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I'm not a fancy big city lawyer, but it seems to me that Spell Combat just isn't working the way I think it was intended to work. Even though it tries to up the number of actions that a Magus can perform on a given turn, it also causes them to have a number of problems such as a 15-minute work day, failure to cast successfully, and a fairly large penalty on subsequent attack rolls.
Honestly, something about this just isn't that fun. I hate losing spells, and worse is that I hate to miss in combat. It's frustrating to waste a turn AND lose a spell. Especially at lower levels, where you don't have many spell resources to spend.
One solution I see, and has been said before, is to move Spell Combat to a higher level where the penalties are less burdensome. They really do make the class less enjoyable at lower levels, where you'd like to use the ability but have trouble with it. Moving it could be the solution.
I, however, think that maybe the ability should be replaced. Certain domains, spell schools, and bloodlines give extra spell-like powers to augment a character at lower level, such as Dazing Touch in the enchantment school for a wizard. I'm thinking that these might be the solution.
If the Magus had an ability to gain spell-like or supernatural touch attacks that it could channel through its Spell Strike ability as free actions or even just move actions this would also increase the action economy of the Magus and allow its most flavorful ability to shine a little more. A variety of abilities could be possible here: extra elemental damage, something similar to stunning fist, dazing touch... yada.
I'm getting together with a friend Monday night, I'll playtest this some then and report my comparison. I am also wondering what others would think of something like this instead of Spell Combat or if anyone had a similar idea.
Exactly what I was thinking! I posted about it a few days ago but it got ignored. Here, I copied my text from my post here so you can see my early thoughts. Also here is a link to a thread I made where I rearrange the class abilities to support this idea an introduce an arcane pool concept to help limit it.
Kortz suggested in a thread a change to arcane strike that didn't involve channeling at all. I like the idea but it seems to rooted in the rogues sneak attack and is just a damage increase able to bypass certain DR. I propose something similar that involves granting the weapon abilities a number of rounds per day, similar to a barbarians rage powers or rogue talents. These would be abilities that could be used 3+int modifier rounds per day.
Examples:
Fatiguing strike: When you make a successful melée attack against an opponent he must make a fortitude save or be fatigued 1/round per Caster level. Ala touch of fatigue.
Paralyzingly Blow: When you make a successful melée attack against an opponent he must make a will save equal to DC or be paralyzed for 1/round per caster level. Each round on it's turn the subject may attempt a new save to end the effect. "essentially hold person"
Make the DC's static based off a spell level. You could make more powerful strikes later that mirror other spell like effects. Balancing could be done by dropping spells per day keeping with the flavor of spellstrike as written but hopefully that's not necessary.
These abilities are examples and are arbitrary. I'm not saying they are balanced in any way but are merely suggestion to show an idea.
I like the idea of a mix of Kortz's idea and yours, Seeker. I'm thinking something along the lines of you get dice that level up, and the ability to sacrifice one or more dice to pickup a "rider" effect, like fatigue, daze, paralysis, etc.
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Well, we only managed to get together for the playtest for a short time. We ran a short PvP to start getting a feel for it, but only proved that Glitterdust is an awesome spell through that.
:(
We built our characters each at 5th level with 5th level wealth. We built a variety of Magi, but only played with these two. My friend built an Elf Magus, I built a human.
We both looked at dwarves and and elves for better weapons than the Magus currently has. Dwarven Waraxe and Elven Curved Blades turned out to be favorites, but MAD made the Rapier on our human builds seem nearly as effective over the course of the fight.
Spell Combat against a blind opponent (Glitterdust) works really well (duh). The loss of dex and the extra -2 to AC made hitting with nearly every attack very easy. Though the blindness only lasted 5 rounds, it was enough. It proved to me that the right penalties on an opponent can make all the difference in the world.
The blindness brought up another issue that we had with our playtest though. We hadn't figured out how we were going to do HP. My friend maximized his HP, while I had only averaged it. 55 versus 41 (I also took toughness). Still, the Blindness prevented him from hitting me at all, even on a critical hit and it only took 5 rounds to bring him down even having failed a concentration check and losing a Shocking Grasp in the process. By the end, however, I was out of useful spells for the combat. I had purposefully chosen some less than optimal spells and no cantrips for spamming with spell strike.