Long casting time spells in PF-Exploit?

[JoshuaZ]

What spells in Pathfinder have long casting times that could be severely abused if they could cast quickly? The reason I ask is the following: In Pathfinder the capstone of the Eldritch Knight is Spell Critical which says:



At 10th level, whenever an eldritch knight successfully confirms a critical hit, he can cast a spell as a swift action. The spell must include the target of the attack as one of its targets or in its area of effect. Casting this spell does not provoke an attack of opportunity. The caster must still meet all of the spell's components and must roll for arcane spell failure if necessary.

Suppose one has a friendly psion who can manifest Death Urge (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/psionics-unleashed/psionic-powers/d/death-urge), which causes you to automatically hit yourself as for a critical hit. So, the idea is psion casts the spell while you are holding a tiny dagger. You voluntarily fail the save, and crit yourself, and then cast the spell with an obnoxiously long casting time.

The main problem I see with this is that arguably Death Urge doesn't make an actual critical hit, only deal damage as one since it says:


If armed, the subject attacks itself as a full-round action. The attack automatically succeeds and deals damage as a critical hit.

So, does this work? And if it does work, what spells would be most fun to use it with?

[Cog]

I don't know PF spells well enough to comment on that side of it, but this exploit doesn't work. The class ability requires you to confirm a critical hit, while Death Urge doesn't require confirmation, and merely does damage as if a critical; it's not treated as a critical for non-damage effects.

[JoshuaZ]

I don't know PF spells well enough to comment on that side of it, but this exploit doesn't work. The class ability requires you to confirm a critical hit, while Death Urge doesn't require confirmation, and merely does damage as if a critical; it's not treated as a critical for non-damage effects.

That was more or less what I was wondering about in the second bit. So I guess this doesn't work. I suppose the same basic tactic can still work if one is just tries hitting a cooperative someone a few times until one crits, thus reducing the time to cast long spells until how long it takes to roll a critical hit, but that's going to be more variable (even if on average it might be much shorter than a long casting time).