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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9348547" data-attributes="member: 6877472">In fairness, I have a lot of 3e/PF1e experience, having played 3e from when it first came out.  It's a system I love, but it's not without it's flaws.  On the topic of buffing, while it can be very powerful, I noticed in my games that players often have problems knowing when to buff and when to act.  Many times I saw fights where someone said "I should have cast that buff spell" and equally many times were the fights where someone was like "so wait, it's over?  I still have 55 combat rounds left on that spell!", knowing full well that the spell could very well be over before there was another encounter.Often, my groups would not have a caster dedicated to buffs if I was running.  When I played, I would either focus on crowd control/debuffs or buffs for the party, and the experience was like night and day, but it didn't change how other people played, lol.And to be fair, knowing when and how to buff is difficult even for experienced players, which is why my last 3.5 character was a Cleric (ab)using Divine Metamagic to provide the party with all-day buffs.  Which eventually killed the game, because it didn't matter how poorly my team operated or how strange their builds were, the numbers I was giving them let them muddle through even epic battles.When we took on a CR 17 at level 9, the DM finally threw in the towel- he'd been running published adventures and didn't have the experience to know how to adjust for a party that was frequently operating as if 2-3 levels higher than they actually were!He even remarked that it was strange the rest of the party didn't think I did much (because, to be fair, outside of emergency healing in combat, most of my turns were spent using my Reserve Feat), when in reality, I was the glue that kept them going.  And I'd told him straight up what I was going to do, and got his approval, but as he said, in retrospect, he had no idea how powerful buffs could be when you always have them.And when he tried to have enemies dispel my buffs, he found that was a miserable use of enemy actions- they might get lucky and strip something away, but do no real damage to the party, which demoralized him (never no mind that taking away +3 to AC or +4 to attacks/saves was a huge blow).TLDR: buffing in 3e is complicated.  Depending on player skill and circumstances, it can range from a waste of time to absolutely back-breaking for creating balanced encounters.</blockquote>

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