Talk:Wrathful Spell (3.5e Feat)

Ratings

Spanambula favors this article and rated it 4 of 4!

A feat tax but not a spell level tax for a fairly limited-condition power increase that only affects direct-damage spells seems fair, even if the increase can approach 30% in semi-optimized conditions. It's kinda niche, but the same can be said for a lot of WotC metamagic. Something to maybe think about would be for each spell you cast with this metamagic, the duration of your rage decreases by one round.

	Ghostwheel dislikes this article and rated it 1 of 4.
	While I think the feat has some promise, +0 metamagic effects are prone to abuse if not noting the things I said below. This gets even worse when it gives you free damage (an increase of 28.57% if the base dice was d6 for the spell's damage!) for no actual cost increase in the spell.

	Eiji-kun favors this article and rated it 4 of 4!
	Rage mage approved. This is pretty clever.

Seems a bit weak

For an increase in spell level it adds approximately 1 average damage per caster level. That's probably fine as an increase without any restrictions, but the raging requirement means that the player has to expend an additional resource to be able to use the spell (either rage per day or the spell). For this reason, it would likely be okay if it didn't raise the effective spell level at all. --Aarnott (talk) 19:23, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

If it didn't raise the spell level, then it shouldn't get the added damage either. Rage isn't so hard to come by that you tend to be missing out on it after the first few levels even if you don't want to invest levels in Barbarian. Instead, if you REALLY want to change it, the only change I would make is that you can cast it while not raging, but get the damage increase when raging. Plus, this comes out to more than +1 damage per die if you combine it with maximize or similar metamagic stacking stuff. --Ghostwheel (talk) 20:43, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, as city spell and invisible shown us +0 metamagic is dangerous. Ghostwheel is also right, wrathful spell stack very well with other metamagic feats. --Leziad (talk) 21:10, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

The way I see it is that a caster needs to have barbarian levels (or something effectively equivalent) or spend an action to buff in order to be able to use spells with this feat. Yes, it's a bit on the stronger side if it doesn't have a slot adjustment, but I think it's more reasonable that way. Keep in mind as well that daily rage uses are daily. This means that if you are going to be able to throw one of these off without a spent action, you need to choose which daily encounter you do that in carefully.

Combinations with maximize and empower just makes them actually pull their high slot increase more reasonably. If I spend a 7th level slot for a fireball, it better do a crapton of damage. It's for damage spells anyways. The general +0 metamagic problems I'd consider a separate issue. They are problems with abuses of them. If you ignore those abuses and think about using as intended, I think +0 is the better option. --Aarnott (talk) 21:20, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Aarnott on this one. This doesn't even have the broad scope of Empower or Maximize, where the increase applies to all variable numeric effects, it's JUST applying to straight HP damage, which combined with the rage requirement, is enough to justify the +0. Sure you can do a bit more damage with some blaster spells, but it's not overpowering IMO. --Spanambula (talk) 21:31, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Aarnott: Metamagic is generally stronger when it comes to blasting. For two reasons. First, it "saves" a spell slot for people. You aren't going to "spend" a spell slot on Delayed Blast Fireball if you have a maximized fireball handy as a sorcerer.

Second, people don't actually do the math (which they REALLY should be doing more of), but when they do, they find out that metamagic gives a small increase to the actual damage on average. At level 14 (when you get access to DBF), a DBF does 14d6 damage, which comes out to 49 on average. On the other hand, the maximized fireball will do 60 damage, which is a 22.45% increase in damage, which is quite respectable. DBF only "trumps" maximized fireball in average damage once you hit level 18, at which point it almost caps out as well.

Finally, there are a ton of ways to reduce the cost of metamagic. And while this isn't too open to abuse as it is written, homebrew is not created in a vacuum, and it would be shortsighted of us to not observe the ramifications of what we create. --Ghostwheel (talk) 21:47, 24 April 2015 (UTC)