Spell Casting really sucks

[jfoytek]

So the further into this game I play the more and more evident its becoming that having Ember or Nenio in my group is just a waisted slot... And I really like Ember and want her in my core group for the RP aspect, she is an enjoyable character....

But at this point she is a non effective archer that sometimes hits something for minimal damage... If I use her as a caster which I have made her be, she has Mythic casting abilitys to overcome spell immunity and resistance she has spell penetration etc she specialized in Evocation and she specializes in Fire and most of the time when her epic fire ability's are cast at something I see the words Target Resisted??? What.... in the early game she was useful for crowd control as she put stuff to sleep and kept the fight manageable now sleep is pointless everything has the will power to resist it.... She is basically an emergency healer at this point....

And Nenio who I have all the mythic ability's the same as Ember but for Cold instead of fire and his spell just get resisted too... fighting a dragon when he should shine he missed or was resisted every single time the only person on my team who could actually hurt the damn dragon was Me myself and I with my Angel ability.... Everyone else just kinda stood around and tried to stay alive lol.....

Lann has been my bread and butter DPS but I am noticing that he is tappering off now and myself a Paladin and the other Paladin we are picking up.... And also Camelia is picking up, basically any Melee damage character I have is picking up steam and becoming more usefull and my spell casters they have remained useless even more so now that their skills like spell just don't work on anything....

I am about to totally ditch the spell casters all together....

[ColonoscoPete]

The only spell caster I use for offensive spells, is myself, being a wizard lich. The others just seems to have such low DCs and spell pens compared to the enemies.
Death of elements ability feels like an asbolute requirement, to ever do damage with elemental spells.

[MightyMickey88]

Because Owlcat doesn’t understand proper pathfinder encounter design / balance and just bloats numbers to oblivion yes casters are the most adversely affected.

Focus on buff / debuff spells and abilities with no saving throws and they are still effective (and critical) party members though.

[phantommail]

Yep. Playing wizard elementalist right now - going for azata.
Lvl 9 + 2 mythic levels. Encounters are designed in a way you almost have no use for your offensive spells.
Trash mobs - web/grease or haste.
Boss = insane saves = haste , buffs , maybe some touch attacks or cc.
Maybe around lvl 13-15 something will change i dunno.

[Deviant]

i have ember in my party and shes really good damage dealer what are you talking about? i got bracers wich gives me 5/6/7/8th lightning spells and converts all damage abilities to lightning so i speced her into pure lighting mage and i am doing alot of damage on top of it she can heal and do some buffs for me

[WarheroJango]

If you're using default builds for the characters they're near useless on Normal difficulty.

I don't use much offensive magic since the only magic I see as useful just blows up the party, unless theres a perk or feat that prevents the party from being fried by fireball.

After my first play through I'm just going Pally, Rogue, 3 rangers and a Cleric.

They've all got pets and it feels like I'm leading a animal herd into battle :/

[jfoytek]

Originally posted by Deviant:

i have ember in my party and shes really good damage dealer what are you talking about? i got bracers wich gives me 5/6/7/8th lightning spells and converts all damage abilities to lightning so i speced her into pure lighting mage and i am doing alot of damage

Silly me I specc'ed the person called Ember into Fire....

[Morgian]

Pathfinder (as does D&D) leans heavily on melee and archery damage, while the casters got nerfed more and more every edition. As a result you need to know and use all the tricks to make a caster effective.
In this game casters are heavily handicapped because the majority of the enemies have very high spell resistance and monstrous saves. To call a reflex save of +22 a weakness, because the other two are at +31 is missing the point that your DC is only 19.

So what to do? First you can rely on buffs, since they are not resisted and always work. Second you can look to damage spells, since Ascendant Element makes them viable, and they do at least half damage. Ranged touch spells that don't allow saves are far better, especially when modded. The next option is to use spells that are unaffected by spell resistance and saves, which means conjurations. Being a summoner is it's own specialty and I have never tried. Your big problem is spell resistance. By taking spell penetration and it's greater brother you get +4 to the roll, and with the mythic feat you add your mythic rank to it - at that point you can get spells somewhat reliably to the target.

Raising the DC is difficult, but there are ways. There are the spell focus, gr. spell focus and mythic spell focus feats for that, plus the mythic ability to apply all those bonuses to a second school of magic. The sage sorcerer gets +2 to any single school, some races have a racial bonus to a school, and there are items to be found that raise the DCs of specific types of spells. I have gloves that add +2 to enchantments, another item that does the same (not sure if it's a dagger), and elves can get another +1 by the mythic heritage feat. That adds +11 to my DC - where an unprepared sorcerer has a DC of 18, I have 29.
In what to specialise, what items to give to whom, and so on, is a science by itself. You can certainly find info about it on the web, but this might give you an idea what you can do to improve your casters.

Even if you do all that, casters are weak against bosses, who are immune to all the nice debuffs. But they are great at clearing out the minions, which are often as big a danger as the boss.

[Lightning]

Originally posted by Doktor Barber:

The only spell caster I use for offensive spells, is myself, being a wizard lich. The others just seems to have such low DCs and spell pens compared to the enemies.
Death of elements ability feels like an asbolute requirement, to ever do damage with elemental spells.

Ember seems to have the biggest spell pen in the entire game

[elationtheory]

spellcasters are an easy way to get range touch spells, which help tremendously in late game fights because the enemies have low touch resistance but stupid high ac. ember also works well as a combat controller with selective web, glitter etc.

[Flip]

I am playing a fire focused Sylvan Sorc Azata and my damage is fine. Level 10 now. It is not as powerful as in Kingmaker but thanks to Mythic Elemental Resistance override I can hit most enemies just fine and do good damage, especially now that I am lvl 10 it's getting better. Main things to take though are the point blank shot / precise shot feats + all the spell pen + spell focus. My sorc is ez, he is fire and evocation so very easy to buff up the DC and Damage of those spells.

Outside of dmg, AoE disablers like the pit spells and grease are still incredibly powerful and can help make hard encounters easy, plus of course all the haste spells etc.

My party has MC as Sorc, Ember and Daeran, all sling fire spells and it works quite nicely. Lann use to be the undisputed king of dps but we are almost on part now single target.

I still find melee by far the weakest because at least in turn based mode they are SO SLOW. Battle is often times over by the time those lumbering brutes get anywhere and if they do half the time they are incapacitated in so way. Only my animal companions perform, bear for tank and Dragon has a very powerful breath attack.

Also worth mentioning some of the harder encounters the enemies have very high AC which requires my ranged and melee to roll a natural 20 to hit but it's no problem for the casters to hit with ranged touch (and vice versa as well )

[jasta85]

You sort of need to decide what you want your companion casters are going to do from the beginning of the game and then focus their build around that. If you want to be casting offensive spells you need to max out spell penetration, you can get +6 from 3 feats, and some more from specific gear.

If you choose to go a more support related spell caster with heals, buffs and summons, you don't need to worry about spell pen at all.

My lich sorcerer is the only damaging caster I have right now as his mythic spells straight up ignore spell resistance, and he can blow up enemy groups just by himself.

[Princess Pilfer]

While the game does heavily favor gishes if you're really trying to minmax, it's not actually that casters are bad, it's that the companions builds are set up in ways that are good for RP, but not good mechanically.
But the game generally assumes you have builds that are good mechanically. It's actually a common problem in crpgs. (All but like 2 of the companions in pillars of eternity are intensely mediocre mechanically, so on higher difficulties you basically have to be capable of soling everything with just your protagonist if you're keeping the story companions around)

You can make her a good caster it's just harder than it would be for your MC, you have to have a better idea of what specifically you want them to be doing, and devote everything they do to that. If you don't have the expereince (or the patience) to figure something out for the story companions, youtube and neoseeker are both good sources.

[ColonoscoPete]

Originally posted by WarheroJango:

If you're using default builds for the characters they're near useless on Normal difficulty.

I don't use much offensive magic since the only magic I see as useful just blows up the party, unless theres a perk or feat that prevents the party from being fried by fireball.

After my first play through I'm just going Pally, Rogue, 3 rangers and a Cleric.

They've all got pets and it feels like I'm leading a animal herd into battle :/

With how much fire resistance most demons have, default fireball is a joke lol.

[Draken]

Originally posted by Doktor Barber:

With how much fire resistance most demons have, default fireball is a joke lol.

Literally on the first mythical level you can choose a mythical ability that lets you ignore the damage reduction and immunity for one element.
If you want to burn demon with fireballs, you can.

[Flip]

Originally posted by Draken:

Originally posted by Doktor Barber:

With how much fire resistance most demons have, default fireball is a joke lol.

Literally on the first mythical level you can choose a mythical ability that lets you ignore the damage reduction and immunity for one element.
If you want to burn demon with fireballs, you can.

This is what I did, my sorc uses only fire spells and that solves the problem nicely as it bypasses all fire resistance and immunities. In addition there is a very nice right that enhances fire damage you can get from Kyado.