Teridax wrote:
I think if we step outside the context of the Magus for a brief moment: slow is perfectly capable of trivializing fights on its own if a powerful enemy crit fails their save, that's what that spell is known for along with synesthesia. Although forcing failures on saves from an attack roll would be a significant buff to the frequency of those failure effects, the problem of those spells incapacitating enemies when they shouldn't is a problem intrinsic to those spells that few others come close to, as incapacitating effects generally have the incapacitation trait. A Magus being able to force a crit fail on a powerful crowd control spell like warp mind isn't going to trivialize the boss encounter, because warp mind has the incapacitation trait and permanently confusing a lower-level enemy would likely be fine, but forcing a crit fail on slow would be far more debilitating, as suddenly your boss would find itself reduced to 1 action per turn the whole encounter. The problem in my opinion doesn't inherently stem from increasing the reliability of certain failure or crit failure effects, so much as specific spell effects that really should not exist in those amounts.
I also feel the fix here would be fairly simple: for both slow and synesthesia, simply replace the crit fail effect with: "as failure, and the creature is stunned 1." It'd still be strong, but wouldn't eat a creature's entire turn. If you wanted to get into more detail, you could have creatures make saves each round to end the conditions on the failure effect for both, and only make the effects last the full duration uninterrupted on a crit fail. In either case, a Magus or whoever else forcing a crit fail effect would no longer be able to trivialize a boss encounter, even if those spells would still remain strong.
Several iterations of Champions have demonstrated in our group that a Master Hammer wielder can fairly reliably knock opponents prone with a crit, and a Frost Hammer wielder can frequently Slow them at the same time.
