Can you give an example of a spell like this? I know sometimes they do the +2/+2 on a class feat that gives damage. I think the Psychic has a couple feats that do that, for example. The point there, I believe, is to keep it in line with a +1 dice per spell level that casters often get. But yes, doing it for a spell seems like it would be pointless.
Sometimes, the reason for it is that it has a mechanic, aside from the damage, that only scales by 1 every 4 levels, and it's easier to write a heightened +2 entry and double the damage increase than to write out the increase for every single level or to have two different heightened entries.
PF2e has become my favorite system ever. But yes, this is one of those ridiculous things they do that just make zero sense. I think most of those spells probably came out early, when they were still uncertain about balance issues? That’s all I’ve got in the form of answers. 😂 It’s sort of like their penchant for making certain class feats way too high level for what they do. And/or taxing a high level class feat that doesn’t need it, and it just sucks the usefulness out of it. For example, that Psychic feat at level 14 or whatever that grants an extra spell slot at levels 1-4. Awesome! Oh wait, they can only be spells granted to you by Conscious Mind? Outside of Infinite Eye, which has True Strike at level 1 (basically giving you a total of five extra True Strikes per day), there’s not much to get excited by from that feat.
From what I noticed, cantrips aside, it's usually because it's a spell that deals continuous damage (rouse skeletons, animated assault) or heightening also increase the number of targets (Blistering Invective). Honestly though, there's no reason heightening can't be broken up into smaller increments and/or seperate tracks. I already do this in my homebrew for low level blasts like burning hands, pummeling rubble, grim tendrils, etc where there's a seperate track for heightening where the AoE size expands to match other AoEs in that spell level (imo, a 6th level slot is a 6th level slot, you shouldn't be punished because you just vibe with shooting grim tendrils more than lighting bolt). This would work fine with like blistering invective where you have a +1 track of +1d6 fire damage and a +2 track of adding an extra target
I find this best used in, to give an example, a spell that heals you for say 1d6 and Grant's +5 movement. Sure adding 1d6 every level would be fine but not with the additional movement, so instead it Grant's 2d6 and +5 additional movement every two levels, but it is bad in the cases you described
The problem is not the hightening +2 but the fact that they don't scale well. I add more dmg everytime I see something as useless as Daze, for example Daze is 1+spelldmg at 1st and 1d8+spelldmg at 3rd
I feel like it is fine for cantrips and focus spells since those are always known and you are not making a commitment to heighten them. But I recently memorized a 2nd-level Magic Missile thinking "Oh yeah the most iconic 1st level spell ever would greatly fill the gap in my 2nd-level spells." I was so disappointed to realize it did absolutely nothing different from the 1st-level version. I cannot explain how mad I was!
For daze, it's the stun 1 on a crit is why they have reduced damage. The damage is just an add on to shooting for that with no resources used. Acid splash is a cantrip AoE as is the new wind one. Echoing weapon is just terrible.
Tbh daze is so useless anyways. It should stun 1 on a normal fail. If it needs to deal less damage to make that balanced then fine, but the spell needs to feel worth casting.
As someone who did break 4 ribs in a falling accident I will say this: It will take time for you to feel normal again. Just trust the process. My guess is that you should be back to normal by the 20th to 24th.
I'm guessing for daze they calculated it as needing around 1.75 damage per spell level. So they made it 1d6 every 2 levels because they wanted to add a damage die.
Echoing blade scales with level and number of hits with said weapon. It's a non concentration, buff spell you can give others....at 3rd level it is about as powerful as fireball. But can outpace the fireball with luck and special builds.
Magic Missile? Since it's automatic damage, it scales in probably a balanced way. Using all 3 actions to cast, it's 3d4+3 or 10.5 avg damage at level 1. That's great. At spell level 5 (character level 9), it's 9d4+9 or 31.5 avg dmg. For an auto-hit, that's still not bad.
Also, there's no ability to claim mechanical balance. Because produce flame is just a better can trip than almost every other attack cantrip, except Ray of Frost which has insane range for a cantrip. Like there's no real balancing in all of those. And then like look at acid splash since we will might go. Oh but it's an AOE, I'm sure an AOE that can damage your allies and also spout and the Earth one also do multiple squares.
I think it has less to do with the mechanic itself and just that echoing weapon and some of the other spells are just bad. But i feel like for alot of them something else is going on. Magic Missle is auto damage and is variable in the amount of damage you can send and variable when it comes to who you can target. That is insanely flexible and useful. Daze stuns enemies on crit fails and more importantly is the easiet way to do non lethal damage besides your fist. So if you want to try and knock someone unconscious instead of killing them you can bring it in. Grim tendrils has a persistent damage effect, so the earlier in the fight and the longer the fight lasts it can payoff there. Acid splash and haunting hymn are splash/aoes that are great for swarms and troops. And they are a bit harder to come by. Acid is also good against anything that has regeneration, and sonic damage is rarely resisted. Sonic damage can also be used to stop regen on at least one type of troll(when my cleric who had haunting hymn prepared was the only one who has sonic damage are party would have had to flee or die by that troll) I think alot of these spells have tons of utility and options. The damage is just a bonus. They arent your go to options for everything but when you need them you need them.
@@rosesanchez1252 I agree with you, I also hate how other people so often want everything to scale consistently, just for the sake of "balance". I usually like Pathfinder, but I feel like this "balance" is one of the problems of the system. As a common example, why does something happen every single level-up for every single class? So your entire party levels up, and now suddenly _everyone_ gets stronger? Why haven't they made it so only some classes get stronger at specific levels? It's almost as if they want all the different classes to be equal at all levels. But as you put it so well, that approach just results in everything being homogenized, which is just bad game design.
It's about balance. The description of Daze (the example used) deals automatic damage, with a Will save for the stun effect. This has been confirmed on Paizo forums by the designers. It's designed to be a great low level spell that loses it's potency as you level up. The auto damage is why it only does spellcasting modifer damage at level 1 instead of 1dx + modifer.
@@TheSahugani Not with its current text it isn't. It's a basic save, which means the save affects the damage dealt. If it's not meant to work that way it needs an errata. Why do you say the save isn't supposed to be a basic save?
See, I like Pathfinder 2e quite a bit, but videos like this just make me want to play something OSR. When we're starting to nickel and dime our feats and spells, and measure damage points in millimeters, I just want to throw in the towel.
I honestly wished they had mutable spells. Like there is no 3rd lvl Burning Hands and why does it HAVE to be Fire? Have a generic: Ray, Splash, Save, Ball, Cone. Pick the elemental type with the spell (so it's not hot swappable, but you could memorize 2 versions). If Burning Hands increased damage every (H+1) and increased range (H+2), then you wouldn't need Cone of Cold. To me one of the problems is there's too many spells that are just the same. Aunt, it just clogs up the game with lots of duplicate versions of spells. It would be so much easier for especially new players, but even old ones if like all the basic damage spells were like common and defaultable. And then every other spell does something actually new and interesting. It doesn't just do whole milk because the damage spells can just do that. And before anyone says it, no, you can't pick Force damage. Of course, don't make straw man arguments.
I feel like it'd work better for balancing if it was a normal scaling (1 per spell level) but delayed and packed into 2 per 2 spell levels. So at some level ranges it doesn't get an upgrade where it wouldn't really need it to be effective because it's already strong (like it's efficient against some ennemies of that level range, or it's rarely resisted around that level) but in the end it catches up. So Echoing weapon going from 1 at level 1, to 3 at level 3, 5 at level 5 etc, but still 1 at level 2, 3 at level 4. because it doesn't *need* to eat up your highest slot at that level.
Any spell can be cast with any level of spell slot equal to or higher than their level. Some spells have an additional effect when cast with a higher slot. For example, if you cast Magic Missile with a level 3 slot instead of a level 1, it fires additional missles.
This is a great example of why things like Acid Arrow SUCK! Acid Arrow scales slowly because it includes persistent damage. The PROBLEM is that Acid Arrow does the same damage as an equal level Sudden Bolt... after 3 rounds. Factor in the fact that Saving Throws do more damage because "half on save" and you are left with absolutely ZERO REASON to prep Acid Arrow over Sudden Bolt.
Daze is especially stupid. The damage isn't great to begin with and would still rather suck at +1d4/SL. The main advantage of the spell only comes when the target crit-fails it's save. And there are so many enemies that are just immune to the spell entirely. And please don't get me started on how hard it is to play an effective Enchantment specialist wizard in general. Incapacitate!
So I may be wrong but reading “Heightened” it seems that means level not spell level so daze would be increased at 3rd level to a 1d6 at 5th 2d6 and so on. The example they give is fire ball. But I would assume the cantrips work the same way.
Other heightened entries give a number after a plus sign, indicating that heightening grants extra advantages over multiple levels. The listed effect applies for every increment of levels by which the spell is heightened above its lowest spell level, and the benefit is cumulative. For example, fireball says “Heightened (+1) The damage increases by 2d6.” Because fireball deals 6d6 fire damage at 3rd level, a 4th-level fireball would deal 8d6 fire damage, a 5th-level spell would deal 10d6 fire damage, and so on. This is from Archives of Nethys
The key words here are "For every increment of levels by which *the spell* is heightened" not the character. Spell levels are separate from character levels. A new spell level is available every odd character level. (1st level can cast 1st level spells, 3rd level can cast 2nd level spells, 5th level can cast 3rd level spells, etc.)
@@Nonat1s I feel people forget that it works that way, so thanks for explaining that... but yeah, a +2 effect should do much more for the +2 cost. Daze should kind of take away an action at the higher levels on a failure and lower (instead of the general critical failure), considering the damage here is to take away actions and not really the overall damage. It also makes more sense with Gale Blast IS a +2 effect, considering the effect can hit multiple targets at once and push them away at the same time, even on a normal failure.
@@Nonat1s just to make sure I understand. The fireball in the example. It’s each spell slot level? Also apparently cantrips level up different then spells they are half your level so at level 20 you would cast level 10 cantrips. So daze would get 5 extra dice max right?
![ตีสิบเดย์ [FULL] | เปิดใจ "อาจารย์ เบียร์ ฅนตื่นธรรม" นักสนทนาธรรมสายดุดัน!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vqaBI_mnoDk/mqdefault.jpg)
Especially weird moment, when spell has "Heightened (+2): +2 dice of damage". Why? Why it is not +1/+1
Can you give an example of a spell like this? I know sometimes they do the +2/+2 on a class feat that gives damage. I think the Psychic has a couple feats that do that, for example. The point there, I believe, is to keep it in line with a +1 dice per spell level that casters often get. But yes, doing it for a spell seems like it would be pointless.
@@Captainpigraven the Psychic's Daze when Heightened scales at +2 for an extra 2d10
Sometimes, the reason for it is that it has a mechanic, aside from the damage, that only scales by 1 every 4 levels, and it's easier to write a heightened +2 entry and double the damage increase than to write out the increase for every single level or to have two different heightened entries.
Magic missile is a great example of why it exists.
And has never scaled differently, not even in AD&D first
Sounds like we should ask the Knights of Last Call and their 80 hours of ranking every spell in the game.
PF2e has become my favorite system ever. But yes, this is one of those ridiculous things they do that just make zero sense. I think most of those spells probably came out early, when they were still uncertain about balance issues? That’s all I’ve got in the form of answers. 😂
It’s sort of like their penchant for making certain class feats way too high level for what they do. And/or taxing a high level class feat that doesn’t need it, and it just sucks the usefulness out of it. For example, that Psychic feat at level 14 or whatever that grants an extra spell slot at levels 1-4. Awesome! Oh wait, they can only be spells granted to you by Conscious Mind? Outside of Infinite Eye, which has True Strike at level 1 (basically giving you a total of five extra True Strikes per day), there’s not much to get excited by from that feat.
From what I noticed, cantrips aside, it's usually because it's a spell that deals continuous damage (rouse skeletons, animated assault) or heightening also increase the number of targets (Blistering Invective).
Honestly though, there's no reason heightening can't be broken up into smaller increments and/or seperate tracks. I already do this in my homebrew for low level blasts like burning hands, pummeling rubble, grim tendrils, etc where there's a seperate track for heightening where the AoE size expands to match other AoEs in that spell level (imo, a 6th level slot is a 6th level slot, you shouldn't be punished because you just vibe with shooting grim tendrils more than lighting bolt). This would work fine with like blistering invective where you have a +1 track of +1d6 fire damage and a +2 track of adding an extra target
I find this best used in, to give an example, a spell that heals you for say 1d6 and Grant's +5 movement. Sure adding 1d6 every level would be fine but not with the additional movement, so instead it Grant's 2d6 and +5 additional movement every two levels, but it is bad in the cases you described
The problem is not the hightening +2 but the fact that they don't scale well. I add more dmg everytime I see something as useless as Daze, for example Daze is 1+spelldmg at 1st and 1d8+spelldmg at 3rd
I feel like it is fine for cantrips and focus spells since those are always known and you are not making a commitment to heighten them. But I recently memorized a 2nd-level Magic Missile thinking "Oh yeah the most iconic 1st level spell ever would greatly fill the gap in my 2nd-level spells." I was so disappointed to realize it did absolutely nothing different from the 1st-level version. I cannot explain how mad I was!
acid arrow has that scaling to simplify the persistent dmg scaling
For daze, it's the stun 1 on a crit is why they have reduced damage. The damage is just an add on to shooting for that with no resources used. Acid splash is a cantrip AoE as is the new wind one. Echoing weapon is just terrible.
Tbh daze is so useless anyways. It should stun 1 on a normal fail. If it needs to deal less damage to make that balanced then fine, but the spell needs to feel worth casting.
As someone who did break 4 ribs in a falling accident I will say this:
It will take time for you to feel normal again. Just trust the process.
My guess is that you should be back to normal by the 20th to 24th.
Acid arrow scales the same way but does beat out most other spells on even levels
I'm guessing for daze they calculated it as needing around 1.75 damage per spell level. So they made it 1d6 every 2 levels because they wanted to add a damage die.
That clock threw me off 🤣
Is this video flipped, or is that just an insane clock on the wall behind you?
It's just supposed to scale roughly at the rate of striking runes, it's pretty fine
Echoing blade scales with level and number of hits with said weapon. It's a non concentration, buff spell you can give others....at 3rd level it is about as powerful as fireball. But can outpace the fireball with luck and special builds.
Magic Missile? Since it's automatic damage, it scales in probably a balanced way. Using all 3 actions to cast, it's 3d4+3 or 10.5 avg damage at level 1. That's great. At spell level 5 (character level 9), it's 9d4+9 or 31.5 avg dmg. For an auto-hit, that's still not bad.
Also, there's no ability to claim mechanical balance. Because produce flame is just a better can trip than almost every other attack cantrip, except Ray of Frost which has insane range for a cantrip.
Like there's no real balancing in all of those.
And then like look at acid splash since we will might go. Oh but it's an AOE, I'm sure an AOE that can damage your allies and also spout and the Earth one also do multiple squares.
I think it has less to do with the mechanic itself and just that echoing weapon and some of the other spells are just bad. But i feel like for alot of them something else is going on.
Magic Missle is auto damage and is variable in the amount of damage you can send and variable when it comes to who you can target. That is insanely flexible and useful.
Daze stuns enemies on crit fails and more importantly is the easiet way to do non lethal damage besides your fist. So if you want to try and knock someone unconscious instead of killing them you can bring it in.
Grim tendrils has a persistent damage effect, so the earlier in the fight and the longer the fight lasts it can payoff there.
Acid splash and haunting hymn are splash/aoes that are great for swarms and troops. And they are a bit harder to come by. Acid is also good against anything that has regeneration, and sonic damage is rarely resisted. Sonic damage can also be used to stop regen on at least one type of troll(when my cleric who had haunting hymn prepared was the only one who has sonic damage are party would have had to flee or die by that troll)
I think alot of these spells have tons of utility and options. The damage is just a bonus. They arent your go to options for everything but when you need them you need them.
Also i think if theey made every spell that candeal damage, heightened 1, it would just homogenize everything and make it all look samey
@@rosesanchez1252 I agree with you, I also hate how other people so often want everything to scale consistently, just for the sake of "balance".
I usually like Pathfinder, but I feel like this "balance" is one of the problems of the system. As a common example, why does something happen every single level-up for every single class? So your entire party levels up, and now suddenly _everyone_ gets stronger? Why haven't they made it so only some classes get stronger at specific levels? It's almost as if they want all the different classes to be equal at all levels. But as you put it so well, that approach just results in everything being homogenized, which is just bad game design.
It's about balance. The description of Daze (the example used) deals automatic damage, with a Will save for the stun effect. This has been confirmed on Paizo forums by the designers.
It's designed to be a great low level spell that loses it's potency as you level up. The auto damage is why it only does spellcasting modifer damage at level 1 instead of 1dx + modifer.
What do you mean by automatic damage? Like, because it's a spell with a basic save it only does 0 on a critical success?
@@12thLevelSithLord The save is for the stun effect only. It always does full damage.
@@TheSahugani Not with its current text it isn't. It's a basic save, which means the save affects the damage dealt. If it's not meant to work that way it needs an errata. Why do you say the save isn't supposed to be a basic save?
See, I like Pathfinder 2e quite a bit, but videos like this just make me want to play something OSR. When we're starting to nickel and dime our feats and spells, and measure damage points in millimeters, I just want to throw in the towel.
That's not as bad as higher level monsters saving v. virtually every non-attack spell
I honestly wished they had mutable spells. Like there is no 3rd lvl Burning Hands and why does it HAVE to be Fire?
Have a generic: Ray, Splash, Save, Ball, Cone. Pick the elemental type with the spell (so it's not hot swappable, but you could memorize 2 versions).
If Burning Hands increased damage every (H+1) and increased range (H+2), then you wouldn't need Cone of Cold. To me one of the problems is there's too many spells that are just the same. Aunt, it just clogs up the game with lots of duplicate versions of spells. It would be so much easier for especially new players, but even old ones if like all the basic damage spells were like common and defaultable. And then every other spell does something actually new and interesting. It doesn't just do whole milk because the damage spells can just do that.
And before anyone says it, no, you can't pick Force damage. Of course, don't make straw man arguments.
D&d 5e has the same problem with basically all of the scale every other type spells
Someone needs to explain echoing weapon to me, because it seems to have no use case at all.
I feel like it'd work better for balancing if it was a normal scaling (1 per spell level) but delayed and packed into 2 per 2 spell levels. So at some level ranges it doesn't get an upgrade where it wouldn't really need it to be effective because it's already strong (like it's efficient against some ennemies of that level range, or it's rarely resisted around that level) but in the end it catches up.
So Echoing weapon going from 1 at level 1, to 3 at level 3, 5 at level 5 etc, but still 1 at level 2, 3 at level 4. because it doesn't *need* to eat up your highest slot at that level.
The only time I'm ok with it is guaranteed damage like force fang or magic missle to be honest
wait, does "Heightened" happen on character level up? or on spell slot expended?
I thought it was only cantrips that auto-heightened on level?
Any spell can be cast with any level of spell slot equal to or higher than their level. Some spells have an additional effect when cast with a higher slot.
For example, if you cast Magic Missile with a level 3 slot instead of a level 1, it fires additional missles.
1d6+4 vs 4 is almost double the damage on average.
7.5 vs 4
Yep, at Level 5.
@@rylandrc yup, iirc there is a rider on that too, so that's where part of the value goes I guess? Rider as in non damaging effect.
This is a great example of why things like Acid Arrow SUCK! Acid Arrow scales slowly because it includes persistent damage.
The PROBLEM is that Acid Arrow does the same damage as an equal level Sudden Bolt... after 3 rounds.
Factor in the fact that Saving Throws do more damage because "half on save" and you are left with absolutely ZERO REASON to prep Acid Arrow over Sudden Bolt.
Daze is especially stupid. The damage isn't great to begin with and would still rather suck at +1d4/SL. The main advantage of the spell only comes when the target crit-fails it's save. And there are so many enemies that are just immune to the spell entirely.
And please don't get me started on how hard it is to play an effective Enchantment specialist wizard in general. Incapacitate!
same
Daze isn't primarily a damage spell; it's a cantrip that eats an action. Look at PF1e daze and be grateful
Yesss! This is so obnoxious!
i hate daze with a passion. This spell was designed to be bad ..
So I may be wrong but reading “Heightened” it seems that means level not spell level so daze would be increased at 3rd level to a 1d6 at 5th 2d6 and so on. The example they give is fire ball. But I would assume the cantrips work the same way.
Other heightened entries give a number after a plus sign, indicating that heightening grants extra advantages over multiple levels. The listed effect applies for every increment of levels by which the spell is heightened above its lowest spell level, and the benefit is cumulative. For example, fireball says “Heightened (+1) The damage increases by 2d6.” Because fireball deals 6d6 fire damage at 3rd level, a 4th-level fireball would deal 8d6 fire damage, a 5th-level spell would deal 10d6 fire damage, and so on.
This is from Archives of Nethys
The key words here are "For every increment of levels by which *the spell* is heightened" not the character. Spell levels are separate from character levels. A new spell level is available every odd character level. (1st level can cast 1st level spells, 3rd level can cast 2nd level spells, 5th level can cast 3rd level spells, etc.)
@@Nonat1s I feel people forget that it works that way, so thanks for explaining that... but yeah, a +2 effect should do much more for the +2 cost. Daze should kind of take away an action at the higher levels on a failure and lower (instead of the general critical failure), considering the damage here is to take away actions and not really the overall damage.
It also makes more sense with Gale Blast IS a +2 effect, considering the effect can hit multiple targets at once and push them away at the same time, even on a normal failure.
@@Nonat1s just to make sure I understand. The fireball in the example. It’s each spell slot level? Also apparently cantrips level up different then spells they are half your level so at level 20 you would cast level 10 cantrips. So daze would get 5 extra dice max right?
@@kodymann6120 Exactly 👍
This is why I don't play mages...
:=8/