Haylehydra's page

Here's a question: Can anyone give a decent reason as to why heightening spells is so limited? Here are two really WTF choices:

1) Sorcerers need to re-learn a spell as a heightened version in order to cast it as a heightened spell.
2) Spontaneous Heighten isn't spontaneous at all. They need to be prepared at the beginning of the day.

If casters are already limited by spells per day, why even bother having a limit on heightened spells? If someone would rather cast a heightened fireball than greater teleport, why should they not be able to? It seems extremely reasonable to me to presume that if a caster knows how to put more into spells like Magic Missile for more missiles (adding in more components), then surely they also know how to put ever-so-slightly-more in (cast as a level 2 spell) in order to get one more.

I for one am house ruling these stupid limitations out of my games, but can anyone understand why they exist at all?

Well, your post is actually off-topic, but this is something I feel rather strongly about. I really don't know why all spellcasting classes are now so unbelieveably underwhelming, constrained, and generally worthless. All spellcasters got hit hard, but sorcerors in particular got pounded. Not only do they still have all the downsides that went with the boon of spontaneous spellcasting, the sole benefit of having more spell slots than other casters has been removed. While there are bloodline powers, these seem to be used as a reason to make it a major sacrifice to heighten spells, give them fewer class feats (2 less) than any other spellcasting class and 4 less than any "martial" class, and just generally make them completely unviable as a class.

The explanation given is that bloodline powers are so powerful that they had to be balanced against other classes. But other spellcasting classes got to have "class powers" either through domains or animal companions/shapeshifting. And lets face it, bloodline powers generally suck (there may be a few exceptions, depending on your play style). So why pound on Sorcerers so hard.

The only reference that I remember to this whole debacle was an early podcast where one of the devs (I won't name names) said something to the effect of 'we know there is an imbalance between casters and fighters (notice that they only mention the fighter class), and we intend to address the issue'. So that's the only justification that I have read or heard concerning the severe beating that spellcasters in general, and sorcerers in particular have taken under the new rules.

It is idiotic in my opinion since the complaint seems to revolve around sorcerers/wizards clearing entire rooms with a fireball before the fighter had a chance to swing. I personally have never seen that happen. Spell DCs for saves in PF1 are one of the few things that are pretty tightly controlled and unless all the mooks in the room were really low level or unanimously failed their Reflex saves, none of them would be killed by a single fireball. Average damage for a 6d6 fireball is around 21 points, which wouldn't be enough to kill anything that was 6HD. And the save damage of 10pts wouldn't kill a creature of half that level. True, some of the higher level spells could take out a boss if they rolled badly on the save (usually they had to roll a 1 or something under 5 to fail) but bad rolls do happen and not only to PCs.

It was much more likely, in my experience, for the fighter types to rush in without giving any thought to the fact that the caster could use an AoE to soften things up a bit. I almost never got a chance to use an AoE in a fight. Usually, I was casting buff spells the first round - something like Haste which granted me only the subsidiary benefits while everyone got extra attacks.

On the other hand, I have seen melee types and archers take out an enemy a round without expending a single resource besides a few arrows.

So if you ask me there is no reason except that someone has a lot of bias against spellcasters, since it is obvious that they did indeed address the issue mentioned above whether it was valid or not.