The Making of a Time Mage (Spheres build)

[SangoProduction]

Preamble: I watched Invincible on Amazon Prime. In... episode 2, I think, the alien invasion was self-thwarted by time distortion. They grew grey and elderly, and noped back to their dimension.
I found that intriguing. Reignited the spark of wanting to make a time mage, that was lost when I actually looked at the Time sphere.
So... let's try and figure out the powers that a time manipulator would want.

Powers (Conceptual): Obviously, inflicting some sort of debuff and/or damage through "aging" is going to be absolutely necessary.
Turning back the clock to heal wounds is also useful.
Providing time-flavored buffs as well. Bonuses to perception to represent additional time to see things, in particular, would be useful.
Teleportation. Classical superspeed. So fast you barely even pass through the intervening space, and no one can really respond to you moving through. Might want to take drawbacks which require LoS and stays on the ground.

Spheres (proposed): Destruction (damage/debuff), Death (lasting debuffs, at later CLs), Light/Illusion (miss chance buffs, fluffed as time-based motion), Nature / Enhancement / War (Generic buffs which can be reflavored to be time-based), Life (duh, healing), Light / Divination (Perception buffs), Warp (teleportation)

Talents:

Destruction: (Generic) Demolition - full damage to objects.
(Shapes) Explosive Orb. Energy Tether also works, with its persistent damage deal. Energy Leap has the effect of being as though you launched past someone, afflicting them as you did so. Kind of like Ben 10's Time Lord.
(Types) Acid for persistent damage. Adhesive for a "stuck in time" deal. Drowning Blast - speeds up metabolism faster than air will move in to the lungs. Gloom Blast for sicken - differential time dilation can't be good for the vestibular system.

Death: Curse (-3 permanent to all rolls is well worth the cost, and a generic debuff is a generic debuff - they are out of sync with reality). Hunger (fatigue and hunger, not to mention damage. accelerated metabolism with indefinite duration debuff). Sickening (Used instead of Gloom Blast by level 5)
Feats: Flexible Ghost Strike (Makes use of Explosive Orb), Dispatch the Weak (fatigued / exhausted takes -2 to saves vs death effects)

(campaign-dependent) Divination: (Light) - free action perception check at +CL, if divining light. (Time) - look up to CL hours in the past for information from within the range
Fast Divinations. Lingering Divination.
(Divine talents): Augury - looks into the future to get an idea of the consequences of an action. Witness The City (Look into the city's recent past and try to find information). Object Reading (same deal).
(Senses): Foreshadow - obvious. Given brief glimpses of the future.
(Advanced): Trapfinding (if you can't see a trap coming, you're a terrible time lord)
Feats: Tabulated Mind: Reduces opportunity costs for divining.

Life (Any desired talents. They all work. Mostly)

Time: After Image (20% miss chance). Second Chance (immediate action reroll save). Rapid Response (Initiative, and worse version of Foreshadow for less time).
Retry (target redoes their turn - game changer, especially in social situations)

Warp: Emergency Teleport (immediate action). Quick Teleport (move action).

War: Any Momentum talents make obvious sense. Also they are really efficient action- and point-wise.

Light: (base sphere): Telescope: bonus perception. makes distance multiplicatively less relevant to (your) perception
Obscure (once per turn per buffed ally, enemy takes disadvantage to hit)

-

That's... quite a shopping list of talents (especially in trying to use Divination). So let's boil it down to what a level 1 incanter might want, with his 2 base talents, plus 2 from level 1 incanter, plus 1 from bonus feat. No drawbacks, because... sod it, it's 4 am.
Destruction: Explosive Orb. Adhesive Blast.
Death: Curse
Time: Retry.
Divination: Foreshadow

That's a reasonably diverse and potent set of capabilities for a level 1 character.... Actually, I guess I am assuming we somehow trade out the base spheres. In which case Destruction would only take 1 talent, so the bonus feat could be spent on something else.

[Particle_Man]

If you can somehow work in a backstory where your mentor is an older version of an apprentice you take on later, that would be fun.

Bonus points if your mentor is your own older self.

[SangoProduction]

If you can somehow work in a backstory where your mentor is an older version of an apprentice you take on later, that would be fun.

Bonus points if your mentor is your own older self.

There's actually a pokemon fan game where you, the professor, and the rival, are all time-clones of you. Actually a pretty neat story for a pokemon game. "Infinities" or something like that? Damned if I can remember the name.

[Kitsuneymg]

When I did my time type wizard, I used crystal blast instead of adhesive. It was fluffed as a “broken reality” type deal, which is why the crystals vanished after a minute; time healed itself.

But if you really wanna do that right, add in admixture, slow/steal time, and time-thief’s admixture. AoE damage, stuck, eg tangled, and slowed/nauseated. Plus gives you another standard to entangle anyone who saved the first one.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

I'd lean more toward Creation than Destruction for the blasting element, especially if you're open to playing Dhampir for their ability to Alter (destroy) creatures

[Kitsuneymg]

I'd lean more toward Creation than Destruction for the blasting element, especially if you're open to playing Dhampir for their ability to Alter (destroy) creatures

Why? Is there any case where destroy does more damage than destruction? Since it’s d4 +1/4 cl, I doubt it.

[StSword]

Why? Is there any case where destroy does more damage than destruction? Since it’s d4 +1/4 cl, I doubt it.

Destroy bypasses all hardness.

Whether that is supposed to apply to the damage reduction of creatures when you can apply destroy to them, well that's a question of RAW and RAI.

So presuming a table applies that rule, it might do more damage if the foe has a lot of DR. Haven't done the math on that or anything.

[Kitsuneymg]

Destroy bypasses all hardness.

Whether that is supposed to apply to the damage reduction of creatures when you can apply destroy to them, well that's a question of RAW and RAI.

So presuming a table applies that rule, it might do more damage if the foe has a lot of DR. Haven't done the math on that or anything.

Destroy is untyped damage. Since it’s not bludgeoning or piercing or slashing, it’s not subject to DR or ER. However, if turned into a ranged attack, it still does half damage to objects. There are multiple destruction damage types like this as well.

5th level destroy. 1d4+2 damage. (Average 3.5 damage)
5th level base destruction. 5d6. (Average 17.5).

Even if you’re fighting robots, you’d need hardness 14 for destroy to win. (Assuming you didn’t take electrical blast. Destroy cant take advantage of weakness either.) And that’s with no optimization whatsoever. A character who wants to actually use destruction as the primary way to deal damage is probably at 6 dice, and took primal blast to add CAM, and almost certainly took orc bloodline (or similar) for another 1/die. For something like 6d6+10 or ~31.

In order to alter an object. It must be non magical and unattended. You must touch it. Destruction is both touch and ranged touch (plus the plethora of shape talents), can target regardless of attendance or magical nature, and does far more damage. There’s even the demolition talent to not halve damage first for objects (if using ranged) and add +1/dice. Remember that it’s “object” not “hardness” that grants 50% damage to ranged attacks. “Object” also grants 50% to energy attacks unless the GM says otherwise.

The dhampire ability is not particularly useful. You may target a creature (and assume that the creature cannot attend itself I guess) and do destroy damage. If they fail a fort save and you succeed at a touch attack. Destruction typically would only save for rider and the attack is ranged or melee.

With investment (altering burst, distant creation, and potent alteration) you could do 1d6+CL to a small burst area. Or you could take explosive orb or some other shape.

As the name implies, Destruction sphere is geared towards breaking things. It takes a very specific build to approach the damage it can do with other spheres. And that’s usually some very specific situation. Such as damaging objects.

Math time.

Destruction + gather energy does 3.5 damage/level w/o optimization. Destroy does 3.5 +1/level with the potent talent. Adamantine has hardness 20, and that means that:

3.5x -20 >= 3.5+x
3.5x >= x+23.5
2.5x >= 24.5
x >= 9.8

So at 10th caster level, Unoptimized destruction hurts adamantine more than destroy. There’s your use case and the math.

If we assume +1 damage per die and a CAM of 4 added to damage, the math becomes: 4.5x -16 >= 3.5 + x, x >= 4.333

In terms of creature damage, even d6+1/cl fort for half is almost always going to be worse than d6/level. Even than d6/odd level. That fort save makes it pretty awful. Optimized destruction for pure damage is d8 fire/level, two+ rays, each ray using CAM to hit and damage. Later on you gain SP to ignore 2*CL resistance and count immunity as ER 40, and ignore SR for a sp. also getting trivial +1/dice. Possibly +2-4.

I will admit that I don’t know creation like I do destruction. It’s alway struck me as a meh sphere. So there may be some great combo I’m missing. But it seems like the advice of “use creation for damage” is always going to be bad advice.

[SangoProduction]

Oh, no. You are positively right, when Creation sphere is *far* from the damage sphere. Creation is focused around (interestingly) creating objects. In combat, this largely revolves around inconveniencing your opponent, rather than directly hurting or debuffing them. (Save for the splitting drop thing, which, yeah. If you are allowed to just multiply your damage innumerable times, that does get silly, and is why it does recommend that you never be allowed to drop more than 4 items per creature per cast.) The Destroy / Repair alterations are mostly just fluff to say "Yeah, you can also modify the objects of the world around you. In addition to creating them."

I very much enjoy the Creation sphere. You know those traps where the stairs turn into a slide? Well, I trivialized that by destroying stair-like cuts into the slide. And then conjured a bridge over the pressure plates. And placed a stone wall in front of the arrow traps. A trap-filled dungeon, based on my experience, is easily where they shine the best.

But... cutting off 1 kobold from the rest of the swarm, by using a wall? Very useful. Creating a dome, to protect you from an ambush... also very useful. Separating the dragon and your dying teammate... anyway. I love creation. I also love always having literally any mundane item I could ever want, without needing to have it on my character sheet.

Of course, I do have the Stay a While and Listen build (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?556685-(SoP)-Stay-a-While-and-Listen-build&p=23006590#post23006590) in my signature, which focuses on the ability to trap creatures. Which is incredibly disgusting, and overoptimized. Granted, it is a pre-USOP build. But still.

[Kitsuneymg]

I like nature for trapping. Or even protection. Spheres of force do a great job on those dumb imps they like to use a 1-2nd level bosses in modules.