Rounding out Energy Arrow Spells

[trentonjoe]

You’re right about the RANGED touch attack, trentonjoe. But ranged touch attack spells don’t normally allow saves for ½ damage if I recall correctly.

Flame arrow does.

 

[Destil]

Flame arrow does.

Flame Arrow has more problems than good points, though. As far as spells go it's simply a mess.

I can easily foresee one of my players trying to Spring Attack between these slowly circling spheres if he figured out that they were 15+ feet apart, and he’d have a fit if they zapped him from that far away, given that they only get you when you, “[enter an] area occupied by the globes . . .” At 15+ feet apart, he’s argue, there’s plenty of space they don’t occupy. Yah, it’s meant to be abstract, but try explaining that to him.

I hate to say it, but that's you'r problem. I mean, it would be like saying lightning bolt shouldn't be able to zap you when the caster's 15 feet away. It's just the way the spell works... perhaps the globes should resize to the caster, so an ogre would have something more like a 4 foot wide globe?

As far as my bias: Say an ogre mage has this spell and is dealing with other ogre mages. If you define it as a 5' area around him then it's useless, since with their natural reach the other ogre mages don't ever need to enter the spell's area. Which strikes me as silly. And you still need to scale the spell's area even if it is just 5' when you deal with something with a larger face...