| Alkarius |
Hello Paizo community,
I am seeking advice or experience with the spell Blessed Boundary. I love everything about this spell, but I am trying to wrap my head around how to make the most effective use of it. Particularly it's effect on melee allies. Because it makes a ring of adjustable size anywhere within a 120 ft range, it acts a bit different from walls like it's predecessor Blade Barrier.
I'm playing a cloistered cleric in a party of 6, and 4 of them are melee focused martials (Rogue, Barbarian, Monk, Swashbuckler).
It is effective to cast it around a group of enemies to divide and conquer? That would provide the enemies with cover, and lock out any friendly melee from approaching them without risk for the full min duration.
Is it effective to provide a dome protecting my party? The enemies could just sit tight, fall back, or launch ranged attacks (albeit against cover) and our melee would be stuck inside the dome giving me dirty looks. Perhaps a dome covering our entire party but overlapping the enemies first line, hitting and splitting them?
Is it best used to just protect myself? Seems a selfish use, plus the enemies could just ignore me in lieu of easier prey and the spell would be largely wasted. Not to mention if an area effect with duration was dropped and I'd have to run through my own spell.
Seems to me it's best application would be if we were defending from an assault. This can be a fairly rare occurrence, and many enemies aren't dumb enough to just blindly run into it when they could fall back until the duration was over.
As always, thank you!
| yellowpete |
Depending on how the GM runs the 'attempt to move through' line, the most brutal setup can be to just make a 5-ft burst intersecting 1-2 low reflex enemies and pingpong them between opposide sides of the barrier as long as they keep failing. If the table interprets it as only triggering when the victim itself takes an action to move through, that doesn't work, but remember that in that case you can at least shove/reposition your buddies through the barrier without harm, should it become necessary.
Generally I'd try to just intersect as many enemies as possible in the initial cast and split them up depending on saves. So, the front of the bubble goes on their frontline, the back on their backline. If the backline fails, push them sideways to remain inside the wall back there, such that they need to waste an action moving to avoid another save. For the frontline, pull 1-2 out towards your frontline and the push the rest inside of the bubble. If not all frontliners fail (the most common case), start with pushing those inside who do.
It also depends on which side has the better ranged options. If that's your party (usually that's common, maybe not so much with your lineup), you want to tend to push more enemies back. If it's theirs, pull more out towards you.