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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 5721824" data-attributes="member: 12460">I am going to embellish here a little bit to bring things into perspective.How a ****ing saving throw exterminates an entire school of magic. NO MORE OF THAT!So a 1st level wizard casts charm person on an orc and the orc rolls a natural 20 on his saving throw. WHAT? The spell is completely wasted!But this isn't limited to charm person. Oh no. Try casting charm monster, dominate person, sleep, deep slumber, dominate monster, and oh so many other enchantment spells. A successful saving throw just completely ignores the spell! OMFG! A 28th level wizard with a 36 Intelligence can cast an epic enchantment on the orc and he rolls a natural 20 and bam! Spell wasted.Saving throws are obviously unbalanced and need to be fixed.[/hyperbole]This is all situational. Detect magic is not an at-will ability. Even its older siblings arcane sight and greater arcane sight are not at-will abilities. It isn't like every caster is walking around with an infinite ability to detect magic. Even spells made permanent by a pemanency spell can be dispelled (and if you play higher level games where permanency is an option this is bound to happen sooner or later). Usually the caster needs a fairly good reason to cast detect magic in the first place. Maybe a tunnel stops when a map indicates it should be continue. Whatever the case, there are certain conditions that need to be met in order for detect magic to reveal an illusion, the most important of which is that the character with the detect magic spell needs a good reason in the first place to suspect an illusion, that is, if the illusion hasn't caused damage already. If you step on an illusory floor covering a 30' deep pit with spikes at the bottom you have already suffered the ill consequences and know there is an illusion there one way or the other. The illusion served its purpose. So what if you can use detect magic to find the illusory floor now that you have eleven spikes protruding through your body? And if you have time to stop and cast detect magic every 60', you are wasting a lot of time. I hope there isn't a damsel in distress at the bottom of the dungeon whose time is slowly ticking away. And detect magic is simply not an efficient way to sort out illusions during combat, period, especially at higher levels. You just don't have time to sit around for 3 rounds to narrow down what is an illusion and what isn't. Rounds 1 and 2 aren't generally going to help in a lot of situations anyway because often there will be other magic auras in the area.So detect magic can detect the presence of an illusion. That's a given. The fundamental issue here then is whether this is a game balance issue. I contend it is not. Detect magic is a limited range, limited duration, limited resource spell that takes a significant amount of in-game actions to actually fulfill its potential. And the notion that it negates the use of the entire school of magic is preposterous. Only a handful of illusions are really of the nature that they will be subject to a detect magic spell in the first place.</blockquote>

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