Zyrelion's page

As I mentioned before the Technomancer can cast a spell that deals 13d12 to 1 primary target and up to 10 secondary targets. That's a lot of damage. More than any Solider or Solarion can deal in a single turn. If Technomancer can do that sort of thing at will (or nearly at will) then magic dominates the game. And that's just with regard to damage, not all the other thing that magic can do.

If we assume an encounter has 11 clustered monsters with electric items and they don't save, average damage would be 939 per cast.

But then we'd also want to assume soldiers and solarians are doing 300 dpr every round to infinity, and every encounter with fewer than 4 monsters, or spread out a bit, would result in casters doing lower damage even with infinite spell casts.

Cherry picking half truths is amusing, but it doesn't seem like an honest effort to address the problem posed in this thread.

And which fun toys is that? What things are needed that can only exist in a 7-9 spell slot but also won't break the game?

I'm thinking a "fun toy" could be the ability to cast spells or do magic-like activities effectively in combat for more than one minute per day.

On a related note, a bit more spell scaling would really add to combat-viable casting options. The number of available spell slots isn't actually that bad, if the spells didn't fall off so much.

Perhaps more integration of technology into Mystic abilities, if Mystic is intended to be a hybrid caster rather than a pure caster.

No real need to add more arbitrary levels of spells.

What would your Mystic spend that on? I honestly think the answer to that will balance out any desire you have to be moderatly better at the shoot-bangs.

That's actually an interesting question. Much of this thread is about how casters should be shooting stuff due to lack of pure spellcasting ability. This is also reflected in the gear available: unless I'm missing something, there are no special magic-enhancing armors and weapons for casters.

So to improve combat effectiveness, a caster would be aiming for the best weapon possible (700K+, multiple types, at endgame) and the best armor possible (900K+, 6 upgrade slots, at endgame). Where Starfinder diverges from many other games with casters, is the casters want the same weapons and armor as non-casters. They'll use them less effectively than physical fighting classes, but there's no other way to upgrade.

If you just want to throw smoke grenades or harry/cover fire, there's no need to think about weapons. Level 1 is all you'll ever need.

Reading through this thread and others, it seems like the general advice for combat effectiveness in the non-str/dex primary classes is to get longarm proficiency and dex. Otherwise you'll end up spending most of the fights just missing every round and, other than Envoy, you won't have much of anything else to do.
With the two caster classes (especially Mystic), it's a bit weird because they don't really have hybrid-type class abilities, but players are apparently expected to build them and play them like hybrids.