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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3095065" data-attributes="member: 22779">Oh, hey, I agree that buffing is an effective tactic.  It wouldn't be discussed if it wasn't.  I just question whether or not it's so effective that it dominates play.  As jmucchiello mentions, at high levels, people's magic items overshadow most buffs.  I watched my own group try to buff the other day and realized that, even at 12th level, most of the buffs were wasted as the PC's already had better.I think that people are making this a bigger deal than it needs to be.  Yes, saving throws become much more of a problem at higher level.  OTOH, higher level casters have more options and can generally target weaker saving throws.  Plus, the large number of battlefield control spells generally ignore saving throws anyway.  A wall of iron closes off a route of attack pretty effectively.  Plus, the whole buff routine assumes that your players have knowledge of impending combats.  How are they gaining this knowledge?  Scry/buff/teleport only works if you actually know someone that you want to go face.  That is certainly not true in most scenarios other than big boss fights where the tactic is usually foiled through very simple means.  Rearrange the furniture and teleport doesn't work anymore.  As far as buff routines on surprised parties, well, that doesn't work either.  The party shouldn't have time to drop those buffs before they got surprised, meaning that the buffs are either cast during combat or go unused.The buff routine only works when the party knows that they are about to face a combat.  Parties that rely on burning resources that way will find themselves very short changed in any situation where they have less than good information.  Going to a full day duration in a step back to 3e where the buffs lasted an hour/level.  Why spend the money on magic items?  Simply burn the spells at the beginning of the day and you were walking around with 2-5 points all day.  There's a reason the durations were lowered.  It stopped those spells from being so ungodly powerful.</blockquote>

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