Best Evocation spells for a shadowcaster

[Lans]

The shadow caster is a bad class, and its spells are not worth its casting, one of the interesting things it gets is lesser shadow evocation, like the spell except it is and casts 4th level evocations, and the greater version which is and casts 6th level spells.

What are the best evocaton spells for this mystery?

[peacenlove]

The shadow caster is a bad class, and its spells are not worth its casting, one of the interesting things it gets is lesser shadow evocation, like the spell except it is and casts 4th level evocations, and the greater version which is and casts 6th level spells.

What are the best evocaton spells for this mystery?

Depends if you allow the caster to take the full effects of Shadow evocation buffs via deliberately failing their Will Save. This is a controversial matter, best left decided by the DM.
If not, (Greater) Shadow evocation is much less useful because it doesn't affect objects.

If yes, Blacklight, Dalamar's Lightning Lance, Early Twilight, Fire Shield, Greater Floating Disk, Invoke the Cerulean Sign, Slashing Dispel, Parboil, Passage of the Shifting Sands, Ray of Resurgence, Thunderlance, Venom Bolt, Vision of the Omniscient Eye, Wind Wall, Wings of Flurry and the various Wall spells are amongst my favorites.

For the Greater brother you have Contigency, Emerald Burst, Legion's Fire Shield, Lord of the Sky, Overwhelming Revelations, Sending, Streamers and Wall of Force.

[Yogibear41]

I wouldn't say its bad, its just got no lasting power, you can do some neat stuff with the meta-shadow feats, you can just only do it once or twice a day, before you run out of gas.

I would highly recommend taking levels in Master of Shadow for the "all day" servant that you can keep using when you are out of resources, or a 1 level dip+precocious apprentice for Noctumancer to give you more endurance.

I know this response did not answer your question at all, and for that I apologize, just wanted to throw my 2 cents in. :smallsmile:

I've had a few conversation about shadowcasters and reserve feats since technically their highest level mysteries function as arcane spells, whether or not they could be used to power certain reserve feats.

[Zaq]

I've had a few conversation about shadowcasters and reserve feats since technically their highest level mysteries function as arcane spells, whether or not they could be used to power certain reserve feats.

Mysteries cast as arcane spells can totally power reserve feats, but it gets really awkward when you hit a new tier of mysteries (Initiate or Master), you suddenly have only one mystery that’s an arcane spell (hope it’s got the keywords you care about!), and all of your other mysteries suddenly no longer work to power the reserve feat. And for that matter, if it DOES have the right keywords, I hope you weren’t planning on, like, actually casting that one single mystery of your highest tier, at least not if you still want your reserve feat to work. Yeah. Shadowcasters get messy when reserve feats hit the table.

All of this is simple to houserule away (“new rule: mysteries can power reserve feats regardless of whether they’re spells, SLAs, or supernatural”), but I believe it to be RAW. I personally feel like if we’re already houseruling to give Shadowcasters more staying power, it’s more appropriate to just make their mysteries per encounter instead of per day, or staple on a no-frills Eldritch Blast, or whatever.

[BowStreetRunner]

To be perfectly honest, Shadow Conjuration and Shadow Evocation always gave me headaches. I like magic that is quick to sort out so we can resolve it quickly and move on to the next person in the initiative sequence. Whenever someone used one of these in our games I always saw it as an opportunity to get up and use the restroom or get something to eat or drink - they would still be sorting everything out by the time I got back. Maybe it was because the casters in my group were always coming up with the most convoluted ways to use the spells, but I still shrink at the idea of having one of those spells go off when we are running short on time.

What I do recall however, was that one of the casters made good use of these spells and the saving throws to cast area effects that normally were negatives for everyone (friend and foe) but by letting the party members in on what wasn't real we could often ignore the effect. "A character faced with proof that an illusion isn’t real needs no saving throw. If any viewer successfully disbelieves an illusion and communicates this fact to others, each such viewer gains a saving throw with a +4 bonus."SRD (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm#illusion)

So a Shadow Evocation 'Darkness' spell would only impair the vision of our enemies. Or a Greater Shadow Conjuration 'Black Tentacles' would be ignored by our party while the enemy dealt with the effects.