[PHB] Divine Favor and Righteous Might Official Spell Changes

[rangerjohn]

Now, the cleric retains his personal area of expertise--healing (and fighting the undead, I'd say,) while his ability to completely trivialize the fighter is reduced.
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Obviously you haven't read all the threads saying the only use for turn/undead attempts is to power divine feats. What with a high level undeads hd/saves being so high.

 

[Agamemnon]

Sounds like too much like a video game to me.

I've never seen a video game like that, myself, but I suppose that was not your point. You just wanted to trivialize my response with a one-sentence reply.

The problem with Polymorph is that its power level is open-ended, and every single encounter a player has, and every single monster book the DM buys, adds to it.

Personally, I'd add "Material Component: Brain of creature the caster wishes to change to" to Polymorph and Shapechange. I don't think mere familiarity allows you to change form into a creature. No matter how much you observe dragons, you don't gain insight into their inner workings.

BTW, shapechanging to an outsider is, I feel, a Bad Idea (TM). It just doesn't feel right. They're beings powered by the energies of their home planes / patron deities / whattheheckever, and emulating one with an arcane spell doesn't sit too well with me. (Divine casters are another thing altogether) There is more to being an angel whan a pair of wings and a glittering halo.

 

[rangerjohn]

Actually, the various Infinity Engine games do handle Polymorph/Wild Shape that way. I wasn't being facetious, just pointing out what might work in a video game, wouldn't neccasarily work in role playing. Being limited to the forms you mentioned, definately had that feel.

 

[Thanee]

Like the change to Divine Favor, that spell was just crazy powerful. It's still a +3 on top of what you got, so that's not bad or anything. It's a goddamn 1st level spell!

Righteous Might I am not so sure about. That's a 5th level spell with a very short duration. Is that really enough now? Sure it has this nice stacking size bonus, but they probably should have only reduced the Str bonus to +4, not all the bonuses to half.

I mean Divine Power is actually better now, or not?

Just comparing the max we get...

+1 attack, +8 to hit, +3 damage

large size, +1 to hit, +2 damage, +1/lvl hit points, +1 fortitude, +1 AC, 9/evil DR, stacks with belt of giant strength, higher cost (5th level slot)

Bye
Thanee

 

[Agamemnon]

Actually, the various Infinity Engine games do handle Polymorph/Wild Shape that way. I wasn't being facetious, just pointing out what might work in a video game, wouldn't neccasarily work in role playing. Being limited to the forms you mentioned, definately had that feel.

Oh, now that you mention it... I totally forgot NWN. I don't think I ever used Polymorph in BG, I didn't even know it was there. Well, having one-form spells was apparently a gimmick they toyed with in an issue of Dragon. That way they could give extraordinary abilities for forms, and start from a lower level.

Form of the Bat (with blindsight), on 2nd level, and so on.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Obviously you haven't read all the threads saying the only use for turn/undead attempts is to power divine feats. What with a high level undeads hd/saves being so high.

You're right, I haven't. And to be honest, a lot of people say things around here that I don't agree with. This is one of them. Turning Undead is useful from 1-20. No, you aren't often going to Turn the big bad undead himself, but his army of minions is toast.

And even the "not Turning the big bad" is only a general rule. In my last campaign I used paladin Turning to Turn a lich.

 

[Thanee]

Turn Undead is an ability that comes into play rarely, however. It's good in the right circumstances, even very powerful, but more than 1-2 turn attempts are rarely used, unless you fight against undeads exclusively in an adventure (and then you can still choose to not use that Divine Metamagic for a day). That's at least my experience here. I can remember only one adventure at all, where turn attempts have been used excessively.

And there are other way to beat leagues of weak undead, too, you could simply use a spell.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Celtavian]

re

In the end, the spells in question allowed the Cleric to dominate in melee, which was supposed to be the Fighter's job. Now it can be again.If you mean the animal buffs, then certainly. Do you have other examples of obsolete cleric spells at high level?

Clerics in our campaign do tend to find use mostly as healers. Alot of the cleric spells that provide Deflection and Resistance bonuses are fairly usesless at high level like Shield of Faith, Magic Circle from Evil and even Holy Aura and similar spells at time.

Cleric is kind of a thankless job. I keep hearing how powerful the cleric is, but we have three now in our party and they spend most of their time trying to keep people alive at high level. High level monsters do so much damage they whittle my 200 plus hit point fighter down to nothing every other round.

I don't know if we play differently from other people, but it seems like once we reached around 12th level the cleric spends more and more spell slots on healing, Death ward and Resist Energy. They rarely get a chance to unleash any divine magic offensively. Cleric is a boring job that takes a certain type of player mentality to play well.

 

[dcollins]

... From time to time, we will identify a mechanic that creates too great an impact on the play experience or creates constraints for designing new mechanics, and we act to correct the problem.

Is this what errata is even for? I thought the idea of errata was to correct language mistakes in the printed books, not to fiddle with balance settings.

Feels like the the wheels have pretty much come off the wagon as far as having a centralized "core rules" system that people can gain "mastery" of.

 

[Celtavian]

re

You're right, I haven't. And to be honest, a lot of people say things around here that I don't agree with. This is one of them. Turning Undead is useful from 1-20. No, you aren't often going to Turn the big bad undead himself, but his army of minions is toast.

And even the "not Turning the big bad" is only a general rule. In my last campaign I used paladin Turning to Turn a lich.

I agree. If you really want to, you can build a super powerful turning character with magic items and feats. I recently had to nerf some turn boosting magic items because my undead BBEG were being turned too easily. I would have either had to make the undead BBEGs way too many levels higher than cleric risking a TPK or nerf the magic items. I nerfed the magic items.

Turning is very powerful.