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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7887131" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'll give a brief example with Blasphemy. Blasphemy was a rare spell that offered no saving throw. In it's 3.0e edition version, it was a spell meant for quickly dispatching minions that would otherwise not be a difficult to a caster of the prowess to cast Blasphemy. When 3.5e updated the spell, someone decided that instead of effecting a fixed HD foe, it ought to scale to the caster level. They made this change without updating the spell to take a saving throw, which meant they now had a die no save spell in the game that depended solely on caster level. And if that wasn't bad enough, the had elsewhere in the rules published numerous ways for a caster to easily or cheaply increase their effective caster level by an arbitrary amount based on the assumption that increased caster level was of only a minor benefit (an assumption that largely holds in core 3.0e, because for example, spells that dealt damage like fireball that did scale with level had caps on damage written into them).The result of this was first there were builds where once the caster could cast Blasphemy or another alignment's equivalent, they could cast it at an almost arbitarily high level by stacking means to raise caster level, which meant that by the time the caster was in the mid teens they could insta-kill gods.And the second result of this is that on the DM side, there were monsters that could cast Blasphemy at will, and PC's of a level where they were supposed to be able to face this monster would be stun locked indefinitely and the only way to thwart this was some sort of magic Paper to the monster's Rock.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7887131, member: 4937"] I'll give a brief example with Blasphemy. Blasphemy was a rare spell that offered no saving throw. In it's 3.0e edition version, it was a spell meant for quickly dispatching minions that would otherwise not be a difficult to a caster of the prowess to cast Blasphemy. When 3.5e updated the spell, someone decided that instead of effecting a fixed HD foe, it ought to scale to the caster level. They made this change without updating the spell to take a saving throw, which meant they now had a die no save spell in the game that depended solely on caster level. And if that wasn't bad enough, the had elsewhere in the rules published numerous ways for a caster to easily or cheaply increase their effective caster level by an arbitrary amount based on the assumption that increased caster level was of only a minor benefit (an assumption that largely holds in core 3.0e, because for example, spells that dealt damage like fireball that did scale with level had caps on damage written into them). The result of this was first there were builds where once the caster could cast Blasphemy or another alignment's equivalent, they could cast it at an almost arbitarily high level by stacking means to raise caster level, which meant that by the time the caster was in the mid teens they could insta-kill gods. And the second result of this is that on the DM side, there were monsters that could cast Blasphemy at will, and PC's of a level where they were supposed to be able to face this monster would be stun locked indefinitely and the only way to thwart this was some sort of magic Paper to the monster's Rock. [/QUOTE]

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