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It seems like enemy health scales much faster than spell damage, too. High level combats seem to take a long time.
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I disagree. Lower level spells should be less useful than higher level spells obviously. But now all low level spells use the same spell DC as your high level spells so the lower level ones are still relevant. For example a low level burning hands can still be useful in situations like in a small room full of mummies even up to level 10 since they can still fail the DC and they would be weak to fire adding a flat damage boost to each mummy hit.
Blasting is going to be strictly a high spell slot thing, yes. Your lower ones will be better used for buffs and debuffs.
Heal has the same problem, at higher level play a low level Heal does basically nothing against player HP (except to get someone out of dying).
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Lower level spells should be situational imo.
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Spell points are certainly better than having 3 real spells, but I don't think a 1 point per level system would scale properly.
I would not like to see the total spell damage per day grow quadratic for free, again. It was disgusting for non-caster players for a long time (especially since the d20 engine tinkerers had this horribly wrong idea of overvaluing at-will options).
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Blasting is going to be strictly a high spell slot thing, yes. Your lower ones will be better used for buffs and debuffs.
Heal has the same problem, at higher level play a low level Heal does basically nothing against player HP (except to get someone out of dying).
What if you're playing a spontaneous caster and your low level spells are all attack spells rather than buffs and debuffs?
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What if you're playing a spontaneous caster and your low level spells are all attack spells rather than buffs and debuffs?Blasting is going to be strictly a high spell slot thing, yes. Your lower ones will be better used for buffs and debuffs.
Heal has the same problem, at higher level play a low level Heal does basically nothing against player HP (except to get someone out of dying).
You can always retrain low level spells whenever you gain levels.
What if you're playing a spontaneous caster and your low level spells are all attack spells rather than buffs and debuffs?Blasting is going to be strictly a high spell slot thing, yes. Your lower ones will be better used for buffs and debuffs.
Heal has the same problem, at higher level play a low level Heal does basically nothing against player HP (except to get someone out of dying).
You should probably not do that how things are set up right now, because those are just not going to scale up that well. Retraining is a thing, I think?
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Lower level spells should be situational imo.
I'd prefer every level to have a mix of situational and always-useful spells of each general category (buff, debuff, damage, control).
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Not to take away from the current discussion, but one of the larger issues with the upcoming change (at least, given what we know about it) is that enemy saves are too high, such that any reasonable increase to damage won't really matter as enemies will save for half anyway.
Again, this doesn't really matter if the increases to damage are unreasonably high, but I don't think anybody wants that. Enemy saves need to go down across the board, or there needs to be ways for casters to increase their save DCs.
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Not to take away from the current discussion, but one of the larger issues with the upcoming change (at least, given what we know about it) is that enemy saves are too high, such that any reasonable increase to damage won't really matter as enemies will save for half anyway.
Again, this doesn't really matter if the increases to damage are unreasonably high, but I don't think anybody wants that. Enemy saves need to go down across the board, or there needs to be ways for casters to increase their save DCs.
This is a known issue and will be addressed in the full release. Reworking the stats for every monster in the Playtestiary would be too much of an overhaul to do during the playtest period.
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Spell points are certainly better than having 3 real spells, but I don't think a 1 point per level system would scale properly.
A nice addition for wizards would be to let them use their spell points to spontaneously heighten spells. This would be a great option especially considering how crappy most of the school powers are. (Universalists would need to gain a pool of spell points, too, to keep pace).
Alas, this doesn't solve anything for sorcerers, who are basically crap in this edition.
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Spell points are certainly better than having 3 real spells, but I don't think a 1 point per level system would scale properly.Spheres of Power manages a sort of compromise. Broadly speaking, powers fall into one of two groups. Either the free version doesn't scale or you can spell a spell point to make it scale, or it always scales and the spell point is the difference between having to concentrate or not.For those unfamiliar with Spheres of Power: Spell Points are a daily resource pool, usually equal to Class Level + Ability Modifier. Characters can gain additional points by taking drawbacks to add things like somatic or verbal components, a casting focus, obvious magical signs, or various other limitations/penalties to their casting.
Overall, it works out quite well. The all day powers are useful enough that you never truly feel like you're out of stuff you can do (so 15 minute adventuring days really aren't a thing), while all stronger stuff has a built-in limit so your power isn't endless.
So like Focus Points?
I think that this upgrade to spells is going about things the wrong way. I do not so much think that the scaling issue with blasting spells is their raw damage output at the heightened level. The scaling issue is that a character's lower-level spell slots become worse and worse for blasting spells due to static damage dice, whereas hard control spells (e.g. blindness) and buff spells (e.g. haste) always remain relevant due to not being reliant on quickly-outdated damage. This is, incidentally, the exact same issue 5e's own blasting spells suffer from.
I think that what Paizo should have done was implement a system for better scaling of blasting spells even in non-heightened form.
I welcome the increase in damage for spells. I think it was justified
I am happy that lower level slots do less damage so I'm not really seeing your point. The game would be unbalanced if an evoker could heighten all their fireballs to maximum level.
Yes the arcane school powers, especially the evokers, are weak. The shaping area of effects in 5th ed D&D was much better.
But really it is the non damage spells that are exceptionally bad for wizards. Please fix those. Up to 4th level only blindesss and suggestion are any good. All the others are only good if you can count on critical saving throw fails, the results for normal saving throw fails are very ordinary.
Well, there is a discrepancy in blast vs debuff spell scaling; debuff spells apply a condition that reduces enemy effectiveness by a set % regardless of level, while blast spells take off a fixed amount of HP that becomes less significant with levels.
However I don't think the OP's point is valid specifically in the context of the update, as devs explicitly said they are only looking at buff spells first because they are the easiest to tweak not because they were in biggest need of tweaking. So what we now need to focus is old blasts vs new blasts, not new blasts vs control spells. Yes, this means the playtesters should be encouraged to take blasts and test them even if they are suboptimal or less fun options compared to control - that's the point of playtesting!
To address the blast spell scaling, I would suggest that spell level (or a value derived from it) is added to damage as a general rule, and the spells only specify the damage dice.
There can be several ways to address the control spell scaling too. At different levels it can change the severity of the condition, duration, range and area. Also perhaps more spells should work like Power Word: Blind, affecting higher-level targets if they are heightened.
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Doesn't that mean the playtest is largely useless for spellcasters?
Inflated saving throws make a huge difference in this edition with 4 degrees of success. Having the enemies save / critically save against your 3 relevant spells a day vs having the enemy fail / critically fail their save is huge. It is the difference between a caster feeling useful and powerful vs feeling like a weak nobody who'd be better replaced with a martial who doesn't run out of spell slots.
It was useful in the sense that it illustrated with painfully deadly clarity just how badly spellcasters were nerfed. They know the status quo is unacceptable.
It's probably still useful to see just how badly casters will struggle at higher level play so they get an idea of just how far reaching the nerfbomb was and how much of it needs to be undone, but anyone playing a caster now needs to go in realizing they're going to struggle. I saw that the other day in my group, someone playing a Wizard was really not prepared for just how ineffective blasting truly is.