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Other than the Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus feats, are there any other ways for a spellcaster to improve / increase his saving throw DCs for spells he casts?
I'm playing a 10th level caster and I'm starting to get a bit bummed out how often monsters and other foes seem to make their saves against my spells ...
Other than the Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus feats, are there any other ways for a spellcaster to improve / increase his saving throw DCs for spells he casts?
I'm playing a 10th level caster and I'm starting to get a bit bummed out how often monsters and other foes seem to make their saves against my spells ...
Heighten Spell feat springs to mind. Otherwise, I think that's about it, short of playing a gnome (+1 DC to illusion magic).
EDIT: That, and raising your prime requisite (spellcasting ability) scores.
Stat Boosting Buffs for your primary casting attribute?
Dude, I played a wizard for two years from level 1 to level 20. I can tell you, right now, that the higher you get the more often your enemies will save. It's downright frustrating, and you're going to have to learn to deal with it.
However, since that's not even remotely helpful (or a proper response to your original question), here are some suggestions:
- Learn to identify an enemy's higher and lower saves. Meat bags generally have low will saves, squishy caster sorts usually have low fort saves, and blobby slow movers tend to suck at reflex saves. Doing this in-character, via common sense and 10 levels of spellcasting experience, will help you avoid metagaming.
- Switch to no-save spells. Rays, summonings, and crowd control spells like the Wall series are great choices.
- Be more careful with your spell selection. Only cast multi-target save spells to help ensure you'll have a failed save or two.
- Inflicting status effects & debuffs will drive enemy saves down quickly, and many stack. Sickened, staggered, shaken, prone, grappled, and entangled are among my favorites and usually easy to inflict. Intimidating an enemy is a quick -2 to saves, which is the equivalent to 2 feats.
Hope any of that helps.
As stated above the main ways to increase the DC are Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus. Heighten Spell and increasing your INT/WIS/CHA also work.
Aside from those knowing your enemy and picking a spell that is more likely to affect them will help a lot. Plus don't forget about things that lower a targets saves. Things like negative levels, shaken condition, Prayer, will all help.
But Save DC's are the main reason that a primary caster usually has to have the very highest casting stat possible. I would also expect there to be some new stuff in the upcoming APG that may help as I think there will be feats that mirror, or take inspiration from, the Archmage powers of old.