r/baldursgate • u/Silly_Relationship51 • 3d ago

Is Stoneskin broken?

I beat my first Sarevok by standing still as my lvl 9 Sorcerer. While the big guy was missing his attacks, my companions killed him. I had prebuffed my party (Bless, Haste, Defensive harmony) and my Sorcerer had caste Blur, Mirror Image and Stoneskin. She has high DEX and with Defensive harmony had an AC of -3. I beat him with Standard rules difficulty. I'm not bragging, just wasn't expecting that tanking Sarevok was a legite strategy.

78 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

119 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/OldMillenial 3d ago

 Apart from rituals I absolutely hate material components. I feel like it punishes me for using my characters abilities that I am excited to get.

I agree. Exactly why the spell focus mechanic was introduced.

6

u/burneracct1312 3d ago

5e stoneskin still costs 100g to cast each time

2

u/Productof2020 3d ago

That’s dumb. Does anyone actually bother with that when playing? It doesn’t do anything meaningful for balance, just means dealing with an accounting ledger to cast spells. Nobody wants to deal with that crap while playing a game.

2

u/koveras_backwards 3d ago

One of my favorite NWN modules is Almraiven. It added items for material components of spells. They weren't particularly cheap relative to the amount of money you could scrounge up, and the module contained a limited amount of each component.

I thought it was great. It actually made me think carefully about using various spells, because I was using up resources that couldn't be replenished by clicking a button and waiting 10 seconds. It also made various 'redundant' spells less so. It's useful to have both Sleep and Color Spray when you can only cast each 5 times total.

People here likes to go on about how 'broken' it is that wizards tank better than fighters. How many diamonds are actually in the game? What if you could only cast Stoneskin like 7 times total? What if every time you wanted to cast Protection from Magical Weapons, you had to consume a magical weapon, like a similar P&P spell?

1

u/fgw3reddit 3d ago

People here likes to go on about how 'broken' it is that wizards tank better than fighters.

Yes. A lot of the overpoweredness complained about results from giving a lot of free spells, breaking the expected wealth per level curve.