Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
I was just going through some edge cases because I can't trust one of my players to be reasonable unless I make him. I'm trying to make sure I understand correctly what spell slots are granted by the bounded spellcasting archetype feats, e.g. the Summoner archetype. As far as I can tell, assuming you pay the appropriate feat taxes at the earliest possible levels, it goes like this:
6th level: Basic Bounded Spellcasting: 1 1st, 1 2nd
8th level: still 1 1st, 1 2nd
10th level: 1 2nd, 1 3rd
12th level: Expert Bounded Spellcasting: 1 2nd, 2 3rd
14th level: 2 4th, 1 5th (this seems like a really big jump)
16th level: 2 5th, 1 6th
18th level: Master Bounded Spellcasting: 2 5th, 2 6th
20th level: 2 6th, 2 7th
My main question is the really big jump at 14th level. Is the improvement from Expert Bounded Spellcasting at 12th level supposed to be better? Just seems strange to me.
Your numbers are correct. The jump at 14 is a bit weird, but you don't go higher than any non-bounded spellcasting archetype so it doesn't seem like an issue to me.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Honestly... I think the mistake is actually earlier. It seems like the wording on the Expert Bounded Spellcasting benefits assumed that the slots you end up with at 12th level are 2 3rd and 1 4th, which would make the rest of it make perfect sense. I understand that they wanted to make the progression from Basic Bounded Spellcasting realllllly slow, but... maybe this is too slow.
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
With a potential remaster of the magus and summoner classes possibly coming sometime Soon (tm), I wanted to necro this thread for consideration. I really think the Expert Bounded Spellcasting benefit is missing the phrase "and replace your 2nd-rank slot with a 4th-rank slot", along with the existing additional 3rd-rank slot. This would make the entire progression much smoother and more sensible, without a sudden 2-rank jump at 14th level.
MC bounded spellcasting feats are already a scam and you want to make them worse?
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Baarogue wrote: MC bounded spellcasting feats are already a scam and you want to make them worse? He is talking about 12th level, that would make it better not worse.
Errenor wrote: Baarogue wrote: MC bounded spellcasting feats are already a scam and you want to make them worse? He is talking about 12th level, that would make it better not worse. Ah, my bad. I still maintain that the feats are a scam and should be reworked so that the earlier feats don't just end up as vestigial feat taxes to gain the later ones
But Paul's suggestion is a decent one if we get nothing else
Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
I have to agree that Basic Bounded Spellcasting really does seem like a vestigial feat tax. It's REALLY awful. The fact that it does nothing at 8th level seems like a terrible wart, but it really can't be made significantly better than it is, because it absolutely cannot grant 4th-rank spells.
But then Expert Bounded Spellcasting giving you basically nothing until 14th level, when it SUDDENLY gives you 2 full spell ranks, seems worse. I mean, sure, Expert proficiency in spells, I guess that's important. And another signature spell if you're a multiclass summoner, which really doesn't matter at all when your spell repertoire is only two spells! Now they're both considered signature spells! But one of them is probably already the highest rank you can cast, so having it as a signature spell doesn't do anything! It just seems like not enough thought went into the numbers behind these feats. It's the sudden 2-rank jump that just seems completely wrong to me.
The numbers mentioned in the OP are correct, and yeah, archetype bounded spellcasting is infamously janky. Were I to redo the feats, I'd restructure them in the following way:
Basic bounded spellcasting would be available at 4th level and give you a 1st-rank spell slot, then a 2nd-rank spell slot at 6th level. At 8th level, your 1st-rank slot would increase to 3rd rank, and at 10th level your 2nd-rank slot would increase to 3rd rank.
Expert and master bounded spellcasting would simply increase the ranks of those two spell slots, i.e. 4th rank at 12th level, 5th at 14th level, 6th at 16th level, 7th at 18th level, and 8th at 20th level.
Add a breadth feat to bounded spellcasting archetypes much like the breadth feats on regular spellcasting archetypes: the feat would be available at 10th level, rather than 8th level, and could give you a single spell slot 1 rank below your highest-rank spell slot from the archetype.
So the differences would be: rather than end up with two 6th-rank spell slots and two 7th-rank spell slots at level 20, you'd get just two 8th-rank spell slots instead. The breadth feat would then give you another slot that'd scale up to 7th rank. You'd be able to access these spellcasting benefits at the same time as other casters, and wouldn't be one rank below the spellcasting output of other casting archetypes either, though you'd still have fewer spell slots to play with. The tradeoff compared to other caster archetypes would therefore be gaining fewer spell slots in exchange for those spell slots being of a higher rank.
We're getting into the homebrew part here. But in my opinion, bounded spellcasting should only cost 2 feats instead of 3 feats (ignoring the dedication feat).
The reason for this is that at high levels it ends up having far fewer spell slots than the normal spellcasting archetypes, which greatly discourages investment in feats.
Currently, it still has some advantage by dispensing with the Breadth feat to have 2 spell slots of the same rank, but this ends up losing the compensation for the fact that it also progress slowly and never reaches rank 8.
For me, if the level 12 feat included progression to rank 7 and automatically gained expert at level 18, it would become much more interesting as an alternative to traditional spellcasting for those who want to have a magus/summoner archetype.
I hope that Paizo designers considers this for a future "SoM remaster".
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