Quote Originally Posted by Pex View Post
It's the spells themselves. Depending on the spell even if the target fails the save you don't get what you wanted the spell to do. You only get a minor inconvenience. The target has to critically fail to get the effect you wanted. Roll a 1 or (10 or more) below the target number. Therefore the spell is highly unreliable. Buff spells don't have this problem, which is why they're more valued.

It is a limitation that nerfs spellcasters. It's not even a "punishment" that I soap box against. I'm not a fan of it either. Complain all you want spellcasters are too powerful. They're still entitled to have the spells they do get to work.
I wonder if Paizo stress-tested the math enough on "failed save / critical fail" spells.

Something I'm playing with is writing up spells with a "dual save" mechanic. Roll 2 saving throws at the same time, full effect on 2 failures, partial effect on a single failure. And designing the spell with the knowledge that the most likely outcome is "partial effect", with "full effect" and "no effect" as outliers.

So replace sleep with deeper daze. Full save, no effect. Partial save, target is dazed for one round. Full effect, target is dazed for one minute. (Damage breaks the spell). Now you have a spell that is less of a "win button" than sleep at low levels (no free coup-de-grace), that still scales as you level up (as long as save DCs scale).

Instead of petrification as a single-roll binary save-or-die-or-no-effect, you get petrification/slow/no-effect.