Blink has a spell has got me a bit confused. There's so much talked about in the spell description.
Here's the spell.
"You "blink" quickly back and forth between the Material Plane and the Ethereal Plane and look as though you're winking in and out of reality at random. Blink has several effects, as follows.
Physical attacks against you have a 50% miss chance, and the Blind-Fight feat doesn't help opponents, since you're ethereal and not merely invisible. If the attack is capable of striking ethereal creatures, the miss chance is only 20% (for concealment).
If the attacker can see invisible creatures, the miss chance is also only 20%. (For an attacker who can both see and strike ethereal creatures, there is no miss chance.) Likewise, your own attacks have a 20% miss chance, since you sometimes go ethereal just as you are about to strike.
Any individually targeted spell has a 50% chance to fail against you while you're blinking unless your attacker can target invisible, ethereal creatures. Your own spells have a 20% chance to activate just as you go ethereal, in which case they typically do not affect the Material Plane (but they might affect targets on the Ethereal Plane).
While blinking, you take only half damage from area attacks (but full damage from those that extend onto the Ethereal Plane). Although you are only partially visible, you are not considered invisible and targets retain their Dexterity bonus to AC against your attacks. You do receive a +2 bonus on attack rolls made against enemies that cannot see invisible creatures.
You take only half damage from falling, since you fall only while you are material.
While blinking, you can step through (but not see through) solid objects. For each 5 feet of solid material you walk through, there is a 50% chance that you become material. If this occurs, you are shunted off to the nearest open space and take 1d6 points of damage per 5 feet so traveled.
Since you spend about half your time on the Ethereal Plane, you can see and even attack ethereal creatures. You interact with ethereal creatures roughly the same way you interact with material ones.
An ethereal creature is invisible, incorporeal, and capable of moving in any direction, even up or down. As an incorporeal creature, you can move through solid objects, including living creatures.
An ethereal creature can see and hear the Material Plane, but everything looks gray and insubstantial. Sight and hearing on the Material Plane are limited to 60 feet.
Force effects and abjurations affect you normally. Their effects extend onto the Ethereal Plane from the Material Plane, but not vice versa. An ethereal creature can't attack material creatures, and spells you cast while ethereal affect only other ethereal things. Certain material creatures or objects have attacks or effects that work on the Ethereal Plane. Treat other ethereal creatures and objects as material."
I -think- it does the following.
1. You gain a 50% miss chance against melee, reduced to 20% if someone can see invisible creatures. Blindsight is no help.
2. You gain a 50% chance for enemy targeted spells to fail, reduced to 20% if someone can see invisible creatures or affect the ethereal plane. This is completed negated by force effects since they affect both planes.
3. You take half damage from area attacks.
4. You can step through solids at risk of being shunted.
5. You can attack Ethereals.
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Those are pretty basic. Here's where it gets tricky.
"the Blind-Fight feat doesn't help opponents, since you're ethereal and not merely invisible."
Okay great, so we are ethereal.
"An ethereal creature is invisible, incorporeal, and capable of moving in any direction, even up or down. As an incorporeal creature, you can move through solid objects, including living creatures."
Excellent. So blink has a built in fly that's not really a fly. And we are invisible and incorporeal, so non magic weapons won't do anything.
"Although you are only partially visible, you are not considered invisible and targets retain their Dexterity bonus to AC against your attacks. You do receive a +2 bonus on attack rolls made against enemies that cannot see invisible creatures."
Wait! I thought I was ethereal, which also makes me invisible and incorporeal!
"You take only half damage from falling, since you fall only while you are material."
Wait! How can I take falling damage if I can move any direction I want, to include down or up?
Correction to #1: the miss chance is for any physical attack, melee or not.
For the rest, you are only ethereal about half the time, at random. That's why, for instance, you take half falling damage: while material you fall, while ethereal you don't, you end up hitting the ground more slowly than you would if purely material.
Does that make more sense?
It does, at least, help explain that part.
What about invisibility? Is that a thing you get? What about the immunity to non magic weapons for being incorporeal?
blink should not be confused with just being ethereal. The effect is rapid and constant, so your character looks like a really bad hologram. When the miss chance occurs it's because there's a chance that you'll "sputter" out of existence right when their attack is about to connect not because they don't know where to aim.
Certainly you can move in an upward direction, but you won't stay in the air. It's a weird byproduct of things being handled round by round. You can move your movement rate (say 30 feet) straight up. But unless you end your movement on solid ground you would then fall 30 feet back down taking half of the 3d6 falling damage. I imagine the sensation would be like running up a crumbling stairway only to have it completely disappear once you get to the top and then falling through several nets(that break right after slowing you slightly) before hitting the bottom. Not as bad as a straight fall but still unpleasant and a bit jarring.
You're invisible about half the time, going back and forth quickly but randomly; the benefits of this are included in what they explicitly spell out, so you shouldn't need to look up invisibility. Similarly, when you're ethereal (and thus incorporeal) physical weapons don't hit you whether they're magic or not; the impact of that is summed up in the 50% miss chance your enemies have.
LordKailas, you think you switch between material and ethereal on a round-by-round basis? I've always assumed a much higher frequency. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said about movement.
You're invisible about half the time, going back and forth quickly but randomly; the benefits of this are included in what they explicitly spell out, so you shouldn't need to look up invisibility. Similarly, when you're ethereal (and thus incorporeal) physical weapons don't hit you whether they're magic or not; the impact of that is summed up in the 50% miss chance your enemies have.
LordKailas, you think you switch between material and ethereal on a round-by-round basis? I've always assumed a much higher frequency. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said about movement.
The switch isn't round per round, it's much much quicker than that. However, the spell blink re-iterates the fact that ethereal creatures can move in any direction. Which seems to indicate that the blink spell "also" lets you do this. This makes sense to me since I see it as your character "pushing off" in the moments that they are ethereal. you would still have enough upward momentum to make progress, but only while you're moving. Once you stop moving you would immediately fall back to the ground again.
I could possibly see the argument that you can jump twice as high/far for the same reason as taking less falling damage, but you're flipping randomly between gavity and no gravity.
That should rather be 50% chance to jump twice as high/far, and 50% chance to waste the action, as you're ethereal at the moment of pushoff.
The spell also stacks with Displacement and Mirror Image.
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The spell also stacks with Displacement and Mirror Image.
If you don't mind the GM throwing books at you.
It could work, yes. But I recommend against it. I played a scenario once, around level 7-8 I think, with a lot of serpentfolk enemies in it. They had blur and mirror image. Several PCs had multiple attacks. It was a nightmare. First you roll to hit, then you see if you hit an image or a real enemy, then you check miss chance. And wait, do the images have a miss chance as well? What order should we roll in? Hey, I've got 5 natural attacks, how many dice do you want me to roll now?
That's actually pretty accurate and reasonable, but since you're timing the jump I'd say it's probably more like a 20% chance you fail for the same reason as the attack rolls and such being easier for you to time than the enemy.
Oh, yeah, that sounds fair!
I believe they mention that you can move in any direction whilst ethereal so you don't fall through the floor/deck/ground when you "blink". Not as a mini flight ability.