Wow, nice work you did with this mod to revise how broken it was. I too made my own version of it and changed a lot of stuff to balance it + also add progression to level 20, but never got around to uploading it due to not being satisfied with the limitations of what the game can do + me being new to modding. For example, I was able to implement the Perfect Strike from Pathfinder to actually maximize the damage dice by copying Tempest Cleric, but wasn't able to make it only maximize base weapon dice and not the extra damage from crits.
Honestly speaking, the Dimension Strike changed from original spell DC to Attack Roll, personally I believe is a buff rather than a nerf mentioned in description. The main point is with Attack Roll, you can now crit, which is much better than the spell DC version.
When you really think deeply (or maybe like me, spent an hour to try the original out) , the original version, if I upcast it with a lv 6 or lv 5 spell slot, it is only a 6d6 or even 5d6 non-AOE spell (maybe it is 6d8 and 5d8, bad memories), and if you compare with other same level spells such as Chain Lightning, which is 10d8 with aoe ability, or Cone of Cold, which deals 8d8 dmg with aoe ability as well. The original dimension strike could not even compare with low level spells like Ice Storm or Call lightning. The former could create difficult terrain and have the potential to prone the enemies. The latter can be casted again and again, you just need to keep your concentration. Both of them could be upcasted as well.
At the same time, lightning and cold vulnerability is much easier to make just by throwing a water bottle or use Create Water, which Force vulnerability is much harder to make which needs to freeze the enemies, and one hit will end the Frozen condition.
Type too much just to say the original design is not reasonable at all, spent too much resources but to exchange a not satisfying result. And the author claimed oneself inspired by PF subclass, but one's design did not show how powerful dimenstion strike is in PF, not at all.
Now I can at least crit, spend a level 3 spell slot could deal 6d6 dmg by doubling the dmg dice, even 12d6 by spending and upcasting a lv 6 spell slots. The atk roll penalty, honestly speaking, have thousands of methods to overcome. Hold person, hold monster, reverberation, coatings like drow poison or crawler mucus, crit set (Sarevok Helmet, Fighter subclass Champion etc.), everything you can tell.
I am not saying that I dislike the original version. Being a player, I respect mod authors' result and hard work. Being a fan of PF, I am glad to see classes and subclasses of PF being transplanted to BG3. It is just I want to play a real sword saint, which could show how powerful sword saint is in PF, but not a deficient mod class.
Anyone who read this comment, if you ever played PF: WotR and played Magus (or its subclasses), and go with Trickster Mythic Path, I believe you will understand what I want to express.
Great point about being able to crit. That does indeed incrase the maximum potential damage slightly, however I do believe that your average damage goes down. How much crit is a player going to realistically get? 20%? Crit threshold isn't that easy to find and honestly speaking if you manage to gather all the crit threshold items and buffs in the game, then I think you kind of deserve to be OP lol.
I still think, for this game's balance, being able to sidestep the only real downside of instant strike made the original dimension blade a bit too much of a nobrainer to spend all of your spell slots on. I'll definitely keep an eye on it balance wise when I have time to test it further into the game(I'm still in act 1 on my current playthrough). I don't mind that there's ways to ignore attack rolls (hold person etc), because all of those are conditional and if conditions were perfect every time, you could just oneshot pretty much every enemy in the game with the many exploitable mechanics the game has. My first playthrough of the game I beat the nether brain by dropping all my explosives and blowing them up for over 300 damage. That's the cool stuff we remember a year later that this game shines at. Obviously not the same amount of effort as "just cast a spell", but realistically if you manage to hold person an enemy, you don't need a SS to kill the target.
As for scaling with items, yeah, I think that's fine? I mean, every class becomes strong with strong items. The instant strike attack penalty isn't meant to be a "you can't overcome this" punishment for the player. It's there as a counterbalance for the otherwise super strong passive. The main point of the attack penalty is that it forces you to pay something for those extra attacks, in this case items / buffs / actions / equipment slots that increase attack. The reason I don't mind hold person for example, because that's something you have to commit another character to do. If it requires 2 characters for SS to perform at its peak, well that's exactly what I wanted out of my revision. That's why SS doesn't have hard CC spells in their spell list.
1 other thing with instant strike is that it doesn't benefit from haste. So with haste, SS's max number of attacks in a turn goes from 4 to 5, while extra attack classes go from 2 to 4. So in optimal conditions, SS isn't actually that much stronger than other weapon attack focused classes and SS doesn't offer much utility other than "hit hard".
I'm not too familiar with pathfinder systems as I haven't played played pnp pf or the owlcat games, so I don't know how they balance this class, but reading up on it, this is my understanding: Dimension Strike costs pf equivalent of a bonus action to give the character a buff that makes their attacks touch attacks. Touch attacks are:
Touch attacks completely disregard armor, including shields and natural armor - the aggressor needs only to touch a foe for such an attack to take full effect. In these cases, the attacker makes a touch attack roll (either ranged or melee). When you are the target of a touch attack, your AC doesn't include any armor bonus, shield bonus, or natural armor bonus. All other modifiers, such as your size modifier, Dexterity modifier, and deflection bonus (if any) apply normally.
So basically you treat all enemies like they weren't wearing armor and / or shield, but they keep all other AC modifiers. I actually like this as an idea and it actually would be a pretty cool idea to have on this class and something worth keeping in mind for if I decide to put more effort into reworking the class (no promises), but this seems like it would be.. quite a bit of effort to implement as written. idk if it's even possible to find out target's AC - armor without diving into script extender stuff which I have no familiarity with.
As for your damage comparisons, let's start with single target damage. With default level scaling (capped at 12. I don't really have interest in trying to balance outside of that scope.), the class only learns 1 level 5 spell slot at level 12, so the base damage was always capped at 5d8 = 40 (+ weapon damage) even in the original mod. Making that able to crit would make the max hit 10d8 = up to 80 (+ weapon damage), which is certainly quite high. But in this mod I reduced the damage die to a d6. With that in mind, the max damage for dimension blade can deal would be:
5d6 base damage from casting it with a level 5 spell slot.
1d6 force damage from Arcane Guidance.
0/2/4 thunder damage from Storm Combo.
Proficiency Bonus from Perfect Strike. It starts at +2, increases to+3 at level 5, and becomes +4 at level 9.
Weapon damage. For example greatsword deals 2d6 + int modifier damage (because of arcane weapon).
that brings the total max damage at 5d6 + 1d6 + 4 + 4 = 44 + weapon damage.
This is certainly still a lot of single target damage, especially since it can crit, but it's barely more than divine smite with level 4 spell slot dealing up to unconditional 5d8 = 40 + weapon damage (also able to crit just like dimension blade). Paladin can only obtain up to level 3 spell slots, but you can multiclass any class that has higher level spell slots into 1 level of paladin to get divine smite. Or a level 12 paladin with improved divine smite who just gets bonus 1d8 radiant damage to all their attacks, which has the same end result with a level 3 spell slot.
As for single target damage vs AOE damage, direct comparison is a bit harder for 2 reasons:
AOE damage scales up based on how many target it hits.
Not all damage is equal, because not every target is equal. Dealing 10 damage to 10 random targets is not the same as dealing 100 damage to a high value target, even though they deal the same total damage. For example, many boss fights end as soon as you kill the boss, so just nuking down the boss with single target damage ends up being more "efficient" in terms of total damage needed to win the fight.
With that in mind, I focused on the class's single target output when balancing my revision as I felt that it was more overtuned than SS's AOE output. Not saying their AOE isn't also overtuned, because it probably is, but I haven't reached far enough in my current playthrough to be able to properly test it yet, so I'll touch the AOE stuff when I get there.
Another thing to keep in mind with AOEing, is that a lot of the classes that are strong at AOEing (wizard, sorceress) are quite weak for the first half of the game and only really start to get rolling sometime in act 2. Because of them being weak in the early game, they tend to become some of the stronger classes at high levels, which I think is fair. SS doesn't have this downside, other than being quite frail early on.
So with that, I think as it is, dimension blade with the rest of the kit of the class, is pretty comparable to the damage output a vanilla class can deal, which was the goal of this mod.
The AC buff from prescient Defense is applied twice with two different amounts. the first one is giving a +2 to AC while the second is giving a +3 to AC.
12 comments
Any plans on doing progression to 20?
When you really think deeply (or maybe like me, spent an hour to try the original out) , the original version, if I upcast it with a lv 6 or lv 5 spell slot, it is only a 6d6 or even 5d6 non-AOE spell (maybe it is 6d8 and 5d8, bad memories), and if you compare with other same level spells such as Chain Lightning, which is 10d8 with aoe ability, or Cone of Cold, which deals 8d8 dmg with aoe ability as well. The original dimension strike could not even compare with low level spells like Ice Storm or Call lightning. The former could create difficult terrain and have the potential to prone the enemies. The latter can be casted again and again, you just need to keep your concentration. Both of them could be upcasted as well.
At the same time, lightning and cold vulnerability is much easier to make just by throwing a water bottle or use Create Water, which Force vulnerability is much harder to make which needs to freeze the enemies, and one hit will end the Frozen condition.
Type too much just to say the original design is not reasonable at all, spent too much resources but to exchange a not satisfying result. And the author claimed oneself inspired by PF subclass, but one's design did not show how powerful dimenstion strike is in PF, not at all.
Now I can at least crit, spend a level 3 spell slot could deal 6d6 dmg by doubling the dmg dice, even 12d6 by spending and upcasting a lv 6 spell slots. The atk roll penalty, honestly speaking, have thousands of methods to overcome. Hold person, hold monster, reverberation, coatings like drow poison or crawler mucus, crit set (Sarevok Helmet, Fighter subclass Champion etc.), everything you can tell.
I am not saying that I dislike the original version. Being a player, I respect mod authors' result and hard work. Being a fan of PF, I am glad to see classes and subclasses of PF being transplanted to BG3. It is just I want to play a real sword saint, which could show how powerful sword saint is in PF, but not a deficient mod class.
I still think, for this game's balance, being able to sidestep the only real downside of instant strike made the original dimension blade a bit too much of a nobrainer to spend all of your spell slots on. I'll definitely keep an eye on it balance wise when I have time to test it further into the game(I'm still in act 1 on my current playthrough). I don't mind that there's ways to ignore attack rolls (hold person etc), because all of those are conditional and if conditions were perfect every time, you could just oneshot pretty much every enemy in the game with the many exploitable mechanics the game has. My first playthrough of the game I beat the nether brain by dropping all my explosives and blowing them up for over 300 damage. That's the cool stuff we remember a year later that this game shines at. Obviously not the same amount of effort as "just cast a spell", but realistically if you manage to hold person an enemy, you don't need a SS to kill the target.
As for scaling with items, yeah, I think that's fine? I mean, every class becomes strong with strong items. The instant strike attack penalty isn't meant to be a "you can't overcome this" punishment for the player. It's there as a counterbalance for the otherwise super strong passive. The main point of the attack penalty is that it forces you to pay something for those extra attacks, in this case items / buffs / actions / equipment slots that increase attack. The reason I don't mind hold person for example, because that's something you have to commit another character to do. If it requires 2 characters for SS to perform at its peak, well that's exactly what I wanted out of my revision. That's why SS doesn't have hard CC spells in their spell list.
1 other thing with instant strike is that it doesn't benefit from haste. So with haste, SS's max number of attacks in a turn goes from 4 to 5, while extra attack classes go from 2 to 4. So in optimal conditions, SS isn't actually that much stronger than other weapon attack focused classes and SS doesn't offer much utility other than "hit hard".
I'm not too familiar with pathfinder systems as I haven't played played pnp pf or the owlcat games, so I don't know how they balance this class, but reading up on it, this is my understanding:
Dimension Strike costs pf equivalent of a bonus action to give the character a buff that makes their attacks touch attacks. Touch attacks are:
As for your damage comparisons, let's start with single target damage. With default level scaling (capped at 12. I don't really have interest in trying to balance outside of that scope.), the class only learns 1 level 5 spell slot at level 12, so the base damage was always capped at 5d8 = 40 (+ weapon damage) even in the original mod. Making that able to crit would make the max hit 10d8 = up to 80 (+ weapon damage), which is certainly quite high. But in this mod I reduced the damage die to a d6. With that in mind, the max damage for dimension blade can deal would be:
- 5d6 base damage from casting it with a level 5 spell slot.
- 1d6 force damage from Arcane Guidance.
- 0/2/4 thunder damage from Storm Combo.
- Proficiency Bonus from Perfect Strike. It starts at +2, increases to +3 at level 5, and becomes +4 at level 9.
- Weapon damage. For example greatsword deals 2d6 + int modifier damage (because of arcane weapon).
that brings the total max damage at 5d6 + 1d6 + 4 + 4 = 44 + weapon damage.This is certainly still a lot of single target damage, especially since it can crit, but it's barely more than divine smite with level 4 spell slot dealing up to unconditional 5d8 = 40 + weapon damage (also able to crit just like dimension blade). Paladin can only obtain up to level 3 spell slots, but you can multiclass any class that has higher level spell slots into 1 level of paladin to get divine smite. Or a level 12 paladin with improved divine smite who just gets bonus 1d8 radiant damage to all their attacks, which has the same end result with a level 3 spell slot.
As for single target damage vs AOE damage, direct comparison is a bit harder for 2 reasons:
- AOE damage scales up based on how many target it hits.
- Not all damage is equal, because not every target is equal. Dealing 10 damage to 10 random targets is not the same as dealing 100 damage to a high value target, even though they deal the same total damage. For example, many boss fights end as soon as you kill the boss, so just nuking down the boss with single target damage ends up being more "efficient" in terms of total damage needed to win the fight.
With that in mind, I focused on the class's single target output when balancing my revision as I felt that it was more overtuned than SS's AOE output. Not saying their AOE isn't also overtuned, because it probably is, but I haven't reached far enough in my current playthrough to be able to properly test it yet, so I'll touch the AOE stuff when I get there.Another thing to keep in mind with AOEing, is that a lot of the classes that are strong at AOEing (wizard, sorceress) are quite weak for the first half of the game and only really start to get rolling sometime in act 2. Because of them being weak in the early game, they tend to become some of the stronger classes at high levels, which I think is fair. SS doesn't have this downside, other than being quite frail early on.
So with that, I think as it is, dimension blade with the rest of the kit of the class, is pretty comparable to the damage output a vanilla class can deal, which was the goal of this mod.
edit: it seems like arcane weapon is not given out at level one.