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Thankfully, they cleared up cantrips actually not using spell slots, so there's that.
Page 300: The text on cantrips was confusing and implied that they might use spell slots, even though they don't. Change the second to last sentence in the first paragraph to "If you're a prepared spellcaster, you can prepare a specific number of cantrips each day. You can't prepare a cantrip in a spell slot."
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It is extra confusing because you can't cast any spell slot spells until level 4, so what level are you cantrips at levels 2 and 3?
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It was changed so they do scale to half your level. In the original version, spellcasters said it was your top spell level and a non-spellcaster used half your level. We didn't want multiclassing as a spellcaster to lower your cantrips, so we made the errata entry.
So is there ever a case where a character could have a cantrip and it is not equal to character level/2?
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No, we were trying to remove that corner case from the CRB (which it seems most people didn't notice anyway).
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Thanks! Yeah, I never realized it wouldn't, which is why the change was initially so confusing to me.
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A lot of people seemingly read it the way all of us always wanted it to work, which is in some ways a good thing I guess. :D
But we found out thanks to one eagle-eyed player that the rules technically said something else.
As for 10th level spells, I believe cantrips should still scale to 10th since it was talking about slots.
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It's still a little confusing the way that it was written. I think it might have been clearer to update the wording to:
"A cantrip is automatically heightened to half your level rounded up, which typically equals the highest-level of <Classname> spell slot you have."
They could have set that wording anywhere that cantrip scaling was placed just to make it more clear.
I know that they're limited on print space though.
The book seems to use somewhat different wording than the errata suggests that it does. There are some extra always's and usually's in there. (And weirdly, the Bard text is missing the 'always.')
A cantrip is automatically heightened to half your level rounded up, which equals the highest-level of <Classname> spell slot you have.
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A cantrip is automatically heightened to half your level rounded up—this is usually equal to the highest level of bard spell slot you have.
A cantrip is always automatically heightened to half your level rounded up—this is usually equal to the highest level of cleric spell slot you have.
A cantrip is always automatically heightened to half your level rounded up—this is usually equal to the highest level of druid spell slot you have.
A cantrip is always automatically heightened to half your level rounded up—this is usually equal to the highest level of sorcerer spell slot you have.
A cantrip is always automatically heightened to half your level rounded up—this is usually equal to the highest level of wizard spell slot you have.
Its also worth noting, I think, that that text was only added to the spell-casting classes. Not to the MC archetypes. From what Mark said upsteam it really sounds like it wasn't intended as a change to the way 99% of us read it. Its to close some loophole that most people were completely unaware of.
The "usually" is there as a quick aid for people who have difficultly doing the 1/2 level round up. The "meta" errata that tried to combined the five separate errata into one, lost the usually and when applied mistakenly to MC archetypes/etc and appears to be more restrictive than it actually is.
Yes, that seems to be the intention.
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The "usually" is there as a quick aid for people who have difficultly doing the 1/2 level round up. The "meta" errata that tried to combined the five separate errata into one, lost the usually and when applied mistakenly to MC archetypes/etc and appears to be more restrictive than it actually is.
That could be the reason for the 'usually.' It also might be that they wanted to create general language that covered future classes and class archetypes. For example, it looks like the Magus and Summoner won't have 10th level spells so their cantrip level will eventually be 10th while their highest spell slot will be 9th.
My main point was that the actual wording in the text is different from the errata wording. I've seen several discussions dissecting the errata text that don't apply to the actual text.
It was changed so they do scale to half your level. In the original version, spellcasters said it was your top spell level and a non-spellcaster used half your level. We didn't want multiclassing as a spellcaster to lower your cantrips, so we made the errata entry.
Yeah, this change just made it more confusing. The more variables you add into an equation the more complicated it becomes. It would have been much more simple to remove the "which is equal to the highest spell level you can cast" part.
"Cantrips are automatically heightened to 1/2(rounded up) of your character level"
Or something very much like that would have been much easier.
"A cantrip is automatically heightened to half your level rounded up, which equals the highest-level of <Classname> spell slot you have."
Whereas this ^ just makes it seem like you're tying cantrip levels to the spellcasting class you get the cantrip from. Which of course throws all other sources of cantrips into question, including those gained from magic items.
