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Do you guys have any idea what he's talking about?
Glitterdust comes to mind. :)
Many of the Save or Die (SoD) and Save or Suck (SoS) spells were changed to allow repeated saves so they don't have as big of a swingy effect on combat.
As for what the current crop of broken spells is, I'm not there yet. :)
I was talking to a buddy the other day about how great a time I'm having playing Pathfinder recently, and he responded "of course you are, you play a wizard, Pathfinder fixed a few of the broken spells from 3.5, but not all of them, and they made/broke a lot more!" now I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out which spells he means, all he tells me is "just google broken pathfinder spells" and I cannot come up with anything! Do you guys have any idea what he's talking about?
I think, basically, there are three possibilities:
1) Your buddy is the closest real-life alternative of an internet troll or
2) Your buddy thinks he understood what the good spells were in 3.5 and why, but actually didn't.
3) Your buddy thinks he understands how the good spells changed in PF, but has somehow gotten it wrong.
I'll be the first to say Pathfinder isn't perfectly balanced, but the rewrite of the core spells came about as close to the mark in one shot as possible.
Here is a list of the spells that I felt were the most powerful compared with similar spells of the same level. I left the highest level spells off the list because well, they are almost all really powerful.
A lot of folks posted other spells, but there wasn't much of a consensus, and no one really offered up any surprises. I'm hoping that someone who plays a lot of high level casters can fill in some of the highest spell level choices.
While it is hard to to balance a game where one character can cast Wish, Miracle, or Time Stop, I think Paizo did about as good a job as you could and still have it be the same game as "back in the day".
Besides the big 3 9th level monstrosities (miracle, wish, time stop) the broken spells are largely related to the SoS spells that didn't get nerfed enough. Most of the SoD spells got hammered in some ways but for many people the ability to stunlock a NPC is equal to insta-gibbing them.
Basically it comes down to being able to cast single round insta-gib spells with a high enough Save DC that they become automatic or close to automatic vs non-optimized foes. Some people feel that Pathfinder did enough to discourage this tactic whereas others feel that SoS/SoD headhunting is still the optimal playstyle.
It seems to me that there are far more spells nerfed than there are spells that are "broken." In fact, many spells are so feeble compared to other more obvious choices for their spell level that few PCs would ever select them, let alone spend valuable time n' resources casting them in combat. This usually narrows most viable spell lists down to a dozen or so no-brainers and the rest are just seldom selected filler. I don't think your friend knows what he's talking about.
Do you guys have any idea what he's talking about?
Sounds like he's trying to pass off his possibly uninformed opinion as established fact, and then using appeals to the Internet's presumptive authority to browbeat you into accepting his opinion.
Just a guess.
I googled the topic, and all I could find was this post:
http://samhaine.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/dd-3-5pathfinder-overpowered-spell s/
I would disagree with some of his choices, (resist energy?) but he did remind me of one spell that does seem way too good - Silence.
In close quarters this spell effectively totally shuts down casters, but not spell like abilities. You can't read a scroll, use a wand or staff (I think). Also, silence is the ultimate ready-vs.-casting counterspell.
perhaps, he usually is pretty on the ball when it comes to RPGs though...
Well, even the brightest are prone to error. :)
The problem with the adjective "overpowered" is that it almost always has no objective criteria to support the judgement. Instead, "overpowered" almost always means "I think this is overpowered."
I once banned a class because I would be too tempted as a GM to abuse it....
^^^ The Assassin? ^^^
The problem with the adjective "overpowered" is that it almost always has no objective criteria to support the judgement. Instead, "overpowered" almost always means "I think this is overpowered."
Normally I would totally agree with you. Most over/under-powered discussions are comparing things with so many externalities that conclusions become meaningless without a very specific situation to apply it to. While spells are situational, there is a clear ranking system - spell level - that means there is a small group of direct comparisons. We can also as compare arcane vs divine, or specific class vs class. There was even a whole section in the 3.5 DMG about balancing newly created spells.
I think a great example is the Blight spell. If you compare Blight with another 5th level Sor/Wiz spell - Cone of Cold, you will find that the only real advantage of Blight is the ability to kill a single non-sentient plant. As I have never found a time when this would be useful, I must conclude that Cone of Cold is a better spell.
A spell that seems to stand head and shoulders above the others of its level is Protection from Evil. This spell grants total immunity to something like 2 dozen different spells from Charm Person to Dominate Monster (assuming they come from an evil source) as well as several other benefits. There is no other lower level spell in the game that comes close to granting such a broad immunity.
Thanks for the plug, Fergie :) .
I think that post gets a lot more traffic from players looking for the more powerful spells in the game. If I had it to write over again, it might instead be titled "Pathfinder spells with which to surprise and annoy your GM."
My campaign didn't get quite to the point where there were a lot of SoD or SoS spells getting thrown around. Instead, whenever I'd have a spellcaster enemy, it seemed like the first couple of spells he'd get off would be completely ignored or minimized by utility spells and buffs the Theurge had on hand. And by that point, the monk had made it to grappling range or the archery ranger had already taken him out via lots of burst damage. Effectively, they're mostly the list of spells that turned theoretically imposing enemy casters into speedbumps because I wasn't prepared to circumvent them (or didn't think the caster would be prepared for them in character).
That said, I do think there was a lot of unnecessary creep into those spells to make them more powerful than they used to be (though a lot of that creep was 3.5, not Pathfinder specifically). The level of negation Protection from Alignment has taken on over the years, specifically, tends to make it a must-have buff.
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I was talking to a buddy the other day about how great a time I'm having playing Pathfinder recently, and he responded "of course you are, you play a wizard, Pathfinder fixed a few of the broken spells from 3.5, but not all of them, and they made/broke a lot more!" now I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out which spells he means, all he tells me is "just google broken pathfinder spells" and I cannot come up with anything! Do you guys have any idea what he's talking about?I think, basically, there are three possibilities:
1) Your buddy is the closest real-life alternative of an internet troll or
2) Your buddy thinks he understood what the good spells were in 3.5 and why, but actually didn't.
3) Your buddy thinks he understands how the good spells changed in PF, but has somehow gotten it wrong.
I'll be the first to say Pathfinder isn't perfectly balanced, but the rewrite of the core spells came about as close to the mark in one shot as possible.
I vote for all three. Especially the first one.
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Except they really don't. When a combat takes two rounds, even if they save on the second they're still going down. And of course you're casting on the first.
I'm not seeing combats take that short very often. If your group's gaming style goes in for longer combats, then the repeated saves come into their own. YMMV.
And even when the level of system mastery all around is low, 1-2 just changes to 2-3. It's slower sure, but it's not long.
With all due respect, if combats are always 1-2 rounds, system mastery or no, your DM isn't very good at putting challenging encounters together.
And that's fine, but it doesn't make everyone else who posts here an idiot.
PF nerfed all the wrong spells. Except probably Forcecage. They reduced death effects to merely doing damage, even though a blanked immunity to [Death] was relatively easy to obtain; but Enchantment spells that make people worse than dead are as powerful as ever. Of course, a blanket immunity to them always was even more accessible, but still. And Charm Person is vastly more problematic than every [Death] spell combined, simply because it is accessible to vastly more PCs (not many campaigns even last long enough for anyone to cast Finger of Death).
For that matter, Flesh to Stone still kills people outright. And it was actually one of the few single-target SoDs worth casting regularly in 3.X (because immunity to petrification was relatively uncommon).
Then they shafted spells that actually encouraged tactical cooperation between casters and physical attackers, like Grease and Glitterdust. But as far as I'm aware, battlefiled control that is mostly useful to casters operating alone, like Solid Fog and Wall of X, is untouched.
And of big campaign-breakers only Astral Projection was meaningfully nerfed (into uselessness).
...Or the players just throw a save or lose every turn until it sticks.
I'm familiar with that style of play. I'll say it again: your DM doesn't know how to make encounters to challenge you.
Humanoid NPCs have really bad saves. Monsters have a little better but usually have a crippling weakpoint in either Fortitude or Will.
Why don't the monsters have class levels?
Why don't these enemies have buff spells that help their saves or render spells weaker/useless?
Why don't these things have the save feats or other sources of rerolls?
Why aren't you ever fighting something that's immune to one of your save or loses, possibly without initially realizing it?
Why aren't enemies pulling the same trick?
Why aren't there sometimes conditions that make your preferred strategies problematic?
etc.
The game's got its flaws, true, but the way you describe your play, it's pretty clearly experienced players making reasonably optimized characters and running roughshod over a DM who doesn't know how to make things interesting regardless. Which, again, is fine if it's fun for you, but it doesn't make everyone else who posts here an idiot.
But as far as I'm aware, battlefiled control that is mostly useful to casters operating alone, like Solid Fog and Wall of X, is untouched.
Nope. Those spells got it too.
Solid Fog was nerfed harder than anything I can think of, excepting Forcecage.
Wall of Force has hit points and can be beat down now. It still might well be too good but it definitely got reduced.