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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 6875970" data-attributes="member: 9789">Fair enough!  Yeah I guess any 9th level spell that does less than 40d6 is strictly worse.  Evocation FTW!The Cloudkill / Dimension Door example is pretty decent - but then again, it's hard to imagine a situation where this would be THAT much more effective than taking two rounds to do those things instead - especially a situation where a different 9th level spell wouldn't have been a better use of your slot (again:  Meteor Swarm).  Same thing with Forcecage / Animated Objects.  If your goal is killin', meteors tend to get that done (140 avg dam).  Certainly there are niche scenarios but other spells are still just as useful if not more so.pming has a decent point, honestly.  If Time Stop didn't allow you to just walk up to someone and stab them in the neck, I'm not sure what else it could be used for.  (Now, I can justify the "crit doesn't mean auto-kill" thing, at least to myself:  HP still represent the difficulty of killing something, and even stabbing that enemy in the eye is something that might not kill them if you didn't do it exactly right.  So your auto-crit-to-the-eye STILL didn't kill the guy if you didn't do enough HP damage because that means you just didn't quite do it right, and now they are horribly injured but alive...)  I mean, again:  9th level spells can just straight up kill a dude.  So this isn't much different than Meteor Swarm or True Polymorph or whatever, except that the target doesn't get a save - which I suppose you could still add after-the-fact, like a Con save for half due to the time distortion of "getting stabbed" suddenly allowing you to react.  Or, if you didn't like that, you could always interpret the spell such that the "action" "affecting a creature" is what breaks the spell - and crucially, not the effect of the action - which means that at best the creature would be surprised, but not helpless, when the action took place.  It's a reasonable interpretation, even if a bit rules-lawyery.  Or, you could just decide that like Power Word Kill, the spell's target gets no save and that's that.  PW:K still has a limitation of 100 HP, but it's otherwise pretty comparable.Still, even if it's arguably not RAW, this seems like the best possible use of this otherwise useless spell.</blockquote>

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