Spells and duration

[Dekalinder]

Invisibility, 1 minute. Wild Shape, 1 minute. Unseen servant, 1 minute. Is there any spell in this damn rulebook that has not been demoted to a glorified encounter power for a tactical wargame?
I want my damn narrative agency back in my spells, else i'll be playing warhammer.

/rant

[Joe Hex]

Suggestion, 1 minute.

[JDragon_ITTS]

Along with the shortening of duration they have made a number of spells concentration.

Concentration takes an action each round to keep it going. The biggest impact I see is on Summon Monster/ Nature's Ally. They are concentration and three actions to cast, so you will only ever have 1 creature out.

[Alyran]

JDragon_ITTS wrote:

Along with the shortening of duration they have made a number of spells concentration.

Concentration takes an action each round to keep it going. The biggest impact I see is on Summon Monster/ Nature's Ally. They are concentration and three actions to cast, so you will only ever have 1 creature out.

I suppose you could Summon on the first turn, then the next turn cast a quickened Summon and use your third action to concentrate on the first monster.

[JDragon_ITTS]

Alyran wrote:

JDragon_ITTS wrote:

Along with the shortening of duration they have made a number of spells concentration.

Concentration takes an action each round to keep it going. The biggest impact I see is on Summon Monster/ Nature's Ally. They are concentration and three actions to cast, so you will only ever have 1 creature out.

I suppose you could Summon on the first turn, then the next turn cast a quickened Summon and use your third action to concentrate on the first monster.

True, and there is Effortless Concentration that allows you to get one free Concentration at the beginning of your turn (14th level Feat).

Until 14th or 8th with the Quickened Casting (1/day though) you can only have 1 creature out and I think I would be hard pressed at those levels to use a 1/day ability to get a second monster on the board.

* * * *
Another change with Concentration is how easy it is to have a spell disrupted. Only takes taking your level or higher in damage. no save/roll to keep it.

[Emeric Tusan]

I feel like they could use encounter mode and exploration mode to fix a lot of these spells. You make the current duration for encounter mode and bump up the other spells to either 10 minutes or just till exploration mode ends.

[Iziak]

This is honestly the thing that I'm most disappointed by in 2E from what I've seen so far. I like many of the changes, and there's a few (like certain uses of resonance) that don't make sense to me but which I can deal with easily enough. This though? What happened to transforming into a cat (pest form) to do a bit of eavesdropping? What happened to summoning up an unseen servant to wait tables at a fancy dinner? These are commonplace uses of such spells. If power level is the concern, maybe they could require resources of some sort to maintain (maybe something like spending additional spell slots to extend the duration before it runs out), but simply hard-capping these sorts of spells to 1 minute makes them essentially useless outside of combat scenarios, which is the exact sort of issue D&D 4e had with its spellcasting. I mostly play low-combat games. Possession may have had a ridiculously long duration in 1E, but limiting it down to 1 minute (or even to the heightened 10 minutes) makes it useless for any of the interesting sorts of subterfuge it provided - the very sort of thing many people would think of when thinking about what such magic can do.

[Kodyboy]

I agree the summoning spells the duration needs to with scale with level or be an hour or something like that.

[Alyran]

Kodyboy wrote:

I agree the summoning spells the duration needs to with scale with level or be an hour or something like that.

I'll have to disagree here. I think summon spells will still be very powerful overall, so out of all the spells that could use a duration boost, this isn't one of them.

[Red Griffyn]

Alyran wrote:

Kodyboy wrote:

I agree the summoning spells the duration needs to with scale with level or be an hour or something like that.

I'll have to disagree here. I think summon spells will still be very powerful overall, so out of all the spells that could use a duration boost, this isn't one of them.

I put a summoning statblock excel file up here for people's review (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2vafm?Summoning-Aid-and-Observations).

However, the spell has been nerfed in many ways:

1. You can't have more than one creature out (whether through summoning a lower level creature with a higher level spell, having multiple summons, or having a non concentration duration). The one exception is a wizard who appears to get get a few options at very high levels to improve action economy.

2. The creature can't act autonomously and it doesn't get a full round of actions.

3. The actual creatures being summoned are below level. It is probably okay for the first few levels, but at higher level you get a L15 creature for a L10 spell (this is well below the lowest CR you're expected to face which is a L16 creature). This is true for most creatures you're summoning. Its made worse by the fact that lower level summons become irrelevant because you can't get multiple summons and they can't be expected to hit anything at your actual level.

4. Because of the new definition of hostile actions, you can't even stay safe via sanctuary or invisibility, etc. while summoning because these count as indirectly hostile actions.

I think the duration on spells is a huge issue for the playtest. To lose # of spells per day, to lose power in spells, and to lose duration makes spell casters super nerfed. On the other hand you have martials who will be able to get out multiple attacks per round with no multi-attack penalty (i.e., double slice, furious focus, etc.) while casters are stuck with scaling cantrips that take 2 actions to complete.