Revisiting Pathfinder 3.5 spells: Haste and Ice Storm

[Elder_Basilisk]

If you want the best 3rd level spell in Pathfinder or 3.5, haste is almost always in contention (IMO, the dispel magic nerfs in Pathfinder mean it has less competition). And if you wanted one of the worst damage spells, ice storm has been a contender since first edition.

What are potential improvements to these spells?

Ice Storm:
1. Level 3? It could work but I still don't think it would be good.
2. Extended duration. Maybe Concentration+ 1 round or 1 round per 3 levels... and deals damage every round. Would that be good enough for 4th level? Not sure, but it would have a lot of nice 4e style combos.

Haste:
1. Increase to level 4? It would probably still be good (compare to Pathfinder's blessing of fervor for example) but I'm not certain that's the best way to balance it
2. Add a drawback. In 1e and 2e it aged characters which was either prohibitive or meaningless depending upon the character race and campaign. Not a fan of that. But it could make you fatigued or even exhausted at the end of the duration. (This suggestion sponsored by the guild of paladins of Zilchus with scribe scroll and/or brew potion. (Get your discount lesser restoration s here). Co-sponsored by the Pathfinder fatigued and exhausted mercies).
3. Rework it? It could grant a move action--in some cases more valuable than the bonus attack, but not as good overall.

[RandomPeasant]

haste is a spell that makes your team awesome, while having relatively little impact on your individual performance. Even if it is "overpowered" by some metric (which I would personally disagree with), nerfing it is a bad idea from a practical perspective, since making it worse will encourage casters to play in less pro-social and teamwork-focused ways. If you convince the Wizard to start casting death spells instead of spells that make the Fighter and Rogue better at their jobs, that will make the Fighter and the Rogue less happy, and since making the Wizard less powerful is likely to make him less happy, its not clear who this change would serve.

[Seward]

Haste I think is fine where it is. It arrives at the same time as the introduction of iterative attacks for martials and fades away by about L10 when the martials who care have boots of haste or similar. It also arrives right when the melee brute enemies get a lot tougher and raw damage output becomes the primary means of dealing with them for martials, rather than assuming you can tank it or defeat it with grapple/trip/etc.

Ice storm has the fundamental problem that it is a worse version of both fireball and sleet storm. If you want to impede enemy motion, you cast sleet storm, or maybe black tentacles for a more archer-friendly crowd control.

If you want to kill something at long range, barring enemies with evasion, fireball after they make a save does the same damage as ice storm, once you hit caster level 10, and it has the potential to outdamage ice storm even at level 6.

1 round of difficult terrain+5d6 guaranteed damage is great to put on a scroll for a NPC mook facing PC's stupidly high-by-wbl+optimization saving throws. It's not something a PC will put in a precious spell known choice or spell slot.

Compare a couple well designed L4 spells. Wall of Ice has two modes, that do different but both useful things (sometimes you want a damaging barrier after it has been broken, sometimes not. Sometimes a dome shape is more useful than a plane). Wall of Fire is opaque but doesn't block line of effect, which can be a very useful combination. The double damage vs undead is a cherry on top, plus no saving throw.

All you need to do to fix ice storm is to make it "sleet storm with damage". Make it last round/level, make it half the radius of sleet storm, that's fine, but give it the icy ground to walk on and do a dot to anybody who doesn't escape it. 5d6 might be a little higher than you want on a 4th level rnd/level no-save spell, but that can be tuned to taste. I think 2d6 bludgeon (dr applies) and 2d6 cold (cold resistance applies) round/level blockes sight, balance roll to move....that's cooking with gas, is similar in power to Blistering Radiance and gets used for the same reason freezing fog sometimes gets used instead of solid fog.

[Kurald Galain]

The problem with spells that deal damage each round, is that generally speaking enemies move out of them after the first round. But that's still valid area control, so a level-3 long-duration Ice Storm strikes me as decent.

And Haste almost always lasts until the end of combat, so getting exhausted after combat ends is not much of a penalty. The main thing I'd change about Haste is removing its +1 bonus to hit and armor class, because it's annoyingly fiddly (and because an extra attack is good enough already).

[Eurus]

haste is a spell that makes your team awesome, while having relatively little impact on your individual performance. Even if it is "overpowered" by some metric (which I would personally disagree with), nerfing it is a bad idea from a practical perspective, since making it worse will encourage casters to play in less pro-social and teamwork-focused ways. If you convince the Wizard to start casting death spells instead of spells that make the Fighter and Rogue better at their jobs, that will make the Fighter and the Rogue less happy, and since making the Wizard less powerful is likely to make him less happy, its not clear who this change would serve.

I'd strongly agree with this, haste is a great spell because it's strong (so you don't feel bad when you cast it), it doesn't instantly end the encounter (so the DM doesn't feel bad when you cast it), and it helps your party do cool stuff (so the other PCs don't feel bad when you cast it).

Ice Storm...


Ice storm has the fundamental problem that it is a worse version of both fireball and sleet storm. If you want to impede enemy motion, you cast sleet storm, or maybe black tentacles for a more archer-friendly crowd control.

If you want to kill something at long range, barring enemies with evasion, fireball after they make a save does the same damage as ice storm, once you hit caster level 10, and it has the potential to outdamage ice storm even at level 6.

You sort of pointed out and then glossed over the fact that ice storm does actually do more damage than fireball in some situations (enemies with evasion, or successful saves prior to CL 10). I agree that ice storm is a little bit too weak due to its lack of specialization -- there just aren't that many situations where you really want a small but reliable amount of no-save damage and a big blob of difficult terrain to the point of being willing to compromise in order to achieve both -- but if you benefit from both of those aspects, it's not completely awful. Its biggest problem is that crowd controlling spells are just so dang good at the 4+ level range, so the competition is wild.

[Ramza00]

Ice Storm is a level 3 Warmage spell, just saying *shrug*

[RandomPeasant]

You sort of pointed out and then glossed over the fact that ice storm does actually do more damage than fireball in some situations (enemies with evasion, or successful saves prior to CL 10).

It's not like fireball does enough damage to be relevant though. fireball could very easily be a 2nd level spell at the amount of damage it deals, and if not for the range and the sheer size of the AoE, it could probably be a 1st level spell. Also ice storm doesn't scale at all (though how damaging spells scale is a weird issue in general).

From the name, ice storm sounds like it should cause some kind of BFC effect (beyond just "people don't want to go in the ice storm"). I could see the spell getting tweaked so that it is competitive with black tentacles by being easier to escape, but more punishing to stand around in.

[Scots Dragon]

You sort of pointed out and then glossed over the fact that ice storm does actually do more damage than fireball in some situations (enemies with evasion, or successful saves prior to CL 10).

Also fire-type creatures that are vulnerable to cold. If you're fighting fire elementals, a fireball is less than useless, but ice storm is gonna put at least some hurt on them. It's a few more class levels until you can cast cone of cold, after all.

[Gnaeus]

haste is a spell that makes your team awesome, while having relatively little impact on your individual performance. Even if it is "overpowered" by some metric (which I would personally disagree with), nerfing it is a bad idea from a practical perspective, since making it worse will encourage casters to play in less pro-social and teamwork-focused ways. If you convince the Wizard to start casting death spells instead of spells that make the Fighter and Rogue better at their jobs, that will make the Fighter and the Rogue less happy, and since making the Wizard less powerful is likely to make him less happy, its not clear who this change would serve.

This. As much as a change to polymorph was needed, making it personal (PF) just makes the Wizard 7 say "Fine, if you don't want me to buff the fighter I guess I won't. I have other good spells" if you want to encourage cooperative play, buffs should be competitive spells.

[pabelfly]

The problem with spells that deal damage each round, is that generally speaking enemies move out of them after the first round. But that's still valid area control, so a level-3 long-duration Ice Storm strikes me as decent.

It's not just that enemies can move out of a spell that deals damage each round, it's also that enemies can also be doing whatever they want every round while you're waiting for the spell to finish off your enemy. It's far more effective to frontload the damage, even if it ends up being less than the total you would have from a full duration spell. Even if you haven't killed an enemy, you may well have weakened it enough for another party member to do it.

[Kurald Galain]

If you're fighting fire elementals, a fireball is less than useless, but ice storm is gonna put at least some hurt on them.
This is why most fire blasters either invest in Elemental Spell (or a rod thereof) or take the Evocation Admixture ability.

[sreservoir]

Ice Storm is a level 3 Warmage spell, just saying *shrug*

Honestly, being a warmage also does a lot of work there to make it viable, since it means you always have it as a costless option.

[Ramza00]

Honestly, being a warmage also does a lot of work there to make it viable, since it means you always have it as a costless option.

Metamagic Rods of Sculpt are also helpful since it is the magic number 3 and not the wrong magic number 4. One downside without a houserule is that the 3.5 Sculpt Metamagic Rods are more expensive than other +1 metamagic rods for some strange reason. If I recall this applies to all Complete Arcane metamagic rods.

[Scots Dragon]

This is why most fire blasters either invest in Elemental Spell (or a rod thereof) or take the Evocation Admixture ability.

It's more a port-in-a-storm than a genuinely great option.

[Seward]

The problem with spells that deal damage each round, is that generally speaking enemies move out of them after the first round. But that's still valid area control, so a level-3 long-duration Ice Storm strikes me as decent.

It is one reason I like it better as an upgraded sleet storm, rather than trying to make it work on its own terms. The darkness and slippery makes it harder to escape, while the damage mitigates the problem of sleet storm where it is hard for your own party to hurt anybody that is still inside it.


Also fire-type creatures that are vulnerable to cold. If you're fighting fire elementals, a fireball is less than useless, but ice storm is gonna put at least some hurt on them. It's a few more class levels until you can cast cone of cold, after all.

*cough* lightning bolt *cough*. You don't have to wait for cone of cold, and lightning bolt will almost always be a better choice than ice storm (if fire elementals are at long range, ignore them or buff your archers)

Somebody mentioned warmage. One strength of this reasonably unpopular class is that it has all the options, even the marginal ones, at its fingertips and the edge actually makes some of the marginal choices with weird strengths (like acid arrow's range+SR=no, or ice storm's weird no save damage) a little stronger. So when you hit that unicorn condition where Ice Storm really is the best choice, you have it available, it isn't sitting in your spell book or passed over as a spell known.

See also all the various orb spells of less popular elements that have interesting kickers on a failed fort save etc.

[Endarire]

Ice storm and other no save spells are useful for when you GM can reliably roll high against your spells.

[RandomPeasant]

Making ice storm "sleet storm, but also some token damage" seems like it'd probably be the best fix.


Ice storm and other no save spells are useful for when you GM can reliably roll high against your spells.

I think outside of the Warmage dynamic (where you can decide to use ice storm in the moment), hyper-prepped Wizards (who can reliably divine when they will need ice storm), or metagaming that amounts to the latter, ice storm is not going to be reliably good enough for that to matter. Plus, evard's black tentacles is going to be a generally-superior is going to be a generally-better option if you can't afford to allow saves, and even if you also know your enemies are going to have giant grapple bonuses, it's not like there aren't defenses against ice storm, or like its damage is high enough to notice even if it is the only option your enemy can't counter.