Rystil Arden
First Post
Hmm...that's interesting. Keep in mind the trade-off: The 15d6 Fireball has 2 lower DC, and the 20d6 Fireball has 4 lower DC, and every caster level increase continues to catch Cone of Cold up to the 15d6 Fireball in damage with the higher DC, ditto for Delayed Blast Fireball to the 20d6 Fireball. In my mind, this is an extremely fair trade in those cases. It isn't fair for Orbs, in a sense, because they don't have any piper to pay with DCs being lower. Let's look at an example case of the 15d6 Fireball vs the 10d6 Cone of Cold using the chart for Ref saves--IanB said:Nah, I've never liked the 15d6 vs 10d6 fireball vs. cone of cold example either, or the 20d6 admixtured fireball vs 13d6 delayed blast fireball, etc. etc. etc.
They seem to break the spell level system in fundamental ways to me, or at least the ones that scale damage do. I was happy to see 3.5 take away stacking empowers on one spell, but admixture (for example) just basically puts it back in.
EDIT: That said, I'm not sure I'm comfortable totally removing them in a game that has psion blasters in it.
At level 10, enemy Ref saves average at +8. Your DC will probably be around 19 on the Fireball and 21 on Cone of Cold. Thus, you expect 39.375 from the Fireball and 28 from the Cone of Cold. Not quite as bad, right?
Now we'll look at Admixture--
At level 13, enemy Ref saves average at +10. Your DC will probably be around 19 for the Fireball and 23 for the Delayed Blast. Thus, you expect 49 damage from the 20d6 Fireball and 36.4 from the Delayed Blast.
But for both of these cases, the Fireball with metamagic never improves, and the normal spell adds ~3 to damage with each level increase
Also, note that if the enemy has Evasion, the numbers jump even more in favour of the non-metamagicked version. The 13d6 DBF does more damage to the level 13 Rogue NPC in the DMG than the 20d6 Fireball.
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