. Once you start stacking fixed damage bonuses, they can get quite good.

For instance: If you use +Caster Stat to damage, Introduce Banespell, and he takes Spell Spec and Magical Lineage with an elemental bloodline (16 Charisma):

At level 1 he's casting a 3d6+6 Burning Hands, +2d6 against a creature type for no cost if he takes a full attack action. 5d6+6 at level 1 is a LOT of damage.

==Aelryinth

Silver Crusade

A small step could be simply removing the "SR: yes" line from damage spells.

Overall, it is probably better to add a flat modifier than more dice. I'd probably do the following:
1) remove CL caps
2) add casting modifier in damage
3) add a flat damage bonus based on spell level (1st=1, 2nd=4, 3rd=7, 4th=10, 5th=13, 6th=16, 7th=20, 8th=24, 9th=30) [based on average monster HP at spell level x2]


Well, Cyrad is completely right in how blaster spells work differently than melee. Adding a flat damage bonus is what makes them consistent, and would make them do more damage. This is (from everything I've seen) the perceived problem with blaster spells, and the reason why Orc and Draconic bloodlines are touted as the optimized blaster bloodlines and builds. This is why blaster spells seem underpowered, and this would fix their damage "problem", but it also changes their role in combat.

What has to be kept in mind is that the reason for this is that they almost always target Reflex and still do half damage on a save or, on occasion, have no saves at all, like magic missile. Melee targets AC and can get a lot of penalties stacked up, and melee also can't hit a 20-ft radius all at once. So adding damage would make blaster spells "better," but also a bit too consistent. Melee is consistent damage, blasting is variant damage, and both have different jobs. I do think that single-target blasting spells like scorching ray or acid arrow could use a modifier damage bonus, but adding modifier to AoE spells would be a bit much.

I'd be careful adding too much to blaster spells. I think adding a +1 per die, a flat increase to damage, or taking away monsters' ability to resist could seriously rework the balance.

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the bloodlines don't add fixed damage. The bloodlines add SCALING damage, i.e. as you do more dice of damage, the benefit of the bloodline increases rapidly.

Int to damage is more a 'fixed' ability.

A comparison would be Weapon spec at +2 vs Weapon Spec = +your BAB to damage.

Adding an ability to add +1 per die of damage that doesn't stack with a bloodline, but merely replicates the level 1 ability, isn't broken. It's why you dip a level of sorc to make a blaster caster.

==Aelryinth


Aelryinth wrote:

the bloodlines don't add fixed damage. The bloodlines add SCALING damage, i.e. as you do more dice of damage, the benefit of the bloodline increases rapidly.

Int to damage is more a 'fixed' ability.

A comparison would be Weapon spec at +2 vs Weapon Spec = +your BAB to damage.

Adding an ability to add +1 per die of damage that doesn't stack with a bloodline, but merely replicates the level 1 ability, isn't broken. It's why you dip a level of sorc to make a blaster caster.

==Aelryinth

Yes, I am very much aware that it is a +1 to damage dice. I am also aware that this is precisely why people take the Orc and Draconic bloodlines. I am also aware that adding modifier to damage is a fixed bonus.

What I'm saying is that taking that bonus and just throwing it in regardless of bloodline, school, or other specialty, may tweak the balance too much. If it doesn't stack with bloodlines, then why have the bloodlines? Scaling damage for spells is represented by the damage dice, but this is highly variant and this is how it seems the designers want to balance a fireball or burning hands being able to hit multiple targets at once. Softening them up for melee or archers to take down appears to be the intent.


Unfortunately, too often, what happens is that the damage spells aren't taken at all, because all they do is 'soften up' enemies. Why bother softening up enemies when you can stop them dead in their tracks?

Burning Hands? Nah, I'll use Color Spray or Sleep, and by the time those stop being useful, we got stuff like Web...Flaming Sphere? Acid Arrow? What are those?

So yes, that may be how the designers want to balance damage spells, but I don't believe it's working. Not when I have to specific traits, feats, and magic items, as well as dip a level of crossblooded Dragon/Orc Sorcerer on my Admixture Wizard to get reasonable damage.

I'm not even playing an offensive caster atm, and I think the situation is ridiculous. Yes, giving the toolbox of an optimized blaster to every caster does create a situation where certain options no longer have any meaning- but something has to be sacrificed, and if the cost of convincing people that it's actually worth their time to cast damage spells is the Orc Sorcerer bloodline, well, I'm okay with that.

^-^

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The problem here is the same as save or dies, however.

Once you get to a certain level of damage, blaster spells become quite as broken as save or dies...because it's save or die, save and be half dead.

It's a delicate area to cross. When you can plow out 300 hp of fireball damage in one round...yeah, not much is gonna live through that. esp if you can change it to sonic or something.

Magic missile builds used to be able to hit 700 dmg in one round with meta'd spells. You didn't even need to worry about the save, stuff just died.

==Aelryinth


More than anything, though, it's that spells like Color Spray and Sleep are too good for the level you get them at. They make burn spells seem very poor in comparison, because essentially 1-shorting something is way better than softening it up. I totally agree, and that's why "God Wizard" is such a hazardous thing, because they can break the game without having any idea what they're doing and they can REALLY break the game with high system mastery. Even summoning is usually more effective than an un-optimized damage spell, but that's because typically the best summon spells are those that are cranking out 3-4 dudes and making action economy a nightmare for the opposition.

Since we're talking about damage spells, I won't get into why we should nerf Color Spray and its ilk (which 5th Ed did, and it's nice). On that note, 5th Ed did do something nice with burn spells that I like, and with magic in general, where they do scale well since most of them can simply be cast with a higher level spell slot for better effect. That, and cantrips do decent scaling damage, so the wizard can always shoot fire at something.

A good way, I think, to fix damage spells is like what's been suggested here: make the buffs into feats, so that wizards actually have to be a little focused with their feat choice to burn things down (or shut them down, for that matter), but they can be rewarded for that specialization. As it stands, most wizards are nowhere near feat-starved for builds, while martials have to leverage everything they can in order to drop dudes and stay alive.


<@><@>

Long story short. Take away the spell level cap, would help out at mid to high level games. Due to every ed of game, lowering the over all number of spell slots full caster get. Also, all class get more HD per level, the HD went up for many class to 1d6 or 1d8, and 3 class Monk/Rogue/Ranger gained Evasion/Improved Evasion vs Reflex damage spell.

Low to Mid level, The game has changed. The para-dime, is that Melee now does damage at low to mid levels. Spell can be useful, but you should treat them more as Magical tricks. Caster are no longer glass cannon, but more like Marvel Battlefield Controllers.


You just need to adopt the following house rule:

All spells that deal damage deal an extra 2 points per damage die.

This would bring spell damage back in line with the damage that spells do in original D&D, and would make blast spells top tier spells for arcane casters, the way that they were in original D&D.*

Note that this change slightly increases the power of arcane casters, but not so much that you have to worry about it. Mostly the change just makes blast spells competitive with battlefield control spells. Wizards will now be casting magic missile instead of grease or enlarge person, and fireball instead of stinking cloud or black tentacles.

It won't particularly make enemy casters more threatening, but it will alter their tactics. Using the current rules, enemy arcane casters are extremely dangerous because they can hit the whole party with a stinking cloud or a black tentacles. If you adopt the house rule above, you'll be just as worried about enemy fireballs, but overall enemy arcane casters won't be significantly more dangerous.

Finally, if you adopt this rule, I would recommend removing the Empower Spell feat from the game. My opinion is that the other metamagic feats would remain reasonably balanced, but I can't guarantee it.

* Note: I've done the math on this. Monster hit points have increased by about 60% since original D&D (more at higher levels), and this house rule increases spell damage by about 60%.

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