Creating Walls: Is it inherently OP?

Clearly, context is critical. If you are always fighting in a blank white void with no obstacles or terrain whatsoever, then it's pretty pointless to place only 10 ft of fencing in front of someone. I mean, it blocks line of sight, and thus stops AoO, so there's still utility, but still, that's probably the least useful context to use it in.
Assuming that you use walls in the context in which they are actually meaningful, are they destined to just be too good at what they do?

I make this as someone who really loves to use the Creation sphere. Any dungeon activity can generally be solved or mitigated by a well-placed wall. Surrounded and out numbered? Wall in front, take out the back, and you're good (and any attacks devoted to the wall to bust through are attacks not hitting you).
Swinging axe trap? Plop down an iron wall. Is it too strong, and busts through? Place the wall higher up, so it avoids the axe, but catches the handle. Arrow, or pressure plate traps? Obviously defeated.
Anyone who needs to full attack for optimal damage? Well, you've reduced them to just one attack, with no save, as an AoE effect. (Unless they, again, devote attacks to the wall, and not you, which is basically equivalent to preemptive healing. Not to mention since you can't use your lowest BAB attacks first, you probably soak their best attack(s) if they hit the wall.)
Need to go for the lever to end the encounter? Create corridor to run down that safely isolates you and the lever from the enemies.

Now, walls are not one-way. You block off your own team. But obviously you wouldn't place it in a way that is more detrimental to your team than the enemy.

I mean, walls are good. Walls are underrated, perhaps. But what's the question even mean? How would we be able to tell if walls are 'too good at what they do' versus 'just good enough at what they do'? Certainly, I can build a wizard who doesn't pick wall spells and doesn't lag behind in power.

I think it's worth noting that teleportation is really helpful in most of the examples you list, summons are really helpful in most of the examples you list, flight can be helpful in a lot of the examples you list. The niche of walls over those is largely that it's really good at preventing enemies from getting to a place, which is mostly nice when you're playing defense. That's a pretty situational niche, though.

Combat should, ideally, take place in a variety of conditions and against a variety of enemies. Sometimes the overall combination of conditions and enemies will be quite favourable to walls and being able to use them. Others will require different tools to overcome, and walls will be useless.

"In specific conditions against specific types of enemies, it's really good" isn't OP. Spells more along the lines of "I will always cast them if I can, regardless of enemy composition and conditions" are OP.

As others have pointed out walls being good isn't the same as walls being overpowered. They have a clear and limited purpose, they're best used in specific environments where they can actually enclose things fully, and there are several monsters and spells that can pretty easily invalidate them as either a threat or a deterrent. What's being described here isn't really "this can solve everything", it's "I've found my favorite hammer, everything suddenly looks like a nail, I guess this outclasses the swiss army knife and screwdriver over here."

Good options used well can be great, used very well they can be amazing, but that's still starting with the baseline of just being a good option. The situation and the application are what makes it excel and those same factors can result in it failing disastrously if they aren't in your favor. In 3.5 and Pathfinder the options range from absolutely terrible but you can still make them work in the right situation to this one tool actually can shut down just about every problem you run into. Walls can be somewhere above the middle of that range but they run into a similar issue in game as they do in real life, their main purpose is keeping something on one side and at the end of the day a determined or lucky enemy will show that blocking off a problem is often just delaying it while you try to find other ways of fully resolving it.

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Originally Posted by SangoProduction

Clearly, context is critical. If you are always fighting in a blank white void with no obstacles or terrain whatsoever, then it's pretty pointless to place only 10 ft of fencing in front of someone. I mean, it blocks line of sight, and thus stops AoO, so there's still utility, but still, that's probably the least useful context to use it in.
Assuming that you use walls in the context in which they are actually meaningful, are they destined to just be too good at what they do?

I make this as someone who really loves to use the Creation sphere. Any dungeon activity can generally be solved or mitigated by a well-placed wall. Surrounded and out numbered? Wall in front, take out the back, and you're good (and any attacks devoted to the wall to bust through are attacks not hitting you).
Swinging axe trap? Plop down an iron wall. Is it too strong, and busts through? Place the wall higher up, so it avoids the axe, but catches the handle. Arrow, or pressure plate traps? Obviously defeated.
Anyone who needs to full attack for optimal damage? Well, you've reduced them to just one attack, with no save, as an AoE effect. (Unless they, again, devote attacks to the wall, and not you, which is basically equivalent to preemptive healing. Not to mention since you can't use your lowest BAB attacks first, you probably soak their best attack(s) if they hit the wall.)
Need to go for the lever to end the encounter? Create corridor to run down that safely isolates you and the lever from the enemies.

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Are those walls indestructible?

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Originally Posted by SangoProduction

Now, walls are not one-way. You block off your own team. But obviously you wouldn't place it in a way that is more detrimental to your team than the enemy.

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That implies very fine control on the shape and placement of the walls.


Having the power to generate something that is both a) indestructible, b) many meters long/wide c) that you can "obviously" place at the best positioning 100% of the time and d) that you can spam at will/often enough that it might as well be at will is quite OP, yes.


If one of those criteria isn't met, it's going to be significantly less OP.

To use a fairly simple example: You're going through a long tunnel to get to the room where the Macguffin is. Bad guys coming from the Macguffin room want to stop you. If you put up a wall between you and them, now the bad guys can't reach you, but you also can't reach the Macguffin. The bad guys have succeeded in stopping you from reaching it.

What is powerful is Battlefield Control. Of which, walls, properly used, are a subset. Entangle and grease are among the gold standard first level spells. Solid fog is a game changer. But AOE effects like darkness and fog cloud are also strong for their level. So are movement type debuffs like slow. Anything that lets you shave off portions of the enemy to destroy sequentially or at a range that gives you the best advantage is a devastating tactical tool.

Maybe crowd control is OP. It is widely acknowledged to be among the best specializations among the strongest PCs in the game. If walls are the way you like to do that, walls are cool. But there are enough ways to do that that walls are optional for optimized play

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Originally Posted by Chronos

To use a fairly simple example: You're going through a long tunnel to get to the room where the Macguffin is. Bad guys coming from the Macguffin room want to stop you. If you put up a wall between you and them, now the bad guys can't reach you, but you also can't reach the Macguffin. The bad guys have succeeded in stopping you from reaching it.

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I think this situation is too reductive to be a common scenario, unless you do a lot of fighting in 5ft tunnels. For example, if it's a 10ft tunnel you can place a 5ft wide wall down half of it, and now the enemies have to come at you one at a time. Maybe the enemies are large and now have to squeeze and take debuffs. Maybe the enemies are coming at you from more than one angle, and you can wall off one tunnel and fight one group of enemies and then take out the other later or avoid them entirely. Even if you have to break down the wall to go that way later, splitting 1 encounter into 2 is a huge advantage. Even in the exact scenario you've described a wall might still be useful if you can't defeat your opponents in a straight up brawl and need to run away. Or if they leave open space between them you can drop the wall there and split the encounter in half again. A scenario has to be incredibly contrived for a solid wall to not be useful.

That said, I think the creators of even 3.5 understood that walls were quite powerful, to some degree. Walls that are particularly hard to destroy or have loose restrictions on how they can be placed tend to be level 5+ spells. Wall of stone, the most classical and discussed wall spell, is actually generally useless if you aren't either in a stone building or underground. Wall of force, the other big wall spell, is indestructible and fairly lose in its placement restrictions, but only allows flat planes, limiting its use.

I've long pondered this question myself. I've never personally tried Creation Walls, but I've played a character that wielded protection magic primarily, and her walls were the source of a lot of GM frustration. This only got worse once I picked up Selective Barrier, which I've come to believe is actually too effective at what it does. Then I was also a frostweaver, so I made Walls even out of turn with Icy Barrier, which particularly irked my DM since a well-placed immediate action barrier could put a stop to a pounce or diminish a brutal full attack.

Even just looking at normal barriers and, by extension, normal walls, they're really hard to balance. They tend to piss off some GMs because they can feel like no-save mass crowd control since every enemy on the wrong side of a wall is being just as effective as if they were in a hypnotic pattern of sleep until they break through.

This is true for a lot of spells like Entangle, Grease, and Solid Fog - as mentioned in earlier comments - but all of those either offer saving throws or can be overcome quite a bit less painfully than a big-ol pile of HP that stands between you and the party. Teleport and flight help, of course, but they're not going to happen in every encounter, and if you're playing spheres, you will have access to this magic every encounter.

I don't really have a definitive answer to how to "fix" walls so they don't feel so unfair to some, or even if they need fixing, or if they're just a matter of GM taste. I personally enjoy the feeling of tactically deploying walls and traps far more than blasting with Destruction, so that bias makes it harder to say, too.

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Originally Posted by Ady

I've long pondered this question myself. I've never personally tried Creation Walls, but I've played a character that wielded protection magic primarily, and her walls were the source of a lot of GM frustration. This only got worse once I picked up Selective Barrier, which I've come to believe is actually too effective at what it does. Then I was also a frostweaver, so I made Walls even out of turn with Icy Barrier, which particularly irked my DM since a well-placed immediate action barrier could put a stop to a pounce or diminish a brutal full attack.

Even just looking at normal barriers and, by extension, normal walls, they're really hard to balance. They tend to piss off some GMs because they can feel like no-save mass crowd control since every enemy on the wrong side of a wall is being just as effective as if they were in a hypnotic pattern of sleep until they break through.

This is true for a lot of spells like Entangle, Grease, and Solid Fog - as mentioned in earlier comments - but all of those either offer saving throws or can be overcome quite a bit less painfully than a big-ol pile of HP that stands between you and the party. Teleport and flight help, of course, but they're not going to happen in every encounter, and if you're playing spheres, you will have access to this magic every encounter.

I don't really have a definitive answer to how to "fix" walls so they don't feel so unfair to some, or even if they need fixing, or if they're just a matter of GM taste. I personally enjoy the feeling of tactically deploying walls and traps far more than blasting with Destruction, so that bias makes it harder to say, too.

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It sounds like the GM had only a small variety of enemies and strategies he wanted to run in an environment that specifically rewarded good use of walls.

There are many enemies who would not care about walls and can use strategies such as teleporting, passing through them, or digging underneath them in the right environment, or he could have just changed the environment to make them less of an automatic win condition. Any buffing caster would love some free turns of combat to set up their allies. Maybe an enemy spellcaster puts up their own wall - if you're able to use the strategy, so should the DM. Or you could even just have enemy reinforcements come and mass up behind the wall, ready for the next part of combat.

The DM should reward good strategies in combat, but if you're using the same strategy in every combat, you should expect there to be some difficulties or even impossibilities in implementing said strateg.

Not that I don't agree with the generally applicable advice that DMs should make interesting encounters that respond to player capabilities, but the fact that that a DM would need to go out of their way to deal with a strategy sort of indicates that that strategy is unusually problematic, no? Wall spells are very frequently no-save hard CC, aka one of the strongest things in the game. As mentioned by Zanos, the 3.5 designers seemed to understand this, as wall spells are relatively high level and tend to come with caveats, making them both less spammable and also online at a point when enemies are more likely to be able to meaningfully interact or circumvent the wall. The problem becomes much more pronounced with something like Spheres, where there are more options to spam walls at low levels.

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Originally Posted by Logalmier

Not that I don't agree with the generally applicable advice that DMs should make interesting encounters that respond to player capabilities, but the fact that that a DM would need to go out of their way to deal with a strategy sort of indicates that that strategy is unusually problematic, no?

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But it sounds like the DM in the example post wanted to use the same enemies and the same combat environments each time. Even if the DM ran random monsters instead, they would, through chance, find some monsters that would not be worried about walls. And even if you had to specifically run environments in a dungeon and used simple, random underground environments you would, through chance, work out that large, cavernous spaces aren't great for walls.

You can tailor combat specifically against walls if you want, but random enemies and random environments would also be just fine. Don't be surprised if the players come up with the same solutions if you're presenting them the same problem.

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Originally Posted by pabelfly

But it sounds like the DM in the example post wanted to use the same enemies and the same combat environments each time. Even if the DM ran random monsters instead, they would, through chance, find some monsters that would not be worried about walls. And even if you had to specifically run environments in a dungeon and used simple, random underground environments you would, through chance, work out that large, cavernous spaces aren't great for walls.

You can tailor combat specifically against walls if you want, but random enemies and random environments would also be just fine. Don't be surprised if the players come up with the same solutions if you're presenting them the same problem.

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My experience both in custom games and adventure paths is that, especially at low to mid levels, most enemies are some flavor of "beatstick" or "beatstick with an unusual offensive ability," and that most encounters take place in fairly tight environments, if for no other reason than that such environments are convenient for authors and DMs to create and work with. Very few creatures have teleport or burrow (fewer still rock burrowing). Incorporeality and flight are the most common counters, and flight only if the ceilings are tall enough. I won't say my experience is representative of all tables, but I also think that this sort of DM complaint is fairly common.

I think walls should be recognized as an exceptionally powerful form of crowd control, and that the situations in which they are best rob enemies of counterplay they would otherwise have in the face of other CC options, even if that counterplay is just a saving throw to resist. I think that this is mostly a useful lesson from a game design perspective. One of the recurring DM complaints about Spheres is that it creates overpowered characters that trivialize encounters. But usually those complaints aren't that the character's numbers are too high (at least not for Spheres of Power), but that they have an uninteractable and spammable gimmick at low levels, like Dark Sphere users covering the map in deeper darkness that only the party can see through, or putting up walls everywhere with Creation. Yeah, there are things you can and should do as a DM to counter these tactics if they keep coming up, but I also think that most DMs don't go into games expecting to have to deal with players solving all their nails with the giga-hammer Spheres let them build.

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Originally Posted by Logalmier

My experience both in custom games and adventure paths is that, especially at low to mid levels, most enemies are some flavor of "beatstick" or "beatstick with an unusual offensive ability," and that most encounters take place in fairly tight environments, if for no other reason than that such environments are convenient for authors and DMs to create and work with. Very few creatures have teleport or burrow (fewer still rock burrowing). Incorporeality and flight are the most common counters, and flight only if the ceilings are tall enough. I won't say my experience is representative of all tables, but I also think that this sort of DM complaint is fairly common.

I think walls should be recognized as an exceptionally powerful form of crowd control, and that the situations in which they are best rob enemies of counterplay they would otherwise have in the face of other CC options, even if that counterplay is just a saving throw to resist. I think that this is mostly a useful lesson from a game design perspective. One of the recurring DM complaints about Spheres is that it creates overpowered characters that trivialize encounters. But usually those complaints aren't that the character's numbers are too high (at least not for Spheres of Power), but that they have an uninteractable and spammable gimmick at low levels, like Dark Sphere users covering the map in deeper darkness that only the party can see through, or putting up walls everywhere with Creation. Yeah, there are things you can and should do as a DM to counter these tactics if they keep coming up, but I also think that most DMs don't go into games expecting to have to deal with players solving all their nails with the giga-hammer Spheres let them build.

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So once one of those walls is created, NPCs are straight up unable to affect it?

Can't break it, move it, melt it or the like, they have to find a path around it or they're out of the encounter?

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Originally Posted by Unoriginal

So once one of those walls is created, NPCs are straight up unable to affect it?

Can't break it, move it, melt it or the like, they have to find a path around it or they're out of the encounter?

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A level 5 Incanter with Larger Creation, Expanded Materials, and the Wall Master feat can create five 10x10 four inch thick iron walls, or ten 10x10 two inch thick iron walls (120, 60 hp respectively, 10 hardness), as well as other permutations of thickness to size. A Pathfinder troll is dealing 1d8+11 damage at this level. If the NPCs charitably take 5 rounds to break a hole through a wall, then yes, they are effectively out of the encounter for that time, and the wall has probably done its job.

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Originally Posted by Logalmier

A level 5 Incanter with Larger Creation, Expanded Materials, and the Wall Master feat can create five 10x10 four inch thick iron walls, or ten 10x10 two inch thick iron walls (120, 60 hp respectively, 10 hardness), as well as other permutations of thickness to size. A Pathfinder troll is dealing 1d8+11 damage at this level. If the NPCs charitably take 5 rounds to break a hole through a wall, then yes, they are effectively out of the encounter for that time, and the wall has probably done its job.

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Then this ability is quite decisevely overpowered, as it's essentially a save-less, roll-less, long-lasting incapacitating feature with large AOE.

How many times per day would this character be able to create that ammount of walls?

The great aspect of Wall spells is that they require and encourage cleverness and creativity. The more imaginative the player, the more useful the spell.

Wall spells aren't inherently OP. Cleverness, creativity and imagination are inherently OP.

Walls are hecking useful, that's for sure.

In some encounters, they can be OP, but I wouldn't call them UNIVERSALLY overpowered.

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Originally Posted by Unoriginal

Then this ability is quite decisevely overpowered, as it's essentially a save-less, roll-less, long-lasting incapacitating feature with large AOE.

How many times per day would this character be able to create that ammount of walls?

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It would depend on their build and resource expenditure. Minimum 5 times per day. They could do it infinitely if they took the Practiced Creation talent and only maintained the walls through concentration, something that can be done as a move action in Spheres with trivial investment.

I agree with you that this is too strong. A Stinking Cloud of comparable size wouldn't be as problematic (emphasis on as). "Save-less, roll-less, long-lasting incapacitating feature with large AOE" is why I think that walls are generally stronger than other forms of CC, much the same way that deeper darkness spam is stronger than something like Entangle.

Using concentration means you're just trading your actions for the enemy's though, and while Easy Concentration helps, SoP has a lot of other things you'd want to use it on as well.

I think walls can situationally be quite strong, but you need the right conditions.
* If you're spending a PCs worth of actions to block less than a quarter of the enemy forces, that's probably not a good trade-off.
* Conversely if you block *all* the enemies, it's just a delaying tactic.
* If the blocked enemies can escape easily *or* have useful actions to take while blocked, then it's not doing much.

So - given that they're sometimes not applicable or not effective - they wouldn't really be worthwhile if they were only "ok" when they did work.

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Originally Posted by Logalmier

My experience both in custom games and adventure paths is that, especially at low to mid levels, most enemies are some flavor of "beatstick" or "beatstick with an unusual offensive ability," and that most encounters take place in fairly tight environments, if for no other reason than that such environments are convenient for authors and DMs to create and work with. Very few creatures have teleport or burrow (fewer still rock burrowing). Incorporeality and flight are the most common counters, and flight only if the ceilings are tall enough. I won't say my experience is representative of all tables, but I also think that this sort of DM complaint is fairly common.

I think walls should be recognized as an exceptionally powerful form of crowd control, and that the situations in which they are best rob enemies of counterplay they would otherwise have in the face of other CC options, even if that counterplay is just a saving throw to resist. I think that this is mostly a useful lesson from a game design perspective. One of the recurring DM complaints about Spheres is that it creates overpowered characters that trivialize encounters. But usually those complaints aren't that the character's numbers are too high (at least not for Spheres of Power), but that they have an uninteractable and spammable gimmick at low levels, like Dark Sphere users covering the map in deeper darkness that only the party can see through, or putting up walls everywhere with Creation. Yeah, there are things you can and should do as a DM to counter these tactics if they keep coming up, but I also think that most DMs don't go into games expecting to have to deal with players solving all their nails with the giga-hammer Spheres let them build.

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This aligns with my experiences within and without modules. GMs don't always have the passion or time to create custom monsters, and basic creatures in Pathfinder are often just beat sticks. As a result, these abilities are incredibly potent. It should also be said that crowd control - when used on players - can be even more frustrating. The GM has the opportunity to control many enemies, while each player typically has only their character. If they're countered by effective use of CC, that's a whole combat they essentially sit out.

If walls gave enemies a reflex save to move (staggering them if they do), then that'd probably help make things feel a lot more fair. That's just one idea that came to mind while playing this character, that and banning Selective Barrier since there really isn't any sensible fix I can envision for that where it isn't just a completely different ability.

Are walls overpowered? Well, let’s compare them to something rather universally consisted underpowered around here: a Fighter.

Both can be used to block off an area; depending on the terrain and relative size of the two, which are superior in this regard differs, so that’s something of a wash.

Once placed, walls are immobile, whereas the Fighter can reposition themselves. Advantage: Fighter.

Both have HP; the Fighter has an AC that actually has to be attacked. (EDIT: and if we’re talking about optimized wall-building, an optimized meat shield might have more advantages, like immunity to damage). And the Fighter actually hits back. Fighter wins this round.

The wall is expendable; you loose the wall, you’re not really out anything. OTOH, if you lose the Fighter, they tend to drop a lot of loot. Fighter sounds better here, too.

All in all, walls sound suboptimal when compared to the generally acknowledged underpowered muggle meat shields. I can’t imagine that the Playground would seriously consider them OP. :smallamused:

While reading through PHB II, I came across the Earthbound Spell metamagic, which seems like it would be worth discussing in this thread.

Earthbound Spell gives you a chance to put down spells in the ground up to an hour before they fizzle out, but can be triggered by enemies runinng over them. Now, combine this with something like a wall, which we can use to funnel enemies into particular squares, and you have a potent spell combination.

The obvious disadvantage here is that you need to be able to have some control of the location and timing of a battle beforehand to be able to cast an effective Earthbound Spell. However, if you can do that, you can have the effect of a spell (or multiple spells) triggered in combat without having to spend turns casting in combat.

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Originally Posted by Logalmier

It would depend on their build and resource expenditure. Minimum 5 times per day. They could do it infinitely if they took the Practiced Creation talent and only maintained the walls through concentration, something that can be done as a move action in Spheres with trivial investment.

I agree with you that this is too strong. A Stinking Cloud of comparable size wouldn't be as problematic (emphasis on as). "Save-less, roll-less, long-lasting incapacitating feature with large AOE" is why I think that walls are generally stronger than other forms of CC, much the same way that deeper darkness spam is stronger than something like Entangle.

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No, because what you suggested is backed by a feat and 2 class selections and is essentially a core component of their character. A stinking cloud cast by a necropolitan with some mechanism to see through fog or blindsight is probably a STRONGER combo. As in, I see you and can hurt you. You can't see me. And if you try to walk in here to find me you are going to start taking saves or be incapacitated, and also be fighting my undead minions, who are immune to the cloud effects. Or the snowsight blizzard combo, which doesn't even require build resources, unless you are trying to persist snowsight on the party, and is available at lower level iirc.

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Originally Posted by Gnaeus

No, because what you suggested is backed by a feat and 2 class selections and is essentially a core component of their character. A stinking cloud cast by a necropolitan with some mechanism to see through fog or blindsight is probably a STRONGER combo. As in, I see you and can hurt you. You can't see me. And if you try to walk in here to find me you are going to start taking saves or be incapacitated, and also be fighting my undead minions, who are immune to the cloud effects. Or the snowsight blizzard combo, which doesn't even require build resources, unless you are trying to persist snowsight on the party, and is available at lower level iirc.

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I think "how many build resources does it take to produce an effect" is a separate question from "how strong is an effect" (although they're both important when considering overall game balance). Off the top of my head, I can think of three criterion by which CC options can be judged:

Is it resistible?
Does it affect allies?
How many effective actions does it deny?

Walls are generally unresistable and deny many enemy actions, but also affect allies. A wall that trapped enemies but which allies ignored would obviously be stronger, just as concealment for thee but not for me is stronger than just concealment. Selective concealment is probably stronger in many instances than unselective walls.