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I'm not convinced by this argument at all, really. True Strike is amazing, but I'm not convinced that casting it on your attack roll spell is any better than casting a Save spell and then casting True Strike on your martial buddy.How, exactly, are you casting True Strike on your martial buddy? I don't know of any ability that lets you cast spells that only affect yourself on your allies in 2E.I was completely spacing that it was self only, my bad.
I'm still deeply unconvinced that True Strike alone somehow makes otherwise mathematically bad spells good. It helps with the math a fair bit...but not nearly enough in isolation.
And I'm pretty sure if you use, say, Bon Mot or Demoralize and a Save Spell you'll still do a lot better than the True Strike + Attack roll spell combo. The bonus is smaller, but the base level of efficacy of the the Save Spell is such a higher baseline.
I agree...if you are good at targeting the right saves and have the skills with the raised proficiency necessary to make those boosts stick. Truestrike is automatic and doesn't play into a guessing game. Being built to exploit Bon Mot and have will targeting spells can be great, until you run into a stream of casters or high will targets that you never get your bon mot off against. It takes a focused build and it can be tough to keep your casting skill, diplomacy, intimidation and possibly athletics high enough for those 1 action debuffs to be reliable. True strike + flanking (another bonus that can be got without a skill check) + status bonuses to attack rolls (fairly common and don't require checks) is going to be better than targeting a middle save that you failed to debuff.
That is all a part of the fun for casting to me (that there are so many different ways to play a caster and boost your casting efficacy). But it can have a steep learning curve that is especially rough when facing off against more powerful enemies.
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The same could be said of a few more of the spells in the game that involve attack rolls because they also bring saving throws into the mix (specifically tanglefoot, but also ray of enfeeblement and disintegrate since those are attack+save spells).Given that these are all single target it's a disadvantage rather than an advantage, since the spell needs to get through two...Actually, the text of Disintegrate doesn't note that you need to hit: "You fire a green ray at your target. Make a spell attack. You deal 12d10 damage, and the target must attempt a basic Fortitude save. On critical hit, treat the save result as one degree worse" (CRB page 330).
The attack trait added to the spell in the errata doesn't change it too because it only says you need to roll against an AC.
Edit: Ray of Enfeeblement's text do note that you have to succeed in order to cause the target to save. I am not sure which of these spells need an erreta (but I hope Ray of Enfeeblement does) ;).
I would bet money that you have to hit the spell attack on disintegrate for it to have any kind of effect.
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You have highlighted what I meant when I said that estimations often don't work because of the person's choice of how to evaluate non-damage factors of spells and of what parameters to set for the test. In this case it's putting a low value on disintegrate's ability to make a creature dead when it might not be otherwise - since being "reduced to fine powder" is a more specific rule than regeneration, for example.
Regeneration is pretty rare. It's certainly a factor, and could be argued if Disintegrate was in a close damage race with another single target damage spell, but it's not a common use case at all, and the comparison isn't close.
And not that it makes a general case that disintegrate is better than chain lightning, the particulars of a target actually matter. For example, say you are facing a veteran reclaimer NPC from the Lost Omens Character Guide. Throwing chain lightning at it as an 11th-level caster has (unless I messed up my math) 18.2 average damage, while a disintegrate spell without true strike has 81.015.
Uh...that math is pretty flatly wrong on Disintegrate. Disintegrate does 66 damage if you hit and they fail the Save (about a 50% probability vs. that foe), and 132 if they crit fail (or you crit on the hit), which is a less than 15% chance. That's a DPR of somewhere less than 55 points. I'm not gonna take the time to work out details, and True Strike does help, but your damage there for Disintegrate is just not correct.
That foe is also seriously cherry picked. It's one of only a handful with actual Evasion (something vanishingly rare among monsters), so it's a ridiculous outlier in terms of how little damage it takes vs. Chain Lightning. I could just as easily pick a monster with sky high Fortitude and use it to say Disintegrate is bad (and that situation is way more common than Evasion, I assure you). You have to compare the spells vs. the usual use cases, not weird outliers for the comparison to have any meaning.
So yeah, there are a handful of monsters where Disintegrate would be better than Chain Lightning...but I'm pretty sure vs. most of those Vampiric Exsanguination remains better on two targets. So the use cases for Disintegrate over other on-level attack spells are way more niche than they should be. You need a single monster with Evasion or Regeneration. That's...way too narrow to be a spell anyone should actually spend resources on picking up.
With True Strike it's probably a little better than that...but not much.
While I will conceed that the conditions in which disintegrate is a better choice than chain lightning are heavily affected by campaign style particulars, I can't conceed that "it's only better in certain situations, and those situations don't happen to come up much in my particular campaigns" is a valid reason to improve the spell - spells being situationally better than each other, rather than always perfectly balanced regardless of the campaign particulars, is the game working as intended.
If it's only better vs. targets with Evasion or Regeneration, it's only better in something like 5% of cases. Or less. When one spell of the same level is that much better than another, something is wrong.
I already said as much when I mentioned how difficult it is to test the impact of the single variable that is save vs. attack roll - since the spells in the game are always multiple variables different from each other such as difference in range, damage type, non-damage effects, and even just the fact that most saves are 4-result saves rather than 3-result saves.
But just like I've shown that a 3-result save is less powerful than a 3-result attack roll, we can know that a hypothetical 4-result spell attack roll (half damage on a miss) would be more potent than the current best-there-is 4-result save option, and from that gain perspective that it isn't "attack rolls < saving throws" it's attack rolls < saving throws + 'fail' effects.
I mean, I don't disagree that this is true, it's just that Attack Rolls + Fail effects basically don't exist, while Saves + 'Fail effects' are ubiquitous. You're basically making up categories that don't exist in the actual game. Whenever anyone talks about Saves they're talking about Save + Fail Effects, and when they talk about attacks they're talking about Attacks + No Fail Effects because those are what actually exist in the game.
Neither disintigrate nor ray of enfeeblment need errata as they both are clear in how they function, despite that one includes a reminder that the other doesn't on how the rules generally work.
Here I agree entirely. Disintegrate needs to hit to provoke a Save, and that's really pretty clear from the rules.
My guess is that the design is spell attacks are easier to raise than spell DCs (status bonuses, circumstance bonuses) and AC is easier to debuff than saving throw DCs (flat-footed), so spell attacks are considered potentially more reliable and thus do not gain a benefit on a non-critical failure. In theory, you are more likely to succeed on the spell attack roll than the enemy is to fail on their middling save. Thus, to prevent spell attacks from untipping the balance, they don't have an item bonus to buff them; if they did, there would need to be an equivalent bonus to the spell save DC to maintain the supposed balance.
I think, in the end, the spell save DCs are just more favorable even if you are rocking a Bardic Inspire Courage and the enemy is flat-footed by a sword crit. And you don't have a cover bonus for the enemy. This is off feeling rather than mathematics, but from my readings of play experience this seems to be a perception at the very least.
That's my guess why an item bonus to spell attacks doesn't exist: if it did, it could necessitate DCs having a similar boost. But that would improve saving throw based spells, which may be undesirable.
It is interesting why the item arms race (improve AC/saves with runes) applies to martials and defenses, but not on spells. Spellcasting proficiency bumps could be reduced in return for there being spellcasting runes to offset enemy item bonuses, but perhaps Paizo did not like the idea of enforcing spellcasters to use a hand of a spell focus to put these runes on.
EDIT: That being said, I think I'd like to see at least +1 and +2 item bonuses to spell casting attacks, as it does feel like they fall behind at least compared to martial accuracy.
I will just give my simple answer, the creators of the game decided that the game was more balanced without them. I feel that is a simple answer. I am sure it wasn't just an accident...
I have no idea if and how much "attack" spells are worse than save spells on average. If they are close I feel then it is fine since in general I find it easier to increase hit/reduce ac than the opposite.
I think the main goal should be to have attack/will/dex/fort saves all to be equally or close to viable.
I haven't done all the numbers but one thing can be said for certain... save spells feel a lot better to me because of the 50% damage on saves. Even if a monster saves it doesn't feel that bad while missing an attack spell feels bad.
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That's one of those thing that is true, but not quite in an applicable way. The number of options in the catalog of creatures with X trait is not directly related to the number of encounters in a given campaign that include a creature with X trait.
I mean, that's true, but if you need really niche circumstances (including a really niche campaign) for a spell to be good it's not a very good spell.
That's why there just needs to be situations in which a spell is worth casting somewhere in the game for it to be an alright spell - it doesn't need to be of a particular amount of use in every possible campaign in order to be good.
Sure, but if all attack roll spells are almost always a worse option in almost all campaigns, they're a bad spell category and powering them up is good.
You are right, in my speedy drunk math earlier I appear to have flubbed more than one step. Recalculating now with slower, still drunk, math it looks like it comes out to 29.4525 (higher than chain lightning, but not by such a massive degree)
Yeah, that seems more plausible.
I picked it to illustrate that situations exist in which disintegrate can be a better choice than chain lightning - I'm not trying to prove a general point with the example, so that it's cherry picked is as irrelevant as it is obvious.
Fair enough as far as it goes, I'm just noting that it's a pretty rare circumstance for that to be the case. Even in terms of campaigns (there aren't even whole creature types with it, only rare individuals).
Evasion, or just significant difference in saving throws, regeneration, allies that can heal so 0 HP isn't being treated as death, resistance or immunity to electricity but not force damage, needing to take down a wall of force, or needing to destroy an object... there's a lot of room for disintegrate to be the spell someone would rather have compared to chain lighting (which, so I'm not misunderstood, I will say is also a great spell with plenty of times in which it's better than disintegrate)
I don't think any of those, except perhaps the healing, are common enough to warrant the down sides, and the healing one (and regeneration one, for that matter) only applies if you actually take someone out with it, which is actually very difficult to ensure.
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True strike solves the problem of the lack of spell attack bonus runes in spades. The fact that it costs an extra action is similar to the cost of using metamagic.
Moppy wanted to know "What is the spell casting equivalent of striking and potency runes?" and we all know the answer is "There isn't one."
I find it pointless to argue why that is, and am uninterested in houseruling them into existence when we already have a fine tool to more than make up the difference: the true strike spell.
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Regarding the OP's question, honestly I just think nobody really thought of it at the time. There aren't enough spells that rely on attack rolls to begin with and when people were considering spellcasters during the game's development there was a lot of hyperfocus on many of the other, more systemic changes to magic. The obviously broken math here is just something that didn't come up enough or exist prevalently enough to be worth solving.
I find it pointless to argue why that is, and am uninterested in houseruling them into existence when we already have a fine tool to more than make up the difference: the true strike spell.
Yeah, it completely solves the problem, my druid really loves true strike.
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You are doing a thing that a lot of gamers do where you make sweeping claims about the hobby as a whole, assuming that your own experiences and preferences match to the majority
No, I'm basing absolutely nothing on my own experiences, I'm basing these statements on the published content for the game. And frankly assuming that the entirety of the game's published content is reflective of most people's experiences with the game is pretty much universally going to be correct. That's how published content works.
It's certainly true for both the Bestiaries as a whole and each of the two and a half APs released thus far.
- and even if you are actually correct, which there's no way to be sure of, the solution to the "problem" doesn't have to be making something more powerful or making more different circumstances in which something is a good choice, it can just be "...so make those circumstances more common in your campaigns."
When the circumstances get specific enough, this becomes pretty much completely unworkable. I mean, if you need every day's encounters to include Evasion, Regeneration, or Walls of Force, that's just not realistically gonna happen.
You seem to be completely discounting that disintegrate is a counter for wall of force and can destroy objects (like blasting holes in walls), which are special traits it can't just get "for free" while still matching a damage-only spell's damage potential in a broad range of circumstances if the goal is for spells to be fair and balanced.
These are all really niche uses. They'd certainly make up for a slight damage disparity, but we're not talking about a slight disparity, here. Not on average. We're talking about doing less damage than a spell designed as an area effect spell. You can add all these corner cases up and they will still be useful vastly less often than 'Does more damage, and also hits a second target'. Like, orders of magnitude less often.
But that goes back to my earlier comments about how the non-damage parts of spells, which are harder to strictly measure, tend to be ignored or downplayed as DPR calculations are done to "prove" the superiority of one spell over another.
A fair number of spells pretty much just do damage. Frankly, even Disintegrate's other theoretical uses don't really count for much compared to a similar spell that just does more damage. Spells that give up damage for non-niche usages definitely exist, but Disintegrate is not among them.
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As a frequent spellcaster player, my experience is that (despite all of the armchair theorizing) spellcasting feels more toward equal to martialing than it ever did in PF1.
IF I were to give spallcasters a boost to their spell attack, it would only be a +1, and it would be a status bonus. It addresses the complaints but doesn't overly benefit as many buffs give status bonuses.
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I'm basing these statements on the published content for the game. And frankly assuming that the entirety of the game's published content is reflective of most people's experiences with the game is pretty much universally going to be correct. That's how published content works.
It's certainly true for both the Bestiaries as a whole and each of the two and a half APs released thus far.
First, not everyone playing the game plays the published adventures. Second, even when they do play the published adventures, that's not actually a guarantee that they are going to play them unaltered, or that if they do play them unaltered they are going to play them the same way.
2 and a half APs is barely a drop in the bucket that is all of the possible campaigns that can be devised with the current game materials - and how many creatures in the Bestiary have X is, again, not a direct correlation to how often X is going to come up in campaigns.
For example, I've run into a monster that can petrify a character in 2 of the 2 and a half APs put out so far... and there's like, 3 or 4 monsters in the Bestiaries right now that can do that? And I haven't seen so much as one dragon and there's a bunch of statblocks for those. But that doesn't mean every campaign I play is going to have monsters that can petrify characters and zero dragons - it means that what has happened in campaigns and what can happen in campaigns are different things.
It's a complete tangent here, and might be asking for spoilers, but surely there are dragons in Age of Ashes?
That being said, it really does seem like the justification being given for Disintegrate here is a little lacking. There's obviously going to be variation in the enemies fought in a campaign, and if a spell is very effective against a certain group, that might work OK for prepared casters, but it just seems overly specific, and cruel for spontaneous casters. A sorcerer picking up Disintegrate seems like a fun choice that you shouldn't be encouraged to say 'Well, we're not going up against trolls or the thieves' guild, so maybe leave that for another campaign...' - that just feels like not a great outcome.
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Did we ever resolve the question of whether the bonus to ranged attack rolls from quicksilver mutagen also applies to ranged spell attacks?
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First, not everyone playing the game plays the published adventures. Second, even when they do play the published adventures, that's not actually a guarantee that they are going to play them unaltered, or that if they do play them unaltered they are going to play them the same way.
This would be why I listed the Bestiaries first and the APs second. I almost didn't list the APs at all since, as you say, they are not necessarily representative, but I thought I'd throw in that they agree with the Bestiaries on this point since it seemed like it might be relevant to someone.
But the Bestiaries (and GMG) are, in fact, representative of the monsters that exist in the game and the primary thing I was referencing.
So the rest of this post is basically ignoring the most important part of what I said while acting like I said the APs were the most important thing. Which I did not.
For example, I've run into a monster that can petrify a character in 2 of the 2 and a half APs put out so far... and there's like, 3 or 4 monsters in the Bestiaries right now that can do that? And I haven't seen so much as one dragon and there's a bunch of statblocks for those.
Side issue entirely, but there are several dragons in AoA, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
That being said, it really does seem like the justification being given for Disintegrate here is a little lacking. There's obviously going to be variation in the enemies fought in a campaign, and if a spell is very effective against a certain group, that might work OK for prepared casters, but it just seems overly specific, and cruel for spontaneous casters. A sorcerer picking up Disintegrate seems like a fun choice that you shouldn't be encouraged to say 'Well, we're not going up against trolls or the thieves' guild, so maybe leave that for another campaign...' - that just feels like not a great outcome.
Yup. This. An attack spell should never be so niche a Sorcerer can't take it and generally feel okay about it. If they are, you need to adjust the balance of your attack spells.
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I feel like I already addressed this when I said spell attack roll spells are pretty much the easiest spells to manipulate the math on with commonly available bonuses and allow the caster to bypass the saving throw guessing game, (the problem with disintegrate specifically is that it is both a save spell and an attack roll spell so it has to deal with the problems of both) they have situational value to all casters. but also the discussion around the value of item bonuses to spell attack roll spells is complicated in the present moment because there are so few of them worth casting at higher levels. Spell attack roll casting, beyond low level with cantrips grows exceedingly niche with level. It feels important early on but becomes less and less of a major issue as time goes on. The reason a level 19 wizard getting a +3 item bonus to spell attack rolls wouldn’t be a super big deal is because there is high level attack roll spells that double damage on a crit/without adding in an additional roll, don’t really exist. Cantrips cast as level 10 spells use such low damage dice values that you just don’t end up with very swingy spikes and heightened shocking grasp is still a single target spell that is only really worth considering against an armored target.
All of this could, and probably will be changing In less than a years time, (the magus really needs more attack roll spells, depending upon their final striking spell mechanic) so predicting what that will look like and how powerful universal item bonuses to spell attack roll spells would be is a lot of armchair speculation at this point.
It also just dawned on me, PCs don’t get evasion like abilities for AC. That means high level spell attack roll crits are super super lethal to PCs and item bonuses to them, factored into the math, would be PC killers for high level enemy casters.
The fading off of high level spell attacks and stacking saves on their nastier effects, as well as taking away crit damage is about protecting PCs from massive damage death.
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It also just dawned on me, PCs don’t get evasion like abilities for AC. That means high level spell attack roll crits are super super lethal to PCs and item bonuses to them, factored into the math, would be PC killers for high level enemy casters.
It does not mean that, in any way that actually differs from saves, because those abilities don't prevent crits anyway. The attack version of 'if you roll a success, you get a critical success' would be 'if the enemy rolls a failure, they get a critical failure', which is already functionally how spell attacks work.
The higher level version where you also take only half damage on a failure would actually do something, but still has nothing to do with critical hits.
EDIT: Also, and perhaps more importantly, we already know what the game looks like when PCs lack those abilities, because most PCs only get them for 1 or 2 saves. They are still fully vulnerable to 1-2 types of save attacks as it stands, and generally have lower proficiency in those saves to boot.
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A sorcerer picking up Disintegrate seems like a fun choice that you shouldn't be encouraged to say 'Well, we're not going up against trolls or the thieves' guild, so maybe leave that for another campaign...' - that just feels like not a great outcome.It's par for the course that each campaign will favor some options over others. "we're not going up against trolls or the thieves' guild" (and also not featuring any of the other things that would make disintigrate an appealing option) isn't actually any different than "we're not going up against undead" or any other basic truth of a particular campaign.
A campaign will definitely favour some options over others, no doubt about that. That only can go so far, however - if I made a spell that's ineffective against all creatures but Zombies, it's obviously not going to be worthwhile for almost any character. A spell that is pretty average, but is very nice against undead, is an interesting option to take in a fair few campaigns - it is definitely a matter of frequency of the niche appearing. Undead can reasonably be expected to come up quite a lot for many campaigns, but if we're relying on enemies with Extreme Reflex saves/Evasion-like abilities/Regeneration to make the spell worth picking over a generic AoE damage spell, that just feels too limiting. Even in campaigns about Fey, or trolls, etc, it just feels like it won't come up that much. It's probably made worse in my mind for the fact that Disintegrate is an iconic spell, and you don't want it to be too specific.
It also just dawned on me, PCs don’t get evasion like abilities for AC. That means high level spell attack roll crits are super super lethal to PCs and item bonuses to them, factored into the math, would be PC killers for high level enemy casters.
The fading off of high level spell attacks and stacking saves on their nastier effects, as well as taking away crit damage is about protecting PCs from massive damage death.
I'm afraid that's not the case - monster spell attack bonuses just outpace PC's towards the end. The spell attack bonus of a 19th level PC is likely to be +34 (+19 level + 8 legendary + 7 stat) compared to an ancient red dragon's +36. At 20th level the PC will be at +35 in comparison to an ancient gold/umbral dragon's +38, or a Pleroma Aeon's +37. This only holds true for monsters that are focused on their spells - Olethrodaemon are only at a +34, and Veranillia Azata are only +32 despite both being level 32.
It lines up pretty well with monsters that are most focused on it having a +2-+3 item bonus at those higher levels.
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How what's in the books and what's encountered in play are different things. Hence the wording of "I've run into" and "I haven't seen."
I don't think it's actually possible to play AoA all the way through as written and fight zero dragons.
In the right campaign, or with a sorcerer player planning on making creative use of the object destruction feature instead of evaluating the spell as if that weren't a relevant part of it, the sorcerer can take it and generally feel okay about it.
I honestly don't think there's a plausible 'right campaign' where Regeneration and Evasion are common enough to warrant this. As Arcaian notes it's the 'only vs. zombies' problem (though admittedly less severe than that specific implementation)...the cases where it's better are just too narrow.
It's really only when the only thing the sorcerer counts as valuable is damage that other spells overshadow it.
It's really not. Baleful Polymorph, Dominate, Scrying, True Seeing and Teleport are also spells of the same level. If you want to talk non-damage utility all of those beat Disintegrate casually.
And some of those are Uncommon, but by no means all.
It also just dawned on me, PCs don’t get evasion like abilities for AC. That means high level spell attack roll crits are super super lethal to PCs and item bonuses to them, factored into the math, would be PC killers for high level enemy casters.
The fading off of high level spell attacks and stacking saves on their nastier effects, as well as taking away crit damage is about protecting PCs from massive damage death.
This is a bad argument because a maxed out 20th level PC has a +35 Spell Attack, while an Extreme Spell Attack monster has a +39 at the same level (and a Save DC of 47). Adding +3 to Spell Attacks for PCs (which is what an item would do) maxes them out at DC 45 and +38 instead of DC 45 and +35, which is to say it brings them closer to parity based on the monster guidelines.
Indeed, if you examine the NPC rules they always grant a Spell Attack Bonus +2 higher than the Save DC of the same creature would indicate if they were determined like those of a PC, and this generally holds true for published creatures as well.
In short, it doesn't really change the threats a PC might have to deal with much, especially given how rare NPCs made using the PC rules tend to be. It's arguable that the monster rules indicate that an item that did this should be limited to +2 rather than +3, and that's defensible, but such an item being unbalancing at +2 is not a well supported assertion of the rules.
I was probably confusing everyone with my attempt to bring my comment around to be about item bonuses to attack rolls.
The reason item bonuses to attack rolls are actually a relatively minor issue in the game, is that there is a lack of high level spells that target AC, don’t provide a save and double damage on a crit.
Why was this the case? Was it just a development issue of TAC going away in the playtest and the developers not wanting to come up with a bunch of new spells that target AC? Or was it in intentional choice?
I think it was probably more of an intentional choice. A typical party is likely to have a spread of strong saves with at least one character in the party having the evasion like powers to turn success into crits and even potentially the more advanced version, either coming from class abilities or ancestry feats.
There is no super damage spell that is going to be effective against all PCs that targets a saving throw.
If there were a bunch of high level spell attack roll spells, especially with nasty crit effects, players can’t use hero points to reroll bad results and likely have someone in the party (by high level) nearly immune to spells that target a particular save.
Thus item bonuses to spell attack roll spells are a little bit of a trap item (especially in comparison to having the first level spell true strike something you can buy on a scroll), because you will use less and less spell attack roll spells as you level up, and we are unlikely to get a lot more powerful ones, since they can quickly become PC killers.
I think it is a fine thing to home brew especially if, as a GM it seems like something your players need, but then make it a super special rare thing for your players. Maybe even make it a story element to acquire.
We definitely need to see if secrets of magic keeps a tight lid on high level spell attack roll spells or opens them up more for the magus before deciding if or how to integrate items that grant spell attack roll spells bonuses into the game universally.
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"True Strike fixes spell attacks" is honestly a weird position when you have spell lists that include attack roll spells and don't include True Strike.
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True strike solves the problem of the lack of spell attack bonus runes in spades. The fact that it costs an extra action is similar to the cost of using metamagic.
Moppy wanted to know "What is the spell casting equivalent of striking and potency runes?" and we all know the answer is "There isn't one."
I find it pointless to argue why that is, and am uninterested in houseruling them into existence when we already have a fine tool to more than make up the difference: the true strike spell.
A limited tool that makes you rely on a spell slot that even Fighters with MCD could acquire does not make it "fixed."
There's also the factor that True Strike is only available to Arcane and Occult spellcasters, and maybe some select Divine spellcasters. Primal spellcasters need to MCD to do that, and Divine spellcasters must worship certain deities to get access to it. It's as much a fix as telling someone to roll Fighter because they have problems hitting enemies.
Plus, it's a matter of not having to be so hingent on dice rolls to be effective. True Strike can still mean you roll an 11 and a 12 and still miss because boss requires a 14+ on the dice just to hit, whereas if you had a +2 potency to your attack rolls, you might have hit on the 12, which was your first dice.
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Regarding the OP's question, honestly I just think nobody really thought of it at the time. There aren't enough spells that rely on attack rolls to begin with and when people were considering spellcasters during the game's development there was a lot of hyperfocus on many of the other, more systemic changes to magic. The obviously broken math here is just something that didn't come up enough or exist prevalently enough to be worth solving.
I find it pointless to argue why that is, and am uninterested in houseruling them into existence when we already have a fine tool to more than make up the difference: the true strike spell.Yeah, it completely solves the problem, my druid really loves true strike.
We actually know they considered item bonuses to spell attacks because they existed in the playtest. Spell Duelist wands were a little clunky because they had to be drawn and held, but they did exactly this and cast spells to boot. They also lagged +1 behind weapons of their level. Omitting them from the final game was definitely intentional.
But you're probably not entirely off base either. Items were one of the bigger mathematical overhauls from the playtest, as polling suggested people wanted less from items and more from proficiency. The end results are pretty good, but some things tied to item math feel awkward now. Alchemy is the clearest example of this: Mutagens have less room to shine now that they don't scale up to +6.
A less clunky solution than needing a dedicated item, especially a handheld one, would be letting potency runes apply to spell attacks made while holding the weapon, including staffs. This would probably make weapon potency runes mandatory for casters, though still less mandatory than they are for martials. It does eat into the budget casters can allocate towards staffs, wands, and scrolls.
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"True Strike fixes spell attacks" is honestly a weird position when you have spell lists that include attack roll spells and don't include True Strike.
Yeah, it's a very puzzling position. Does that mean they think spell lists without true strike should just never be used for spell attacks?
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"True Strike fixes spell attacks" is honestly a weird position when you have spell lists that include attack roll spells and don't include True Strike.Yeah, it's a very puzzling position. Does that mean they think spell lists without true strike should just never be used for spell attacks?
Clearly, those people are forced to multiclass to take advantage of those, sweet, sweet true strikes that the game assumes they have to have to make the math work...
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This is a bad argument because a maxed out 20th level PC has a +35 Spell Attack, while an Extreme Spell Attack monster has a +39 at the same level (and a Save DC of 47). Adding +3 to Spell Attacks for PCs (which is what an item would do) maxes them out at DC 45 and +38 instead of DC 45 and +35, which is to say it brings them closer to parity based on the monster guidelines.
Indeed, if you examine the NPC rules they always grant a Spell Attack Bonus +2 higher than the Save DC of the same creature would indicate if they were determined like those of a PC, and this generally holds true for published creatures as well.
Just to confirm this, I checked out a few NPCs from adventure paths to compare and can verify this is true in practice as well.
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Did we ever resolve the question of whether the bonus to ranged attack rolls from quicksilver mutagen also applies to ranged spell attacks?
It doesn’t. “Ranged spell attack rolls” and “Melee spell attack rolls” don’t actually exist. It’s all one Spell Attack Roll, the range of a spell is inherent to the spell, not the type of attack roll it makes.
Quicksilver Mutagen applies only to “ranged attack rolls”, which are a discrete and defined game term. Currently, no spell in the game makes a ranged attack roll.
One thing maybe worth noting: an awful lot of creatures get status bonuses to saves against magic. It is only +1 for most, so it probably doesn't shift the math that much, but it doesn't seem that their base saving throws are generally lower to account for it.
So that is at least one advantage of targeting AC. Though often those monsters also have a low reflex, which makes a lot of blasting save spells better anyway.
A stance that increases spell attack rolls (possibly with a downside like "if you move, you drop the stance") seems like a better fix than "a new class of item bonuses."
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I don't think it's actually possible to play AoA all the way through as written and fight zero dragons....and I never said it was...
Er...you kinda did? By saying that you encountered zero dragons in Age of Ashes?
Now, you later clarified that you hadn't finished that AP, but your initial post said that you hadn't run into any dragons in the two and a half APs out so far...which rather implied you'd actually experienced at least a fair bit of each of said APs, at least to me, hence the confusion.
That said, I did miss you clarifying that initially and you did so before I posted this statement, so my apologies for seeming to accuse you of being evasive in regards to something you'd already clarified, it wasn't my intent. My bad, there.
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No, I didn't - not even kinda.
That's why before the part of the post I say "I didn't see them" includes me saying a sentence that you even already quoted before you said you didn't know what I was talking about: "Second, even when they do play the published adventures, that's not actually a guarantee that they are going to play them unaltered, or that if they do play them unaltered they are going to play them the same way."
That sentence makes it sound like the AP might have been altered, not like it might not have been completed. My confusion stemmed from the fact that the plot of Age of Ashes utterly falls apart without dragons to the point that it's not remotely playable in a recognizable form.
Being altered and being abandoned pretty early on are different things entirely. Your post made it clear that the first might have been done, it did not make it clear that the second was a possibility. Hence the confusion, since I couldn't think of an alteration that allowed someone to complete AoA in a recognizable way without dragons being involved.
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My campaign is using automatic bonus progression - would it make sense to wrap a bonus to spell attacks at the same levels everyone receives their attack potency increases?
At the moment it kind of feels like a "you get nothing, good day sir" level for casters.
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That sentence makes it sound like the AP might have been altered, not like it might not have been completed.You'd have a point if diverging from the plot in the book to pursue something else the group is more interested in weren't an alteration of the campaign the book lays out. Because no, being altered and being abandoned aren't really that different except in the case of "we were going to play it as-is, but stopped instead"
I fundamentally don't think you can be said to have played an AP if you change things so radically that you're not even referencing the actual AP volumes any more, and that's about the kind of change you'd need to make to remove dragons from AoA.
You just can't play the first book of an AP, go off to play a completely different campaign thereafter, and say you played that AP. That's not how that works or how most people will understand that phrase. Hence my confusion.
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And yet a GM can, and would, say "This is my [insert name of published adventure here] campaign" if they used any of the published adventure, or even just kind of based their adventure on it... or once I played in a "Temple of Elemental Evil" campaign wherein the only thing the GM had actually used was the title and the maps, with every other detail changed.
So you've proven a Dm can lie to you? How is this proving you played the Ap/adventure? It's like saying I read war and peace because I took the dust cover off and read a MAD magazine inside the dust cover instead... :P
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My favorite part of War and Peace is Spy vs Spy.
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And yet a GM can, and would, say "This is my [insert name of published adventure here] campaign" if they used any of the published adventure, or even just kind of based their adventure on it... or once I played in a "Temple of Elemental Evil" campaign wherein the only thing the GM had actually used was the title and the maps, with every other detail changed.
Are you seriously going t sit here and argue that even though you actively chose not to play what was in the AP, you still played an AP?
Just admit you said something a bit silly and move on. It's a nonsensical argument.