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Persistent spell is IMO, hands-down the best metamagic feat available to any caster, period. The target(s) having to beat the save twice for just +2 to spell level is incredible considering the importance of 'save or lose' spells. And bards get access to a number of solid save-or-suck-and-lose spells, like stinking cloud and slow, or outright save or lose like hold or charm.

However I'd suggest considering an investment in metamagic rods - a rod of lesser quicken and/or a rod of lesser persistent are great additions to any caster, especially a bard who'll want to save his actual feats for a weapon.


Abraham spalding wrote:
My assumption was that the 'str or dex' argument was for after Intelligence.

I kinda got the impression from the focus on doing hp damage in melee, and another thread where someone suggested starting with a 14 int and using a circlet to get it up for casting higher-level spells, that the discussion was on str or dex as a primary stat here.

As secondary stats after Int, I'd recommend Str and Con. Dex has an AC advantage at lower levels, but not only does that fade by mid level, but you'll start wanting to use magic for defense at later levels anyway.


I don't entirely understand why the focus on magus is on str or dex, rather than int.

Hear me out.

The fundamental question is, why build a magus towards dealing hitpoint damage as a primary role in the first place?

Other than the style of being a melee-caster, I think if you want to really be a caster-warrior hybrid who deals strong hitpoint damage in a practical manner while still bringing arcane casting to the table, arcane archer (or maybe, some kind of archery-focused eldritch knight) is over that-a-way <points>. Archery's just going to get you more full attacks, especially if you spend a round or two casting at the start of a fight rather than charging or double-moving for position, and you can't use spell combat either with a ranged weapon, or as part of a standard attack action. In short, you'll relatively rarely get to actually use spell combat because it requires a full-round attack. And as a caster, even a hybrid caster, you're going to be a more important target than the big slab o' meat fighter three or four squares over.

Spells, even touch and ray spells, generally scale poorly in terms of hp damage, frequently run afoul of resistances and immunities at higher levels, and often still allow saving throws. And as a 'fighting' magus you'll have to trigger them on criticals, or be getting into full attack situations often, and then also either make a concentration checks or eat AOOs to cast them until level 20, since by definition you're casting while threatened.

Basically... maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the draw of the magus who's focusing on being a 'spell fighter' and casting spells for additional hitpoint damage. It's not likely to bring you up even with an equally optimized pure melee combatant, there's lots of limits on when you can cast in combat, and it's exposing you to the additional risks of being a melee while you've also got at least some of the target priority of being a caster.

On the other hand, the case for the Int focus is summed up in one word: Synergy. Your int gives you higher save DCs on your spells, a bigger arcane pool, a bigger tohit buff from the arcane accuracy arcana, a longer-lasted hasten arcana, improved benefit from the wand use arcana, and a bigger AC buff from the spell shield arcana. In short, you get a double-benefit off abilities that use your arcane pool but also scale with int - int gives you more uses, and a bigger bonus. And a bunch of side bonuses like 'more uses of your weapon buff ability, or more pool strikes, and etc.'

And don't downplay the magus's ability to function as a battlefield caster. The magus gets up to level 6 arcane spells, and many of their spells are excellent ones that other casters employ with great success already (stinking cloud, web, slow, black tentacles, wall of stone, solid fog, etc). You can also add spells from the wizard list, if you so choose. Really, you and your party will benefit a lot from your getting that save DC up there and throwing out the save or lose spells.

Of course by this point you're probably asking 'why not just be a wizard then, huh Mr Smartypants? And how'm I supposed to fight and use the magus's higher AB, spell combat feature, and other abilities if I'm not pumping an AB stat and am engaging in stand-off casting?'

For the first question - you don't want to be a wizard if your party's already got a few casters, and the magus has a leg up on the wizard because a magus is going to be better at doing hp damage than a wizard, and thus will have things to do on rounds when casting a spell isn't very attractive.

The basic answer to the second is that you only need a high AB on rounds where you're going to attack, so arcane accuracy turns Int into your AB stat when you need it - ie, any round you're able to get a full attack off in. And thus, any round you get to use spell combat in, so now you can use spells with saves as part of your spell combat routine too. This does preclude you from getting extra spells off critical strikes, but that frees you up from wanting to be a crit-fisher, and from having your big damage coming out in random bursts. And on rounds where you are just going to get a standard attack, you can either cast something then move instead, or move then pool strike, depending on your tactical situation.

You won't end up winning any DPR Olympics, but you weren't going to anyway, and with an int focus you are contributing winning the fight with your save or lose magic then moving in to seal the deal with your hp damage, rather than being a wonky fighter who comes up short at dealing hp damage.


Many of the most important 'everyday adventuring' spells in my experience are almost all level 1-5 spells, and spell levels 2 and 3 are actually the 'rock stars' of spell levels IMO. So if instead of going for 1-2 levels in every spellcasting class you sort of picked 3-5 caster classes and got 3rd level spells in at least 1 or 2 of them, you'd be okay for spell selection as a sort of utility infielder of a caster.

The problems that a very heavily multiclassed caster are going to face are going to be their attribute dependencies - you'd have to either pick divine or arcane for a 'specialization' to be able to overcome saves with your prime stat - and your caster level being low in everything will hurt your spell durations and make you dispelbait, if you have a GM who thinks to use dispelling.


As an AA I'd probably take Arcane Strike in lieu of an early metamagic feat, and use a metamagic rod instead. Extend spell is rather suspect to me, in particular since so few buffs really seem to warrant it.

I might also shift a feat like manyshot or deadly aim back a little to move Arcane Strike up, so that I could 'absorb' the -AB from those feats a bit better with items or higher dex by then.


In my previous PF game I was using tentacles a lot as a witch, partly because of lack of better area control spells to use (it was an undead campaign, so any mind-affecting spells were mostly a wasted memorization). I'd much rather have been using Slow, actually, if I'd had it. Against humanoid targets, Tentacles had about a 40% success rate, and most encounters were a little too spread out to cover with a single AOE. I can't say tentacles won any fights by themselves, though they contributed decently to several.

Due to a combination of lucky rolls, the fact that it grapples on a failed Ref save rather than CMD check, and the fact that it provides cover, I actually got much, much more effective use out of Web in that campaign. If there was a singular spell that was the star of my selection in that campaign it hands down was Web, not tentacles. To the point I was mainly using tentacles against caster class enemies, or if there were no anchor points for web.

It's really a pretty average spell, especially compared to what you can do with other area save or suck. It just stands out a little bit because it's a 'CMD or suck' instead of 'save or suck,' and it can, before level 10 anyway, be a little rough on humanoids including players.


Well, I am wrong, in that it's only explicitly stated that you can exchange a standard action for a move action in the rules.

I just assumed that went on down the line to swift actions, since swift actions are generally rather limited (or in the case of quickened spells, expensive) - there's never been a case before where I thought 'boy I wish I could use a 4-level higher spell slot twice in one round! And I still really don't - I'd swift action this spell out, then cast the regular cone of cold (or more probably another spell entirely after seeing what got dazed and what didn't by this one) if you want to double it up. Following this thing up with a power word kill might not be a bad idea.

The action thing could easily come up now though, if you made this your spell perfection/preferred spell... though I'd still kind of think you're just as well off using this spell to add blasting to a more general caster rather than specializing entirely on blasting.


The Chort wrote:

Remind me why I try to use metamagic again? *le sigh* To get a fireball to have a comparable effect, it would take 9 levels of metamagic: 4 quicken, 3 heighten, 1 intesified, 1 elemental. *le sigh again*

Anywho, I can see building around this spell as a Sorcerer. Spell Perfection + Dazing (or just a Rod of Dazing) and whole bunch of other stuff = win? (If you can get your enemies dazed for 6 rounds... essentially save or die?) Also, if a sorcerer applies metamagic to a spell that is naturally a swift action, it becomes full round, right? That might work to your advantage in this case, given you can't have more than one swift action each turn...

You can still trade a standard action for a swift action, though.

Of course, why cast this spell twice when you could cast it as your swift and another spell of a different spell level as your standard anyway? Thus I think the wizard comes out ahead of the sorcerer, as usual. At 20, you can memorize Dazing Intensified Cold Ice Strike as a 9th-level spell and have a swift action 20d6 ref save for half or be dazed for 6 rounds area attack... and then still have your standard action to cast anything else you've prepared. And your move action to engage in positional tactics for self-defense.

Now that sounds to me like a worthy 9th-level spell. Too bad it's based on a 6th-level spell...


It really depends on your party. Playing a witch with misfortune and evil eye both recently, I was teamed with some seriously heavy-hitting melees and found that in most encounters my debuffing hexes were at best icing on the cake. I fell into a 'battlefield control caster' strategy very quickly, and ended up using offensive hexes - like misfortune - mainly as fallbacks for if I hadn't prepared enough of the right spells.

Hexes might be good for self-defense too, but I found when I'm in a dangerous position I didn't have time to use more than one hex - and my go-to for that was slumber, since if it landed - and it usually did - it ended the threat.

At lower levels and if you're fighting very close to the front, and probably if you're in a party with other casters who can benefit from them, offensive hexes are pretty good. But my witch ended up using the buff hexes and the witch's eye hex most often in that campaign, and the debuff hexes and even my beloved slumber hex took a back seat by level 8 to time-tested wizard spells - stinking clouds, webs, black tentacles, waves of fatigue, and so forth.


CrackedOzy wrote:

I have a player who has a halfling fighter that specializes in using Combat Maneuvers rather than damaging attacks. He wields a whip, but is willing to use other weapons. He's using the Free Hand Fighter archetype if that makes any difference. We just hit 5th level and I'm trying to decide what feat to suggest next. His feats so far are Combat Expertise, Imp. Dirty Trick, Imp. Steal, Agile Maneuvers, and Weapon Finesse.

Also, we ran into the problem that against Large or bigger foes, he loses the capability of some Combat Maneuvers. Also undead seem to be a problem area.

Any suggestions on how to improve his build?

Most creatures size larger and bigger, or with four legs or more, are effectively immune to combat maneuvers, or at least the chance of succeeding against them is small enough that it's liable to be a waste of an action to try.

You could try using Dazzling Display and Shatter Defenses to force the target into Flatfooted and reduce its CMD appropriately, as well as remove its abilities to take AOOs (so you won't take 'em when you make CMA attempts that you don't have Improved X feats for).

A wand of enlarge person, or a magic item that's continuous use or command activated enlarge person, would also do a lot to help him out here.

So would not being a halfling but I guess that's not in the cards... unless you use a wand of alter self, mayhaps.


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A lingering dispel could be used for area denial against someone using magical flight - if they fly into the lingering dispel, they fall.

If you can use Lingering with Mass Cure spells, you could use them to create "happy places" for your party to stand in, especially if they're fighting undead.

I can't think of too many other interesting uses of it though. It does seem to basically be a way of adding CC/area denial to basic evocations, assuming the enemy cares enough to avoid a second round's damage - at 10d6 save for half, avg 35/17.5, a lot of enemies may well choose to take a second hit rather than sacrifice a good position. And there's more and better ways of providing area denial without having to use a feat on it. If you want a feat to add CC to your evocations, Dazing Spell is probably it.


How and when do delayed actions prove useful?

There's a few ways. You can use delayed actions or holding initiative to execute pre-arranged, setpiece group tactics. A very commonly used one in one of my groups was other characters delaying/holding/readying actions until the party's casters had their turns and prepped the battlefield a bit or got their buffs off. This kept them out of the line of spell-fire and in relative formation for being buffed and protecting said casters from early charges and in the case of bad initiative rolls.

Another thing that worked well for us in the middle levels was a time when, with the melees delaying until after the wizard, the wizard further delayed in order to dimension door the party into the opposing caster's lap after some of the opposing melees had charged our lines. So they were on the wrong side of the field while we used their support as a pinata in round 1. Oops! This is the kind of trick a lot of GMs will only let you pull off occasionally, however, even though technically you should be able to keep repeating it as long as you aren't fighting the same enemies over and over.

Delaying's rarely as useful on rounds after round 1, as it is on round 1, and it's rarely that useful without casters involved. The only reason I can see delaying as a melee, otherwise, is to let the enemy charge or close to you so that you can get a full attack off, but the enemies are probably going to be charging for casters or archers, not melees. I guess you'd want to stand a 5-foot step away, and hope that the wizard doesn't mind being bait?

When are combat manuevers useful compared to direct damage-dealing?

Combat maneuvers are good if you're fighting humanoids, especially humanoid casters. They also make good use of spring attack or as a standard attack to prevent or reduce retaliation full attacks when you're closing in on a target. Improved Trip can be good for this. And you can do some interesting things with Shatter Defenses and CMAs.

Actual monsters, especially anything sized large or that has four or more legs, may as well be immune to combat maneuvers, however.

How important is positioning, in this equation?

I find positioning critical. I often play casters and to me battlefields are a geometry of lines of movement and the placement of area of effect and battlefield-shaping spells. I hate when my party gets in my way from poor positioning, because it makes me pick between risking fratricide or else holding back and pulling the 'total defense action because I either am gonna kill Bob Fighter or just waste a spell that isn't needed.'

Melees also are prone to blocking each others' lines of charge, or of getting into positions where they're being flanked, or aren't able to support one another by flanking the target. Worse, alot of them fight without any consideration to blocking charges towards the casters.

Communicating around the table for everyone's turn, especially casters, and keeping an eye on the map - and getting your group to use a map for tactical combat if it doesn't use one already - are huge helps in all of this.

How does one make proper use of cover?

That depends on the situation. It can be a very good thing to block enemy lines of effect towards your party if they have nasty supernatural/spell abilities or a powerful archer, but cover is generally a two-way street. If you're covered from them, they're covered from you. You're usually better off busting up in the other guys' faces, unless you're at a severe disadvantage in some form - and in that case you probably want your wizard to teleport your party away and come up with another plan.

Since the PCs are usually aggressors in D&D combats (you're invading X's lair/dungeon/village/etc) you're basically losing if you turtle up and hunker down. The enemy has no need to rush your position, they win by stopping you, not killing you. At best you've bought both sides equal time to buff/prepare for the confrontation, in which case the side that prepares better gains an advantage; at worst they'll just wait you out or even disengage if they're away from 'home' - denying you their exp and loot.

A lot of monsters ought to be too stupid, evil, or bloodthirsty to realize this though, so baiting things around a corner or into an otherwise covered position is a fairly basic but often-effective ambush unless the GM is using meta-tactics and making mindless hungry undead into the Zombies of Sun Tzu.

Stealth?

Depends on the game, but most parties aren't stealthy enough on the whole for them to get away with a stealth-oriented strategy. One guy in plate armor failing one opposed roll at a hefty penalty basically kills it for everyone.

Stealth is useful for scouts and flankers, but they can end up in the very unenviable position of literally living or dying by the skill, and scouting can easily be accomplished by casters (who are overall more effective in other capacities as well) at a much lower risk.

How should an all-melee party operate? All-ranged?

An all-melee party at middle and upper levels should operate by using magic items extensively, which makes it an expensive proposition and one that will probably involve a lot of UMD checks. At lower levels you'd be okay just beating things up, generally, but once enemies start having spells or spell-likes on a regular basis you're, at bare minimum, going to need excellent saves or some other way of countering enemy magic.

All-ranged parties are less of a problem, unless by 'all ranged' you mean 'all archer, no caster.' In which case, see above, but with a decent chance of leveraging their higher initiatives and ability to kill from a distance into a blitzkrieg type strategy where they tear up the enemy back-line (ie, casters) early. That kind of thing works until it doesn't, such as if the enemy's buffed with miss chances or the initiative rolls go against you, at which point you haven't got a lot to fall back on, especially if you haven't taken that feat that lets you shoot while threatened without provoking AOOs.

How/if do you make use of traps? Ambushes? Terrain? If you use the light rules, what effect do these have on your game?

I don't bother with traps. However, some 'adventuring items' like caltrops, tanglefoot bags, alchemists fire, and burning oil can be very useful, especially in the hands of lower-level summons, hirelings, or things like improved familiars or animated dead. They can act sort of like 'instant traps' but really are more like low-level (but still useful) spell effects.

Ambushes tend to take two forms in my parties - the quick and dirty basic ambush, where the party sets up around a corner or in a room and then lures enemies to them, or the elaborately planned ambush that's a mini-quest in itself, drawing out an enemy and trapping them, etcetera.

Terrain is another critical factor and a major advantage to having a caster - they can change easy terrain into difficult, or ferry you across difficult terrain easily. Difficult terrain blocks charges and bogs down movement, providing defense to your high-value targets and making it easier for ranged characters to pick off their prey. It also helps keep things from escaping if they have difficult terrain to their rear.

Light rules in my experience only ever work to the players' disadvantage unless they are very well prepared and thoughtful players using a prepared strategy, because the GM generally controls the environment. If the environment's dark it's going to be populated by creatures that can see in the dark, and the players need to use lights and the lights give their presence away from a greater distance than they can see.

If the enemies need lights, they'll have lit their surroundings, and the players need to have prepared themselves to see in the dark and then do something to darken the area in order to turn the lighting to their advantage. Which gives away their presence, cause people start asking "hey, who turned off the lights?"

A party who has all darkvision, like an all-elf group or something, could operate lightlessly in dungeons and favor night operations but I'm not sure they'd get more than an occasional advantage from it.

How much does party makeup change? How should an all-melee party play? All-ranged? All-mounted?

Unless you're mainly playing an overland game with little dungeon crawling, mounts are a waste of money and effort. A very stealable waste of money and effort. Several low-level arcane spells basically summon you mounts, including phantom steeds which are better than normal mounts anyway.

All-anything parties, as noted, tend to have problems compared to mixed parties. You can get by without casters or melee front lines but you need to really be on the ball build-wise and it would be hard to pull off in a game with a stingy GM, because you'd need to at least occasionally use consumable magic items or purchase spells from NPC casters.


In short, the key to damage output in PF/D&D type games has never been the weapon's 'basic' damage die, it's always been the amount of bonus damage you can get for it.


Umbral Reaver wrote:

Clearly, some spells are a lot better than others.

For example, haste is leagues ahead of anything else in the 3rd level lists. Would you learn and cast haste regularly if it were 4th level instead? How about 5th? Higher?

What other spells would you still cast if they were higher level than they are now?

Personally I think by level 5/6 most spells are in their right level, or even more often, actually are weak or very situational considering their level. Here's a list of spells I often find myself casting at higher levels or memorizing metamagicked into higher slots for additional advantages or to keep their save DCs current.

Level 0: Detect magic, prestidigitation, mage hand.

Level 1: Color Spray, Grease, Mage Armor, Silent Image, Sanctuary, Protection from Alignment

Level 2: Alter Self, Glitterdust, Mirror Image, Invisibility, Rope Trick

Level 3: Haste, Slow, Magic Vestment, Magic Circle against Alignment, Greater Magic Weapon, Fly

Level 4: Greater Invisibility, Black Tentacles, Enervation, Solid Fog, Divination, Fear

Level 5: Teleport, Wall of Stone, Magic Jar, Telekinesis


Flight negates reverse gravity and most walls. You can use boots of flying, wings of flying, brewed potion of flying, wand of flying with UMD skill, etcetera.


Basically, as your level goes up more the melee does take on the supporting role for the caster. The caster almost surely wins the fight, in terms of battle strategy, but the fighter still is the one who walks up and kills the other guy. The exhausted/slowed/walled-in/pit-trapped/webbed or whatever other guy.

The fighter is best for this because he does a lot of hitpoints damage fast without a spell/day cost and with no save or spell resistance, and if the other guy survives long enough to offer some retaliation, he has enough hitpoints to absorb a lucky crit or the like and still be standing.

In the meantime, one thing the fighter can do to be effective is to guard the casters - screening them, heading off charges, and smacking down anything that comes in close to attack them. His presence as a high-damage threat near the caster(s) gives enemies a tactical problem - by positioning everyone right, if they close in to threaten the casters with melee, they're going to eat a full attack from that fighter before they get to try and full attack the caster. If they don't, the fighter just CC'd that enemies from doing what they really wanted, by virtue of standing where he is.

It's not flashy and glamorous but it's often effective, and in fact with really well-built melees you might even see tactics where the casters invis the melees, then use themselves as bait to draw enemies out... only for said enemies to get mowed down by the invisible fighter.


It probably has to do with tiers referring to breadth of capability for accomplishing things, not statistical combat power or survivability - survivability in particular seems to be rather under-valued by the classic 'tier' definitions.

IMO the 'lower tier' characters have never been useless in the way many seem to place them, and rather the physical characters and the magical characters in a well-running party have a symbiosis where the magic-users alter the battlefield and apply buffs and debuffs in order to set up the enemy for the physical characters who have high no-save hp damage offenses to knock down. The casters thus expend fewer spells for the same or even bigger victory, by making the situation into one for their lower-tier comrades to shine in and apply their specific strengths to.


I think some of us might be picking on some poor wordage there and missing the meaning for the message-mangling :)

It is statistically true that over a long enough timeframe, what's improbable - even highly improbable - as an individual event (such being crit when you're wounded, or being crit twice in one round) actually becomes likely to happen.

It doesn't happen every round, or every time you're attacked, or even once per encounter. But over enough attacks, in enough rounds, in enough encounters, it becomes likely to happen. In this way, as a dice-based game, Pathfinder (and indeed most pen and paper games) operate like gambling, and the math of probability and statistics applies in much the same ways. In fact this points to a lot of balance issues in the game, in my opinion, because it points to the fact that the players are likely to eventually lose it, and that loss will be based on bad luck.

Arguably this is a contributing reason a lot of campaigns that don't start at high levels never reach them - for player characters over a campaign's worth of encounters the mortality rate is actually quite high, especially considering how many saving throws with a 50% or better failure chance they're likely to face, leaving aside the lethality of being full attacked by a reasonably optimized enemy after level 8 or so.

I'd say this is why many players will tend to try to eliminate the role luck plays via their builds and tactics, and thus at least some players who have enough experiences getting 'burned' by bad luck, may be inclined to arrange their statistics in order to 'absorb' bad luck rather than hope they never have it. It's like crash-resistant crumple zones for your character.

Now, is it the best strategy... that actually depends on your GM. IMO a lot of GMs actually kinda go easy on their players in terms of save or lose abilities being thrown at them, since most mid to high end creatures have at will or multiple/day abilities they could spam at the characters until they fail their save, but often only use them once or twice in an encounter instead. This does make for a more fun gaming experience, and is probably the right thing to do in that regard, but from a pure mechanics/tactics POV, those enemies aren't bringing their A game by doing that.


Chaosthecold wrote:


Protection from any spell that possess or exercise mental control (including charms and compulsions).

The fact that it is in parentheses like that means two things. You can remove what is in parentheses and still have a true statement.

OR
you can replace "any spell" with what is in parentheses and also have a true statement.

If you were meant to be immune to all enchantment spells (since they are all either charms or compulsions) it would simply say that.

You keep saying your way is RAW but its just rule-unreasonably-abused-due to misinterpretation.

Except that's what the book says. I'm not making it up. It's there in black and white (actually, black and tan, but whatever!). Parenthetical statements are not parsed as 'optional' in any English I ever learned, they're parsed as clarifications - as in this case or in the case of my previous sentence. Yes, the meaning of either sentence doesn't change if you remove the parenthetical expression, but the parenthetical expression adds detail to the sentence that clarifies said meaning.

The clause in parenthesis that specifically includes enchantment [charm] and enchantment [compulsion] is a clarification on what "exercises mental control" means for the purposes of this spell. It's a better argument, in terms of "what it says" to argue that this is a limitation on what it means as well as an inclusion on what it means, rather than arguing that it doesn't mean what it definitely says because of your opinion on game balance. The game's balance is off and broken in lots of places based on what's written. That doesn't mean that the rules for those things don't mean what they explicitly say either.

There's a situation that clarifies this part of my point: under my reading, the spell Sleep is blocked, while the witch Hex Slumber is technically not. Even though both actually "do" exactly the same sort of thing. The first is tagged as enchantment [compulsion] and the second is a supernatural mind-affecting ability. Protection from X explicitly includes protection against the first category of "exercises mental control" but not the second category thereof.

What you'd like to say is that neither should be blocked, and you seem to think I'm saying both should be blocked, but I'm not. I'm saying that as the rules are written the first definitely is and the second isn't.

Or to put it more succinctly, I'm not arguing about if the rule is good in this section, I'm stating what the rule says.

Quote:
It seems pretty obvious that this 1st level isn't strictly superior to mind blank especially since they removed the immunities from that and its still 8th level and not 0.

It's not strictly superior, since Mind Blank is alignment-irrelevant. But it's certainly a lot lesser as an 8th-level spell without the immunities. And this is the part where I'd argue about if the rule is a good one or not. Certainly for a first level spell, Protection from X is very good, especially when you consider that in the majority of campaigns X is going to be "evil." However, from a balancing POV, consider that most of the time characters with "poor" Will saves will tend to face a 40% to 60% failure rate on their save even if they've not dumped wisdom and are wearing an up-to-date cloak of resistance, going by the creature save DC formula of 10 + 1/2 HD + ability mod.

For example, at level 20 a poor willsave character has a base save of 6 + 5 resistance from a cloak, be generous and give them a 12 base wisdom and assume they're wearing a +6 wis headband for an 18 wis final, and they've got a will save of +15. That gives them a 50% fail rate against a DC 25 will save, which is a common, if not somewhat low, DC for a level 20 character to face. And that's the character doing all the standard things to improve their save, which assumes they don't have lagging wealth-by-level and full access to the gear they want - both being things that many players in many campaigns can't count on. Just look at all the threads about "I don't like Ye Olde Magick Item Shoppe as a GM."

Now in one sense that's "fair" - both the attacker and defender have a 50% chance of winning the roll. But in truth, the saving throw mechanic badly favors NPCs, for several reasons (like PCs having to face many saves, many creatures having a 'layered defense' of spell resist and saves against magic while spell resist is often too expensive for PCs to include as part of their gear, NPCs being less inclined to shepherd and conserve spell-per-day resources compared to PCs, and PCs having a steeper failure penalty for failed saves since a TPK is often game over for them). And there's a nice long parenthetical statement that gives clarification on what I mean ;)

Furthermore on the meta-level, a situation where a fighter has a 50% chance of being hosed in any given will save also serves to exacerbate the existing physical combatant vs caster (aka "low tier vs high tier") balance issues many people around here are concerned about. When the level 20 fighter has a 50% chance of being crippled or KO'd by area spells like Slow or Mass Hold, or worse, turned with all his damage output against the party with Dominate... you've got a situation where many times if the bad guys are playing to win, your noncasters are potentially a liability rather than an asset.

A level 1 spell stopping that is a much smaller issue, in my opinion, than the fact that that situation exists in the first place.


Except the basis of my opinion is the explicit use of the enchantment [compulsion] and enchantment [charm] spell tags, not mind-affecting or the otherwise vaguely-defined term "mental control."

Enchantment [charm] and enchantment [compulsion], and possession, are the only things that are explicitly mentioned. And sleep, confusion, etcetera are all explicitly tagged as enchantment [compulsion] or enchantment [charm].

In short, because those are some of the only things that are specified quite clearly as being covered, they're what's definitely covered in a narrow reading of the protection from spell, rather than their being the 'overreach' of the interpretation.

The rest of my opinion is that this is a tricky balance issue, with many angles; at low levels you often really can't do much about your saves other than using buffing spells (like protection from X) because you can't afford many magic items.


My reading is that since the spell takes the specific pains of pointing out enchantment [charm] and enchantment [compulsion] as explicitly as it does, it's indicating that it considers all spells tagged as such as mental controls, at least for the purposes of protection from alignment.

Ie, since Sleep is an enchantment compulsion spell, it's definitely protected against, because it's explicitly written that way.

Basically, what I'm saying is, the writing won't win a Pulitzer but on this specific point there's actually little room for interpretation of what the spell says. Whether or not you agree and/or would houserule it in your game is your own decision as a GM; if I were a player in your game I'd respect your call on the matter. But the rules do say what they say.

I myself would certainly houserule the continuous magic item in some manner (for another magic item that kicks cost-vs-effect in the shins, btw, look at a continuous Shield spell item...)


However, wizards - and specifically wizards - have an alternate source of (quite large) initiative bonus in the Divination specialization. So I think the point isn't that initiative's not important, it's that if you're a wizard, at minimum, you get to have it both ways via the diviner specialty.

Your improved init cancels out the enemy's, your specialization init bonus more than cancels out your enemy's dex bonus, and nothing is saying you aren't putting your 3rd-highest stat into dex (with the 2nd in con) and aren't wearing a +dex item too, at least when treasure permits. You end up with a modest to good advantage in initiative rolls against non-diviners, but without having to focus your stats on it as heavily.

That "frees you up" to have a higher con, and lets you have your cake and eat it too - you have a high initiative bonus, and you've got a higher fort save and more hitpoints for when you're getting attacked.

Which will eventually happen, if only because you're liable to be outnumbered.


Quote:

Second, the subject immediately receives another saving

throw (if one was allowed to begin with) against any spells or
effects that possess or exercise mental control over the creature
(including enchantment [charm] effects and enchantment
[compulsion] effects)
. This saving throw is made with a +2 morale
bonus, using the same DC as the original effect. If successful,
such effects are suppressed for the duration of this spell. The
effects resume when the duration of this spell expires. While
under the effects of this spell, the target is immune to any new
attempts to possess or exercise mental control over the target.

Italics and bolds added.

It seems clear to me in the spell's wording that it's referring to all attempts to exercise mental control by a creature of the protected alignment, specifically including the Enchantment school's Charm and Compulsion effect spells, which it explicitly is using in the sense of spell descriptor tags since the words are in brackets, but it's not explicitly limited to just them, either.

And not only does it grant an extra save with a bonus against existing mental control effects, but it explicitly makes you immune to any new mental control effects from the protected alignment - which were just stated two sentences previous to explicitly include Enchantment Charm and Compulsion.

So, RAW, if the spell has the charm or compulsion descriptor on it and is cast by a caster of the protected alignment, the character's protected from it.

It could perhaps be written more clearly, but the words are actually there supporting the "yes, enchanters are screwed" interpretation.

Now is this a balance issue? I guess it depends on your game a bit. Certainly if enemies are running around with Protection from Good on all the time, it sort of spikes the players' tires when it comes to a lot of spells, ruins a wizard specialization, kicks witches in the shins, and reduces the variety of viable tactics available to your gaming group.

But for the player-characters... I'm not so sure. Yes, it's a very low level spell for the effect, but at those same low levels a single enemy Sleep spell could potentially turn into a TPK. Adding to the issue, nobody really likes their character being knocked out of a fight that easily, or worse, turned against their partymates. Which are, themselves, both things that can cascade into TPKs if it's a serious fight. And IMO, challenging your players shouldn't be luck-based like that. It's okay to me if they're able to get immunity to a subset of 'save or lose' spells with a low-level pre-usable buff spell.

As a magic item it's trickier, since for the effect it has a staggeringly low cost even if crafted normally and not gained as an effect of other items. Considering an item that grants +2 ac and +2 saves alone would cost 12,000 gp - and that's without the mind and possession immunity. Whereas a continuous protection from evil seemingly would cost 4,000 gp (level 1 spell x level 1 caster x 2 duration factor). Juuust a bit of a difference there.


Pinky's Brain wrote:
TwilightKnight wrote:
According to my CRB, Confusion and Sleep are both compulsions and therefore affected by Protection from Evil.
That depends on what you think constitutes mental control ... if I were your DM you would be wrong.

Compulsion in this case is a spell tag, like Fire or Evil. It's part of the spell description, and unless you're houseruling away spell tags, the Sleep and Confusion spells in the Core RuleBook are indeed Compulsion tagged, and would, according to the Rules As Written, be affected by Protection from Alignment.


I'm not being silly. I don't have the inclination to go through and read every monster in the bestiary, and took the table they provided in the text as a set of reasonable guidelines I'd have expected most of the creatures to follow. In fact, I sort of think the opposite expectation - to comb through 250 pages of creature stats for the sake of an internet argument - is kind of silly.

And I think you're conflating my claim that battlefield control "is best accomplished by" or that the "workhorses" thereof are terrain-affecting spells, with that being the "only" method thereof. I do claim it's the only entirely reliable method thereof, and that that's what makes it the preferred method. But "best" doesn't mean "only."

For example, I didn't claim solid fog was as effective as wall of stone, I said they both tend to split the enemy up on the battlefield. Wall of stone is often better at it, but the ways in which it is better weren't a part of the discussion as far as I knew or cared - the problem wasn't 'which battlefield control is better.'

Further, I'm not changing arguments. I'm presenting additional cases, clarifications, and what are to me, anyway, practical problems. The fact that I don't repeat the content of previous posts ad nauseum doesn't mean I'm recanting them by omission. That ground is covered and moved on from. It's not like there can't be multiple angles to a given topic, or that in some situations one drawback is more of a problem than another. Thinking someone has to recap all their posts for a thread in every new post or else they're vacillating or changing their argument is silly.

Witches still have a problem in having to beat yours saves in order to lower your saves. They have a problem in having to trade off personal mobility to keep your saves lowered, especially if they don't beat them the first time. They have a problem in those abilities being short-ranged when they're on the low end of the personal survivability totem pole compounded by the fact that casters make high-priority battlefield targets. They have a problem in that the save-debuffing hexes take several actions worth of building, during which the battle is not waiting for them to finish hexing. They have a problem that for all of that, the hexes are still single-target. They have a problem in their spell list as well as their hex list being invested heavily into mind-affecting and save-to-negate, leaving them with less flexibility than other casters if going after the enemy's saves isn't working out or the enemy has immunity to mind-affecting. There's not very good backup to "hex up and go save or lose" in the witch spell list - summoning is probably your best Plan B, and Plan C is likely "try to beat their saves again."

This example is from my recent personal experience, at level 9 with a witch in a party of 4 (2 fighters, a paladin, and me), we fought two npc fighters and a mohrg (sp?) that I think had some class levels. Since my partymembers charged into close combat immediately my area spell options were nonexistent at that level and battlefield terrain alteration would be moot except to give cover to myself, but that would impede myself from getting into hex range too, so I didn't. I moved in to start hexing down one of the opposing fighters with evil eye and slumber... except my fighter party-mate one-rounded him on her turn thanks to a crit. The other fighter was too far away for me to hex without moving again, the mohrg was immune to mind-affecting and was eating some smite evil anyway. Seeing his allies taken out like the trash, the remaining fighter ran for it fast enough that we decided to let him go rather than use up my dimension door spell that we might need later to catch him.

You'd think that I could probably just go and slumber right off against fighters and their low will saves, but I tried that in a previous encounter, and went 0-for-3 on it, thus leading to my "I'll evil eye them first this time" attempt in this encounter. And this was with an extremely high pointbuy for the game, and full starting WBL, so I had a 24 int juicing up my DCs.

Amusingly, blowing my actions in those encounters on pointless hexes at least saved me from wasting spells on enemies who turned out not to deserve them. But so far I've found my witch's best contributions overall have been of the noncombat kind, often via divination magic since we're in a 'collect all the mcguffins' plot.

Meanwhile, battlefield alteration has served me and my party very well when I've been able to use it. Same party, in a dungeon corridor, facing an archer and three wolves. A single web spell effectively won us the encounter by trapping 2 of the wolves for the first two rounds, and leaving us with full concealment and cover from the archer, changing his tactical choices from "which of us to pincushion" to "spend 2 rounds getting free of the web" or "waste his time trying to shoot through it."

Even in the one boss fight where we encountered a boss creature by himself, and where I did start out debuffing: I got up misfortune and slow, and then he was as good as dead anyway from eating two rounds worth of smite evil as an evil outsider.

To sum up, even from this mid-level experience with a witch, it's turning out that battlefield alteration I often can't employ because my partymates are sword-happy maniacs, is still working out better in practice than hexes, which are often failing me or proving redundant even on trivial targets. I find myself fighting "the map" (and sometimes "my own teammates") rather than "the enemy's stats" and this is a very, very wizardlike playstyle in my opinion. A witch who's in a party with at least one other caster instead of all melees, might not run into this issue. I'm not sure. I am sure that I'm trying to fill the wizard's shoes in this group, and I'm not doing as well as I thought I might at it, while my opportunities to "be witchy" have been limited and unsatisfying.

At higher levels my experience with other characters tells me that that "I go to debuff something, and somebody else kills it dead" situation will get worse, not better - the damage physical characters put out explodes with more feats and higher ABs, as well as stronger weapons. What I'm looking for in witch now is ways to cover them and protect them as we go up levels, and I'm not seeing the tools that I really want for that. I'm not concerned about getting a single enemy to -8 saves or something over 3-4 rounds and then hitting him with a save or die or Forced Reincarnation or whatnot. I don't really need to kill anything directly myself, I've got three meat grinding, head smashing, evil-smiting warriors on my team who do way plenty of damage. I expect most parties will have at least two such beings, too.

So my role in this group is going to be preventing them from eating too much damage, because I expect that reactive midbattle healing isn't going to work well, or often. I'll run out of Heal spells before the other guys run out of damage, it's liable to get my familiar killed by drawing attention to it if I use it to shuttle the touch spell (and that's kind of GG for a witch), and without spontaneous casting if I want to rely on healing as a first or second line of defense I'd have to over-memorize healing spells for what the party "might" need, cutting down my opportunities to employ other spells instead. And I'd rather keep the healing spells in reserve for critical emergencies, personally. This isn't an MMORPG.

So instead of wanting to debuff a single enemy and strike him down with my witchery, I'm more concerned with keeping my partymembers alive and arranging it so they always face a favorable tactical matchup, aren't getting flanked and plowed over with enemies offering aid others and using combat maneuvers on them to soften them up for the heavy hitters, and do get to close on the enemy on terms where they're delivering the beatdowns rather than receiving them. The hex I'm most looking forward to in the near future is actually the Wizard Eye one, because I don't dare risk my familiar for scouting and clairvoyance is a waste as a 3rd-level spell.

I certainly see the design intent of layering debuffs culminating in a master-stroke that capitalizes on them, and that's what I call 'striker-like' about the witch - instead of defeating something over a few rounds of attacking, you defeat it by paving the way for a single, devastating spell to land. What I'm saying is that my actual experience in playing one is not living up to that intent. The hexes ultimately are redundant with my damage-dealing teammates, and have a surprisingly high fail rate despite a better save DC than most spells and no concern about spell resistance. The defensive benefit of the hexes is single-target, whereas I'd much rather employ an area debuff spell like Slow or Waves of Exhaustion from the witch list, or best of all a no-save ability that will wall off or split up multiple enemies, costing them valuable actions to break through, go around, or just be trapped by.

And heading into those higher levels of play, I'm leery of exposing my witch to hanging around within 30 feet of enemies that can 2-round her, for the same reason I wouldn't put my wizard in the same place - she's squishy and a high-value target.

The party is going to fight in many encounters per day, for many days, and only really gets to lose once unless you're high enough level to make clones or have other TPK insurance. A party whose lone caster goes down is a party whose chances of surviving that encounter have gotten quite bad. And sort of like flying vs driving in reality, while the risk of flying is small, the consequence of failure is catastrophic. That's what taking undue risks in PNP gaming is like - you will probably be lucky enough for a long time, but when you get unlucky it's probably catastrophic. I don't think that risk is worth it over hexes.


My GM's have always allowed me to use higher-level spell slots to memorize lower-level spells. I've never tried it with a cantrip, but I assume at worst I'd be able to do it, and then after casting the cantrip the slot would be expended for the day, like any other spell.


To counteract some of the evocation downers - don't forget a lot of very good "non blast" spells live in the evocation school. Tiny Hut, the Hand Formerly Known as Bigby line, several Wall spells (including Force), and Ice Storm (minor damage plus battlefield alteration).

Conjuration and Transmutation are clear winners though, they have the most spells, and many of the best ones too.


Phneri wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:

For characters, not monsters. But in most games I'm fighting monsters, not characters, most of the time. A level 20 character's "Good Save" is +12 at base; a CR 20 monster's is +22 at base and heck, their base Poor save is +17.

Now you're simply making things up.

CR 20 pit fiend has +24 fort as his "good save."

He has 35 con. (35-10)/2 = 12. Meaning his bonus is 12, his base save is 12. Same as a fighter/barbarian/etc.

His poor save is wisdom at +18. - iron will = 16. - 10 points from wisdom = base save of 6.

Beastiary page 291, table 1-1, monster statistics by CR. Granted, alot of monsters from the beastiary itself don't follow that table, like the one you found, but I don't know why it's published there under "monster creation" if it's not meant to be used.

But then, we're also not getting into spell resistance much. What's that pit fiend got there? Oh, 31. A level 20 caster with greater spell penetration has a 35% chance of their direct spells just plain failing on him before going against his saves.

Quote:
Providing miss chance for allies is playing reactive, as you're not doing things in that round other than making your player react to what the bad guy might do (if you want to argue that you get 15 minutes unmolested to buff you and the party beforehand, I'm going to giggle). If you have to do nothing but play reactive that means you've been effectively removed from that fight, because you're letting the other guy do whatever he wants.

Something as simple as dropping a fog cloud isn't buffing, or reactive. It hampers the enemies from making ranged attacks against you and makes them have to maneuver against you blindly - with no save and no spell resistance potentially messing it up. A well-placed Solid Fog, or Wall of Stone, is even better because it will tend to split the enemy up. Which is the whole point of battlefield alteration. You change the shape of the battlefield to favor your side.

And heck, if you do want time to buff, you more or less just bought some of it.

But no, I'm not talking about spelling the whole party with displacement before an encounter, no, I'm talking about a character who's only got AC and no miss chance magic item, ending up being more or less auto-hit on a standard action attack, and usually being hit 4-5 times out of a full attack (depending on the type of full attack). A miss chance treats the incoming AB as irrelevant, so with even a minor cloak of displacement you go from full AB attacks pretty much being autohit, to missing 1/5 of the time.

This is a tricky proposition without custom-crafted magic items, too, because most characters would choose a cloak of resistance over a cloak of displacement with little to no second thought.

Quote:
Debuffing the other guy by lowering his to hit and attacks/round (pox, evil eye, bestow curse, fogs, swarms, summons, waxen image, forced reincarnate) will do this AND harm him. That's a far better use of an action. And gives the bad guy a lower % chance to land attacks. How about that?

Which takes multiple rounds to set up. Even if you just misfortune-evil eye-forced reincarnate that takes 3 rounds. You'll almost certainly have to cackle at least once. And during which time you're only affecting the one guy. Which is great if he's the only guy on the battlefield, but is a pretty big 'if' in my experience.

And you've got to be in 30 feet of him so it's not like he's not going to be able to tell where the bad mojo is coming from, at which point he can teleport behind you and start beating you up, or teleport out to let your hexes fall off, then back in to take a swipe at you, then back out... etcetera.

Overall though, 1/3 of spells will fail on his spell resist before they even go against his saves. In that sense this is indeed a place for hexes to shine if for some reason you can avoid him ripping you up while you're hexing him up. He's got some Reach though, and teleportation at will, so it's not likely your party's fighters can completely block him from attacking you, or threatening you with AOOs against spellcasting. It's really just not a position I'd want to be in even against a lone devil.

And I really don't expect to ever encounter an archfiend by himself unless it's one of those "plot encounters" where your party's way too low level to handle him and he's in disguise or came out to mock you or something, and basically is more of a cutscene than a fight. An enemy like that would teleport himself out of harm's way and rally allies and get his rainy day potions, wands, and so on out to fight you with if you ever did catch him at anything but his best.

Quote:

The saving throw thing is not what you make it out to be. Neither is the AC/HP issue. If the fighter eats a full attack from the pit fiend he's going to take an average of 120ish damage. He then gets to full attack it back, I use a familiar to deliver a heal spell via touch, and the rest of the party obliterates the bad guy.

Or I ignore the damage the fighter took and do something terrible to the pit fiend. Like forcibly reincarnate him into a new CR 20 devil body with two negative levels. Because the fighter is going to have way more hp at this point than the bad guy can do in a round.

Your devils don't use gear? I'd expect them to have really big weapons with +10 equivilant in tags. Just like melee characters use to generate all that nasty damage they do. Maybe my GM has been particularly aggressive, but in most of our major boss encounters, the boss definitely brought their "A" game and wore their Sunday Best magic items. The 'mistake tolerance' is pretty low as a result.

It does mean that the CR of the encounters is higher than listed, too, but that's part of the way a GM compensates for there being high tier characters in the party. Which, despite having its shortcomings, a witch still is.

But she's more like a 'utility striker' or tier 1.5-2, like a sorcerer, than she is a full tier 1 like a druid/cleric/wizard, in my opinion and experience. This is partly because of the spell list, and partly because of her focus on single-target 'striking' (via debuff leading to deathspell) instead of battle-shaping.

Edit - by the way, the one debuff I think is absolutely a winner is Slow. Quickened, Persistent Slow is quite possibly one of the best uses of a level 9 spell slot possible. Or Widened Persistent, if you have an especially large battle-space to cover.


I too would have thought that research existed to add all-new spells to the game, but adding all-new spells often isn't necessarily the best option.

Why? Well, first is simply because a lot of spell effects are already covered in the game. If the character in question should be using a given sort of spell at all, it doesn't make alot of sense to deny them the existing spells for it but allow them to create their own to get around the given balance restrictions. "No, you can't research Fog Cloud, but you could make up Really Thick Mist" is kinda silly. Second, it's a lot less work to balance an existing spell for a new type of caster, especially because in a lot of cases it's unlikely the spell would need modification.

Also, if the character's paying a nontrivial cost in treasure to gain the spell, that helps to offset the balance issues it might cause - treasure is part of balance, the character's gear will start to lag if they drop too much cash onto research.

However, if a spell just doesn't fit with a class, I'd be inclined in the GM chair to disallow it. A ranger wanting to learn fog cloud type spells makes a lot of thematic sense. A ranger wanting to learn black tentacles is a lot harder to justify.

The other issue of custom-created spells is that they can present serious balance problems, since players would likely want to get their money's worth as well as make the "dream spells" they wish their character could cast. It's very unlikely a player will want to spend thousands of gold on researching a spell that's no better than the ones already available to them or doesn't add an all-new capability to their character.

And this might be a path in to fixing some balance issues with spells, if you allow the level 5 Iggy's Improved Incendiary Invocation to be everything Fireball ought to have been... but casters really don't need to be much more powerful than they are. So it's a tricky line to walk in my opinion, fraught with peril for the game's future.

At least with existing spells you can make it a 'yes/no' thing.


Zaister wrote:

I'm trying to create a character that is some kind of a con artist, slightly based on the Saffron ("Our Mrs. Reynolds") character from Firefly. She should, of course be good at bluffing et. al. but also able to hold her own in a fight, maybe even unarmed.

My current idea is a rogue with the spy archetype and master spy prestige class, plus Improved Unarmed Strike and maybe Improved Feint. I don't see her as a spellcaster. She should be around 10th level.

Does anyone have any good ideas?

In a D&D world I'd strongly consider bard regardless, the addition of a few disguise, illusion, and divination spells to your character would fit like a glove in the context of the game. A 'mundanely skilled' character would still need to find and use magic items to defeat magical detection methods, in all likelihood, anyway.


I'd say the 'petty vices' don't even keep you from being Good, let alone Neutral. "Steal from the rich and give to the poor" still involves, you know, stealing. And in fact the guy who coined that phrase in our literary tradition did it via violent holdups at weapons-point. It's safe to assume that those who resisted actually got "the point", too. But Robin Hood is a 'classically good' figure nonetheless.

As far as playing an evil character in a party, it's usually enough to just not start conflicts for the sake of starting them. Start conflicts when there's a reason to that points to your character being evil... but also kinda makes sense. Like questioning if the poor villagers actually have enough money to give you the reward they promised, and asking to see the money or get a downpayment as proof. It's a reasonable suspicion if anyone stops to think about it, but you being the one to act on that suspicion points to your alignment because it makes it clear that you're in it for the reward, not in it for helping people, and also because it shows you don't trust people.

Another way is to simply be uncaring of people outside your party. Advocate strategies that maximize your party's success and minimize their risk, even at the expense of others. Like going 'around' an goblin raiding force to strike at their camps and ambush them on the way back when they're loaded down with plunder and have taken damage from attacking a town, even though that means they'll probably hurt the townspeople in the meantime.


Abraham spalding wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:
Except saving throws for creatures - especially the fort save - scales up faster than your ability to increase your save DC in most cases.
This isn't true -- save throw bonuses stay at roughly the same rate of increase as save throw DC's do. The average "maximum save DC" against the average good save throw (Good save please note) has a success rate of 55% for most levels -- the most it strays is 45% and 65%.

For characters, not monsters. But in most games I'm fighting monsters, not characters, most of the time. A level 20 character's "Good Save" is +12 at base; a CR 20 monster's is +22 at base and heck, their base Poor save is +17.

Add in that many monsters have high Con scores (often due to size bonuses), further improving their (usually Good Progression) Fort save.

So I'd give you that targeting humanoids with class levels is fine. But targeting monsters isn't, because they've got inflated base stats in every regard. The expected success rate for going against a high-end creature's +25 to +30 "stat-improved good save" is under 50% before they start wearing their treasures as magic items, even if you have the highest possible save DC (34 for most games). And most casts are likely to be a bit behind on that save DC, since you only get so many 9th-level slots even if you involve metamagic.

And again, I mostly find myself fighting monsters, not characters. Additionally, NPC-type enemies are often starting out behind the 8-ball anyway because they don't get as much wealth (ie, gear) as the player-characters they're pitted against.

Quote:
These numbers lack only two things: spell perfection, and metamagic feat involvement.

Spell perfection just lets you apply a metamagic without increasing its memorization cost, IIRC, and doesn't improve its save DC or allow you to metamagic a spell above a 9th-level slot (so you still couldn't quicken a 6th or higher level spell with it, for example).

Metamagics allow you to boost your save DCs to keep older spells viable for longer, but the one that really shines for save-or-else spells is persistent spell. Other than persistent spells, I'd usually be more inclined to use superior higher-level spells than heightening older ones, or say, quickening them for the save DC increase as much as the action efficiency.

But say for 'zapping,' memorizing a persistent disintegrate is probably going to have better results than memorizing a polar ray, with an 8th-level spell slot.

(Which as an aside, keep in mind that many 'save or die' spells are now 'save or take alot of damage' spells, and many monsters with their high con scores are able to survive a failed save against them even so.)

Quote:
Wall of Stone has a really small area you know?

I've never needed it to have a huge one. The important thing is to make your early-fight actions as reliable and count for as much as possible, because early advantages will snowball. Ideally you want spells you can employ as offense and defense at the same time and that don't allow saving throws or spell resistances as your opening moves; spells that can be quickened are especially nice because that lets you get more done sooner.

Most of the level 10+ encounters I've played in tend to be foregone conclusions by the end of the 2nd round of effective contact, whether or not most of my fellow players (or GM) really recognize that. Whichever way they go, the question by then usually isn't which side is going to win, but how much damage they're going to take in winning. This almost always falls in the players' favor, because that's just how the game is done, but as the caster if you've adapted to the party-protector role in this phase of the game, you're looking to make 'almost always' turn into 'always' there. Cause most parties only get to lose once. :)

Save-or-else spells come more into play in this second phase of the combat in my experience, either to try and limit the damage you take during mopup, or to try and seize victory from the jaws of defeat if something went wrong in your initial contact.


Phneri wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:


Arguing against witch further because I hate saving throw effects
No one's arguing the wizard, as written, doesn't have a broader arcane spell selection. What you (again) seem to miss is that the witch has significantly more options because of the divine list options that mix with the wizard list, the patron options, and the hexes combined with a billion skill points a level make the witch just as effective in any encounter.

Wizards have the same amount of skillpoints, the divine list options are largely either curative (which are frequently poor in-battle spells) or redundant with arcane spells and the hexes themselves.

Further, the spells witches are missing are not just 'nice to have' they're frequently 'critical for party defense' in my experience. At lower levels your fighters can defend themselves. At higher levels, AB scales up much faster than AC, and physical damage dealt scales up much faster than hitpoints.

Characters who don't have miss chances (start becoming unable to afford to take full attacks more than once, and that's if they're lucky. Mobility, tactics, and magic has to sub in for armor and hitpoints as defense at higher levels.

The caster broadly becomes the party's "tank" in the teens and above, in short, especially because intelligent enemies are going to target him first anyway.

Quote:
The fact that a spell does or does not allow a save doesn't make it bad. I'm aware that you dislike the saving throw. That's not really relevant to advice on a witch or the utility of the witch's spells and abilities. As it's your preference.

Except saving throws for creatures - especially the fort save - scales up faster than your ability to increase your save DC in most cases.

Failed spells don't just represent the loss of a spell slot, either, they represent the loss of an action, and rounds during which your enemy is able to use their offense uninhibited.

Frequently the target of that uninhibited offense will be you, and that is not a position you want to be within 30 feet of them from the outset at.

As far as unlimited funds, hah, you don't need that. Especially because it's not the full spell list that the witch is missing (alot of is pretty redundant), it's key ones which I've mentioned, that she can access through some, but not all patrons, meaning "some" witches have "some" of this capability, but "no" witch has "all" of it.

Edit: This is all important because the PC who's using save-for-negate effects has to get lucky in every fight for an entire campaign. The enemies only have to get lucky once. Eventually your luck is going to run out, so depending on luck is strategically unwise.

That's how you end up needing those miracles to rez the entire rest of the party (though why you weren't killed off first is a good question), whereas if you opened with your initial actions using reliable, non-luck-based tactics, you wouldn't be in that position.

(As an aside, technically, Cloning the party between adventures as a precaution is IIRC cheaper than the material components of a resurrection).


Except for the "very powerful request" thing - "Alternatively, a cleric can make a very powerful request. Casting such a miracle costs the cleric 25,000 gp" and the simple fact that really, I can't remember ever having used a Wish or Miracle for duplicating another spell's effect, and actually, the +5 stat book is 144,000 gp, 5 wishes at 25k each is 125,000 gp, ie unless your GM lets you craft wondrous item your stat book for half-price without having to take all the time that price would require under the RAW, wishes are nontrivially cheaper.

Additionally, while Miracles don't have the same failure chances as Wishes, they do still have them (the 'deity alignment restriction') which isn't written as waived for Witches anyway, anywhere, and ought to be taken in the same vein as the Wish 'backfire' clause: license for your GM to control the spell's outcome when it's not used in a very clear and limited manner.


Abraham spalding wrote:
In most ways miracle is absolutely better than wish.

Miracle:

Spoiler:
Miracle
School evocation; Level cleric 9
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V, S; see text
Range see text
Target, Effect, or Area see text
Duration see text
Saving Throw see text; Spell Resistance yes
You don’t so much cast a miracle as request one. You state what
you would like to have happen and request that your deity (or the
power you pray to for spells) intercede.
A miracle can do any of the following things.
• Duplicate any cleric spell of 8th level or lower.
• Duplicate any other spell of 7th level or lower.
• Undo the harmful effects of certain spells, such as feeblemind or
insanity.
• Have any effect whose power level is in line with the above
effects.
Alternatively, a cleric can make a very powerful request. Casting
such a miracle costs the cleric 25,000 gp in powdered diamond
because of the powerful divine energies involved. Examples of
especially powerful miracles of this sort could include the following:
• Swinging the tide of a battle in your favor by raising fallen allies
to continue fighting.
• Moving you and your allies, with all your and their gear, from
one plane to a specific locale through planar barriers with no
chance of error.
• Protecting a city from an earthquake, volcanic eruption, flood,
or other major natural disaster.
In any event, a request that is out of line with the deity’s (or
alignment’s) nature is refused.
A duplicated spell allows saving throws and spell resistance as
normal, but the save DCs are as for a 9th-level spell. When a miracle
spell duplicates a spell with a material component that costs more
than 100 gp, you must provide that component.

Wish:

Spoiler:
Wish
School universal; Level sorcerer/wizard 9
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V, S, M (diamond worth 25,000 gp)
Range see text
Target, Effect, Area see text
Duration see text
Saving Throw none, see text; Spell Resistance yes
Wish is the mightiest spell a wizard or sorcerer can cast. By simply
speaking aloud, you can alter reality to better suit you. Even
wish, however, has its limits. A wish can produce any one of the
following effects.
• Duplicate any sorcerer/wizard spell of 8th level or lower, provided
the spell does not belong to one of your opposition schools.
• Duplicate any non-sorcerer/wizard spell of 7th level or lower,
provided the spell does not belong to one of your opposition
schools.
• Duplicate any sorcerer/wizard spell of 7th level or lower, even if
it belongs to one of your opposition schools.
• Duplicate any non-sorcerer/wizard spell of 6th level or lower,
even if it belongs to one of your opposition schools.
• Undo the harmful effects of many other spells, such as geas/
quest or insanity.
• Grant a creature a +1 inherent bonus to an ability score. Two to
five wish spells cast in immediate succession can grant a creature
a +2 to +5 inherent bonus to an ability score (two wishes for a +2
inherent bonus, three wishes for a +3 inherent bonus, and so on).
Inherent bonuses are instantaneous, so they cannot be dispelled.
Note: An inherent bonus may not exceed +5 for a single ability
score, and inherent bonuses to a particular ability score do not
stack, so only the best one applies.
• Remove injuries and afflictions. A single wish can aid one
creature per caster level, and all subjects are cured of the same
kind of affliction. For example, you could heal all the damage you
and your companions have taken, or remove all poison effects
from everyone in the party, but not do both with the same wish.
• Revive the dead. A wish can bring a dead creature back to life
by duplicating a resurrection spell. A wish can revive a dead
creature whose body has been destroyed, but the task takes
two wishes: one to recreate the body and another to infuse the
body with life again. A wish cannot prevent a character who was
brought back to life from gaining a permanent negative level.
• Transport travelers. A wish can lift one creature per caster level
from anywhere on any plane and place those creatures anywhere
else on any plane regardless of local conditions. An unwilling
target gets a Will save to negate the effect, and spell resistance
(if any) applies.
• Undo misfortune. A wish can undo a single recent event.
The wish forces a reroll of any roll made within the last
round (including your last turn). Reality reshapes itself to
accommodate the new result. For example, a wish could undo
an opponent’s successful save, a foe’s successful critical hit
(either the attack roll or the critical roll), a friend’s failed save,
and so on. The reroll, however, may be as bad as or worse
than the original roll. An unwilling target gets a Will save to
negate the effect, and spell resistance (if any) applies.
You may try to use a wish to produce greater effects than these,
but doing so is dangerous. (The wish may pervert your intent into a
literal but undesirable fulfillment or only a partial fulfillment, at the
GM’s discretion.)
Duplicated spells allow saves and spell resistance as normal (but
save DCs are for 9th-level spells).
When a wish duplicates a spell with a material component that
costs more than 10,000 gp, you must provide that component (in
addition to the 25,000 gp diamond component for this spell).

Those are pretty darn similar, actually, the only major difference having to do with wizard specialist schools. RAW, Miracles also can't give you permanent stat increases, either. And Wishes have a higher spell component cost limit - 100 gp for Miracle, 10,000 for Wish.

So yeah, Miracle's totally better, especially in the important ways, cause you're definitely going to need to save towns from natural disasters everywhere you go. :) /sarcasm

In fact, Wish is better in the important ways - it can in fact do more and it's more forgiving on spell component costs.


Phneri wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:

Against groups of nonflying enemies Reverse Gravity is a no-save "win button" in one spell; against singular enemies who don't have exceptionally good CMDs, Grasping Hand or Clenched Fist are pretty much game over. Against highend enemies who are 'wearing their treasure', Disjunction is exceptionally powerful.

Reverse gravity isn't a win button. To render something (relatively) helpless it allows a save. Archers/ranged attackers are unaffected, and you grossly nerf the significant power of the spell by hitting a group rather than levitating one dude up 130 feet and dismissing the spell.

Reverse gravity only allows a save if the target has something to hold on to. Against range attackers you can largely foil them with the level 3 spell Tiny Hut, or a Wind Wall. No one spell is absolutely perfect for everything, and that isn't what I claimed. I claimed the wider variety of spells available to the wizard lets them handle varied situations better than the witch, who is largely reliant on debuffing that allows saving throws. Meanwhile, the witch's access to hexes and healing doesn't provide enough of a counterbalance to this in combat, especially because of the tactical issues (mobility loss and short range) that arise when using hexes to help surpass saves.

This plus their access to a superb list of divination spells (and a couple hexes) makes the witch an excellent out of combat caster for intelligence-gathering and 'party repair' but only a mediocre in-combat caster because there's always a risk that her spells are going to be foiled by saves, and unless she takes some specific patrons, her ability to cover the party with battlefield alteration is limited, while she has to expose herself to more danger personally than other arcane casters in order to employ her hexes and healing (the things she gains instead of a broader spell list) on the field.

Quote:
Oh, and it's a 7th level spell. For the same price the witch can throw waves of exhaustion, which is a no save and enormously powerful.

Wizards get it too. If it's appropriate for the encounter, they're just as capable at employing it as the Witch. If it's not, they've got other options.

Quote:
Against low CMD bad guys black tentacles is just as much a win as grasping hand/clenched fist is, only it's a 4th-level spell slot.

Black Tentacles have a lower CMA (caster level +4 strength +1 size) compared to Hands, which are (caster level +10 strength +1 size) and have a nosave Cover effect. Against an upper level target, it's usually a better bet to go with the spell that's got the higher success chance. Bonus points for The Hand Formerly Known as Bigby's not screwing over your own party if you use it in close quarters.

Quote:
I'm going to ignore disjunction, because going to a 9th level slot for a point is silly, and the witch can choose to take it anyway.

Only in the Wisdom patron, which is stocked with mediocre and poor spells that tend to become obsolete as you go up levels. This is a big part of what's wrong with witches, in fact - their flexibility is a lie. Like the cake. You're told it's there, but it isn't. Because if you pick Patron A, you don't get the capability that's in Patron B. "Witches" might have all this capability, but "YOUR witch" doesn't, because you can't pick all the patrons.

Quote:

Or you know, take something else. Like Miracle without a deity alignment restriction.

You mean, like Wish? ;)


To reply to a few things in one post:

The wizard's as or more prepared than the witch for anything, depending on if the player is any good at planning ahead or knowing what works on what encounters. But the wizard has a broader variety of no-save spells at his disposal, especially the very powerful and useful battlefield alteration spells (wall of stone being the workhorse of these). Witches get a few of them, but in the base list they stop at level 4 with Solid Fog (and arguably, Black Tentacles, since it can serve an area-denial role though that isn't what I'd want to use it for). The wizard gets a wider variety of battlefield alteration spells throughout his career (the APG added the create pit line, even), and keeps getting them going into higher levels. Even very situational-seeming spells like Dimensional Anchor or Dimension Lock can become staple abilities if you face increasing numbers of teleport-capable foes. Like say, "most Outsiders."

Against groups of nonflying enemies Reverse Gravity is a no-save "win button" in one spell; against singular enemies who don't have exceptionally good CMDs, Grasping Hand or Clenched Fist are pretty much game over. Against highend enemies who are 'wearing their treasure', Disjunction is exceptionally powerful.

And Shrink Object is, in my opinion, one of the most innocuously overpowered spells in the entire game under a strict interpretation of its rules (shrunken boulders - or even bonfires! - could be thrown by anyone, and return to full size when they hit their target square...)

This leaves out the power available to creative users of illusions, or just plain invisibility.

Witches can access some of these spells, or ones that are close to them or part of their lines - but never all of them in the same character, and not to the same breadth and depth, because they're patron-dependent. In return, witches get hexes - which are quite powerful at lower levels but increasingly difficult to employ at higher ones because of tactical considerations and the number of actions it takes to maintain them - and healing spells. But in PF, healing is a very situational ability mid-combat, partly due to its Touch range, but mostly because enemies of an appropriate level for your party can usually deal more damage in a single full round attack than you can heal with a single spell, meaning that healing buys you a little time at best, when other spells of the same spell level could buy you a lot of time or even win the encounter.

Healing via hex is nice, but you can only do it once per day per person, meaning that having the hex is a way to handwave healing up during travel, and for emergency stabilization of the dying, rather than using for serious amounts of healing during an adventure once you're past the lower levels. But then, just having the spells or someone with channel positive energy around is a way to handwave healing up during travel, too.

It's still better to just avoid needing the heals, and that's usually best-accomplished via battlefield alteration, no matter which way you slice it. Yeah, your wall of stone or even reverse gravity doesn't kill the badguys. But used properly it makes it pretty hard for them to win, and ideally, makes it really hard for them to even do significant damage.


Abraham spalding wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:
Wizards get it.
Big whoop -- so do I can I can bring them back from the dead -- wizard's can't.

And why are they dead? :P

Quote:
Quote:


The two good abilities witches get don't make up for the lack of abilities everywhere else.
Which is incorrect -- the witch has lots of good abilities -- these two are just higher on the charts than some others.
Quote:
Quote:


Did you memorize it Reach, were you in touch range of the fighter, or did your GM forget that healing spells are all touch ranged? Also, what opportunity cost are you paying by memorizing Heal constantly in order to have it around for the occasional in-combat use?
I was within touch range of the fighter -- I generally stay rather close to the front line, but it doesn't really matter since the familiar delivered the spell. Having heal around has been great in general -- and no more of a cost than what a cleric would pay. Heal is a good spell to have and therefore worthwhile -- it could have also been used against some of the undead -- if the paladin hadn't been there.

Those are things I'd almost never get away with in the groups I game with. Being close to the front lines, sending my familiar to deliver spells, etc. That'd net me a dead familiar sooner or later, and probably a KO'd witch on a regular basis.

Quote:


Not at all -- pox pustules is a witch only spell, greater restoration isn't available to wizards, status isn't a wizard spell, animate object isn't a wizard spell, and the others were at the same level and DC as the wizard would have done -- which is the same not worse than the wizard. In addition to doing stuff he can't do.

Witches don't get restoration or greater restoration in their base spell list. I know because I was looking to have mine learn it, assuming it'd be in the spell list because of all the other cure and healing spells she gets, but it's not. It's in the Endurance patron spell list, where it's one of the two particularly good spells on the whole list (the other being Miracle).

But off the top of my head the only thing restorations cure that your individual 'remove X' spells don't is negative levels. YMMV but in alot of campaigns that's not a huge issue.

Pox pustules is a single-target fortsave-to-negate debuff. It's a fairly nice debuff, especially when you get it by spell level 2, but it's going to lose most of its applicability by character level 10 unless you only you metamagick it up to keep up its save DC.

Wizards might not get that specific single-target debuff, but then, witches don't get interposing hand; by character level 10 which would you rather be using?

And if you're layering evil eyes, misfortunes, and other debuffs until you can reliably land a level 2 pox postule on a mid to high level target, why are you bothering with pox postule? You've got deathspells that would outright eliminate the same target, with the same or higher save DC, then.

Quote:
No I'm telling you that you are incompetent at playing witches, lack ability, and imagination as well as skill with advance classes.

Nice personal attack. Good to see you make reasonable facts-based arguments

Layering hexes and debuffs takes several full rounds worth of actions because you end up having to cackle to keep up the hexes. In a static battle that might work if you can keep from being attacked or have the Trickery patron, allowing you to have invis-based survivability.

In the kinds of games I've played, a caster hanging around in the thick of the battle without a miss chance isn't going to get several rounds of unmolested debuffing, especially if they aren't moving to get out of threat range when casting.

And all of that is moot when a wizard or even cleric or druid who's played with imagination, ability, and skill in advanced classes often only needs one spell to accomplish what takes the witch's hexes several rounds worth of actions.


Benchak the Nightstalker wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:


Misfortune, evil eye, charm, and slumber hexes are all mind-affecting. I forget if the deathspell grand hexes are mind-affecting or not.

Incorrect on one count, Misfortune is not mind-affecting. It's just pure bad mojo, works on anything.

Of the Major and Grand Hexes, Nightmares and Waxen Image are the only ones tagged as mind-affecting.

Maybe I'm remembering the playtest version or something, because I specifically remember Misfortune being tagged as mind-affecting in one version of the witch rules. Either that or I'm confusing it with evil eye, that I think was changed from non-mind-affecting to mind-affecting between versions.

Either way, you're right, I just looked it up in my APG.


Abraham spalding wrote:

Flux I believe my entire party would disagree with you:

They loved the fact that waves of exhaustion prevented pounce, charging and gave the enemies a -3 to hit, damage and ac, as well as a -6 to CMD.

Wizards get it.

Quote:

They also greatly enjoyed the fact that the stone golem had to roll twice on everything and because of this failed to hit a single time (misfortune).

Evil Eye with it's -4 penalty to hit prevented five attacks from elementals from connecting.

The two good abilities witches get don't make up for the lack of abilities everywhere else.

Quote:
The heal spell I dropped on the fighter was of huge benefit right after she was Crit'ed.

Did you memorize it Reach, were you in touch range of the fighter, or did your GM forget that healing spells are all touch ranged? Also, what opportunity cost are you paying by memorizing Heal constantly in order to have it around for the occasional in-combat use?

Quote:

Cone of Cold on the efreeti? Yes please, that was just right.

Glitterdust on the Janni fighters and rogues? Yeah that helped too.

Pox Pustules made the gnoll king much easier to hit and weakened his attacks as well.

Status allowed me to keep up with the entire team even as we split up to cover more ground -- I was able to know when to D.Door to help the fighter, and D.Door back to help the paladin two rounds later.

Bestow Curse (persistent at that) prevented a fire giant from doing anything in a combat.

Two rays of exhaustion and an evil eye and the monk mini boss had nothing to show for his efforts.

The dragon was most displeased when his prized marble statue started attacking him (animated object).

Black Tentacles made short work of the gnoll army, while death ward made the greater shadows a joke.

Enervation absolutely killed the spells of the -- ok I'm not sure what it was but it was a caster and it didn't like the -4 to hit, saves, and caster level.

All things a wizard could have done just as well - or better if you consider he's got more spells to apply to leverage an advantage, and further, more of his spells will work without allowing saving throws and taking the chance of it failing.

Quote:
Threefold Aspect has allowed me to avoid buying a belt of physical might.

So? You don't need a belt of physical might when you're a caster, you need a belt of con and dex, eventually, regardless of what other buffs you get.

Quote:

Baleful Polymorph means that whatever that thing we were about to face was -- didn't matter.

Reincarnate and raise dead have both been used once in our campaign.

Plane shift, greater teleport, and even harm have all been useful,

A touch range damage spell is useful? Are you memorizing reach, is your DM very forgiving, or are you casting "Forget Tactics" on your enemies before every fight? ;)

Everything else is stuff you can either get npc casts of or a scroll of for the one time you need them, and/or that a wizard gets too.

And if you're telling me that your enemies rarely or never make their saving throws against your spells, and that you're in hex range without getting pummeled, then what you're telling me isn't that witches are good.

You're telling me that your GM is not giving your party very challenging encounters that are balanced against their having a highend caster.


Abraham spalding wrote:
Question wrote:

Does immunity to mind-affecting effects make you immune to evil eye or any other hex?

And how would you fix the witch spell list? What is your opinion on debuffs like eyebite and irrestible dance?

Immunity to mind affecting affects some hexes -- it doesn't affect misfortune, it doesn't affect flight, healing, tongues, disguise, cauldron, and several others.

The witch has plenty of good spells and abilities to use even against mind immune and undead/constructs.

Misfortune, evil eye, charm, and slumber hexes are all mind-affecting. I forget if the deathspell grand hexes are mind-affecting or not.


Frostflame wrote:
The 'inflict' spells are not as useless as I once thought they have come into great use especially when you have wands that contain the spell.

If you have a wand of it (and why would you take a wand of inflict wounds over a wand of something better?), you don't need to memorize it... sort of the point of wands there

Quote:
Her encahntments are neither redunant or useless. Sleep and deep slumber are still useful taking out groups of enemies and when you reach 11th level there is cloak of dreams. Hold is quite effective in battle. Confusion is a pretty nasty little spell to cast against a group. Augment these spells with spell focus and if the enemy has suffered an evil eye hex enchantments start ruling the game.

Hold person and hold monster are both entirely redundant with the slumber hex, except in their area forms. Actually, they're inferior, cause the hex will have a higher save DC that scales with your level.

Low-level control spells like sleep lose their relevance by the time you're past the mid-levels. Unless you like being a jerk to commoners or something. By level 15-16 you won't be using Hold Person either unless you heighten it, but if you're a wizard, druid, or cleric, you've got better spells to load into your level 7 and 8 spell slots. Witch, I'm not so sure about though.

Confusion's nasty for anyone who gets it, because it targets an area and only needs one or two enemies to fail a save. It's not unique to witches and it's not even especially better for them than for anyone else, except perhaps looking better because it has so few competitors on her spell list.

Evil eye is single-target, and if you try to spread them around a group you'll have to use cackle, sacrificing your mobility, to keep it up on everyone. It'll take several rounds to affect numerous enemies with them, and if you're fighting just a single enemy, that enemy's likely to have high enough saves to resist your evil eye too, forcing you into cackle-mode to try and leverage it.

Quote:
In the situation of immune to mind affecting enchantments than relie on necromantic spells and debuffs or straight up damage.

What straight up damage? Almost all damage spells give saves, often fort saves, and monsters have very high fort saves. I doubt your party would appreciate you dropping horrid wilting on them...

I also don't see a debuff on the spell list better than Slow, which is a save-to-negate level 3 spell (meaning it will have to be Heightened to stay relevant in the late game), except maybe enervate or energy drain. But those are all spells wizards already get, which is my overarching point:

The witch is a kneecapped wizard who's given the crutch of healing spells to hobble around on and pretend she can run. Absolutely nothing in the spell list of witches is unique, and their combination of arcane and divine spells ends up being less than the sum of its parts, not more, because the key parts - spontaneous healing, wall spells, illusions in general, spells that aren't reliant on overcoming saves, and so on - are absent.


ciretose wrote:
Greg Wasson wrote:

In my games, I see alot more of "I failed or made my save by one" , than I see them fail or make by a mile.

Greg

Those may also just be the ones you remember. Math is math.

That being said, every point you get your DC up raises your success rate by 5%, which isn't insignificant.

Well, it's insignificant if you're avoiding spells that allow saves ;)

That's sort of the point of what's really a thought experiment in my mind at this juncture. At 20 a wizard who pours their points into Int and started with a 15 before racial mod, would end up with a 31 stat (15 + 2 racial + 5 book + 5 levelup points + 6 item).

They'd have a save DC of 20 + feat/other adjusts + spell level. Considering a lot of high end targets have saves of +18 and higher, your success chance might entirely depend on your feats and the level of the spell being used, and likely would rarely be higher than 50%.

Technically, there's no benefit to 31 over 30 there, so you probably would've assigned your last levelup point someplace else and ended with a 30 int.

Now consider 14 int, 15 con. Put your racial adjust into int, and 4 of your points, along with your +6 magic item. You end up with 26 int, or DC 18 + feat/other adjusts + spell level. But you put your book into con, and your 5th levelup point into an odd-numbered stat (probably dex?). You end up, using magic items again, with perhaps 26 int, 26 con, and 20 dex as opposed to 30 int, 20 con, and 20 dex.

You basically sacrifice 10% worth of save DC for 60 bonus hitpoints and a 15% better chance of making a fort save.

And I think it could work because saves for a wise wizard are actually optional, especially if you're not trying to directly deal hp damage with magic.


Dire Mongoose wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:

And since I'm basically never using 'save to negate' spells anymore at the high end, especially when I'm 'serious', why do I care about my save DC again?

The question is, what do you use in their place? Almost all of the high level 3.5 screw-you-with-no-save spells have a save in Pathfinder.

(And really, if having hard to make saves is a boon for most of the stretch of levels -- and it is -- that's enough to me to justify investing heavily in the caster stat.)

Terrain-altering spells, buffs, summons. Things that force multiple saves (mass suffocation for example, is very nice regardless of your save DC). Things that still have an effect when the save is passed. The "hand formerly known as bigby's" line.

But when you think about it, by the time you're up to level 16-20, you're likely unable to effectively employ level 4 save-to-negate spells and under without Heightening them, and maybe level 5 spells, even if you do have a high Int. And yet you can still employ Create Pit, or Web or Sleet Storm at that level to some good effect.

If you think you need to deal hitpoint damage yourself as a highend wizard, then yeah, you want that Int for saves against your disintegrates or finger of deaths or whatnot. But if all you care about is winning fights, then battlefield alteration, summoning, and buffing are all 'saves don't matter' options that are usually going to win you the fight with fewer of your spells expended and less damage taken by your side.

And little random chance interfering with your plans.

Plus, except at the very-low end where Sleep is still a realistic option (and at that low end, whether or not you're putting a huge focus on int, you'll have the same int as anyone else...), that strategy is always viable. You won't actually see much of a differentiation in your Int if you split your focus, until after level 16, versus a dedicated Int-user. You'll have the same +int magic item on the body, the +5 to stat book is an endgame item, and probably your int will only be 2-3 behind a 'dedicated int-pursuer' (and thus your save DC only 1 behind them) until level 16 and/or the stat book (or equivilant in wishes) comes into play.

At which point you're in "DCs don't have to matter" land.


LazarX wrote:
Flux Vector wrote:

[

Then your enemies aren't fighting to win, more than likely, because your hexes have a 30 foot range, putting you well within charge, or just move + standard attack, distance of them. "Rush the caster" ought to be just above "rush the archer" in terms of "tactical priorities 101."

Or maybe the group is making use of terrain and placement. There are plenty of ways to deter the rush the caster charge, a lot hallway battles after all do tend to take place in close quarters.

Overrun is a good thing, there, but then narrow quarters and broken-up terrain does a lot to hamper spellcasters without extra help from the enemy, unless they don't care about catching their own parties with their area spells. Really, your allies love tentacles!

Quote:
The witch's strength is that she's a versatile caster, she's effectively a mystic theurge done as a base class. She's the bard of magic casters able to fill various roles from healer, to support, to debuffer, to damage. This means of course she's not going to particularly stand out in any one of them.

Except she's not that versatile. It's a fake flexibility; what she gets as you go up spell levels are more of the same sorts of things, not especially new things. She gets a lot of good divination and transportation utility spells, but that's really the high point of her spell list. And a bunch of those spells are things you might only cast once every few -campaigns-, like plane shift or astral projection, or teleport object. She doesn't get many buffs, and she's notably missing key arcane buff spells like invisibility, displacement, and haste in her basic spell list. And she's missing wall spells and protection from alignment spells, too.

She gets the utterly useless 'inflict' line of spells, healing, which she is poor at for the same reason druids are (needs to pre-memorize, can't spontaneously convert useful memorizations to heals as needed), a lot of enchantments that are either useless because of enemy saves and immunities, or else are probably-redundant with the Slumber hex (which will always have a higher save DC too!), the mostly-useless glyph and symbol type spells, and a bunch of other spells that are either useful once in a blue moon, or are more 'style' than 'substance' or are better used as plot spells by (generally evil) NPCs - like cup of dust/feast of ashes.

Heck in a lot of games the only -especially- good 9th level spells she gets at all are elemental swarm and mass suffocation, and maybe her patron spell. If it's say, time stop. Everything else is at best situational, mediocre, or both. At worst it's awful (I'm looking at you there, refuge and mass inflict critical wounds).


Frostflame wrote:
I'm playing a witch in COT she is far from underpowered or lacking in parts. The slumer hex is amongst her deadliest abilities which has ended quite a few encounters before they even started. Evil eye has really put a kink on the enemies especially when it comes to saves. The healing hex has come in handy on multiple occasions. I've managed to keep the party going and use it against undead opponent. Spell list is mainly debuff/control. Blindess and Hold have worked wonders. Only once at the begining of the adventure she got knocked to 0 hp other than that she has been scratched by enemies

Then your enemies aren't fighting to win, more than likely, because your hexes have a 30 foot range, putting you well within charge, or just move + standard attack, distance of them. "Rush the caster" ought to be just above "rush the archer" in terms of "tactical priorities 101." Any enemy with a feasible amount of intelligence should be doing their utmost to get right up in your face, which means you either eat a lot of attacks, or can't else easily employ close range spells and hexes, let alone touch spells. The party's melee fighters would have to follow them to you anyway, and taking an attack of opportunity in passing one is more than worth it to get into position to get AOOs on you for casting - and thus force concentration checks to keep your spells from going off.

As far as witches and fragility... one of the patrons gets mirror image, and regular invisibility. I'm not sure I can actually suggest using any of the other patrons, considering the lack of effective 'passive' defenses in the witch arsenal and the fact that many of your hexes and spells wouldn't break invisibility. Invisibility and mirror image do at least make hanging around within 30 feet of an enemy less of a problem.

As far as witches and battlefield casting, the problem isn't that they get no good battlefield spells, it's that they get fewer good battlefield spells than any other caster, and many of the ones they do get are save-to-negate, are mind-affecting (still far and away the most common immunity), or are death spells with fort saves (the strongest save of practically every monster ever) that severely reduce their damage dealt or negate them entirely.

It makes the mid and high end witch very sparse and inflexible compared to the wizard, cleric, or even druid - she's supposed to be a full caster, but she hasn't got the spell list of one, and you're going to feel it every time you run into anything with good fort and will saves. Which is almost every appropriate-CR monster in the beastiary after level 10.


Treantmonk wrote:
Fair enough, though I promise you, if they are telling you that an optimization of Wizards involves dumping Dex, then their credibility would be in question!

"Dumping" dex is a questionable move for almost anyone due to initiative, anyway.

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From a pure optimization view, there is no question a Wizard needs Int first and foremost. I think that's pretty basic stuff, and a Wizard can do fine without the other stuff.

If you want an optimized Wizard though, a decent Dex is pretty much considered a universal requirement for any style of build.

I actually have been questioning Int lately. By the high end wizards have more than enough spells/day in my experience without the bonus int slots.

And since I'm basically never using 'save to negate' spells anymore at the high end, especially when I'm 'serious', why do I care about my save DC again?

Why go for a 34-36 int when a 30, or even 28 or 26, int, is plenty given that I'm avoiding spells where the saving throw is relevant?


MicMan wrote:
The high Int for a Wizard is not because of Bonus Spells but for Save DC.

And yet most wizards trend toward spells where there's no save or successful saves aren't very relevant, so really, why worry about save DC at all then?

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In my campaigns (25 point buy) I can confirm that our Casters have only about 10% less HP than our Fighters.

My instinct there is that either your fighters are doing something wrong, your casters are doing something right, or possibly both.

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That isn't the point actually. The point is that usually the caster have a lot lower AC/CMD than the fighters and this means that they can't risk a lort of hurt coming their way anyways.

This is true, though actually, any character is broadly better off getting a 50% miss chance than they are of having an AC of less than 45, especially if they rarely face full attacks or if the full attacks they do face are largely two-weapon fighting, hasted, or ranged (with many/rapid shot).

A highend physical combatant will have an AB of +35 or higher after soaking penalties to their attack roll, meaning their "full AB" attacks will only miss 50% of the time or more at AC 45. And they get as many of 3 attacks at full AB. So if your AC is under 45, miss chance > AC.


The inflict spells are there to give us something to discuss on the internet.

Also, to heal the undead.

There's not a lot of other point in memorizing them, and even if you can spontaneously cast them, they're only 'worth it' if you really have absolutely nothing better to do. Even then, you sometimes might be better off saving the original spell for later, and just sitting a round out, or aid anothering an ally, or moving to flank, etcetera.


Dire Mongoose wrote:


Add it all up and, in practice, an intelligently built wizard will have about as many HP as anyone else.

Perhaps, if 'anyone else' isn't building just as intelligently, or is a 'multi-stat' character. In the second case, perhaps the point is they get to have as many hitpoints as a wizard who focuses on it... while getting to do other things instead. Like be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a physical attack.

That said, I'm increasingly of the opinion as I participate in this discussion that a strong Intelligence focus might actually be a trap for the wizard instead of a Constitution focus: you're unlikely to actually need, or even have a chance to use, the extra bonus spells/day for a 34-36 int compared to a 24-26 one, and you're avoiding spells where a saving throw 'matters' anyway. Of course, this just points out the problem with saving throws even more sharply, as I mentioned above... and on-topic, the witch doesn't even get that option, because she hasn't got a choice but to take her spell list and run with it.

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