I'm a big fan of how Magus turned out, but both me and my players are a little unhappy with how few spells are a good fit for spellstrike. In the hopes of making the class more versatile without raising its power level too much, I'm testing out the following pair of house rules for it:
--Cantrips that require a saving throw instead of a spell attack roll can be spellstriked with, using the attack roll in place of the saving throw (so a critical success on the attack roll has the effect of a critical failure on the saving throw). The feat Expansive Spellstrike allows you to also apply this rule to non-cantrip spells that require a saving throw, in addition to the other effects of the feat.
--If a spell you are spellstriking with normally has multiple targets, choose targets normally. One of the targets (the primary target if the spell has a primary target) must be the target of your spellstrike. Other targets of the spell resolve the spell normally instead of as a spellstrike (each target makes a saving throw, or you make separate spell attack rolls against those targets, whatever is normal for the spell).
.
My goal here is to give more more options for spellstrike choices (electric arc is now on the table!), and also to make multi-target spells not strictly worse than single target spells for spellstriking.
As far as possible concerns, I'm wondering if this makes Expansive Spellstrike too much of a "must pick" (although honestly it's probably already in that category), or if there are any spells that would be outright broken by this choice.
I'd love to hear people's feedback!
|
I think expansive spellstrike is already quite good, because it causes the spell to happen even if you miss the strike. It doesn't guarantee they then fail the saving throw, but being able to "average out" your overall attack can be an advantage compared to it being all or nothing.
Your rule might exacerbate "true strike addiction", because scoring hits would cause enemies to fail saves and true strike is good for that. Not sure I wanna make an already somewhat irritatingly popular tactic even more of a thing.
For the second one I'm guessing you mean Scorching Ray? That one's a bit annoying how it doesn't really work for magi, but then again it still won't work well because you're still not going for the three-action version.
I dunno if this is really the direction to go in. I don't really mind that magi prefer a bit different spell selection than wizards overall, as long as they have enough options. But for my own magus I tend to use my slots more for buffs and spellstrike mostly with cantrips. And most of the time it's just TKP because the damage is highest.
Those are good points.
Thinking on it more, I think rather than adding on the Expansive Spellstrike - and rather than giving out more cantrip options for free - I'm going to just add a new 1st level feat, Versatile Spellstrike, that allows spellstriking with spells that have a saving throw.
The main reason for mixing the attack roll with the save is so that you aren't rolling twice for the same spell, but your note about true strike is well noted.
EDIT: Also, I just realized that I in fact completely misread Espansive Spellstrike, missing that it works with spells that just "target a creature" rather than only spells with an area. So actually the main thing I wanted to enable (spellstriking with fear, slow, or just electric arc) is in fact... totally already possible and I didn't notice.
Boy I feel silly.
So I guess never mind entirely except for the second part about targets!
The ability to use the attack result as a save result could end up being overpowered: there are a lot more ways to buff your attack roll or debuff an enemy's AC than there are to buff save DCs or debuff enemy saves, so this might make it much easier to land powerful save spells. Especially since it means e.g. that if you have a fort save spell you want to cast, but the enemy has a very high fort save, you can completely bypass the fort save by spellstriking.
While this is true, I suspect it might be balanced out by the extremely limited number of spells per day a Magus has.
Still, good food for thought, thanks!