Bypassing emergency force sphere

[blahpers]

It's an emergency, so you have to pick the 5'-radius hemisphere of organs you value the most.

[The Mad Comrade]

blahpers wrote:

It's an emergency, so you have to pick the 5'-radius hemisphere of organs you value the most.

"What about our legs? We don't need those!"

[Kayerloth]

All jesting aside the issue stems from the rules being written primarily from a two dimensional point of view. Many medium sized creature would not fit within a 5ft cube. Heads, arms, carried weapons and gear are all very likely sticking out of the space. The spell is fairly clearly designed to protect a medium sized caster (or smaller) from head to toe while on a 'reasonably' flat surface. Being on rough surfaces or worse the side of a steep slope (where something like a rockslide or avalanche is probably more likely rather than flat ground) it is far more problematic. For a more realistic 3D world, particularly outdoors, it has some real problems working as stated by RAW.

[Cavall]

Holy crap.

I think I got you an answer.

you're gunna need a reach weapon.

[RealAlchemy]

A magus with dispelling strike is an option.
So is a very rude school savant (teleportation subschool) arcanist using shift as a swift action and dimensional slide as a move, leaving the standard action to do something really nasty inside the force sphere like stinking cloud or cloudkill.

[Cavall]

Seriously. Imp. Impaling crit. With a reach weapon the weapon breaks the 5 foot radius. So a wall can't be continuous. And a wizard would have to make a grapple check vs the fighter to pull it out. Which is.. unlikely.

[Kayerloth]

Cavall wrote:

Seriously. Imp. Impaling crit. With a reach weapon the weapon breaks the 5 foot radius. So a wall can't be continuous. And a wizard would have to make a grapple check vs the fighter to pull it out. Which is.. unlikely.

Depends a bit on what character levels are involved and whether the Impaling Ftr actually gets the initiative to strike first (i.e. catch the caster flat footed) and then actually manages to impale the caster. By the time you have a +13 BAB you are into 7th level spells, not far off from things such as Moment of Prescience (which either make the caster much harder to hit or harder to grapple). And going first while they are flat-footed changes the whole battle opening up many other tactics for a melee opponent. The trick is finding something that'll work while in the 6th to 11th level character range or so, deals with it rapidly so the EFS caster doesn't have multiple rounds to do whatever they want and ideally doesn't turn you into a one trick pony either.

Unless I misunderstand dispelling strike that won't work, you can't dispel a Wall of Force and therefore can't dispel the EFS.

[Xenocrat]

Cavall wrote:

Seriously. Imp. Impaling crit. With a reach weapon the weapon breaks the 5 foot radius. So a wall can't be continuous. And a wizard would have to make a grapple check vs the fighter to pull it out. Which is.. unlikely.

Most problematic uses of EFS involve preempting the attack in the first place, so it wouldn't hit and wouldn't have any effect.

[Cavall]

Well yeah, it's a hit them first before they act deal. But it would work.

[Cavall]

I would imagine taking a free intimidate action attack with shattered defense would make him flat footed until end of next turn. No immediate too.