Polar Ray

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Fri Feb 08, 2013 7:37 pm

The big question. Why the hell is it an 8th level spell?!

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Feb 08, 2013 7:40 pm

Because the designers are dumb.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Fri Feb 08, 2013 7:43 pm

Eh. makes sense

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Feb 08, 2013 7:52 pm

The history on that is that it was pulled out of the old spell Otiluke's Freezing Sphere. That was a spell in 3rd edition and before that was "pretty good" on the grounds that it had a bunch of options. And for 3.5, they chopped it up into bits and made each version a different level. So the ice beam version was considered the "best" because Andy Collins gets wood for direct damage, so it's higher level than the other versions.

It's a variant on "compare fighter options to fighter options, compare wizard options to wizard options". Only in this case it's comparing different options of a single multi-use spell to each other. So the final comparison is more super retarded than normal.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Feb 08, 2013 7:53 pm

Pretty much. Evocation could be much better if the "XdY/caster level" spells were all found in spell levels 0-2, and you just got heighten spell automatically (or some other way to get around dice caps.)

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Fri Feb 08, 2013 8:49 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:Pretty much. Evocation could be much better if the "XdY/caster level" spells were all found in spell levels 0-2, and you just got heighten spell automatically (or some other way to get around dice caps.)

We adopted Frank's suggested Evocation fix for our Tome game. It mostly works fine, although we did find it clashed with Kaelik's (AlphaNerd's) metamagic fix which caused a bit of an anomaly until we fixed it by instituting level based damage caps. Now it just means that Wizard's can load up their lower level slots with some reasonable area damaging spells and contribute to the damage war if they want to.