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So sorry if i offended you in anyway.No, you're not. (Edit: Or rather, nothing about your words inspires me to believe you are serious.)
Using anti-magic field is fair game. It's a high level spell that has limited use and pros and cons. Running into a dungeon with specific areas protected by it makes sense. Having an entire dungeon warded with anti-magic can be an interesting challenge to overcome. Dropping it as the very first challenge to overcome is pathetic and suggests the GM would rather be playing a less magic heavy game.
What in gods name made you think that that would be the FIRST thing someone would drop on a player?
I was thinking more along the lines of "The party needs to steal something from a high profile baron, his mansion is littered with anti magic pockets and they either have to use more mundane means to do the deed or find a way to shut them off."
Not "Oh no magic time to throw out the fields" Of course I don't think having them run into Anti-Magic Assassins would be a bad idea either.
And if they decide to teleport away, they might away well be considered out of the way regardless. Good enough.
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And any all purpose spells they could bring to the table are nothing that cant be emulated by a Sorcerer or hell even a Magus.[/i]
Of course Sorcerers can learn the good all-purpose spells and even some of the good more specific utility spells. Wizards shine in that they're able to learn ALL of the utility spells on their list.
Funny story, I once knew someone who did a one time campaign with some people and they pretty much rolled nothing but Clerics, Druids and Wizards. The DM shoved them in an Anti Magic Labyrinth. And half the party instantly committed suicide and never let her run a campaign again.Yeah, it's almost like reading the room is important. Who would have thought?
Oh I'm sorry. I didn't know having Anti Magic Fields and Enemies specifically trained to fight Magic users was considered "Removing it from the game"
If you're seriously that inflexible, then you deserve to get Screwed over. So sorry if i offended you in anyway.
Having the entire dungeon where that's the entire point is pretty obviously different from it occasionally coming up.
Having an issue with the GM deciding that this kind of thing was a good idea is not being inflexible, nor is it a sign that someone deserves to be harassed or mistreated.
Generally speaking, no one deserves to be harassed or mistreated.
Really it wasn't that the DM couldn't do it, it was more of a F*** you to her players, because they were the kind of people who flat out refused to play anything other then tier 1 classes.
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Edit: Well, a GM that says "F*** you" to her players can hardly be surprised when they refuse to play with her.
What in gods name made you think that that would be the FIRST thing someone would drop on a player?
Funny story, I once knew someone who did a one time campaign with some people and they pretty much rolled nothing but Clerics, Druids and Wizards. The DM shoved them in an Anti Magic Labyrinth. And half the party instantly committed suicide and never let her run a campaign again.
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I imagine that would get REAL obnoxious REAL quicklyNo, what is obnoxious is the GM in your second example that couldn't handle magic and so removed it from the game.Oh I'm sorry. I didn't know having Anti Magic Fields and Enemies specifically trained to fight Magic users was considered "Removing it from the game"
If you're seriously that inflexible, then you deserve to get Screwed over. So sorry if i offended you in anyway.
occasionally is fine, but anti magic fields should be thrown about in the same amount as they would disarm the melee classes.
if a dm does it all of the time the the dm being a dick and frankly probably should not be dming a game with magic.
now having enemies that are capable of fighting magic is fine.
a dm should thrown out challenges for all of his players
The players weren't very inventive or workable if they are brought down by a simple anti-magic field that may simply be enabled or disabled with a switch.
The fact that they are so reliant on spells that they can't adventure without them really shows how this game being so magically dependant is an objectively bad thing, and why anti-magic effects in this game are absolutely pointless to implement in the game.
When you get to the point that every significant NPC needs anti-magic, or a half-dozen protective spells and items, you need to rein in the magic.
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When you get to the point that every significant NPC needs anti-magic, or a half-dozen protective spells and items, you need to rein in the magic.
or you know ..be a better dm.
i have rarely had issues with caster characters in games.
the trick is just finding ways the non casters can still have fun in the game
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Why do direct damage when I can throw them to another plane, or in a pit, or mind control them, or insta kill them, or have a horde of summons/necromancy/gated creatures to kill for you?Because some people aren't stupid enough to think that save-or-die/save-or-suck spells are foolproof. Those spells can fail, and when they eventually do fail you just blew a spell to have exactly 0 effect on the encounter.
"Hordes of minions" isn't any better than doing direct damage, either. You're still killing them with damage; literally the only difference is that the wizard isn't the one dealing damage in that situation.
not sure your point?
sometimes the fighter misses his swingfailures are going to happen in a game no matter the class
Why do direct damage when I can throw them to another plane, or in a pit, or mind control them, or insta kill them, or have a horde of summons/necromancy/gated creatures to kill for you?Because some people aren't stupid enough to think that save-or-die/save-or-suck spells are foolproof. Those spells can fail, and when they eventually do fail you just blew a spell to have exactly 0 effect on the encounter.
"Hordes of minions" isn't any better than doing direct damage, either. You're still killing them with damage; literally the only difference is that the wizard isn't the one dealing damage in that situation.
So because I only insta-killed 3/4 or 1/2 of the enemies with one spell it's a wasted spell? Wow, who knew? And otherwise, I accept that 95% is good enough and not worry about the 1/20 "wasted" spells.
right, and the point was made that the wizard doesn't deal damage and thus wasn't good, and so the response was "that's why you have a horde, to do your damage for you".
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When you get to the point that every significant NPC needs anti-magic, or a half-dozen protective spells and items, you need to rein in the magic.or you know ..be a better dm.
i have rarely had issues with caster characters in games.
the trick is just finding ways the non casters can still have fun in the game
So instead of asking the player to tone down his powergaming for the sake of you enjoying the game, perpetuating the arms race (which a GM can win at any time and most likely result in hurt feelings on both sides) is "being a better GM"?
That doesn't make sense, especially when we already have an example where that basically happened (caster thrown into an anti-magic environment, the epitome of the GMs arms racing capability against a caster), and people have said they were badwrongfun GMs for it.
Heck, if I take a Great Wyrm who casts Anti-Magic Field and Spellbane pre-combat and goes ham on a party of 4, that is basically a TPK, guaranteed, no matter who or what or however the characters are involved, simply because anti-magic is the only thing more broken than magic.
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When you get to the point that every significant NPC needs anti-magic, or a half-dozen protective spells and items, you need to rein in the magic.or you know ..be a better dm.
i have rarely had issues with caster characters in games.
the trick is just finding ways the non casters can still have fun in the gameSo instead of asking the player to tone down his powergaming for the sake of you enjoying the game, perpetuating the arms race (which a GM can win at any time and most likely result in hurt feelings on both sides) is "being a better GM"?
That doesn't make sense, especially when we already have an example where that basically happened (caster thrown into an anti-magic environment, the epitome of the GMs arms racing capability against a caster), and people have said they were badwrongfun GMs for it.
Heck, if I take a Great Wyrm who casts Anti-Magic Field and Spellbane pre-combat and goes ham on a party of 4, that is basically a TPK, guaranteed, no matter who or what or however the characters are involved, simply because anti-magic is the only thing more broken than magic.
Gonna disagree with that actually. That actually tilts things in the PCs favor since you just shut down your dragon's spell-like abilities.
An optimized Archer, Barbarian, and Fighter could probably take it down.
But hey, even if you disagree you had to use a CR 20+ monster in order for that point to hold up. The game breaks down in general at levels around there.
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The dragon in the antimagic field has DR 20 and 39 AC
A fighter archer would have an attack routine of 31/31/26/21/16 (dex 6, WF 1, GWF 1, WT 4, BAB 20, RS -2, Masterwork +1) for 1d8+10 (str 2, WT 4, WS 2, GWS 2) aka unable to hurt said dragon through it's DR.
With deadly aim it's
25/25/20/15/20 for 1d8+22 So you're able to tickle the dragon on your attacks but most shots are looking for nat 20s to hit, my calculations estimate 5 DPR.
The melee barb or fighter would fair a bit better, if the dragon decided to land, but not better enough to really dent the 449 HP of the dragon.
All while the player's AC being like low 20s if that, meaning all the dragon's attacks will land while power attacking for lots of damage.
So unless you're seeing some MAJOR boost that I'm not noticing. The dragon wins easily.
And it doesn't need to be that high of levels to make the difference, the game requires magic to meet expected values of enemies. Much of martial PC's power is from magic. Their magic weapon for accuracy and damage, their magic belt for accuracy and damage, magic armor and trinkets for AC. Get rid of magic and martials will have a really hard time doing their job of hitting and not dying.
When you get to the point that every significant NPC needs anti-magic, or a half-dozen protective spells and items, you need to rein in the magic.or you know ..be a better dm.
i have rarely had issues with caster characters in games.
the trick is just finding ways the non casters can still have fun in the gameSo instead of asking the player to tone down his powergaming for the sake of you enjoying the game, perpetuating the arms race (which a GM can win at any time and most likely result in hurt feelings on both sides) is "being a better GM"?
That doesn't make sense, especially when we already have an example where that basically happened (caster thrown into an anti-magic environment, the epitome of the GMs arms racing capability against a caster), and people have said they were badwrongfun GMs for it.
Heck, if I take a Great Wyrm who casts Anti-Magic Field and Spellbane pre-combat and goes ham on a party of 4, that is basically a TPK, guaranteed, no matter who or what or however the characters are involved, simply because anti-magic is the only thing more broken than magic.
Gonna disagree with that actually. That actually tilts things in the PCs favor since you just shut down your dragon's spell-like abilities.
An optimized Archer, Barbarian, and Fighter could probably take it down.
But hey, even if you disagree you had to use a CR 20+ monster in order for that point to hold up. The game breaks down in general at levels around there.
Not really. The dragon losing his SLAs for countering the Wizard is the smartest trade he's ever done, because he basically rendered the Queen chess piece useless.
Archer's arrows become non-magical when fired at the Dragon, which means DR applies (which is a lot), and it loses significant attack/damage bonuses. Clustered Shots for the win, but against the melee, that's a big deal.
Smart Dragon would know to gun for him first since he retains all magic items and abilities that boost his non-magical means of attack by grappling him and flying up in the air. He can tear him to shreds without the Archer being able to fight back very well, and if he does, he better have flight available.
Barbarian could try Spell Sunder to remove the Anti-magic field or Spellbane, but requires getting close, and not having magical aid makes it a 1/20 chance to work. Better than nothing, but by no means feasible. Fighter has better passive bonuses, but will be overwhelmed by the Dragon eventually.
Wizard teleports away and says screw this because he can't fight back with anything at his disposal, and the other 3 get wiped out.
I believe fighter would retain his attack bonus from his weapon unless the fighter's bow was also inside of the anti-magic field.
Barbarian should be able to spell sunder just fine (he can only do it outside of the AMF (it's SU)), which means he's retaining all his magical bonuses as none of his gear is suppressed. But assuming he has strength surge he's still getting all of his bonuses that's automatic success at a level you'd be fighting said dragon. And the DC is Only a 35 assuming CL 20
And the wizard could/should teleport everyone unless he's being a dick. And even if they do all die he could just bring them back with clones he made for them before, or maybe he just astral projected everyone.
edit:
I see This is level 20, and i misunderstood the Dc he needs to target.
But yea Yea barbarian basically auto succeeds at sundering that antimagic field
20 bab + 20 str surge + 4 rage + 9 Strength (this is without any tomes and starting with 16 base) + 7 Weapon (furious op) + 2 improved sunder = 1d20 + 62 vs a DC 67 (to dispel).
Those are pretty good odds, only a 20% failure chance.
An optimized Archer, Barbarian, and Fighter could probably take it down.But hey, even if you disagree you had to use a CR 20+ monster in order for that point to hold up. The game breaks down in general at levels around there.
Probably not.
I run high level games and one option of the finale for my last campaign was to send a Great wyrm dragon with antimagic against the pc's. I ran the numbers and without their magical weapons, armour, stat boosters etc they could not hit the dragon and it had no problem hitting them while power attacking. (I did not have a barbarian or Fighter fully optimised for none magical combat they may have stood a chance)I don't have a problem balancing fights against high level characters with high level casters, normally I have to provide casters on both sides of the fight the buffing spells then make both sides even. It is fun and all characters contribute , however without the high powered casters the martials would not be able to fight level appropriate opponents.
Several rules in Pathfinder have gone against the 3.5 grain when we expected them not to. Not saying it will here, but there is no evidence to suggest that it won't, either.
@ Firewarrior44: The bow confers its benefits to the ammunition. The ammunition is entering the AMF. Therefore, the bows benefits are being negated via the transitive property.
Barbarian has to sunder the Dragon to break the AMF (which he is the target of), overcoming Dragon's CMD + 15 to dispel the effect. Unless he has Reach, that's not even possible to do, and if he does, that's still a very hard roll.
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The dragon in the antimagic field has DR 20 and 39 AC
A fighter archer would have an attack routine of 31/31/26/21/16 (dex 6, WF 1, GWF 1, WT 4, BAB 20, RS -2, Masterwork +1) for 1d8+10 (str 2, WT 4, WS 2, GWS 2) aka unable to hurt said dragon through it's DR.
With deadly aim it's
25/25/20/15/20 for 1d8+22 So you're able to tickle the dragon on your attacks but most shots are looking for nat 20s to hit, my calculations estimate 5 DPR.The melee barb or fighter would fair a bit better, if the dragon decided to land, but not better enough to really dent the 449 HP of the dragon.
All while the player's AC being like low 20s if that, meaning all the dragon's attacks will land while power attacking for lots of damage.
So unless you're seeing some MAJOR boost that I'm not noticing. The dragon wins easily.
And it doesn't need to be that high of levels to make the difference, the game requires magic to meet expected values of enemies. Much of martial PC's power is from magic. Their magic weapon for accuracy and damage, their magic belt for accuracy and damage, magic armor and trinkets for AC. Get rid of magic and martials will have a really hard time doing their job of hitting and not dying.
Your calculations missed some things and made some weird assumptions. First off the Dragon probably isn't within 10 feet of the archer so their magic belt still applies. Additionally, why assume it's a fighter rather than something like a Warpriest which has plenty of self damage/attack buffs that won't get cut off when they shoot into the field because they're on them, not the missile. As for DR, clustered shot is a thing that any archer will reasonably have by that level.
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I've been in campaigns where downtime was so scarce that the 1 hour/spell level to copy new spells into a spellbook was hard to come by, let alone the time and money to create scrolls. Nothing like getting to 10th level and realizing it's only been a week in game.
That GM figured if your 8th-12th level sorcerer wasn't reduced to just cantrips left there weren't enough encounters in the adventuring day. Also, no magic items shops and WBL was ignored. We went to 23rd level in that campaign and I think at most one PC had about 30k gp worth of magic stuff.
And yes, we did know going in that money and magic items would be low and the GM did rebalance encounters to take that into account. We did not realize how precious a few hours of downtime would be. And yes, by the end of an adventuring day our martial types would be going into battle starting at 12 hp out of 80 or so. No wands or potions, divine caster out of spells, and we have to keep going or else the bad guys win.
Your calculations missed some things and made some weird assumptions. First off the Dragon probably isn't within 10 feet of the archer so their magic belt still applies. Additionally, why assume it's a fighter rather than something like a Warpriest which has plenty of self damage/attack buffs that won't get cut off when they shoot into the field because they're on them, not the missile. As for DR, clustered shot is a thing that any archer will reasonably have by that level.
I picked fighter because it has the biggest non-magic numbers.
And why would you assume that a dragon with anti-magic field and with 250 ft. fly speed or 500ft charge range wouldn't be on top of the archer? The dragon has removed basically all if not all of its ranged options, it's going in for the melee. And because any archer is the only thing that can hurt it this way even if the archer got a full attack off with it's magic, that's the last it has since the dragon will be on top of it next round for sure.|
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Your calculations missed some things and made some weird assumptions. First off the Dragon probably isn't within 10 feet of the archer so their magic belt still applies. Additionally, why assume it's a fighter rather than something like a Warpriest which has plenty of self damage/attack buffs that won't get cut off when they shoot into the field because they're on them, not the missile. As for DR, clustered shot is a thing that any archer will reasonably have by that level.And why would you assume that a dragon with anti-magic field and with 250 ft. fly speed or 500ft charge range wouldn't be on top of the archer? The dragon has removed basically all if not all of its ranged options, it's going in for the melee. And because any archer is the only thing that can hurt it this way even if the archer got a full attack off with it's magic, that's the last it has since the dragon will be on top of it next round for sure.
You know, that's actually a good point. Instead it would probably end up with the Wyrm losing initiative and losing half it's HP to the party in round 1. After that it's a fairly easy fight magic or no.
You know, that's actually a good point. Instead it would probably end up with the Wyrm losing initiative and losing half it's HP to the party in round 1. After that it's a fairly easy fight magic or no.Your calculations missed some things and made some weird assumptions. First off the Dragon probably isn't within 10 feet of the archer so their magic belt still applies. Additionally, why assume it's a fighter rather than something like a Warpriest which has plenty of self damage/attack buffs that won't get cut off when they shoot into the field because they're on them, not the missile. As for DR, clustered shot is a thing that any archer will reasonably have by that level.And why would you assume that a dragon with anti-magic field and with 250 ft. fly speed or 500ft charge range wouldn't be on top of the archer? The dragon has removed basically all if not all of its ranged options, it's going in for the melee. And because any archer is the only thing that can hurt it this way even if the archer got a full attack off with it's magic, that's the last it has since the dragon will be on top of it next round for sure.
The Wyrm is smart and would be behind some sort of total cover prior to the start of combat if he is aware of the PCs coming for him, denying the Archer his free volley of arrows that may only hit a few times. If he's the BBEG, that's practically a guarantee to happen. A move action on the surprise round, or a readied action if the Archer attacks him, to get on top of the Archer, and he's a sitting duck, meaning he has to either fight without magic, and succumb to a full attack, or move and get eaten by the bite, with no magical protection to keep him safe from death.
From here, Wizard may cut his losses, teleport the rest of the party out, and run away, leaving their MVP to die, or he can let the Barbarian try to Spell Sunder the Dragon's AMF to give the Archer a fighting chance before he is eaten to break free, and the Fighter try to be the best breadstick he can to kill the Dragon, whom by the time it is his turn, will have eaten the Archer and fly up until he knows the Archer is dead. Unless the rest of the party has natural flight, they can't even get to the Dragon to kill it, and the Dragon can sit there and laugh at their foolish conundrum.
if the fighter archer doesn't have cluster shot by level 20 they deserve to die to an anti magic dragon.......The dragon in the antimagic field has DR 20 and 39 AC
A fighter archer would have an attack routine of 31/31/26/21/16 (dex 6, WF 1, GWF 1, WT 4, BAB 20, RS -2, Masterwork +1) for 1d8+10 (str 2, WT 4, WS 2, GWS 2) aka unable to hurt said dragon through it's DR.
With deadly aim it's
25/25/20/15/20 for 1d8+22 So you're able to tickle the dragon on your attacks but most shots are looking for nat 20s to hit, my calculations estimate 5 DPR.The melee barb or fighter would fair a bit better, if the dragon decided to land, but not better enough to really dent the 449 HP of the dragon.
All while the player's AC being like low 20s if that, meaning all the dragon's attacks will land while power attacking for lots of damage.
So unless you're seeing some MAJOR boost that I'm not noticing. The dragon wins easily.
And it doesn't need to be that high of levels to make the difference, the game requires magic to meet expected values of enemies. Much of martial PC's power is from magic. Their magic weapon for accuracy and damage, their magic belt for accuracy and damage, magic armor and trinkets for AC. Get rid of magic and martials will have a really hard time doing their job of hitting and not dying.
Okay, throw in cluster shot, that brings average DPR up to like 15 and 6 without deadly aim. WOOO. Still going to be slaughtered.
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Putting aside the "can the martials do it alone" conversation, I just found out how you stop a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. The Wizard uses his greater metamagic rod of quicken (you have one by that level) to cast Project Image and then casts Aroden's Spellbane with antimagic field as one of the selected spells. You then all beat it in initiative and kill it because my god is it's initiative low.
It seems high level wizards even have the solution to antimagic situations.
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To Title Question:
Because they can get away with not paying child support?
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Personally, I don't expect all classes/roles to have the same level of power. In a fantasy setting, Wizards and other spellcasters....at high levels.... are supposed to become more versatile and powerful 1/1 to any martial class. It's part of the genre....and it's perfectly fine.
That was a post from my phone, so yes, it was autocorrect being stupid. To be fair, the Fighter would basically be a breadstick for the Dragon, so I suppose it's not unreasonable to use the term.
Unfortunately, making this post caused my other recent post to get screwed up, and I had to delete it, which is a shame...
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BECAUSE WIZARDS AM TIER JUST BELOW BARBARIAN, WHO AM TIER 0.
THAT AM STILL MAKING WIZARDS TIER 1, BARBARIAN GUESS. IF AM FAN OF BEING SECOND PLACE, WIZARD AM OKAY CHOICE.
Putting aside the "can the martials do it alone" conversation, I just found out how you stop a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. The Wizard uses his greater metamagic rod of quicken (you have one by that level) to cast Project Image and then casts Aroden's Spellbane with antimagic field as one of the selected spells. You then all beat it in initiative and kill it because my god is it's initiative low.
It seems high level wizards even have the solution to antimagic situations.
Post was eaten, so I'll have to repost a different, shorter version to compensate...
Dragon would counter the Wizard's Spellbane with his own Spellbane prior to the combat starting, as well as spells that can counter his Antimagic Field, like Mage's Disjunction, Wish, and whatever else. Even if the Wizard used his Spellbane to counter the Dragon's, that would result in the spells cancelling each other out, still leaving the Dragon invincible to the Wizard in his Antimagic Field.
The Project Image spell isn't foolproof in working, as Dragon has blindsense, which would tell him that it's a false entity due to physical implications such as footsteps from walking/running or whooshing air from flight (AKA an illusion), and isn't threatened by whatever it is that the Wizard can do to the Dragon by himself, and with enough intelligence and experience, said Dragon won't fall for the bait that the Wizard might use against the Dragon.
Even if the Dragon fell for it, the allies only get a surprise round (1 standard/move action) to fight it. The melees won't really be able to scratch him because "LOLAMF" and Archer only gets one attack, which has to deal with damage reduction because the weapon attacking the dragon isn't magical, and even if the Dragon goes last on Initiative, the Archer can't possibly do 450+ DPR without magical weaponry and such unless he criticals, which is highly unlikely, and assuming all attacks hit, which is also unlikely given how iteratives work, and he will be down at least 5+ to hit and damage because "LOLAMF." When it's the Dragon's turn, all he has to do is rush the Archer, eat him (a trivial task because "LOLAMF"), and the fight is basically over since the Barbarian and Fighter can't really contribute to combat, the Wizard is nullified, and they're apparently too stupid to have a Cleric to give them the cutting edge to win the fight (though the Dragon could've also used Spellbane to work against Miracle as well, as long as he kept his distance on Mr. Wizard).
Point here is that Antimagic>Magic>Everything Else, and this example proves it.
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Point here is that Antimagic>Magic>Everything Else, and this example proves it.Putting aside the "can the martials do it alone" conversation, I just found out how you stop a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. The Wizard uses his greater metamagic rod of quicken (you have one by that level) to cast Project Image and then casts Aroden's Spellbane with antimagic field as one of the selected spells. You then all beat it in initiative and kill it because my god is it's initiative low.
It seems high level wizards even have the solution to antimagic situations.
.....wait Wouldn't it be more like a vicious cycle?
Antimagic Beats MagicMagic beats Mundane
Mundane Beats Antimagic
Wouldn't it work more like that?
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Putting aside the "can the martials do it alone" conversation, I just found out how you stop a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. The Wizard uses his greater metamagic rod of quicken (you have one by that level) to cast Project Image and then casts Aroden's Spellbane with antimagic field as one of the selected spells. You then all beat it in initiative and kill it because my god is it's initiative low.
It seems high level wizards even have the solution to antimagic situations.
Post was eaten, so I'll have to repost a different, shorter version to compensate...
Dragon would counter the Wizard's Spellbane with his own Spellbane prior to the combat starting, as well as spells that can counter his Antimagic Field, like Mage's Disjunction, Wish, and whatever else. Even if the Wizard used his Spellbane to counter the Dragon's, that would result in the spells cancelling each other out, still leaving the Dragon invincible to the Wizard in his Antimagic Field.
The Project Image spell isn't foolproof in working, as Dragon has blindsense, which would tell him that it's a false entity due to physical implications such as footsteps from walking/running or whooshing air from flight (AKA an illusion), and isn't threatened by whatever it is that the Wizard can do to the Dragon by himself, and with enough intelligence and experience, said Dragon won't fall for the bait that the Wizard might use against the Dragon.
Even if the Dragon fell for it, the allies only get a surprise round (1 standard/move action) to fight it. The melees won't really be able to scratch him because "LOLAMF" and Archer only gets one attack, which has to deal with damage reduction because the weapon attacking the dragon isn't magical, and even if the Dragon goes last on Initiative, the Archer can't possibly do 450+ DPR without magical weaponry and such unless he criticals, which is highly unlikely, and assuming all attacks hit, which is also unlikely given how iteratives work, and he will be down at least 5+ to hit...
No Great Wyrm that has been statted has Spellbane afaik so at that point you're creating custom monsters. I'm also not sure where Great Wyrm's get Blind Sense as I can't find them listed as having it in my bestiary. The Project Image was just to get your Spellbane in range while keeping you hidden away from it.
I've been in campaigns where downtime was so scarce that the 1 hour/spell level to copy new spells into a spellbook was hard to come by, let alone the time and money to create scrolls. Nothing like getting to 10th level and realizing it's only been a week in game.
That GM figured if your 8th-12th level sorcerer wasn't reduced to just cantrips left there weren't enough encounters in the adventuring day. Also, no magic items shops and WBL was ignored. We went to 23rd level in that campaign and I think at most one PC had about 30k gp worth of magic stuff.
And yes, we did know going in that money and magic items would be low and the GM did rebalance encounters to take that into account. We did not realize how precious a few hours of downtime would be. And yes, by the end of an adventuring day our martial types would be going into battle starting at 12 hp out of 80 or so. No wands or potions, divine caster out of spells, and we have to keep going or else the bad guys win.
This has been my experience pretty much every time I try to play a 9th level caster.
...Putting aside the "can the martials do it alone" conversation, I just found out how you stop a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. The Wizard uses his greater metamagic rod of quicken (you have one by that level) to cast Project Image and then casts Aroden's Spellbane with antimagic field as one of the selected spells. You then all beat it in initiative and kill it because my god is it's initiative low.
It seems high level wizards even have the solution to antimagic situations.
Post was eaten, so I'll have to repost a different, shorter version to compensate...
Dragon would counter the Wizard's Spellbane with his own Spellbane prior to the combat starting, as well as spells that can counter his Antimagic Field, like Mage's Disjunction, Wish, and whatever else. Even if the Wizard used his Spellbane to counter the Dragon's, that would result in the spells cancelling each other out, still leaving the Dragon invincible to the Wizard in his Antimagic Field.
The Project Image spell isn't foolproof in working, as Dragon has blindsense, which would tell him that it's a false entity due to physical implications such as footsteps from walking/running or whooshing air from flight (AKA an illusion), and isn't threatened by whatever it is that the Wizard can do to the Dragon by himself, and with enough intelligence and experience, said Dragon won't fall for the bait that the Wizard might use against the Dragon.
Even if the Dragon fell for it, the allies only get a surprise round (1 standard/move action) to fight it. The melees won't really be able to scratch him because "LOLAMF" and Archer only gets one attack, which has to deal with damage reduction because the weapon attacking the dragon isn't magical, and even if the Dragon goes last on Initiative, the Archer can't possibly do 450+ DPR without magical weaponry and such unless he criticals, which is highly unlikely, and assuming all attacks hit, which is also unlikely given how iteratives work,
All True Dragons get blindsense, and the GM is supposed to build the dragon. If you check the bestiary not every age category of every dragon is presented. They do however tell you how to make them.
All i'm getting from this is only a wizard really has the tools to adequately deal with a CR 22 Dragon sporting a spellbane and antimagic field :/