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You don't put your Nexus staff inside another staff. What you are doing is upgrading your Nexus staff so that it now has the powers of a magical staff (plus the spell and cantrip that it already had). It's still your self-made Nexus staff so it is charged solely by sacrificing spell slots as you've described.
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You are correct that this charging process doesn't have many advantages over that of normal staves until higher levels. The big plus is being able to have "true strike" on something other than a Staff of Divination.
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After 8th level, the charging process does let you do something similar to Spell Blending, though. If your staff let you cast a 5th level spell, for example, you could effectively give up a 2nd level spell and a 3rd level spell for that 5th level spell. That can be useful since lower level slots eventually lose a lot of value.
I agree with your assessment.
A question about Staff Nexus' interaction with other parts of the Wizard - Drain Bonded Item would not allow you to reclaim the spell slot that you put into your staff, correct? Or would it let you get that slot back, once per day?
A question about Staff Nexus' interaction with other parts of the Wizard - Drain Bonded Item would not allow you to reclaim the spell slot that you put into your staff, correct? Or would it let you get that slot back, once per day?
That hadn't occurred to me. I took a quick glance at Drain Bonded Item and the rules for prepared casters and staves, and I think you could expend spells to charge the staff and replace them using Drain Bonded Item. That's really interesting.
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A question about Staff Nexus' interaction with other parts of the Wizard - Drain Bonded Item would not allow you to reclaim the spell slot that you put into your staff, correct? Or would it let you get that slot back, once per day?That hadn't occurred to me. I took a quick glance at Drain Bonded Item and the rules for prepared casters and staves, and I think you could expend spells to charge the staff and replace them using Drain Bonded Item. That's really interesting.
A crafty Universalist with Staff Nexus and Bond Conservation can "prime" their usage of Drain Bonded Item by feeding a parts of a combo to the staff, then letting Bond Conservation cascade down the other spells in that chain.
It requires a decent among of foreknowledge of your encounters that day to get the most out of it, but that's true for prepared casting in general.
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I always thought that once you upgraded to a more traditional staff, you also lose the staff nexus drawback.
So at 8th-level you could potentially have 12 charges, for example (4 from your daily prep, and 8 more from dropping 2 level 4 spells).
Is that not the case?
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You can not drain to regain the slots. Drain Bonded Item let's you re-cast a spell you've prepared and already cast. Spending slots to charge a staff happens prior to you preparing a spell in that slot, so it's essentially an empty and used slot.
The rules are not clear on this. They do not specify what order daily preparations happen.
As for how powerful it is, I'd say not overly so. Staves are rarely to never in a situation where they can cast a level of spell equal to your highest. At best it is only 1 down. I suppose I just don't see a power spike in being able to DBI a spell sacrificed to a stave.
Edit: I suppose on DBI it has a stipulation that you have to have "cast" from the spell slot. So technically, the sacrificed slot does not qualify.
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You don't put your Nexus staff inside another staff. What you are doing is upgrading your Nexus staff so that it now has the powers of a magical staff (plus the spell and cantrip that it already had). It's still your self-made Nexus staff so it is charged solely by sacrificing spell slots as you've described.
That fails the Too Bad To Be True test for me. That the Specialist Staff Thesis has the worst possible staff.
I don't read it like that. I see the restrictive charge as only applying to the initial staff. When you modify another staff, you add the 2 spells from your original staff to it, and ignore the special charging rule that was only there for a temporary staff.
The special staff is being specifically referred to, as separate to a normal staff, in the Staff Nexus charging section.
That special charging rule is only there to stop staff wizards from being overpowerful at level 1-3 where an extra spell slot would be a big advantage and no one else has a staff. There being only one level 3 staff, and only a couple at level 4 so early most wizards wouldn't have them.
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Have to agree with Gortle and Ravingdork. The unique drawback only applies to the makeshift staff you start with, not any staff you upgrade it to later on. It's described as a property of the makeshift staff and the crafting ability only mentions adding the cantrip and spell to your new stuff.
Beyond that like... come on. Trading away the ability to recharge your staff normally for an extra cantrip? Having to expend a top level spell slot every day just to break even with what you'd get for free with a normal staff?
Instead of giving the Staff Nexus extra ability to recharge, you're making them worse at recharging a staff until level 16.
That seems easy to just throw right out.
Have to agree with Gortle and Ravingdork. The unique drawback only applies to the makeshift staff you start with, not any staff you upgrade it to later on. It's described as a property of the makeshift staff and the crafting ability only mentions adding the cantrip and spell to your new stuff.
Beyond that like... come on. Trading away the ability to recharge your staff normally for an extra cantrip? Having to expend a top level spell slot every day just to break even with what you'd get for free with a normal staff?
Instead of giving the Staff Nexus extra ability to recharge, you're making them worse at recharging a staff until level 16.That seems easy to just throw right out.
*shrug* seems like the cost of adding True Strike to any staff you want: I'm personally fine with people having a worse recharge if they gain the ability to toss out a dozen True Strikes in addition to whatever else the staff would normally do. I might think differently if there as ever another 1st level spel added. :P
You don't put your Nexus staff inside another staff. What you are doing is upgrading your Nexus staff so that it now has the powers of a magical staff (plus the spell and cantrip that it already had). It's still your self-made Nexus staff so it is charged solely by sacrificing spell slots as you've described.That fails the Too Bad To Be True test for me. That the Specialist Staff Thesis has the worst possible staff.
I don't read it like that. I see the restrictive charge as only applying to the initial staff. When you modify another staff, you add the 2 spells from your original staff to it, and ignore the special charging rule that was only there for a temporary staff.
The special staff is being specifically referred to, as separate to a normal staff, in the Staff Nexus charging section.
That special charging rule is only there to stop staff wizards from being overpowerful at level 1-3 where an extra spell slot would be a big advantage and no one else has a staff. There being only one level 3 staff, and only a couple at level 4 so early most wizards wouldn't have them.
You've convinced me. (Rather happily, since I love the Staff Nexus concept but disliked that charging restriction.)
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You begin play with a makeshift staff of your own invention. It contains one cantrip and one 1st-level spell, both from your spellbook, but it gains no charges normally during your preparations; you must expend a spell slot to grant it charges in the same way you would add additional charges to a normal staff. You can Craft your makeshift staff into any other type of staff for the new staff's usual cost, adding the two spells you originally chose to the staff you Craft.
The wording seems to specifically change from "makeshift staff". I'd assume that once you Craft it into the "new staff" it works as a staff normally does. Only the makeshift staff operates as a makeshift staff.
Now that we have the Magus MC, there are a few feats that would be fun for a Staff Nexus Wizard to take if they want to occasionally use their staff as a weapon.
Something that I don't understand is whether or not you can use spell slots to charge the staff before your daily preparation, and whether or not the charges would remain afterward. I don't really see much purpose for using Staff Nexus if not, but I'm also just jumping into DMing this edition. Unless there's something I'm not seeing that's hyper-useful for it? (Why was the ruling so vague?)
Extra charges are added to the staff when it it prepared. Which you do once a day.
The point of using staff nexus (or of the base prepared caster ability to convert a spell slot into more charges for their staff) is not "have more slots total" but "convert more slots into charges for the slightly more flexible use of your staff".
If you aren't interested in that, you wouldn't choose stuff nexus.
The main advantage of staff nexus is not only to give you some more flexibility but it also allows you to spam some low-level spells. For example:
Let us consider a lvl 17 wizard with a Staff of Divination that decide to use all its 9th rank spell slots as charges for the staff.
Charges = 9(from normal preparation) + 9 x 3 = 36.
This basically allows this wizard to:
In the end this grants a good amount of low-level spells. The only real problem of Staff Nexus is in the staves themselves. This Staff of Divination for example has true seeing but this spell rapidly becomes useless due its counteract check. In this example with a lvl 17 wizard probably all creatures will have higher levels than a rank 6 spell could deal. For other staves this can be even worse with some spells completely inaccessible to wizards due their traditions.
Probably the best way is making your own personal staff choosing the spells that will be more useful to you in all available spell ranks.
Another interesting usage of Staff Nexus is to use them as a pseudo spell blending using some lower level spell slots to give you charges to cast a higher spell. For example a lvl 20 wizard with a Staff of Sieges can use rank 8 spell slots to charge the staff giving it 27 (10 from normal staff charges + 2 from rank 6 spell slots + 1 from rank 5 spell slot) charges and use these charges to cast up to 3 Meteor Swarm increasing the number of rank 9 spells to 8 (3 from staff, 3 from normal rank 9 spell slots, 1 from school, 1 from Drain Bounded Item).
This basically allows this wizard to:
Casts up to 36 true strikes
Which when you combine it with one of Briny Bolt, Hydraulic Push, Magnetic Acceleration, Polar Ray or whatever other attack spell you like is one way a simple wizard can be an effective blaster.