Too much spell resistance

[Daaki]

This Spell resistance thing seems to be kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Why do casters have to get through 2 defensive layers (spell resistance and ac or saving throw) with a limited resource while any normal attack from martials only has to go through one?
Not to mention the martials like a fighter archer just does straight up the same or even more damage so I don´t get why this is a thing.

[kiloromeo]

What you get from poor design with difficulty raised by inflating stats and CR ...
Don't play focused on casters ...

[Memnarch]

SIice them with your sword then young padawan

[Akogooth]

yesterday i did 1000 damage with my kineticist L18 (sneak crit touch attack with suppressed spell resistance and suppressed immunities)

but jea... SR can be a real pain. before getting the modification for my kinetic blast, that i can ignore SR... i had about 50% chance to do damage between L12 and L17

[Daaki]

Originally posted by Akogooth:

yesterday i did 1000 damage with my kineticist L18 (sneak crit touch attack with suppressed spell resistance and suppressed immunities)

but jea... SR can be a real pain. before getting the modification for my kinetic blast, that i can ignore SR... i had about 50% chance to do damage between L12 and L17

How did you suppress spell resistance? Also yeah I heard that damage can get ridiculous later on. Though apparently for martials and casters alike.

[Stechhelm]

I dont like the fact i get forced to cast only damage spells effectively. Rest is more or less useless since even their weak spots are to high for all this enchanting stuff.

[Naked Granny]

One issue currently is that when you adjust the statblocks of enemies in the Difficulty settings options, it affects enemy ability scores and armor class and attack bonus, but it does not affect enemy Spell Resistance. So you end up playing easy mode but with insane bonkers impossible spell resistance. Your martials will be guaranteed to hit and kill stuff with one shot, but your casters will always have a 50% success against SR even with both spell penetration feats.

It's sort of expected that in a campaign all about demons your enemies will have spell resistance, but Owlcat definitely inflated statblocks in some specific areas to an insane degree. 15 + HD is absolutely **ASTRONOMICAL** spell resistance, and that's just for ordinary trash mooks. This doesn't sound like much until you find out that enemies always have more HD than you have character levels. It's very common for trash to have 2 or 3 HD more than you, and I'm seeing bosses show up with literally 18 HD while I'm running around with a level 7 - 8 party... they aren't impossible to kill, really, but that's because I can stall them for dozens of rounds while my martials whittle them down. Casters are just buffbots in this game right now. Nenio and Ember are absolutely worthless garbage.

I think that the difficulty slider not affecting SR is just a simple bug / oversight, and we're seeing SR that should only be there on harder difficulties. Normal should be 10 + HD at the very most and 5 + HD for trash mooks / easy mode.

[Blue]

The mythic enemies tend to have really high SR, but you also have Mythic Spell Penetration to compensate. If you play any kind of caster except a buffer, you have to invest into the two Spell Pen feats, and the Mythic one. There are also a lot of items that you can get early in the game that add to spell pen, meaning that getting a +30 penetration bonus isn't that hard.

It does mean that "secondary" casters, who have to take feats other than magic feats, are heavily penalized though. Pure casters should be fine. My Azata sorcerer is practically soloing whole encounters without any trouble on Core difficulty, but pure casters don't get to fully shine until mid chapter 3 or so.

[Fluff]

There are a lot of themes like this already.
SR is easy. AC is more of a problem. You can easily pass SR with some SP items, feats, being an elf, or sorcerer with SP sub-class.

Have >100 SP modifier (+d20 dice roll on top of that) at lvl 19-20. The biggest SR i saw was near 50-60. So that's it.

On the other hand i saw many AC 50-70, with saves modifiers of +30 +50, which is much worse for Phys dds.

I just kill everything with Sorcerer and magic. No idea how i would kill those AC without magic.

[Midnight]

Originally posted by Blue:

The mythic enemies tend to have really high SR, but you also have Mythic Spell Penetration to compensate. If you play any kind of caster except a buffer, you have to invest into the two Spell Pen feats, and the Mythic one. There are also a lot of items that you can get early in the game that add to spell pen, meaning that getting a +30 penetration bonus isn't that hard.

It does mean that "secondary" casters, who have to take feats other than magic feats, are heavily penalized though. Pure casters should be fine. My Azata sorcerer is practically soloing whole encounters without any trouble on Core difficulty, but pure casters don't get to fully shine until mid chapter 3 or so.

If you're playing a Cleric or Oracle just go completely martial without spending a single feat or ability on spell pen or saves.

Once you merge spellbooks with Angel you get a heap of nuke spells that completely ignore SR and sometimes even saves.

It's the same with a Lich.

Fact is that even as a pure caster you will encounter enemies you will have low chances of hitting. And your slots are limited so why no fill your slots with those mythic spells which don't allow SR in the first place. And if everyone gets those spells why not play a martial powerhouse and ignore those spell feats altogether?

[Frostfeather]

Nah, there's "too much AC", especially on higher difficulties.

[Elnidfse]

The MC has no problem with AC because of stacking spellbooks or various other mythic feats. Lich's don't have that problem for example given none of their spells deal with spell resistance and a bunch of their saves are for negative effects, letting damage through unmolested. Their sicken for 1 turn has no saving throw. If you use it, it works.

Angel blasters don't have a problem either.
It's a problem that's mostly a problem for hybrid builds. You either basically go 100% in on spell pen and save DCs or you don't bother. Mythic abilities which would be "cherry on tops" are anything but. Being mandatory and a lot of spell-like abilities that have saves or resistances get shafted too once you hit chapter 4.

Landing embers misfortune hex? Yeah good luck pal.
It's more annoying for save or sucks for some mythic paths whose DC's don't scale with stats. 10 + Double my mythic rank? That's 30. On a supernatura. Enemies at this stage of the game are rocking 36+ to their saves as early as chapter 4. How the hell do you expect me to land this?

[Midnight]

I actually think that hybrids and gishes rule Wrath.

Take Magus Lich. Ignore all the spell pen and focus feats and just focus on your buffs. Once you take Lich you can pick from huge DR or debuffing everything to hell by your mere presence and you still get spells that do huge damage and debuff even more no saves allowed.

And you can target touch AC on demand too all while being tanky as hell.

Meanwhile full caster Liches get to ingore SR for a few rounds per rest... yaaay or convert elemental damage into negative energy so your nukes do something (that is half damage, they will probably save).

[Stink Bug]

Originally posted by Aunt Tony:

It's sort of expected that in a campaign all about demons your enemies will have spell resistance, but Owlcat definitely inflated statblocks in some specific areas to an insane degree. 15 + HD is absolutely **ASTRONOMICAL** spell resistance, and that's just for ordinary trash mooks. This doesn't sound like much until you find out that enemies always have more HD than you have character levels. It's very common for trash to have 2 or 3 HD more than you, and I'm seeing bosses show up with literally 18 HD while I'm running around with a level 7 - 8 party... they aren't impossible to kill, really, but that's because I can stall them for dozens of rounds while my martials whittle them down. Casters are just buffbots in this game right now. Nenio and Ember are absolutely worthless garbage.

I think that the difficulty slider not affecting SR is just a simple bug / oversight, and we're seeing SR that should only be there on harder difficulties. Normal should be 10 + HD at the very most and 5 + HD for trash mooks / easy mode.

This amount of level inflation really, really, really sucks; I was hoping they wouldn’t feel the need to do that since demons have so many abilities and resistances (compared to kingmaker’s owlbears, worgs, and manticores). Level inflation for non-bossy enemies is the worst method of lazy balancing IMO, since it in addition to what you said a good number of spells have HD based-effects or caps and this makes them useless. Also not really fixable by difficulty sliders either.

[Tyler Durden]

Originally posted by Blue:

There are also a lot of items that you can get early in the game that add to spell pen, meaning that getting a +30 penetration bonus isn't that hard.

Mind sharing where some of them are? I haven't had any luck finding any so far. 😕

[Stechhelm]

Originally posted by Tusk_Luv:

There are a lot of themes like this already.
SR is easy. AC is more of a problem. You can easily pass SR with some SP items, feats, being an elf, or sorcerer with SP sub-class.

Have >100 SP modifier (+d20 dice roll on top of that) at lvl 19-20. The biggest SR i saw was near 50-60. So that's it.

On the other hand i saw many AC 50-70, with saves modifiers of +30 +50, which is much worse for Phys dds.

I just kill everything with Sorcerer and magic. No idea how i would kill those AC without magic.

I also dont get the problem with spell resistance here. Its not like every enemy has it, and thoese who have, have a bunch of other weaknesses.

Ember is also pretty usefull in those cases.