Pathfinder or 3.5 Spells that could be good at a different level

[Elder_Basilisk]

What Pathfinder and 3.5 spells could be good and/or fun at a different level?

I'll start.
Acid arrow is a cool spell but it should be first level. Make it first level and it's still not obviously optimal but there are scenarios where you might want it rather than magic missile. At 2nd level, there is almost no scenario where you want it.

Waves of Fatigue and Waves of Exhaustion are cool spells and exploit interesting mechanics but at 5th level and 7the level, they're extremely overpriced. You could easily make them 4th and 6th level respectively without breaking anything and I think they would probably be competitive rather than overpowered at 3rd/5th level.

What other spells have cool and interesting effects but never see play because they're several levels too high?

[heavyfuel]

Most spells are weak for their level when compared to truly optimal spell selection.

There could easily be an argument for making Fireball a 2nd level spell or making Passwall into a 4th or 3rd level spell when you're comparing these spell with spells that are top pick from the same level. Stuff like Haste and Slow for 3rd level spells and stuff like Teleport or Dominate Person for 5th level spells really make some spells just completely suboptimal picks.

If you leaf through SC, you'll see a lot of spells that are cool, but just outright bad for their level.

However, Waves of Exhaustion is definitely a good 7th level spell for the simple reason that it has a huge area and NO SAVE. This spell is amazing to put in a Scroll for when you inevitably face a small army of brutes with no SR.

[RandomPeasant]

Honestly, except for the fact that it lets you engage from extreme range fireball could be a 1st level spell. 1d6 damage/level just doesn't kill things, and all the other attacks people are making do, so it will very rarely matter, especially when the competition is sleep.

One spell that seems quite overleveled by any standard is regenerate, which is marginally better than the cure critical wounds (though, to be honest, healing is probably over-leveled too), but cure critical wounds is 4th level and regenerate is, for some reason, 7th level. I guess a missing leg is supposed to be harder to cure than literal death?

Speaking of death, in 3.5 "come back to life without permanent penalties" is way over-leveled. true resurrection does other stuff, so I'm not entirely prepared to argue its overleveled as a whole, but if you're going to throw Bodaks at 8th level parties, the baseline for raise effects should be that you come back the same level.

A lot of Divinations are probably over-leveled, though it's hard to say because there aren't really objective standards for non-combat spells. foresight, for instance, is probably over-leveled, though it's not clear how much so, as there's wiggle room in how much you think "a general idea of what action you might take to best protect yourself" means mechanically. But the mechanical bonuses are not impressive for a 9th level spell.

It's not quite the same thing, but there are a number of spells that don't really make sense as spells. animate dead is probably the best example. It's not really something you cast during an adventuring day, or even particularly often during downtime. It's a class feature some people have that gives them an army of zombies and handling that through the same system that manages fireball or even teleport doesn't make a huge amount of sense. moment of prescience is similar, as it's not worth an 8th level spell slot, but the duration is long enough and the cost of casting it low enough that if a high level Wizard can afford an off-cycle, they can just have one up to pop as needed (especially with Spontaneous Divination).

[Asmotherion]

What Pathfinder and 3.5 spells could be good and/or fun at a different level?

I'll start.
Acid arrow is a cool spell but it should be first level. Make it first level and it's still not obviously optimal but there are scenarios where you might want it rather than magic missile. At 2nd level, there is almost no scenario where you want it.

Waves of Fatigue and Waves of Exhaustion are cool spells and exploit interesting mechanics but at 5th level and 7the level, they're extremely overpriced. You could easily make them 4th and 6th level respectively without breaking anything and I think they would probably be competitive rather than overpowered at 3rd/5th level.

What other spells have cool and interesting effects but never see play because they're several levels too high?

Acid Arrow is a very good spell when you want an enemy caster to fail a concentration check.

[RandomPeasant]

Acid Arrow is a very good spell when you want an enemy caster to fail a concentration check.

It does not seem that way to me. acid arrow falls under "continuous damage during the spell" (indeed, it is the example for that category). That means that, on average, acid arrow requires a DC 12 + spell level Concentration check. That's not trivial to make, but it's not exactly hard either. It's a bit harder for low level characters, but the spell slot is also a lot more costly in that context. As a 3rd level Wizard, I'm not exactly excited to spend a 2nd level spell slot to make the other guy maybe miss his 2nd level spell.

[Kurald Galain]

Honestly, except for the fact that it lets you engage from extreme range fireball could be a 1st level spell.
In Pathfinder, Fireball is an effective spell because it has various damage boosts (and it always had a big area of effect). Sleep is great at level one, but at level three not so much.


One spell that seems quite overleveled by any standard is regenerate, which is marginally better than the cure critical wounds (though, to be honest, healing is probably over-leveled too),
Good point about Regenerate; and also all in-combat healing spells except Heal (and channel energy) are very rarely a good use of your action. The main issue with divinations is them giving cryptic or vague hints instead of useful advice.


Acid Arrow is a very good spell when you want an enemy caster to fail a concentration check.
I get that that's the intent of Acid Arrow, but it's mediocre at best at this. It compares poorly against readying a Magic Missile, so AA is definitely overleveled.

[Zancloufer]

One spell that seems quite overleveled by any standard is regenerate, which is marginally better than the cure critical wounds (though, to be honest, healing is probably over-leveled too), but cure critical wounds is 4th level and regenerate is, for some reason, 7th level. I guess a missing leg is supposed to be harder to cure than literal death?

Speaking of death, in 3.5 "come back to life without permanent penalties" is way over-leveled. true resurrection does other stuff, so I'm not entirely prepared to argue its overleveled as a whole, but if you're going to throw Bodaks at 8th level parties, the baseline for raise effects should be that you come back the same level.


Regenerate could probably be a 6th level spell as the odds of someone having their body/limbs completely wrecked but somehow not being dead a fairly rare condition. Otherwise both Heal and Resurrection cover most of it can do. It does heal NI non-lethal damage though, something no other spell actually does.

The (True) Resurrection line I think actually pans out well. Being able to eventually bring someone back from the dead with no penalty should be hard, death shouldn't be a cheap thing and always a risk that is hard to truly mitigate.


Protection from Energy is a side grade to it's 2nd level counter part Resist Energy but it a level higher and explicitly doesn't stack. Also the 3rd level spell doesn't explicitly protect the user's equipment when the 2nd level spell does. Weird that a level 11 Wizard could choose to stop 120 points of fire damage to himself, OR give him AND his equipment DR 30 fire. Funny that a 2nd level spell will stop NI fireballs from breaking a tree but the 3rd level one gives out within a minute.

[RandomPeasant]

In Pathfinder, Fireball is an effective spell because it has various damage boosts (and it always had a big area of effect). Sleep is great at level one, but at level three not so much.

There are 1st level spells (like silent image or grease) that scale better that sleep to mid levels. I don't think having the damage scale better matters that much, as that'd be true of any spell. But I agree that the non-damage parts of the spell (AoE, range) make me skeptical about putting it at 1st even in 3.5, but it's hard for me to imagine that 2nd would be unreasonable.


The (True) Resurrection line I think actually pans out well. Being able to eventually bring someone back from the dead with no penalty should be hard, death shouldn't be a cheap thing and always a risk that is hard to truly mitigate.

It's not really clear to me why the Medusa's "save or you lose your character" should be curable without lasting penalty by a 6th level spell, but the Bodak's should require a 9th level spell to do the same thing. Death is rare enough to warrant being treated that seriously.

[Kurald Galain]

Protection from Energy is a side grade to it's 2nd level counter part Resist Energy but it a level higher and explicitly doesn't stack.
Yep. I have literally never used PFE because I find RE to better.


But I agree that the non-damage parts of the spell (AoE, range) make me skeptical about putting it at 1st even in 3.5, but it's hard for me to imagine that 2nd would be unreasonable.
The main argument against putting Fireball at L2 is that you end up with not enough better explosion effects at spell levels 3 through 7. Practically speaking, a handful of common low-level spells are simply too good and shouldn't be considered baseline (e.g. Glitterdust's area effect no-SR save-or-lose).

For instance, we could take as baseline that a second-level spell can disable a single target, with restrictions, and with a saving throw. For instance, Hideous Laughter or Blindness or Hold Person. It then follows that a first-level spell that does the same is too strong (it should penalize but not disable), and a higher-level spell that does the same is too weak (e.g. a third-level version should work without restrictions, and a fourth-level should be an area effect like Fear).

For damage spells, L1 burning hands, L2 scorching ray, L3 fireball is a fairly logical progression (however, burning hands is really too weak even for a first level spell).

[Elder_Basilisk]

I'm not sold on fireball. I think the GitP crowd systematically undervalues area damage spells--most likely because the most common 3.x and Pathfinder encounter design in adventures has eschewed large groups of enemies in favor of single monsters and small groups. (This is probably partly an effect of the CR/EL encounter design system and a trend towards discreet and no reactive written encounters). However running more old school encounter and adventure designs where facing 36 hobgoblins plus mounts and leaders is a serious possibility makes area damage more viable.

That said, what about ice storm? The no save part of it is nice (and would make it compare very well to fireball at level 5 if it were dropped to 3rd level) but non-scaling damage has always made it seem disappointing for a 4th level spell to me. By the time you hit 7th or 8th level, you'd almost always prefer fireball even in a 4th level slot. And at the levels where having no save for your lower level attack spells matters, the damage is so low that no save isn't really and advantage.

On the whole ice storm seems like a good candidate for level reduction--possibly with a small modification like native full round action casting time to make the fireball comparison less favorable at level 5 and 6.

[Kurald Galain]

I think the GitP crowd systematically undervalues area damage spells
True. And 3E doesn't have draconic sorcerers or the Spell Specialization feat.


That said, what about ice storm?
Ice Storm largely sucks, because it deals the same damage without a save that Fireball deals on a successful save. So Ice Storm is not so much "no save", but effectively "you always make your save".

[Zancloufer]

It's not really clear to me why the Medusa's "save or you lose your character" should be curable without lasting penalty by a 6th level spell, but the Bodak's should require a 9th level spell to do the same thing. Death is rare enough to warrant being treated that seriously.

Bargest as a similar issue but is even lower CR. Sure it's only after they attack a downed PC, but it's 3 CR lower AND even 9th level spells have a coin flip if the spell never works. I think that's more up to a few monsters being disproportionately punishing if you screw up/have bad luck than a failing of the spell system. We shouldn't be arguing that spells are over leveled, more than certain threats appear at too low a CR. It's like saying Restoration is too low level because Allips exist.



That said, what about ice storm? The no save part of it is nice (and would make it compare very well to fireball at level 5 if it were dropped to 3rd level) but non-scaling damage has always made it seem disappointing for a 4th level spell to me.

Ice Storm has this weird half CC element to it and also has an actual duration instead of being instantaneous. It needs a buff, but putting it down to level 3 would arguably making it too powerful relative to other blasting options.
That weird 1 round duration means that anyone that moves through it between your casting and your next action also take damage, not to mention are slowed enough that pretty much any creature can't move through it. It's more of a half-ass combination of area denial mixed with blasting. Like they can decide if they want to make it DPS or area denial so it ends up being worse than both 80% of the time.

[Elder_Basilisk]

Regenerate is definitely a candidate. It's been sitting at 7th level ever since AD&D where swords of sharpness and various other limb removal effects were a part of the game. (I'm told there was a trap in the tomb of horrors that removed hands for example). Without the limb removal, it's definitely overleveled.

I'd be curious to think if it would still be overleveled even with limb removal effects in the game. For reference, I haven't done a deep dive into it but I think the adventurer conqueror king not quite retro-clone death and dying mechanics have a lot of crippling mechanics but if I read it right I think you can cure them with the same restore life and limb spell which suggests that even in a system with lots of such effects the instinct that it shouldn't be harder to regenerate a lost hand than to raise the dead still holds.

[loky1109]

Honestly, except for the fact that it lets you engage from extreme range fireball could be a 1st level spell.
All spells to first level. Easy.

Fireball unequivocally can't be first level. Not because range, but because it AoO with big damage and bid area. It is in the right place on 3rd level.

[Troacctid]

Polymorph any object should be 9th level.

[RandomPeasant]

Oh, speaking of spells that are too high level: polar ray. The hell is that thing doing at 8th level? At the level you get it, it's worse than orb of cold, which is a 4th level spell, and it only pulls ahead because it keeps scaling and the orb doesn't.


The main argument against putting Fireball at L2 is that you end up with not enough better explosion effects at spell levels 3 through 7. Practically speaking, a handful of common low-level spells are simply too good and shouldn't be considered baseline (e.g. Glitterdust's area effect no-SR save-or-lose).

Why not? The baseline against which spells should be compared isn't really other spells, it's the challenges people face. For all the hue and cry around spells like stinking cloud or black tentacles, I am unconvinced they are particularly more effective than the CR system and the monsters which exist suggest they should be. fireball, on the other hand, seems quite underpowered by that metric.


For damage spells, L1 burning hands, L2 scorching ray, L3 fireball is a fairly logical progression (however, burning hands is really too weak even for a first level spell).

Don't you think if the progression you are presenting includes something that you admit is underpowered, there might be a problem with that progression?


However running more old school encounter and adventure designs where facing 36 hobgoblins plus mounts and leaders is a serious possibility makes area damage more viable.

Does it? Maybe if you push it over CR == APL and mix in elites it does, but that's an extremely fringe scenario spells shouldn't be balanced around, and groups of low level enemies are just not that hard to beat. And in many cases, the best spells against them are ones you'd want anyway. If I want a 4th level spell to beat a horde of trash, it's going to be black tentacles, not ice storm. What's an EL 5 encounter where you think fireball would be the best thing to do with a 3rd level spell slot?


non-scaling damage has always made it seem disappointing for a 4th level spell to me.

Honestly, the way damaging spells scale in D&D has always struck me as somewhat incoherent. Spells scale in different ways (e.g. scorching ray getting additional full damage rays v basically all other spells), spells stop scaling at different points and different number of levels after you get them (e.g. scorching ray gets benefits out to a higher CL than fireball, despite being lower level). If you just ignore the crazy CL-boosting cheese, I think it probably makes sense to just uncap scaling. High level spells should be qualitatively better than low-level ones, not just quantitatively.


I think that's more up to a few monsters being disproportionately punishing if you screw up/have bad luck than a failing of the spell system. We shouldn't be arguing that spells are over leveled, more than certain threats appear at too low a CR. It's like saying Restoration is too low level because Allips exist.

The Allip seems like a bad example as it is A) obviously under-CRed and B) has no real reason do be doing Wisdom drain. Generally, I disagree that the game should push punishing conditions back rather than pulling cures forward. As I said, I see little practical difference between turning someone to stone and killing them, and I'm not really on board with Medusas and Cockatrice being near-Epic threats. I think a small margin between when a condition appears and when the cure appears to allow for "heal our buddy" type quests might be reasonable, but trying to push back status removal results in a game that I don't think works very well.


I'd be curious to think if it would still be overleveled even with limb removal effects in the game.

I really doubt it. As I noted initially, raise dead is lower level than it is. I just can't see a world where "dead" is an easier condition to lift than "missing a hand" making sense.


Fireball unequivocally can't be first level. Not because range, but because it AoO with big damage and bid area. It is in the right place on 3rd level.

In what world is fireball "big damage"? There is one creature type that has a hit die that is the same size as what fireball does for damage, and none that have a smaller one. And the damage scales to caster level. At 1st level, for fireball to deal more damage than the minimum hit of a greatsword-wielding Barbarian or Fighter, it has to hit multiple targets, and that's assuming a 16-Strength martial. I just don't see how you look at the Monster Manual and end up thinking fireball needs to be a 3rd level spell. Like I said, I could give you 2nd, but 3rd just doesn't seem credible to me.


Polymorph any object should be 9th level.

Honestly, PAO needs to function radically differently or not exist. It's not like the things you can do with that spell are okay to do if you are a 17th level character.

[Kurald Galain]

Don't you think if the progression you are presenting includes something that you admit is underpowered, there might be a problem with that progression?
Because the progression is important, I think the solution is to make Burning Hands and Fireball deal more damage; not to make FB a 2nd-level spell and BH a cantrip.

At what level would you place Meteor Swarm? Assuming that's not level nine, what blasting effect would you put at level nine?


In what world is fireball "big damage"?
In the world of 1E and 2E and 5E and Pathfinder. That's why in 3E it should be fixed to become big damage, too. That's the point of the spell.

[RandomPeasant]

At what level would you place Meteor Swarm? Assuming that's not level nine, what blasting effect would you put at level nine?

I don't think there is a printed blasting spell that is as good as wail of the banshee and weird. In terms of effects, there are a number of directions you could do in. It could be a spell like storm of vengeance or apocalypse from the sky that you use for wiping out cities and armies. It could be a spell filled a role similar to wail of the banshee and weird that does enough damage that level-appropriate enemies who fail their save die (right now, meteor swarm barely kills an Aboleth Mage if you roll max damage with every meteor and hit it with all of them). It could be a spell that does so much damage (or such devastating secondary effects) that you're willing to pass on a chance to kill everything else in the room. But it can't be a spell that throws around slightly more dice of damage than a Rogue who has never heard of TWF or Rapid Shot deals in bonus damage.


In the world of 1E and 2E and 5E and Pathfinder. That's why in 3E it should be fixed to become big damage, too. That's the point of the spell.

The spell isn't really any better in Pathfinder, there are just synergy options. And those exist in 3e too, but you shouldn't be required to pick up the right synergy class or feat to make your spells do level-appropriate things.

[loky1109]

In what world is fireball "big damage"?

10d6 is big.


At 1st level
Doesn't matter.
Wizard-10 spamming 10d6 from 1st level slots isn't good design. Even in single target. Especially in 40ft sphere.

[RandomPeasant]

10d6 is big.

Not against 10th level opposition it's not. That was the point of citing HD numbers. Your damage scales slower than monster HP even ignoring that lots of monsters have more HD than their CRs or Constitution scores above 11.


Wizard-10 spamming 10d6 from 1st level slots isn't good design. Even in single target. Especially in 40ft sphere.

Oh no, you found a way to weaponize your 1st level spell slots at 10th level. None of those exist now. Wait, no, they totally do. silent image, fengut, and grease are all spells that are part of the status quo. And, honestly, I'd probably rather prepare them than fireball at 10th level. fengut is a save-or-lose I can pop out of a Lesser Rod of Quicken. grease turns on the party Rogue, who can pump out more dice of damage than a fireball pretty easily. silent image completely negates mindless enemies, forces anyone who's not a immune to illusions to burn an action on it before they get a save, and has non-combat utility. The only way fireball is getting that slot is if I'm really sure that I will have to clear out large groups of low-level enemies and my party doesn't have anyone who's up to that task.

[Elder_Basilisk]

I think the discussion of fireball is pulling the thread a bit off topic.

Right now, I think we can just say, "some very vocal members of the community think that their games would not change if fireball were first level" and move on.

For my part, I disagree but rather than being caught up in the weeds of one spell, let's look at some other spells:
I definitely agree that polar ray could stand to be a lot lower level. I'm inclined to agree with the people who peg it at 4th level--probably with a slightly reduced damage cap. It's only the level it is because it was split out of a multi-function spell (freezing or or something like that).

What others do people see?