Wizard Admixture School and Ultimate Wilderness Snowball

[ZettaC]

In Ultimate Wilderness, Snowball was updated to be an evocation spell with the cold and water descriptors, that deals cold damage.

The Admixture Wizard School grants the following ability: When you cast an evocation spell that does acid, cold, electricity, or fire damage, you may change the damage dealt to one of the other four energy types. This changes the descriptor of the spell to match the new energy type.

Since the ability only mentions changing the selected(cold) damage and descriptor into the new(electricity) damage and descriptor, would Snowball still have the water descriptor?

My character has abilities that care if a spell has the water descriptor or not so I need to know.

[Brew Bird]

Yeah, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't keep the water descriptor. That descriptor is unrelated to the damage the spell is doing, so it shouldn't change.

[Trish Megistos]

RAW it makes sense, but I don't think this was the intention.

[Brew Bird]

I don't know, a snowball is frozen water (water+cold). I don't see why a clever wizard couldn't make it into a ball of electrically charged water, or a jet of steam, or a glob of pool water with an off-balance pH.

[Trish Megistos]

That seems fair.

[Claxon]

The more interesting part of this is that Snowball is now an evocation spell, which means it should allow for spell resistance.

This will disappoint many of my players; but make me happy as a GM.

[Rysky]

Yep.

[Claxon]

Honestly, I've honestly often felt that the majority of damaging spells that are conjuration instead of evocation were BS. What's the difference between "evoking a bead of fire" which explodes into a fireball and "conjuring a supernaturally cold snowball" in terms of how the magic works? To me there is no reasonable difference, and most of the damaging conjuration spells should just be evocation spells.

My only thought is some designer someplace decided "I'm going to get past spell resistance by changing the school to conjuration, heh heh heh."

[Azothath]

ZettaC wrote:

In Ultimate Wilderness, Snowball was updated to be an evocation spell with the cold and water descriptors, that deals cold damage.

The Admixture Wizard School grants the following ability: When you cast an evocation spell that does acid, cold, electricity, or fire damage, you may change the damage dealt to one of the other four energy types. This changes the descriptor of the spell to match the new energy type.

Since the ability only mentions changing the selected(cold) damage and descriptor into the new(electricity) damage and descriptor, would Snowball still have the water descriptor?....

yes. The ability only swaps out the [cold] descriptor.

It's a sideways boon for aquan/water creatures.

Snowball 1st. Save: none {ranged touch}, SR:Yes.
Flurry of Snowballs 2nd seems unaffected. Save: Rflx for dmg/2, SR:no.

musings: the original from People of the North seems to have been more druidical themed which would explain the write up. Both could have been bumped up a spell level given the SR:no.

[Perfect Tommy]

Flurry of snowballs is additionally broken; however as it doesn't scale its a problem from level 3 to maybe 7, and tails off as an issue.