Stacking Zoo Spells Not Adding Correctly

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Aniel
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Stacking Zoo Spells Not Adding Correctly

Post by Aniel » Thu Feb 13, 2020 11:47 pm

Playing a character with both empower, transmutation feats and inficasting, I end up casting a lot of zoo spells and I've noticed something that seems a little off with the math.

The base roll is 1d4+1, empower adds +50% and then GSF: Transmutation adds +1 on top of the final result. So (1d4+1)*1.5+1 results in a range of 4-8 per spell cast.

When casting the second time, in the majority of cases it increases the buff from +4 to +8 as expected. However sometimes, perhaps on natural 1 rolls of the 1d4 it pushes the buff to +7, a mere +3 increase which results in needing a third casting of the zoo spell. If I had to take a guess as I haven't properly isolated and tested this behavior, I'd say that the +1 bonus from transmutation is being factored into the initial casting and with increasing the maximum buff size but is not being factored into subsequent applications of the zoo buff to help reach that maximum. This means it's possible to need 3 castings per zoo per person with empower rather than what you think would be just the 2.

Obviously, for me this isn't relevant as they can inficast the zoos that they need. But I imagine this can be pretty irritating for conventional wizards/sorcerers that need to expend spell slots on their zoo buffs. This could be intentional, I'm not certain, but I felt it was worth highlighting this behavior in case it's unintended.

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