| Green Sun |
Hi all, I'm currently playing through the Way of the Wicked adventure and over the last few months have had quite a lot of fun from it. I've rolled a cleric of Asmodeus and pretty much eschewed the melee half of the class to act a bit more as a caster, and while there was a lot of great stuff I could do at lower levels things have started to lose that "aha!" quality that came from dropping silence on an enemy spellcaster or hold person on a paladin and rendering them helpless. In fact, my character feels almost inconsequential to combat these days.
To give context, I'm nearing the end of book 3 of the adventure, putting me at level 11. Throughout the campaign our group has hired a lot of cohorts, to the point where there are 5 PCs and 3/4 cohorts in combat. As you can imagine, combat can be pretty slow, and the GM has now forbidden the use of any summoning spells. In addition, most of these characters are martial, so when a boss rolls out most of the spaces around them tend to get taken up.
So why does this matter? Well taking a look at the level 6 spells, none of them seem to benefit me in this situation:
-Spells like blade barrier or cold ice strike (arcane domain) are difficult to use without getting in the way of someone else, and even so would have less damage output than the rest of my party.
-Planar ally, create undead, animate object, and summon monster are all out of the question.
- Mass cause wounds is trivial and probably does more damage to my own team, and harm is almost impossible to use due to the massive barrier to entry (successful concentration check, touch attack, and spell penetration checks or I ate that AoT for nothing? And still with a chance of them only taking half damage? No thanks).
- I generally take heals and buffs in my low spell level slots, and they're not really great for action economy anyway, so those aren't really wanted either.
Even the two spells that could provide that "aha!" quality I was after, banishment and mislead (illusion domain) don't work because most enemies have some kind of protection or ability to see through illusions. Even when I move to look at 7th and 8th level spells I find a lack of anything exciting to look forward to.
So what I'm asking is this: What can I do to add a lease of new life into my character? If new spells aren't going to give me anything, what is it that I can do to stay on curve rather than hitting a roadblock? I'd rather not throw away the character I currently have for various reasons, but I'm just not having fun with them whilst my contribution isn't matching up to anyone else's.