| Kayerloth |
Kayerloth wrote:PSusac wrote:DominusMegadeus wrote:Giant types tend to have a lot of HP, which is the very quality of enemies that took blasting out of vogue.I think that you are looking at this wrong.
Let's say you hit them with a standard 10d6 fireball. Nothing to write home about, right? 35 points of damage or 17 if they save
But now you have damaged all the giants in the room for about the amount that the fighter can swing his sword.
So what this means is that every one of those giants will now die one attack sooner.
As a wizard, your job is to come up with solutions to problems that other characters can't do. I think that this is a solution to a problem - ending the fight sooner.
I try to make sure that every round I contribute something meaningful to the fight - I think this counts just fine.
This a thousand times. I didn't expect my fireball or cone of cold or whatever to drop them all when I went blaster mode. I expected it to turn all my foes (except maybe a 'boss') into one or two hit wonders. If they started as foes I could drop with a single blast then they probably weren't a huge threat to begin with for our group. 'Perfect' is a blast to make them all squishy, followed by the archer/dervish/skirmisher clearing them out with single attacks to open the charge/pounce full attack on the 'boss' by the heavy hitting melee type(s) or similar thinking. Of course such plans also typically went astray fairly quickly or got altered on the fly (and I'd go from blaster to battlefield shaper/debuffer etc.).
If you are going "blaster mode" an just throwing a 10D6 fireball, do not bother with throwing damage unless there are like 4 of them in the are of the spell.
Build your caster for what you plan to do.
If you are not built for it at all and do not have the traits/feats for throwing fireballs, by level 10 yes you might be stuck with a base 10D6 fireball, but you should just throw whatever you are built for.
By level 10 a...
And I agree, when I choose to 'blast' I choose which spell(s) every bit as much as I choose them when I decide to go for shaping the battlefield or scouting or what ever. So yes I was unlikely to use a 10d6 fireball at a pack of more or less 'normal' (large pool of hitpoints) giants. As an aside in general picking an AoE to hit one or two targets is not ideal regardless of whether it is 10d6 or 200d6 so yes I'd be looking to use an AoE that would hit 4 or even 6+ targets or I'd be thinking of other options. I was agreeing not with the specific numbers but with the idea that to be a proper blaster (or to use a 'blast') correctly does not require the caster to annihilate all his targets. In my opinion that tactic, in fact, wastes resources usually on damage spent on overkill, fun sometimes but usually not efficient.
Secondly numbers, particularly in a home brew setting, are entirely too 'flexible' in my experience. You have a caster throwing out 100 damage chances are real good, again entirely in my experience, that your targets will be able to take 100 damage and still be staring back at you with their boulders or whatever ... it encourages the GM to up the ante (unless they are unusually fond of 'rocket tag'), a battle the PC's will never win unless the GM is so inclined.