Protective Spell a la WoW

[TuggyNE]

Yes, because all that matters is how the game designers made the game and intended it to be played. Damage Reduction is so hard to deal with; a party is sure lucky to have its blaster wizard to help them take care of those difficult beasties that are practically insurmountable to the big, strong, party fighter.

Seriously, this is the homebrew subforum. If you want to design things that adhere to the original design philosophies of 3.X and that's your goal, more power to you. But a lot of 3.X is flawed from the ground up (shocker) and it's disingenuous to not do better when your goal is to improve where the design team failed or at least admit that you didn't know that aspect of the game is flawed and may need improvement (and either you don't want to improve it or need to consider improving it).

I don't care about the original designer intent much (as most of my homebrew shows) but I do care about the different levels of optimization in actual play. And, strange as it may seem, the level of op you assume is actually one that a fair percentage of players would consider absurdly high. People are weird like that.

Generally, too, I look with a critical eye at any spell that is balanced with the assumption of being played only with, say, Mineral Warrior Water Orc Whirling Frenzy Spirit Lion Totem Barbarians, since spells are already quite capable of keeping up in most cases.

And you know what, your snark is really not called for since a Level 1 Human warrior with half intelligent stat allocation and item choice is not something that people who just plop open the MM and pull stuff out would find strange throwing at a bog standard group.

Elite array, Str high, no racial stat bonus, longsword two-handed with Weapon Focus. +4 for 1d6+3 slashing. About a 1/3 chance of doing no damage, and maximum of 4 damage possible on a regular hit, or 13 on a crit. Against 15 AC, that's the difference between 3.58/round and 0.92/round, average. Sure, that's clearly pretty meaningless.

Or consider an archer: Elf Warrior 1 with a longbow (can't afford composite Str bonus), does 1d8 piercing, so DR 5 would mean 5/8 chance of no damage; average goes from 2.72/round to 0.45/round. Which is really the key point: there are many encounters that will reasonably be substantially neutered by DR 5, even if there are also numerous encounters that will be unaffected, and that's all it needs to do to be useful*. The difference between "18 Str Orc with far overbudget gear and customized feats to do maximum damage in a single hit" and "spellcaster that ignores all DR" is not all that large for this consideration.

*Unless the DM only uses encounters specifically designed to bypass DR, which is not, to my mind, terribly good DMing, any more than using encounters that always target touch AC or encounters that always ignore blur and displacement at low-mid levels.

[Tanuki Tales]

Tugg, I'd love to get into this with you, but I don't want to derail the thread any further than we have. Especially since neither one of us seems to plan to be 100% civil about this.

[TuggyNE]

Tugg, I'd love to get into this with you, but I don't want to derail the thread any further than we have.

Fair enough.

Especially since neither one of us seems to plan to be 100% civil about this.

My apologies, that was not my intent.

[Tanuki Tales]

My apologies, that was not my intent.

No harm, no foul. I'm sorry that I'm being a little more sharp edged then I usually would be; it's the week before finals amongst other things. And let's just say that it's not been a good month on GitP; a lot of negativity going around.

Anyways, I want to apologize for derailing this thread as I have. The DR discussion was tangential to the spell itself, as I was being more critical on the mechanic than actually giving any critique for the betterment of this piece of brew.