Oracle's 'Awesome Display' Revelation

[hymer]

Trying to ask as neutrally as I possibly can: How do you guys interpret this text?


Awesome Display (Su): Your phantasmagoric displays accurately model the mysteries of the night sky, dumbfounding all who behold them. Each creature affected by your illusion (pattern) spells is treated as if its total number of Hit Dice were equal to its number of Hit Dice minus your Charisma modifier (if positive).

Or to put it differently: I'm wondering whether I'm imagining things, or if this by RAW effectively takes away HD? For all puposes? Instantaneously?

In play, I suspect it will be treated differently than what I'm (imagining I am) seeing, of course. What will happen if you play Mythic? Will this ability allow you to use relatively low level spells to crowd control relatively high CR enemies?

[Coretron03]

Its for spells like colour spray that are dependent on enemy hitdie as it effectively lowers their hitdie in regards to that spells effect, Like for if you have 20 cha (mod 5) and cast colour spray on a 7 hd enemy it treats them as 2 hd for colour spray as 7hd - Cha mod =2 so you get better effects from colour spray. Its awesome for save or lose builds for around levels 4 to 10.

[hymer]

Thank you! I expected as much.


Its for spells like colour spray that are dependent on enemy hitdie as it effectively lowers their hitdie in regards to that spells effect,

Which effects would you say it pertains to? Does it do anything for Hypnotic Pattern, e.g., which affects a number of HD? Or something like Color Spray, which affects creatures in a different way, depending on their HD? Or both?

[Serafina]

Yes, it'd work with Hypnotic Pattern.
Suppose you get an 8 on that roll to determine how many total HD you can affect. In the radius there's three 2-HD creatures, two 3-HD creatures and one 5-HD creature (yes that's a lot and not that realistic, I'm using it for illustrative purposes here.

Normally, you'd affect the three 2-HD creatures since lowest-HD creatures are affected first. You wouldn't have enough HD left to affect the 3-HD creature, never mind the 5-HD creature.

With Awesome Display, you'd treat each creatures HD as (Charisma bonus) lower. Say your Charisma bonus is 4 - so you'd treat the 2- and 3-HD as 0, and the 5-HD as 1. You can now affect all the 2 HD creatures (who count as 0 for the purpose of your total HD), all the 3-HD creatures (still 0) and the 5-HD creature (counting as 2) - you'd even have 6 total HD affected left, but at that point it's extremely hard to get more creatures inside the radius.

Suppose the radius contains several 5-HD creatures, and one 8-HD creature.
Normally you'd only affect one 5-HD creature, and could only affect the 8-HD creature if there's nobody else at all in the area (because lower HD get targeted first).
With Awesome Display you could affect up to four 5-HD creatures, and if there's only two you'd even have enough power to affect the 8-HD creature too (since it'd count as having 4 HD).



So yes, this is a REALLY good ability if you want to use Illusion (Pattern) spells. It takes them from "useless at higher levels" to "really strong crowd-control spells that can even affect lone high-level enemies". With a high charisma modifier (say, 8) you could affect whole army units with Rainbow Pattern.
Sadly, the only spells where this actually has any effect are Color Spray, Hypnotic Pattern, Loathsome Veil, Rainbow Pattern and Scintillating Pattern. And all of those spells boil down to "disable a bunch of creatures who still get a will save and spell resistance" - with Awesome Display they become really good at taking out huge amounts of lower-level enemies, but they'll still be not-so-great against stronger enemies, even if you can affect them now.

[hymer]

Thank you very much!

Though I've one more niggle: Hypnotic Pattern 'affects' so and so many HD of creatures. Whereas Awesome Display modifies what happens to "Each creature affected". Is there a case to be made that first you check to see whether a creature is affected by the spell, and if they are, then the HD-reduction comes into effect for purposes of spells like Color Spray or Rainbow Pattern?