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A spellslinger mage is an arcane caster who masters the basic magic of the cantrip. they forgo learning how to use a limited number of leveled spells in order to learn how to use their cantrips with greater power and efficiency. in other words it’s a spellcaster that doesn’t use spell slots.
thank you for reading. any feedback is welcome but I am looking specifically for feedback about the break dice resource and if it now appears / feels distinct from the fighter.
v1.2.5 (old)
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Sounds like a sorcerer using sorcery points. Even a Sorlock - using sorcery points to boost eldritch blast.
If you want unlimited spell casting but limit it to cantrips you’ll have to make a lot of utility. You would have to focus on cc, perhaps denial of area, or even small AoE.
The reason why cantrips are unlimited in use is because they are generally for role play or like fire bolt, a basic free attack.
I see you want dice breakdown, but as soon as you make cantrips deal dmg, a person will find the strongest cantrip and use that all the time.
Either look at warlock class Eldritch invocations - there is a reason they get little spell slots, it makes them have powers to cast at will like a cantrip, including fly and levitate and detect magic among others.
Cantrip ms could scale based on level, then look at eldritch blast as example.
This is my feedback on your Spellslinger idea. Might take a while to balance it.
Thank you for your feedback.
The first version of this class I made a mathematical breakdown for because it was at first just a proof of concept for a spellcaster without spell slots. I had based it directly off of the fighter and made sure it’s damage output would not outpace the fighter, but of course between the levels 17 and 19 it did because cantrips scale at 5, 11, 17 whereas extra attacks for the fighter scale at 5, 11, 20.
While the damage was balanced against the fighter save for the problematic blade cantrips and an abuse of the wording for the classes damage boost using eldritch blast (the first version had every cantrip available to them) it outperformed the fighter by having more exploration and combat utility built into its primary attacks.
I replaced action surge with damage break, reducing the classes nova potential. I hope this will solve the issue with it outperforming the fighter. I also removed cantrips that can deal damage to multiple targets from it’s list (save for acid splash) because a merit to the fighter is that with their consistent damage they can easily take down multiple lower CR creatures at once and that’s something that shouldn’t be intruded upon by the spellslinger.
I will argue that there is no best cantrip for combat because most have effects that would make them more or less effective in different situations. Chill touch for example deals d8 damage which is not the highest damage you can get with a cantrip it prevents the target from regaining hit points, shutting down any regeneration ability. Lightning lure can pull a target into an AoE. And ray of frost can slow a target from advancing, where many monsters don’t have ranged options or have ranged options that are worse than their melee option.
I’ll continue to work on it.