| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
Just a small mistake: "In aggregate they have an 80% chance", it should be 90%.
I must admit I'm lost by your analogy with baseball. The sport is not really popular outside Japan and the US.
You made me look at baseball in my country and none of our national team's players have a Wikipedia page. I think it's telling :D
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Have to agree with SuperBidi. If you want an international audience, drop the baseball stuff. My knowledge about this sport is limited to "ball, stick and fancy gloves".
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I guess I'm in the minority. I appreciated the baseball references, though I could see where it would be confusing out of the US. I'm playing a 6th level Silent Whisper Psychic in a Gatewalkers campaign and I certainly don't feel underpowered, even though I'm playing against the caster meta.
One spell you might bring up for the psychic in particular and occult in general is 'Biting Words'. It doesn't benefit from Unleash Psyche but it is a wonderful 3rd action spell. My typical start of combat is move away from danger and cast Biting Words on the first round of combat, unleash psyche at the start of the second round and cast Shatter Mind, hopefully catching all the enemies in the area, then use the single action activation of biting words as a third action. Great for picking off low HP enemies or trying to whittle down some HP on the boss, though generally I find I do more good on 'boss' monsters (PL +3-4) using gathered lore to aid our fighter in his first attack.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I thought the baseball metaphor worked exactly as intended.
Even without more than a tangential knowledge of baseball, each baseball term that is invoked is explained and integrated into the context of a blaster caster.
The point of that is to give blaster casters more terms to think/work with. I do think it would have been one step better to invent new equivalent terms for the blaster caster version.
I can't say I see terms like "small ball casting" catching on, but a newly invented phrase like "under-gassed accuracy" or something might have a better chance.
The total length of 12pgs was still short enough to breeze through.
My main critique / what's missing is any discussion of slot efficacy and sustain spells.
Even though it's a blasting guide, IMO the lack of mention for spells like Floating Flame, Illusory Creature, Spirit Weapon, Rouse Skeletons, etc, is a small blind spot. Due to slots being a serious resource, and due to sustain being a 1A that's compatible with 2A casts, the role of sustain spells deserved a mention, even if it's to say "sorry, but they are too hard to keep active, and don't do enough to justify slotting them in the first place."
IMO the way such spells poof if you can't afford to sustain them for 1 round is super harsh, but they are still often worth it. Especially if you can get a source of Haste to stay mobile.
And/or you save your little 1A blast like Force Bolt for a turn in which you really want to move, but don't want to loose that sustain spell.
As an Alchemist, I survive via that small ball approach to getting every bit of damage, and have learned to milk every bit I can from dedication spellcasting.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I haven't found any valuable damaging Sustain Spell. I've used a bit Spiritual Weapon due to the lack of options at level 3-4 for my divine casters but that's it.
On important thing about damage is that 1 point of damage at round 1 is not equivalent to 1 point of damage at round 2. Unless you face a single enemy you should aim at quickly reducing the number of enemies. Considering the short average length of fights (it's variable depending on level but it's roughly 3-4 rounds), 1 point of damage at round 1 is much closer to 2 points of damage at round 2, 4 at round 3 and 8 at round 4. As such Sustain spells are only useful for bosses. Same goes for Persistent damage: unless you face a boss, you can consider that one point of Persistent damage is equivalent to 1 point of direct damage.
Many of the sustain dmg spells have some amount of mobility/re-targeting, though it does come at a cost.
Something like Floating Flame has great damage, but 10ft per sustain, and really wants to be comboed with Grapple or other effects.
Spiritual Armament is a single spell attack per sustain, but at 120 ft, it's outright one of the longest range options for Occult, and can instantly smack any low HP combatant.
It's also super important that if these lower burst, sustain dmg spells outrange your "pure blast" options (which is often for Occult), that helps a lot with the turn 1 opportunity cost issue. If your party is willing to let the foes come to you, throwing a 120ft spell can more or less be a free "turn 0" action.
IMO, Illusory Creature earns it's slot in that sustain role over most others.
At 500ft, it's likely the longest range "damage spell" an Occult caster will have. The sustain re-targeting is as fast as the creature you invent, and each sustain is **2 actions** for the creature. Pair that with the smoothness of the +1 heighten, and it can sometimes keep up with Spiritual Armament's damage, though usually that'll happen if you can select a weakness.
And the benefit of all the utility of having a "creature" on the map is worth mentioning even in the context of a blaster discussion.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Something like Floating Flame has great damage
"Great" damage is quite an overstatement. Before Striking Runes it has ok damage. After it has low damage. It's nice at level 3-4 mostly because there's no competition at that level (unless your GM allows Sudden Bolt and then it's buried six feet under).
And unless you can exploit a weakness, Illusory Creature won't kill anything. In a guide about blasting, I don't really see the point of speaking about it.Animated Assault and Phantom Orchestra come to mind as good Sustained spells, though. But Animated Assault ages badly, so it's mostly for level 3-4.
I haven't found any valuable damaging Sustain Spell. I've used a bit Spiritual Weapon due to the lack of options at level 3-4 for my divine casters but that's it.
On important thing about damage is that 1 point of damage at round 1 is not equivalent to 1 point of damage at round 2. Unless you face a single enemy you should aim at quickly reducing the number of enemies. Considering the short average length of fights (it's variable depending on level but it's roughly 3-4 rounds), 1 point of damage at round 1 is much closer to 2 points of damage at round 2, 4 at round 3 and 8 at round 4. As such Sustain spells are only useful for bosses. Same goes for Persistent damage: unless you face a boss, you can consider that one point of Persistent damage is equivalent to 1 point of direct damage.
Phantom Orchestra is the only one I've found. That's why I deprioritized Effortless Concentration. It would be a great feat if they were many good sustain spells for combat.
Then they don't bother to give the cleric Effortless Concentration when they have some good sustain defensive spells at higher level.
The baseball thing worked for me, tho maybe simplify just a bit for others. Maybe ‘You’re not here to hit home runs. Base hits add up’ or something similar?
Also curious what you think of cantrip plinking.
Thanks for the feedback everyone, I update slowly, but I'll take it into account.
The baseball thing-- I can do another pass on simplifying or explaining the references, but I have to admit my favorite optimization guides always had fun conceits like this, so it's def staying, and I know liking baseball isn't that important to grokking the guide due to some test readings I've done: people who don't know baseball are generally still picking up on the concepts as explained here, they just tend to look at the baseball references and say "huh I don't know baseball and have a preliminary expectation that it'll confuse me" but if you ask them to guess what's meant by something, they get it.
Also because I'm not a 'proper-baseball' fan myself, the game is cool but I don't follow it, the concept of small ball when I learned about it was just a very cool metaphor, that makes the guide a lot of fun to read for my target audience, and it's always been in the air here where I lived.
Some specific stuff, in no particular order:
There is a lot of discussion about magic missile, but you don't mention the number one thing! Bonuses to damage are 'per target' so if you spread out the missiles you get the damage bonus against each target (this is confirmed by Logan Bonner here). Said magic missile sorcerer at L8 can cast a L5/3 action magic missile for 6 missiles to 6 targets for 1d4+7 to each. Its like turning the spell into a weird mini AOE that can be great for clearing out some cannon fodder after someone softened them up with a fireball.
I actually thought this was intuitive and only explained how to get the damage bonus on the same target because that's a rule that effectively needs to be bypassed, and I figured it was more implicit when someone read that section, I can def write a bit more on it though.
A blaster guide without going through any math (pick TTK, DPR, etc.) isn't providing enough supporting information for the claims in it. People need some concrete examples and bench marking to know what good blasting looks like otherwise there is no frame of reference to understand how something like demoralize + fireball stands vs. elemental toss + fireball. I think other guides, like a class guide can get away without it because there are many qualitative feats or action compression feats that aren't as easy to assess. But blasting has very defined outputs that can be compared.
I thought the breakdown of die faces against a +3 moderate save was carrying this load since it does discuss how things change as you adjust the target-defense. Perhaps I could add more about how it intersects with enemy HP? As for Demoralize vs. Elemental Toss, I would need a simulator on the order of World of Warcraft's Mr. Robot to work that one out and I can eyeball that the math looks way different in different parties, and with different numbers of allies, never-mind AC vs. Will.
I'd rather settle for encouraging the player to do either as a good third action.
On important thing about damage is that 1 point of damage at round 1 is not equivalent to 1 point of damage at round 2. Unless you face a single enemy you should aim at quickly reducing the number of enemies. Considering the short average length of fights (it's variable depending on level but it's roughly 3-4 rounds), 1 point of damage at round 1 is much closer to 2 points of damage at round 2, 4 at round 3 and 8 at round 4. As such Sustain spells are only useful for bosses. Same goes for Persistent damage: unless you face a boss, you can consider that one point of Persistent damage is equivalent to 1 point of direct damage.
So, I did address this, partially in the Big Innings/AOE section which explains why I'm focused on single target damage for the rest of the guide. But also, I think it's a little different-- damage is damage until the boss is actually dead and the rest doesn't matter until it constitutes overkill and even then you don't have fine tune enough control over when a fight ends for it to generally be sensible to hold back on resources in late rounds unless you're like, party-first in initiative. Using sustain spells in non-boss encounters is good for a different reasons; namely, it's a resource saver, you pop them and then don't spend any more spell slots for the rest of the fight.
Sorcerous Potency is not the same name as dangerous sorcery. RAW the sorcerer got a buff by freeing up a L2+ feat slot, but other classes can still grab it. Things are only 'replaced' if they have the same name, which these don't (perhaps there is a FAQ/remaster conversion guide where this was clarified as the intent, but I haven't seen one yet).
Hmm, don't know why I wrote that, nice catch.
Even though it's a blasting guide, IMO the lack of mention for spells like Floating Flame, Illusory Creature, Spirit Weapon, Rouse Skeletons, etc, is a small blind spot. Due to slots being a serious resource, and due to sustain being a 1A that's compatible with 2A casts, the role of sustain spells deserved a mention, even if it's to say "sorry, but they are too hard to keep active, and don't do enough to justify slotting them in the first place."
I could have SWORN it was in the pitch count section as a strategy for saving spell slots.
Also curious what you think of cantrip plinking.
"Don't."
I thought the breakdown of die faces against a +3 moderate save was carrying this load since it does discuss how things change as you adjust the target-defense. Perhaps I could add more about how it intersects with enemy HP? As for Demoralize vs. Elemental Toss, I would need a simulator on the order of World of Warcraft's Mr. Robot to work that one out and I can eyeball that the math looks way different in different parties, and with different numbers of allies, never-mind AC vs. Will.
I'd rather settle for encouraging the player to do either as a good third action.
No math in this game requires a particularly fancy simulator; it can be done in a basic excel spreadsheet without too much issue. For the most part, it's fine to just use the average damage of each save outcome, then just do an appropriately weighted average of all save outcomes. This will be slightly inaccurate (because we'll ignore that damage can only come in whole number values, and we're not going to bother accounting for overkill), but it's in the ballpark, gives us something to compare against, and is far better than nothing.
E.G., if a monster somehow has a 5/45/45/5 split on outcomes against 3rd rank fireball, which does an average of 21 damage on a failed save, then
5% of the time, the monster will take no damage. 45% of the time, it'll take half (10.5 damage). 45% of the time, it'll take full damage (21). 5% of the time, it'll take double.
(0*.05)+(10.5*.45)+(21*.45)+(42*.05)
comes out to 16.275 average damage.
If we want to know the difference between demoralize>fireball and a raw fireball...
Let's just assume 5/45/45/5 saves on demoralize for example's sake. So 5% of the time, the monster will have -2 to their fireball save, 45% -1, and 50% no change. At this point, you'd start nesting outcomes, so it gets very ugly without using spreadsheets. But I believe it's something like...
{[(0*.05)+(10.5*.35)+(21*.45)+(42*.15)]*.05}+{[(0*.05)+(10.5*.4)+(21*.45)+(42*.1)]*.45}+{[(0*.05)+(10.5*.45)+(21*.45)+(42*.05)]*.45}+{[(0*.05)+(10.5*.45)+(21*.45)+(42*.05)]*.05}
...which, assuming I didn't mangle my syntax, is 17.1413 average damage— close to one point more.
Let's make the further unrealistic assumption that elemental toss has the same success spread (5/45/45/5) for the purposes of illustration. At our level, it'd be 3d8—so 13.5 average, I think.
(0*.05)+(0*.45)+(13.5*.45)+(27*.05)
7.425 average damage from the elemental toss.
So in our extremely silly scenario where all our options have the same success spread, elemental toss is much better for your personal damage than demoralize. Demoralize might be better overall for party damage... but I'm not gonna calc that.
I thought the breakdown of die faces against a +3 moderate save was carrying this load since it does discuss how things change as you adjust the target-defense. Perhaps I could add more about how it intersects with enemy HP? As for Demoralize vs. Elemental Toss, I would need a simulator on the order of World of Warcraft's Mr. Robot to work that one out and I can eyeball that the math looks way different in different parties, and with different numbers of allies, never-mind AC vs. Will.
I'd rather settle for encouraging the player to do either as a good third action.
No math in this game requires a particularly fancy simulator; it can be done in a basic excel spreadsheet without too much issue. For the most part, it's fine to just use the average damage of each save outcome, then just do an appropriately weighted average of all save outcomes. This will be slightly inaccurate (because we'll ignore that damage can only come in whole number values, and we're not going to bother accounting for overkill), but it's in the ballpark, gives us something to compare against, and is far better than nothing.
E.G., if a monster somehow has a 5/45/45/5 split on outcomes against 3rd rank fireball, which does an average of 21 damage on a failed save, then
5% of the time, the monster will take no damage. 45% of the time, it'll take half (10.5 damage). 45% of the time, it'll take full damage (21). 5% of the time, it'll take double.
(0*.05)+(10.5*.45)+(21*.45)+(42*.05)
comes out to 16.275 average damage.
If we want to know the difference between demoralize>fireball and a raw fireball...
Let's just assume 5/45/45/5 saves on demoralize for example's sake. So 5% of the time, the monster will have -2 to their fireball save, 45% -1, and 50% no change. At this point, you'd start nesting outcomes, so it gets very ugly without using spreadsheets. But I believe it's something like......
That last line of your post is the concern, if I'm telling someone "hey for your damage, elemental toss is better" but it turns out to raise TTK on the boss overall for like a major subset of party configurations, that's not advice I'm interested in giving. Especially since it's not how I think about the game when I'm optimizing and engaging my build sense because I wouldn't be willing to leave that DPR increase on the table for the sake of personal DPR.
That last line of your post is the concern, if I'm telling someone "hey for your damage, elemental toss is better" but it turns out to raise TTK on the boss overall for like a major subset of party configurations, that's not advice I'm interested in giving. Especially since it's not how I think about the game when I'm optimizing and engaging my build sense because I wouldn't be willing to leave that DPR increase on the table for the sake of personal DPR.
While I understand the concern to a degree, more complicated things like "is it better to demoralize or elemental toss?" aren't needed to compare 2A blasting spell options to each other.
Also, honestly, simulating a round of party damage with demoralize vs without isn't going to be as annoying as you're making it sound. Tedious, absolutely. Requiring assumptions about party composition, absolutely. But it's hardly impossible.
I'd also consider it extremely unlikely that results for a generic party of some sort (e.g. fighter/rogue/cleric/sorc) would be a poor benchmark, or terribly misleading for other, similar parties. While you can't guarantee the results will generalize, I don't think anyone is going to be be disappointed in you for just running analyses with one generic party type, especially if you state the limitations of your analysis upfront. This feels a bit like a situation where you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Also, honestly, simulating a round of party damage with demoralize vs without isn't going to be as annoying as you're making it sound. Tedious, absolutely. Requiring assumptions about party composition, absolutely. But it's hardly impossible.
Assumptions about party composition, character conditions, initiative order and the ability for the party to focus fire.
When there are more assumptions than rules, I wouldn't call that "impossible", but just "massively whiteroomey".Also, Demoralize has a defensive component that will be hard to take into account without diving deeper into the whiteroom.
