Zag24's page

I am surprised that no one is arguing this from a basic game balance point of view. The obvious design of the system was that a strong warrior type who forgoes his shield defense can either use a large damage weapon (d12 or 2d6) and add 1.5 his strength bonus, or a combination of a medium damage weapon (d8 or d10) plus a low-damage weapon (d6) and still get 1.5 his strength bonus. Twisting the rules to combine the two is a cheap trick to work around the obvious game-balance intent of the rules.

Consider that, if you allowed this, a first level human barbarian could take the two-weapon fighting feat and Improved Unarmed Strike, 18 strength and 15 dex (Can be done reasonably with only a 15 point buy). When raging, he is attacking at +5 for 2d6+9 + d3+3. A first level character who can cut a fourth-level wizard in half in one round without a critical hit or anything special. If you count his attack of opportunity, he'll cut down a sixth level wizard in a single round.

I don't care if the rules-maker forgot to exclude this twisting of the rules. Just say no.

Thanks for the above. I'm pretty sure I know the answer to these followup questions, but I'll ask anyway.

My player has a 3rd level Magus, so his Spellstrike ability allows him to deliver touch attacks while thumping the poor bloke with his staff. I assume that it would work the same way for Chill Touch (and Frostbite, which has the same rules). He casts once and may make one attack that round including the thump plus one discharge of the spell. If he then invokes Cleave in the next round, he could strike twice and discharge the spell both times. Is that right?

Does anyone else find the low-to-mid level magus a little overpowered because of this? He's basically a fighter, but deals an extra d6+3 on nearly every blow. At 5th level, right before the fighters actually get an extra attack, he'll really be crushing them, with an extra d6+5 damage, and only a little bit behind them in attack roll.

Well, I guess, since he can't really afford to pump his strength that high, I guess it's not as bad as I thought at first. An 18-strength fighter with a greatsword is doing almost as much damage as he is.

Sorry to pile on, but a related question just occurred to me. Because he is now using the weapon to deliver the spell, he is no longer going against the touch AC of the opponent (as he would be if delivering the spell like a wizard), but the normal AC. Correct? Or does the only the weapon attack go against the normal AC and the magic attack still ignore armor?

I am confused as to why the Channel Energy ability for Clerics is based on charisma. Not only the number of uses per day but also the saving throw! All other saving throws of clerical actions are based on Wisdom, the cleric's prime attribute.

When I first saw this in the SRD, I thought it was a copy/paste error from Paladin or Oracle, which have charisma is their prime attribute. But looking in my book, it seems to be the same.

Is this a typo? Can someone explain the reasoning behind this.

my wizard and a sorc managed to take down the party bbeg with fly and acid splash, it beats spell resistance, and the monster was busy eating the paladin and the fighter, and in the end it was too much to roll for like 700 rounds but there was nothing I could do except swat the air like some sort of innefectual godzilla. has acid rained down upon my already grotesque face!!!

You could have found a cave or somewhere else that they couldn't float out of reach. Range on Acid Splash is pretty short, so they have to come within missile range to do it. If they stay high and just let it rain down, it will be ineffective because it is too dispersed. The bottom line is that a good GM will prevent players from exploiting rules in an unintended way.

Personally, I love the 0-level spells being unlimited, because it lets players use minor magic for role-playing purposes and not feel that they are wasting something that might be useful later. My hard-drinking druid uses a tiny flame cantrip to light his cigars. My fastidious drag-queen wizard can use a mage hand to poke through the pockets of his victims, since touching them would be "so terribly revolting. Oh please, darling, I'll just stay over here."

I'm playing a spell-caster and we're on a ship in a really terrible storm, when (of course) some huge tentacles appear coming up over the side. I tried to cast a spell, and my GM said that I needed to make a concentration check at DC 21, which my first level character would need to be pretty lucky to get off. I'm ok with this, though it is the first game I've been in where they actually bother with concentration checks.

The the archer shoots the thing with his bow. Ummm, what? Mumbling a few words and making gestures with one hand while I'm holding on to the mast with my other arm seems a lot easier (on the badly rolling deck) than using both hands to nock an arrow, draw a bow, and release with anything like aim.

So, is there an equivalent of concentration for using a bow?

Fair enough. I was comparing different categories. However, the draconic sorcerer does not do 1d4, he does 2d4, because he has two claws. I agree though that it is tougher to work with, because he has to be in melee, and is fighting the real AC, not the touch AC.

However, I don't see that the ability to change my fireball to be an iceball is anywhere near as useful as just adding +5 to its damage. There are very few things that take extra damage from cold -- I might meet two of them in a year. The +1/damage die affects against every single enemy the draconic sorcerer meets.

As an aside, is it appropriate to be adding the +1/damage die to burning hands, which is only a first level spell and only uses d4's not d6's?

It's not meant to be your signature ability. It's meant to replace your light crossbow. In other words, when you don't have anything better to do, you can still contribute with "magic" instead of a mundane weapon.

Ahh. So, you're saying that it's something I'm intended never to use. Thanks for the info. I wonder if it isn't too late to convince my GM to let me change to a useful bloodline -- role-playing be darned.

Hi,

I had the same question. Thanks for the info, but doesn't that make the ability fairly useless beyond, say, 5th level? Even if it were interpreted as "(1d6 points of damage of your energy type + 1) for every two sorcerer levels," which is what I originally assumed when I chose the bloodline, it's not terribly impressive. It doesn't even always hit! With my lousy BAB and -1 dex modifier, it only hits about a third of the time.

3d6+3 is still pretty lame damage for a 6th level character to be dishing out, and if it really is only 1d6+3 he's never going to use it. A magic missile at that level does 3d4+3, and always hits. If the ray were a swift action, then, at d6+3, it would seem reasonable. As a standard action it is just useless.

Compare this to the draconic bloodline, for instance, which gets +1 per die of damage ADDED to any spell using the right energy type. This means that my 5th level sorcerer is adding an extra +5 to his fireball (or the 1st level burning hands, or others), from his bloodline ability. Fireball is an area effect spell, so the +5 is potentially dishing out 15 or 25 or more extra points of damage overall. And this is IN ADDITION to his fireball, so it's the equivalent of a free action.

The pathetic little elemental sorcerer, on the other hand, gets to do less damage, and only to a single target, INSTEAD OF casting a spell.

Am I missing something? Did I just cripple myself by choosing a bloodline power based on role-playing instead of min-maxing?

Just a comment about a simple web standard: If your primary URL is just paizo.com, then you should redirect www.paizo.com to it. The latter currently doesn't go anywhere.

A little-known feature of all browsers is that Ctrl-Enter in the URL bar will prepend "http://www." and append ".com" to whatever you have already typed. That is, one can just type (in the URL bar) "paizo" and hit Ctrl-Enter, and it will go to http://www.paizo.com . Unfortunately, for you guys, that doesn't go anywhere.