Hi everyone,
A player of mine wanted to combine these 2 feats. From my reading, they don't interact, but I wanted the community point of view as I found this ruling quite hard to make (and I don't want to deprive my player of a bonus from a bad reading).
Holy Castigation: You combine holy energy with positive energy to damage demons, devils, and their evil ilk. Heal spells you cast damage fiends as though they were undead.
Cremate Undead: Your positive energy sets undead alight. When you use a heal spell to damage undead, each undead that takes damage also takes persistent fire damage equal to the spell’s level.
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I would allow it. Cremate says you add damage when damaging undead. Castigation says you damage fiends as if they were undead. Seems like it transfers.
In this case, I would err on the side of the player. Its a small thing (fiends with fire resistance will basically ignore it anyway and the damage is small regardless unless the target has weakness).
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My reading of the two feats is probably a no on the combining of them. While the former feat states a "as though they were undead" demons etc don't actually change their creature type. The latter feat works specifically on the undead creature type, which a demon or devil isn't.
As GM its a yes because that's more interesting and isn't likely to be detrimental to the game.
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I don't think they stack but they are both active at the same time.
So if there is a skeleton and a devil near the cleric and the cleric does an AoE Heal, the skeleton would be damaged and start burning and the devil would be damaged by the Heal, too (but not burn).
There's no harm in it and it's a cool combo, I'd allow it.
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My reading of the two feats is probably a no on the combining of them. While the former feat states a "as though they were undead" demons etc don't actually change their creature type. The latter feat works specifically on the undead creature type, which a demon or devil isn't.
As GM its a yes because that's more interesting and isn't likely to be detrimental to the game.
Normally I would agree with you solely based on the wording of the two abilities (and on your personal ruling, btw), but Paizo has a bad habit of not explaining how things interact with non-undead that are treated like undead in one way or another. Cough dhampir Cough.
As far as I'm concerned "Heal spells you cast damage fiends as though they were undead." can be read as "Heal spells you cast treat fiends as though they were undead." I'm aware this isn't RAW, but there's still RAW in the book to this day that makes no sense for Dhampir and has been cleared up to not be the intended reading in the past iirc.
It looks like we all agree. It's not supposed to interact but it won't break anything to make it happen.
Thanks for your help!
I may be late to the party and my opinion might not be relevant anymore but I just wanted to state that I personally would allow to combine the two feats, respecively everything that modifies Heal after you took Holy Castigation.
My reasoning for allowing this is that I read the part of "Heal spells you cast damage fiends as though they were undead." as "apply the Undead trait to all fiend targets solely for the casting of said Heal", which seems to be in line with @Aw3som3-117's mentioned interpretation.
I really dislike the design limitatins on the font.
A big part of the Cleric Feats are linked to the font but most of them don't interact with each others at all.
That really feels like a missed opportunity for the sake of being too careful.
It's a bit of the same with theWitch Hex limitations of 1 per round with a 1 minute immunity...
The latter feat works specifically on the undead creature type, which a demon or devil isn't.
Yeah, but you treat them as if they were per the former feat.
