Is the plan to use the staff as your main weapon or to hold a staff while swinging with a weapon? I'm assuming the magus can cast somatic and material components while wielding a weapon even two-handed.
Is the plan to use the staff as your main weapon or to hold a staff while swinging with a weapon?
Well Twisting Tree is using a staff and Fuse Staff lets a weapon prevent it's a staff so it seems like it's not much of an issue.
Expansive Spellstrike is pretty simple.
The Strike part is as normal, you hit you Strike.
The Spell part is slightly different. The spell goes off so long as you don't Crit Fail your Strike. So long as that doesn't happen the spell goes off as normal (they roll saves.) Otherwise the only difference is on how you generate AoEs.
If that is the case, (which is still questionable to me. I am not sure what it means for creatures to "use their normal defenses against the spell") the feat is horrible. You are almost always better off just casting the spell and not trying to combine it with a spell strike. If you critically miss, you lose the spell and nothing happens. If you miss, you cast the spell normally. If you hit, you cast the spell normally and get extra weapon damage. If you crit, you cast the spell normally and get critical weapon damage.
Basically the feat just gives you the ability to tag a normal attack onto the action of casting as spell with the caveat that if you critically miss, you waste the spell. You also have reduced Spell DCs compared to a full caster, so saving throw spells just become a complete waste of time for the Magus. Meanwhile, you can spell strike with a spell attack roll spell, bypass your spell DC, and benefit from your weapon item bonuses to increase the likelihood of getting a crit with the spell as well.
Non-AoE spells are garbage with the feat read like this, and AoE spells are not really that great to combine with a spell strike this way because you will want to target the lowest AC enemy with the strike (to make sure you don't critically miss) and at that point, you might as well have just cast the spell, because that is likely to be a lower level enemy.
Magi with spell attack roll spells are interesting, doing new and quite powerful things. Magi with this reading of Expanded Spell strike are being worse full casters, trading an additional attack's worth of damage for a chance of not casting the spell at all, and having to deal with 2 rolls agianst different defenses.
Many players are going to be woo'd by the promise of swinging a sword and having it errupt into a fireball, only to be super underwhelmed by how ineffective their spell is compared to a regular caster just casting a fireball. Meanwhile, the Magus using spell attack roll spells, and not wasting a feat in the process, is going to be making the regular caster cry at the reality that their spell attack roll spells will never be as good as the magus.
I can beleive that is the system working as intended, but why even make it a feat if it just makes your spells worse? Spell strike could just work that way and it would still be a bad idea to memorize saving throw spells.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am not sure what it means for creatures to "use their normal defenses against the spell"
I mean, exactly what it says, I'd think. If the spell calls for a reflex save... they roll reflex.
the feat is horrible.
Not sure I really agree though. It takes three actions worth of stuff and lets you perform it in two actions. Not the greatest thing int he world, but action economy enhancers are pretty sweet in general.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think the wording on Expanded Spell strike is mostly about preventing electric arc from working with it.
I get that action economy enhancers are a good thing, but an action economy enhancer that encourages you to waste your precious few spell slot spells on spells you can't use that effectively in the first place feels like it pushing players into making bad choices.
My answer about it was at the end of previous page so I will quote myself lol.
The expansive spellstrike is mainly action economy cheat, as it let you strike and cast a spell together with 2 actions and then you recharge it with your focus spells.
And also enable a style that some people find cool or interesting, like striking someone and then a Lightning bolt goes out and hit the main target and also the enemy behind it.
It does have some fun interactions with Strikers Scroll feat and the Fuse Staff as Magus can put lower lvl but useful spells on them to spellstrike with it, like having a grease scroll on the weapon and then spell striking to damage the creature and at the same time creating a grease puddle to trip it and the enemy adjacent to it or an earth staff with shockwaves.
It's just a fun feat to enable a new way of combining martial and spellcasting.
And like, it enables situations like THIS
It's cool as heck hitting an enemy with a sword and then a cone of cold goes out of it and hits it and every creature in the cone.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I get that the aesthetics of it are cool, I think that is actually part of the problem. The magus is designed to be a single target striker and playing against that grain is going to bring out all the worst problems people have with casters never doing anything exciting.
To use this feat effectively, you have to maximize your weapon attack stat and your spell attack stat, you have to be reasonably confident you are picking spells that target the enemies weakest saves (making it a real gamble to memorize 4 spells in your slots that all target reflex), also reducing your ability to hit the enemy with the right spell to target weaknesses.
With spell attack roll spells on the other hand, the magus can not worry about their casting stat too much (a 12 or 14 starting is fine), and everything you do to make yourself a better weapon expert makes your spells hit a lot harder too.
A wizard with a sword does what you want to do better than a magus because the spell will hit much more reliably and harder and they will have many more opportunities to do it in a day.
Relating back to the question of the OP. Bounded Spellcasting works so well for the magus because they are best at doing their main shtick (single target damage) NOT investing in feats to try to be more castery. Spell attack roll cantrips work very powerfully with their spell strike feature. Spell attack roll spells work very powerfully with their spell strike feature. Spell attack roll spells lower than your second highest level are pretty much a waste of time for any caster.
Expanded Spell strike will mislead you into picking spells that will underwhelm you in play over and over again, and make the limits of bounded spell casting really feel like a punishment.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I read Expansive Spellstrike completely differently from how you guys appear to be reading it, if I am understanding you all correctly.
I read it as you do a normal spellstrike attack against that 1 target you hit with your spell-imbued weapon. If you miss, it is treated as a normal spellstrike that misses its attack roll. If you do crit fail, you lose the spell. If you hit, the spell goes off and the target you hit takes damage from the spellstrike just like other spellstrikes, but with the AOE spell's damage and no save necessary on that target. But, the other targets in the area of the AOE spell must roll their saving throws or suffer the effects of the AOE spell.
That is how I read it. Am I missing something here?
It should not be too bad if you're only playing to around lvl 10 to 15. Most people don't obtain an Apex item or that maximum 22 statistic until lv 20. That's a small number of levels to worry about for the maximized stat problem.
It should be fairly easy to have a 18 or 20 Str and Int by lvl 5 to 10.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I read Expansive Spellstrike completely differently from how you guys appear to be reading it, if I am understanding you all correctly.
I read it as you do a normal spellstrike attack against that 1 target you hit with your spell-imbued weapon. If you miss, it is treated as a normal spellstrike that misses its attack roll. If you do crit fail, you lose the spell. If you hit, the spell goes off and the target you hit takes damage from the spellstrike just like other spellstrikes, but with the AOE spell's damage and no save necessary on that target. But, the other targets in the area of the AOE spell must roll their saving throws or suffer the effects of the AOE spell.
That is how I read it. Am I missing something here?
This is how I am hoping the feat is supposed to work, but a lot of people seem to think there is no problem reading it as requiring a second roll with no additional benefit.
There is a lot of irony in this for me because I liked the way striking spell worked in the playtest, requiring two rolls, as long as the first roll had the ability to positively impact the saving throw in an interesting way. Expanded spell removes that feature for no additional benefit and cost a feat.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Just for everyone's clarity, I will post the feat text
You’ve adapted a wider array of spells to work with your
attacks. Rather than needing to use a spell that has a
spell attack roll for a Spellstrike, you can use a harmful
spell that can target a creature or that has an area of a
burst, cone, or line (abiding by any other restrictions of
Spellstrike). When you Cast a Spell that doesn’t have a
spell attack roll as part of a Spellstrike, it works in the
following ways.
• If your Strike critically fails, the spell is lost with no effect.
• Creatures use their normal defenses against the spell, such as saving throws.
• If the spell lets you select a number of targets, it
instead targets only the creature you attacked with
your Strike.
• If the spell has an area, the target must be in that area.
A burst is centered on a corner of the target’s square,
or the square corner closest to the center of the target,
if the target is Large or larger; you choose the corner
if more than one is eligible. A cone or line emits from
you and must include the target; if you’re not adjacent
to the target (using a reach weapon or starlit span, for
example), choose any square adjacent to the target as
the source. The spell affects all creatures in the area as
normal, but the Strike still targets only one creature.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't just deal the spell's effect on a hit (or crit effect on a crit) because that would lead to some potentially broken interactions with debuff riders. All it does is compress the usual 3 actions to cast + strike into 2 (and you need to recharge after), plus make you lose the spell with no effect if you CF.
I agree with Unicore that the feat just isn't good, but that's mostly because the spells it works with mostly aren't good, especially for someone with limited slots I want spells that are going to be effective in every encounter with no check (invis 4, wall of stone, etc.), rather than ones that are useful in some encounters and still require a check. Relative to a fullcaster (which can already have accuracy issues, avg. fail rates are about 30% for high save, 40-45% for moderate and 60% for low) the magus is at the following penalties.
1-4: -1 DC
5-6: Even
7-8: -2 DC
9: Even
10-14: -1 DC
15-16: -2DC
17-18: -1 DC
19: -3 DC
20: -4 DC
For 11/20 levels, they are 1 behind. For 3/20 they are even. For 6/20 they are 2 or more behind.
And it is going to feel like more because the magus gets an item bonus to weapon attacks. So even at levels that are about the same as a full caster, they are likely to be a point or three behind their own accuracy. In play, it is going to quickly feel bad, especially with only 4 spell slots.
|
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
In situations where AoE is an option it gives them a little more than just casting the spell. Otherwise I'm not sure how it's worse than the playtest? It seems like it would functionally be the same for save spells, except you don't have to use single target and therefore may blow yourself up if you so choose. Unless I'm misremembering it. That would be awkward.
The playtest version had the crit rider, which I'm glad to see completely gone, it was so absolutely warping to the class' power and playstyle that there was no way they could buff it while reasonably keeping that.
