Can arcane cascade trigger off a spell casted from a wand or scroll?
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Can arcane cascade trigger off a spell casted from a wand or scroll?
Yes, you only need to cast a spell.
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Why wouldn't you want your casting stat to be at least be 14? If cantrips are your bread and butter that's more damage. With a 16 in int and str that's +6 to damage per spellstrike.
Well, instead it could be +3 damage AND +2 hp/level and +2 fort saves and +1 will saves [or swap the +1 and +2's].
Or you could instead get a +3 to demoralize checks. Think about a magus that gets a few innate cantrips [say from race] and pumps their cha: they do the +3 damage from the cantrip and get to use Cha skills well but still have the magus cantrips to fall back on for weaknesses and such. And you could go sorcerer multiclass if you wanted extra spells.
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Can just as easily keep the int accel at recall knowledge and multiclass into witch or wizard. For more spells and hell you can use witch to add a second traditionWhy wouldn't you want your casting stat to be at least be 14? If cantrips are your bread and butter that's more damage. With a 16 in int and str that's +6 to damage per spellstrike.Well, instead it could be +3 damage AND +2 hp/level and +2 fort saves and +1 will saves [or swap the +1 and +2's].
Or you could instead get a +3 to demoralize checks. Think about a magus that gets a few innate cantrips [say from race] and pumps their cha: they do the +3 damage from the cantrip and get to use Cha skills well but still have the magus cantrips to fall back on for weaknesses and such. And you could go sorcerer multiclass if you wanted extra spells.
But that wasn't the question was it? You asked why someone wouldn't go INT not why they would. And if it's "just as easy", that means both are viable choices doesn't it?
As for multiclassing, Cha could multiclass oracle and bard for more spells and a second and third tradition. Heck, you could go sorcerer oracle and bard to get every tradition. ;)
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I had this revelation in the bounded accuracy thread. Does the Expansive Spellstrike feat protect you from the damage of casting spells? Or does it make an AoE spell into a single target spell?
The Expansive Spellstrike feat is written a little confusingly. It will be interesting to see how people read it once it is fully out.
The way many folks are reading it right now, it looks like an awful feat, and a bad idea for most magi to try to use it that often. It is much worse than the playtest Striking Spell, which didn't cost you a feat. The only thing it gives you is the ability to use AoE spells but if you critically miss, you lose the spell before it goes off, so why would you really want to risk that on an AoE spell just to get the chance to do an extra melee attacks damage on one target.
It is bad because if you use the ability against the most powerful enemy, you are only increasing your chances of something going wrong, especially if their AC is high enough that you have a 10 or 15% chance of crit failing, and their saving throws are probably high enough that they have another 10 or 15% chance of crit succeeding on the save.
Meanwhile you can true strike on your spell strike with an attack roll spell and actually have a good chance of smacking the high save/ magic resistant boss enemy with a spell that could actually mess them up. You only get 4 spells with your spell slots. Sitting on an AoE that a full caster is going to just be much better than you with is giving up a lot of power.
And using a spell scroll on your weapon for something like goblin pox spell, which was cool in the playtest, just ends up wasting your spell strike that you have to recharge when a produce flame has a much better chance of doing more damage and tacking on a painful extra.
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I had this revelation in the bounded accuracy thread. Does the Expansive Spellstrike feat protect you from the damage of casting spells? Or does it make an AoE spell into a single target spell?The Expansive Spellstrike feat is written a little confusingly. It will be interesting to see how people read it once it is fully out.
The way many folks are reading it right now, it looks like an awful feat, and a bad idea for most magi to try to use it that often. It is much worse than the playtest Striking Spell, which didn't cost you a feat. The only thing it gives you is the ability to use AoE spells but if you critically miss, you lose the spell before it goes off, so why would you really want to risk that on an AoE spell just to get the chance to do an extra melee attacks damage on one target.
It is bad because if you use the ability against the most powerful enemy, you are only increasing your chances of something going wrong, especially if their AC is high enough that you have a 10 or 15% chance of crit failing, and their saving throws are probably high enough that they have another 10 or 15% chance of crit succeeding on the save.
Meanwhile you can true strike on your spell strike with an attack roll spell and actually have a good chance of smacking the high save/ magic resistant boss enemy with a spell that could actually mess them up. You only get 4 spells with your spell slots. Sitting on an AoE that a full caster is going to just be much better than you with is giving up a lot of power.
And using a spell scroll on your weapon for something like goblin pox spell, which was cool in the playtest, just ends up wasting your spell strike that you have to recharge when a produce flame has a much better chance of doing more damage and tacking on a painful extra.
hmm you can use a harmful
spells that target a creature or that has an area of aburst, cone, or line everyone in the area is effected though only the main target gets the strike damage , its not perfect but i can see some spells that would work with it and i think in paticular shooting stars could have some fun with it.
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I had this revelation in the bounded accuracy thread. Does the Expansive Spellstrike feat protect you from the damage of casting spells? Or does it make an AoE spell into a single target spell?The Expansive Spellstrike feat is written a little confusingly. It will be interesting to see how people read it once it is fully out.
The way many folks are reading it right now, it looks like an awful feat, and a bad idea for most magi to try to use it that often. It is much worse than the playtest Striking Spell, which didn't cost you a feat. The only thing it gives you is the ability to use AoE spells but if you critically miss, you lose the spell before it goes off, so why would you really want to risk that on an AoE spell just to get the chance to do an extra melee attacks damage on one target.
It is bad because if you use the ability against the most powerful enemy, you are only increasing your chances of something going wrong, especially if their AC is high enough that you have a 10 or 15% chance of crit failing, and their saving throws are probably high enough that they have another 10 or 15% chance of crit succeeding on the save.
Meanwhile you can true strike on your spell strike with an attack roll spell and actually have a good chance of smacking the high save/ magic resistant boss enemy with a spell that could actually mess them up. You only get 4 spells with your spell slots. Sitting on an AoE that a full caster is going to just be much better than you with is giving up a lot of power.
And using a spell scroll on your weapon for something like goblin pox spell, which was cool in the playtest, just ends up wasting your spell strike that you have to recharge when a produce flame has a much better chance of doing more damage and tacking on a painful extra.
hmm you can use a harmful
spells that target a creature or that has an area of a
burst, cone, or line everyone in the area is effected though only the main target gets the...
The problem rather seems to be - why do a spellstrike and use the recharge action and risk losing the spell (against a strong target) instead of just striking and casting the spell indipendently, the save and aoe spells don't get any bonus from spellstrike (afaik)
The focus spells with build in recharge would've to be really good to make it worth it, but I doubt they will be THAT good
Well, you save one action. But yeah it'd be nice if on crit you inflicted a little penalty on the save or something.
It can be useful against several ennemies for action economy, but I don't think this is intented to be used against a boss.
Recharging with a recall knowledge check after you have dropped your saving throw spell isn’t likely to be that helpful to you though. Spell striking with a spell slot is a nova ability. Doing it twice in one encounter is going to be painful to the whole party, especially if you are not fighting a boss.
The magus really excels at being the single target striker that will tailor their damage type to exactly match an enemies weaknesses/bypass resistances. That is a lot of enemies in PF2 and the DPR of the magus will often exceed that of a Barbarian, and even a fighter in these circumstances.
Cantrips work really, really well for setting the magus up this way and I think expanded cantrips will set a magus up a lot better than expanded spell strike to be good at the thing magi are good at.
The feedback on casters has been pretty consistent on the boards (and something I have spent a lot of time trying to help the players of casters learn to overcome): casting spells that have about a 50% or more of being saved against is frustrating and underwhelming in play. Targeting the wrong defense can give you a fairly high risk of the enemy critically succeeding and that feels bad on full casters. It is going to feel brutally bad on a bound caster with only 4 slots.
Some people really want the fantasy of hitting someone with an arrow and then having a bolt of lightning streak out. That is an incredibly cool visual., and may, occasionally, work out where you get to hit one more person than with a lightning bolt. But you are occasionally going to cast your big spell and then critically miss on the attack roll, losing it entirely, and the most you get in return is a little more damage against 1 target. Sure you could hero point that attack roll, but all the enemies still get to make saves to potentially bring your big nova attack down to a ho-hum low damage round. With a spell attack roll, if you hit, the spell goes off full force right then. If the hero point turns it into a crit, the spell is a crit too. Removing the double roll for spell attack roll wildly increases the power of the spell strike feature. Expanded Spellstrike is using a feat to give up the benefit in exchange for saving an action (kind of, still have to recharge) for getting one extra physical attack in a round. It sounds like some people are really excited about this and I don’t want to take your toy away. If it fills the vision of your character, wonderful. It is just like a sword and board fighter picking up assisting shot with their second level feat. It ends up pushing you into spending a lot of resources into being able to do something that your build doesn’t really do well. It could skew your perception of the magus as a class because it is a magus class feat that doesn’t interact well with other magus abilities and at best, will be super situational.
Nailing a boss creature with an acid arrow is going to be an epic spell strike almost everytime you use it, in a way no martial or caster can emulate. Using spell strike on a fireball (or even worse with a single target save spell) will be combining one thing a full martial does better than you with one thing a full caster does better than you, with often mediocre results as a consequence…and spending a feat to do so. As long as you know this going into it, I don’t begrudge the feats existence, but it is going to be like the burning hands spell for a lot of new players: an option that encourages you to make bad choices for your character. As a GM, I would steer players away from it unless they have really gone all in on some concept that requires it and I’d be ready to let them retrain out of it and the spells they picked to utilize it, if that vision ends up feeling a lot more underwhelming in play than it did on paper when the player was first envisioning their character.
Can you provide the names and brief descriptions of new cantrips on the Occult list?
I saw that the Sparkling Targe Magus' focus spell lets them cast Shield instead of raising a physical one. Does all of its abilities work with the cantrip in place of a physical shield ? Freeing your hand for either dual wielding or using a 2 handed weapon ?
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I saw that the Sparkling Targe Magus' focus spell lets them cast Shield instead of raising a physical one. Does all of its abilities work with the cantrip in place of a physical shield ? Freeing your hand for either dual wielding or using a 2 handed weapon ?
Yes, everything works with the Shield cantrip, though of course if you block with it then will be unavailable for 10 minutes as normal.
I saw that the Sparkling Targe Magus' focus spell lets them cast Shield instead of raising a physical one. Does all of its abilities work with the cantrip in place of a physical shield ? Freeing your hand for either dual wielding or using a 2 handed weapon ?Yes, everything works with the Shield cantrip, though of course if you block with it then will be unavailable for 10 minutes as normal.
Oh that's nice flexibility for builds, I like that.
Why wouldn't you want your casting stat to be at least be 14? If cantrips are your bread and butter that's more damage. With a 16 in int and str that's +6 to damage per spellstrike.Well, instead it could be +3 damage AND +2 hp/level and +2 fort saves and +1 will saves [or swap the +1 and +2's].
Or you could instead get a +3 to demoralize checks. Think about a magus that gets a few innate cantrips [say from race] and pumps their cha: they do the +3 damage from the cantrip and get to use Cha skills well but still have the magus cantrips to fall back on for weaknesses and such. And you could go sorcerer multiclass if you wanted extra spells.
I feel like magus is never going to have a spare action to demoralise with (or bon mot for that matter) so any charisma skills would be solely for non-combat use.
Spellstrike is 2 actions, you need another to recharge, you need to fit arcane cascade in there somewhere, preferably early on, you'll obviously need to be moving since most magi are melee.It'll hopefully make for some interesting decision making in combat, but really doesn't leave room for picking up stuff like demoralise, shove or trip.
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Well, you could choose to spellstrike less often and use it more to capitalize on windows of opportunity.
Creating them with feints or demoralize (for example if you can't reach the enemy this turn) which can benefit your entire team.
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Well, you could choose to spellstrike less often and use it more to capitalize on windows of opportunity.
Creating them with feints or demoralize (for example if you can't reach the enemy this turn) which can benefit your entire team.
I feel like this is definitely going to be an option for an inexorable iron playstyle. A Strength-heavy, Athletics-heavy approach can easily combine with a guisarme or meteor hammer to do reliable, hard-hitting damage mixed with maneuvers and the occasional spellstrike nova across a decent-sized area. If you've got the map for it, throw an enlarge in as well.
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Mauler dedication on Inexorable Iron Magus might be pretty good.
The Magi is definitely capable of doing a lot of useful things in a turn without spell striking. They are going to be action starved, but against any of the many enemies with weaknesses arcane cascade will often be a bigger damage booster than spell striking.
The real "issue" with the Magus and wanting to do a bunch of skill tricks is that they get very few skills and probably need to keep Arcana and keep one of either acrobatics or athletics going boosting at a regular pace. Maybe a starlit magus MC'd into investigator or rogue would be able to keep up with it though.
It is kinda neat how much magi want access to a lot of different cantrips for more than just spell striking though.
If you play a Magus, you mostly want to spell strike every round. Skills not so much.
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Yeah, I think Spellstrike every other round sounds more realistic in most cases, still should give quite a mileage
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Winding up to deliver a spell strike against a seriously injured enemy is probably not usually going to be worth it any way, especially with the need to recharge. Killing an enemy with the weapon attack half of a spell strike is going to feel super deflating, especially since you then have to recharge. Damage-wise, it is going to outpace rogue sneak attack by quite a bit (especially factoring in weakness targeting), so only getting one off every other round is going to be fine. I imagine some rounds just casting electric arc and doing something else (moving, attacking once, getting cascade going, recharging a previous round's big spell strike) is going to be a fine turn.
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What the Magus wants is to be able to spellstrike when he wants to.
This *can* be every round, but realistically it is not.
Realistically it's every other round unless you're ranged or quickened, which you should be if you open with haste into cascade stance or if you have somebody buffing you. The ranged magus is going to open with spellstrike into cascade stance and then spend the rest of the fight recharging and spellstriking again.
If you aren't spellstriking while it's charged, then you probably do like every other martial and just strike twice instead.
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You need a recharge action for spell strike? Hmm. That sounds like a pretty big limiter.
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Remember that all Magus hybrid studies focus spells includes a Strike so if you use them after spellstrike it will have -8/10 MAP and if you use it before Spellstrike then spellstrike will have MAP, so it pretty much incentivizes you to alternate turns.
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Remember that all Magus hybrid studies focus spells includes a Strike so if you use them after spellstrike it will have -8/10 MAP and if you use it before Spellstrike then spellstrike will have MAP, so it pretty much incentivizes you to alternate turns.
But also consider, the Recharge bonus from Focus spells happens whether you hit or miss. So if you have Spellstriked that turn, and say, want to teleport + Strike + Recharge for 1 action, it might be worth it for just the positioning and Recharge alone.
It's also the reason why getting Force Fang would be decent. Melee Force Bolt that auto-hits and Recharges is a good exchange VS just Recharging.
You need a recharge action for spell strike? Hmm. That sounds like a pretty big limiter.It's not too bad. Most focus spells recharge it, plus a few other feats give actions that do as well. So there probably aren't a ton of rounds when you'll be doing nothing to recharge.
If the focus spells are decent, they should be ok. Not sure how the new magus will be played, but the old magus was a go hard or go home class that went for the big strike nearly every round. The fights didn't last long so that tactic worked. Fights in PF2 don't last long, so should work now too.
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Remember that all Magus hybrid studies focus spells includes a Strike so if you use them after spellstrike it will have -8/10 MAP and if you use it before Spellstrike then spellstrike will have MAP, so it pretty much incentivizes you to alternate turns.But also consider, the Recharge bonus from Focus spells happens whether you hit or miss. So if you have Spellstriked that turn, and say, want to teleport + Strike + Recharge for 1 action, it might be worth it for just the positioning and Recharge alone.
It's also the reason why getting Force Fang would be decent. Melee Force Bolt that auto-hits and Recharges is a good exchange VS just Recharging.
Force Fang has been great for my lvl. 2 Magus. It increases your focus pool by 1 at level 2 and grants you an option to get something out of a recharge action. And it also occasionally helps to finish off foes.
The Eldritch shot requires a bow weapon (which technically also includes crossbows (I think?))
does the ranged magus (starlit span was it?) have any similar limitations?
The Eldritch shot requires a bow weapon (which technically also includes crossbows (I think?))
does the ranged magus (starlit span was it?) have any similar limitations?
No, works on any ranged attacks including unarmed ones.
Does the staff magus focus spell ignore MAP for the second attack or are they just 2 regular attacks?
MAP applies normally. The spell even says that outright.
