Spell Compendium: What are the "broken" spells?

[Flatus Maximus]

Anything that enables a front-end nova in the manner discussed before where the party eats 100 levels of spells before initiative 45 comes around is broken.

I don't see how your example works. Once you've cast any of the celerity spells, you're done casting swift/immediate spells until the end of your next turn. (Note to OP: Hopefully this tangent is relevant to the original topic; if not, I can move this discussion elsewhere.)

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Well, Celerity spells aren't in Spell Compendium, so it really isn't relevant. But yeah, I think a DM should rule that you must be dazed afterwards for celerity to work, because otherwise it IS absolutely broken.

 

[akbearfoot]

Wraithstrike...nobody in any of my gaming groups has ever even asked the DM if they could find/learn it. Mutual non-nuclear proliferation pact I think. Kinda like how nobody has ever taken Black tentacles and the DM never used it again after a module where 1 casting of it almost caused a TPK for 6 characters.

What classes even have access to it? The example I saw above someone said they were an unoptomized 16th level wizard/fighter. But then they mentioned having feats from several splatbooks, MiC items and SpC spells.So I'm curious if those wiz/fght levels were actually PrC levels? Racial substitutions, class substitutions etc...any of which can greatly skew an objective comparison.

An actual 16th level fighter/wizard is a -really- bad class combination. Half the HP of a fighter, with half the BaB and half the caster level...Unless possibly it was optimized with only enough caster levels to get access to wraithstrike. Then use a 2H wounding weapon with power attack and a bag full of pearls of power. A Twilight Mithril BP with the shield spell and all the other basic protections gives a competative AC while letting you cast your spells. Pretty much the definition of optimized though.

I sorta assume that no DM in his right mind would allow a PC to say....create a Use Activated item of wraithstrike.

The melee example above was similar, with the expectation that the melee is running around with the +1 weapon full of enhancment bonuses with a greater magic weapon on all the time. With the assumption that he has the MWM line of feats and a BaB thats high enough to PA for full and still hit on a 2. My assumption is that anyone who is optimized to this degree is always the first one to get hit by the Empowered Ray of Enfeeblment, or the Confusion. Or he gets hit by a Ray of Stupidity or Ego Whip and goes comatose because his charisma is most likely a 6!

 

[Ifni]

So... Celerity is not in the SpC, so kind of irrelevant to the thread, but I wanted to answer some questions people asked about my last post. See spoiler text.

akbearfoot: heh, my dervish didn't learn about empowered rays of enfeeblement until around L12, but after that he always carried potions of lesser restoration - worth every penny. He wasn't using belts of battle, because he needed the Str boost more (and we weren't using the MIC rules for combining them), but he could dance in, full attack and dance out without need for items, and was regularly doing 200+ damage/round starting at L11 (in one round at L15 he cracked 1000 damage, but that was an exceptional situation). He didn't actually get targeted that often, because the melee enemies couldn't full attack him, and if the opponents were mostly casters, they usually didn't realize how dangerous he was until after they were dead (or they wasted rounds trying to stop him with effects he was immune to). There were painful exceptions, though.

If you want to restrict belts of battle while allowing their use to help fighters get full attacks, maybe just houserule them to only the move-action option? Meleers really need a way to get full attacks (if they're not spirited charger types), to keep up with the rest of the party. It's never been a very big deal for me, but my meleers are a dervish and a pouncer, and in my recent high-level tables the consensus has been that if the meleers aren't getting to full attack every round, the casters aren't doing their jobs - so I tend to just assume meleers get full attacks, in balance discussions. If that's not the situation, I can see how meleers would feel weak.

Re wraithstrike: before it was banned in Living Greyhawk, people were talking about fighters taking three levels of wizard ONLY to get Wraithstrike. It also has the effect of making spellsword or arcane trickster builds much stronger, and melee wizards (perhaps using a skilful weapon or Arcane Disciple: Divine Power to improve their BAB) can also become very dangerous. I have a problem with anything that gives fighters who dabble in magic, or full-caster wizards wielding swords, an immense advantage in melee damage over non-magical meleers. Also, it makes dragons just horrendously scary.

I agree the riders on the orb spells can be nice. My shadowcraft mage has actually started using shadow-conjured orb of fire now and then, because the rider is so pretty and her save DCs are quite high (and the party she's been playing in is very weak on direct damage). I still don't think the rider+damage makes them dangerously overpowered for L4 spells, though.




[sblock]My sorc only had Celerity for one game - she picked it up for her big finale, because I was absolutely certain it was going to get used against us (final two-round Living Greyhawk Core Special, with strong hints that we'd be facing the Greater Boneheart), and I wanted to have the option to use it myself So yeah... I was actively abusing it, in that game, with Greater Arcane Fusion loops* and a cohort who could use Healing Lorecall to remove the daze (although I note I only resorted to the Greater Arcane Fusion silliness after the GM did it first). But after the game, I noticed just how many instances there had been where if I'd thought fast enough, I could've used Celerity WITHOUT the exploits and saved some resources (three exploding-enemy situations, another case where I used a one-time-only immediate-action Wish-like power to get an AMF when Celerity + AMF would've worked just as well, reactive counterspelling-with-damage against a certain nasty monster's spell-likes, readying an action and wasting that turn when I could have done what I wanted with Celerity...)

I suspect that even without the ability to remove/negate the daze, and without silly Greater Arcane Fusion nested actions, it's still a bit too low-level at 4th. Not sure if it's broken if you remove the abusive combos, but it's very, very good.

StreamOfTheSky: using waves of enemies would help in some cases, but even so, if you weren't planning to use that move action next round, it's not like you've lost much. That said, giving up the ability to use immediate-action defences can be pretty important.

Btw, this only applies to the standard action version. I don't have a problem with the move- and full-round action versions.

How might one acquire daze immunity anyways? Barring one spell which is forgotten realms specific (and unique only to those who worship Ilmater), and an eberron dragonmark trait (something along that line), I can't recall any other ways of becoming immune to daze.

Even undead and constructs are not exempt (with caveats).

Favor of the Martyr in SpC might do it, although I'd be tempted to rule that "immune to any effect that will cause you to be dazed" = "immune to the entire effect of Celerity". Quick Recovery does it at the cost of a move action. Having someone cast Panacea or a Healing-Lorecall-boosted healing spell on you after the fact works as well - in the latter case, a low-level immediate-action spell like Close Wounds is good.

Flatus: in the example I was thinking of (and I suspect ElderBasilisk may have fought something similar), the sequence went like,
L19 enemy wizard (on init 49 - he had a succubus marshal on his team ):
-Swift action: activate Dispelling Cord (MIC)
-Standard action: chained Greater Dispel on PCs and their visible items. Dispel check is at +26 (+20 CL, +2 Dispelling Cord, +2 due to Spellcaster's Bane prebuff, +2 Elven Spell Lore feat). Takes 10 with Arcane Mastery, autodispels everything CL 25 and lower.
End turn.
-Immediate action: Celerity.
-Standard action: Sudden Extended Time Stop. Rolls max on duration. (This ALWAYS happens to me. I have never had a DM roll LESS than max on a bad guy's timestop duration.)
-Next 10 rounds: (dazed), Wall of Force (blocking escape route), Evard's Black Tentacles, Cloudkill, Freezing Fog, Maw of Chaos, Extended Lingering Flames, Cold-Substituted Extended Lingering Flames, Acid-Substituted Extended Lingering Flames, Electric-Substituted Extended Lingering Flames... and a bunch of others I don't remember. The lower-level spells were quickened. I did count up the spell levels at the time and there were over 100 on the battlefield by the time the timestop ended. The dispel had taken down our freedom of movement, heroes' feast and save buffs and shut off our resistance items.

Now, Celerity is not the only issue here You could get nearly the same effect by using the standard action to greater dispel and the swift to activate a Belt of Battle and cast the Sudden Extended Timestop. Celerity specifically became more of an issue a round later, when one of us cast AMF and moved toward him, and he decided to teleport out as an immediate action rather than stay to be captured.

(The fight was more or less a tie - he got out with his succubus girlfriend, his familiar and a PC's body, we killed his other three lackeys and lost a PC and an animal companion. Given we were a L14 party and the fight was EL22, that's not bad, but still... ow, ow, ow.)

The final fight in the mod where my sorc had Celerity was very similar except there were three wizards, two epic, and they only had one melee lackey rather than four. The party was also L16, not L14. It went MUCH better. The top of the initiative order was a bad guy at init 70, who opened with pretty much exactly the same combo but with more L9 spells, but because we had Foresight active (from scrolls) and immediate-action defences such as Celerity, we were able to interrupt the nova. The fact that we had two PCs with inits in the 60s, so they didn't ALL get to go before us, also helped.

*For clarity, by "Greater Arcane Fusion loops" I mean:
-Cast Celerity, grants a standard action, and you will be dazed when that action ends
-Use that standard action to cast Greater Arcane Fusion, which you use to cast a L7 or lower spell of your choice, and Celerity, granting an extra standard action (still inside the first standard action)
-Repeat until you run out of Greater Arcane Fusions or decide to stop.
This is a way to pump out lots and lots of spells as a one-round nova, with very little your opponents can do to stop it - you're dazed at the end of it but that doesn't matter if they're dead. It's a bit like Timestop except you don't need L9 spells and you don't need to restrict yourself to lasting effects. I consider it an abuse of the rules and unquestionably broken, and I have pretty liberal standards for powergaming
[/sblock]

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Wraithstrike...nobody in any of my gaming groups has ever even asked the DM if they could find/learn it. Mutual non-nuclear proliferation pact I think. Kinda like how nobody has ever taken Black tentacles and the DM never used it again after a module where 1 casting of it almost caused a TPK for 6 characters.

What classes even have access to it? The example I saw above someone said they were an unoptomized 16th level wizard/fighter. But then they mentioned having feats from several splatbooks, MiC items and SpC spells.So I'm curious if those wiz/fght levels were actually PrC levels? Racial substitutions, class substitutions etc...any of which can greatly skew an objective comparison.

An actual 16th level fighter/wizard is a -really- bad class combination. Half the HP of a fighter, with half the BaB and half the caster level...Unless possibly it was optimized with only enough caster levels to get access to wraithstrike. Then use a 2H wounding weapon with power attack and a bag full of pearls of power. A Twilight Mithril BP with the shield spell and all the other basic protections gives a competative AC while letting you cast your spells. Pretty much the definition of optimized though.

I sorta assume that no DM in his right mind would allow a PC to say....create a Use Activated item of wraithstrike.

The melee example above was similar, with the expectation that the melee is running around with the +1 weapon full of enhancment bonuses with a greater magic weapon on all the time. With the assumption that he has the MWM line of feats and a BaB thats high enough to PA for full and still hit on a 2. My assumption is that anyone who is optimized to this degree is always the first one to get hit by the Empowered Ray of Enfeeblment, or the Confusion. Or he gets hit by a Ray of Stupidity or Ego Whip and goes comatose because his charisma is most likely a 6!

Dealing with the last item first:
The melee example is actually pretty typical for parties that work together. All the melee character needs to do is have a cleric or wizard in his party who is willing to prep greater magic weapon and cast it on his greatsword. (Bonus points for using a metamagic rod of chain spell or the chain spell feat to hit every weapon in the party at once or for casting extended greater magic weapons at the end of every day so that you still have your full complement of spells for the next day). It's actually better with a cleric or favored soul because they can use the bead of karma from a strand of prayer beads to boost their caster level by four for the whole suite of standard buffs (greater magic weapon, magic vestment, energy immunity, and potentially conviction) which makes them one point better than the example I posted above.

As for the melee type, I posted, it is not necessarily optimized and is entirely possible with a vanilla fighter 16. With a 16 starting strength, there's plenty of room for whatever stats you think you need to be a real roleplayer and the four levels of fighter beyond lvl 12 (needed for greater weapon specialization) are plenty of room to add things like barbarian (rage makes the example better) and hexblade or pious templar (defensive boosts). You can make the character much more effective than the numbers I posted would indicate. Ray of stupidity is on the banned list for reasons explored by others in this post, and confusion is only more of an issue for him than for anyone else if his will save is poor but ray of enfeeblement is an option (as are potions of lesser restoration).

WRT power attack, the full power attack "hits on a 2" number is there to illustrate why wraithstrike anything that turns attacks into touch attacks is a bad idea. The guy does plenty of damage already and turning it into "hits on a 2 with full PA" cracks the game in half.

As to how the character gets wraithstrike, it might require a few sacrifices--two levels of wizard and a few levels of the heinously broken abjurant champion prestige class. It could also be done with a greater ring of spell storing, a lesser ring of spell storing, and casting a contingent wraithstrike into it. But really, the kind of characters who can get wraithstrike in their own right are not far behind the fullBAB melee with that combo.

As for the fighter wizard from my previous post, I believe that, at the time, he was human Fighter 1/Wizard 6/Spellsword 2/Eldritch Knight 7. Starting str 14, dex 14, con 14, Int 14, Wis 10, Cha 10. (Advanced Int at all opportunities; I believe he had a +4 belt of giant strength and +6 headband of intellect, a +1 holy wounding adamantine guisarme, and +1 moderate fortification mithral chain shirt). The relevant combo was greater blink activated by contingency (no action), arcane strike a 7th level spell (greater scrying IIRC--sacrificed as a free action), activate boots of speed (free action), set power attack to full, cast wraithstrike (swift action) take the free attack from the 3.0 version of expert tactician (free action), full attack. No MIC items on that character though--he predated the MIC book.

I didn't say "unoptimized," but rather "not particularly optimized." He was nothing horrible like the even split fighter/wizard you were wondering about, but he was nothing like as powerful as he might have been with access to twilight armor (which would remove the need for spellsword levels), or the knight phantom (who needs wraithstrike as a spell--you get it as a class feature) or abjurant champion prestige classes. He was also not as effective as he might have been had I sacrificed his lower ability scores a bit more (though I think the 10 charisma saved his life from some kind of charisma draining shadow in a Nyrond interactive at one point. 2 Charisma is alive (and able to rudely ask the cleric for a restoration spell). 0 charisma would have been dead). And I'm sure there is a cheesy feat or two buried somewhere in the FRCS that would enable him to qualify for eldritch knight (or abjurant champion) without the fighter levels. So maybe, "not on the bleeding edge of optimized character construction" would have been a better way to put it.

 

[Runestar]

And I'm sure there is a cheesy feat or two buried somewhere in the FRCS that would enable him to qualify for eldritch knight (or abjurant champion) without the fighter levels.

2 actually, both of which are in PGTF. Militia gives you proficiency with all martial weapons, while otherworldly makes you a native outsider (and the MM states that outsiders are automatically proficient with all martial weapons).

But you seem to have made your point.

The relevant combo was greater blink activated by contingency (no action), arcane strike a 7th level spell (greater scrying IIRC--sacrificed as a free action), activate boots of speed (free action), set power attack to full, cast wraithstrike (swift action) take the free attack from the 3.0 version of expert tactician (free action), full attack.

My memory of 3.0 is quite fuzzy, but I seem to recall that expert tactician did not give you any extra attacks - the enemy in question simply does not see what you did for the rest of the turn. But it still seems like a fairly potent attack sequence nonetheless.

Sure would like to know what the designers were smoking when they conceptualized it...

 

[pawsplay]

Moonbolt: Another one of those excessive ability damage effects.

Energy Immunity: I don't mind the basic concept, but it seems low level when compared to Protection From Energy it turns a duration of a few hours into 24hours, and amps up 12 points/level to complete immunity.

Ebon Eyes: There's nothing too remarkable about seeing in magical darkness, except that they took that ability away from all but the most powerful fiends in 3.5. When you're the only kid on the block who can see in deeper darkness, things get ugly.

 

[Thanee]

Ebon Eyes: There's nothing too remarkable about seeing in magical darkness, except that they took that ability away from all but the most powerful fiends in 3.5. When you're the only kid on the block who can see in deeper darkness, things get ugly.

Anyone (well, except blind creatures) can see in Deeper Darkness, as it only creates shadowy illumination.

Blacklight on the other hand...

BTW, Deeper Darkvision also allows to see through magical darkness. And Blindsight.

Bye
Thanee

 

[akbearfoot]

From my perspective that's pretty darn optimized. In our Age of Wyrms campaign each character is only allowed to use Core + Ebberon CS + a single other sourcebook of our choice. We have neither a mage nor a priest, and 3 of our players prefer to do whatever they feel like tactics be damned. Like skipping a 5 attack flurry of blows and abandoning a flanked monster with a rogue on the other side whos next on initiative...just to get the killing blow on a wimpy minion across the battlemap whos already got 3 others fighting it.


A 1 level dip, 2 prestige classes, high level contingent spells, optimized weapon enchantments. All neatly centered around feats spells and magic items that abuse the action economy. Pretty much a pre-dated RKV

I totally agree that 3.5 wraithstrike is broken for gish with broken 3.0 feats that ignore dex/dodge bonuses automatically in combat.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

From my perspective that's pretty darn optimized. In our Age of Wyrms campaign each character is only allowed to use Core + Ebberon CS + a single other sourcebook of our choice. We have neither a mage nor a priest, and 3 of our players prefer to do whatever they feel like tactics be damned. Like skipping a 5 attack flurry of blows and abandoning a flanked monster with a rogue on the other side whos next on initiative...just to get the killing blow on a wimpy minion across the battlemap whos already got 3 others fighting it.


A 1 level dip, 2 prestige classes, high level contingent spells, optimized weapon enchantments. All neatly centered around feats spells and magic items that abuse the action economy. Pretty much a pre-dated RKV

I totally agree that 3.5 wraithstrike is broken for gish with broken 3.0 feats that ignore dex/dodge bonuses automatically in combat.

Hardly just a one level dip. Fighter/wizard is what the character is. (And the truly optimized character wouldn't have bothered with any levels of fighter, so it's not as though pure-classing is somehow less optimized). It just happens that taking only one level of fighter is the best way to do it in 3.x. Curiously, if you do it that way, you end up with most of the same tradeoffs as you had in earlier editions. You hit slightly less often. Your spells aren't quite as good. And you have to be really careful about how much armor you wear.

And expert tactician never denied people their dex. In 3.0, it let characters take an extra attack against any foe who was denied their dex bonus. In 3.5 it was rewritten to give your allies a bonus if you hit with an OA. That character denied foes their dex the same way any fighter/wizard or rogue does: he used blink. (And, because he had the spells for it, greater blink and improved invisibility).

And in any event, wraithstrike is still way broken for any character who has any use for it whatsoever. Fighter 12/Wizard 3? It's still broken. (And pearls of power are cheap). Fighter 2/Wizard 3? It's still broken. The effect: getting to resolve ordinary power attackable melee attacks as touch attacks is too good to coexist with balance in the game.