Tome of Radiance: Mastering the Power of Love and Justice

[Qwertystop]

So just yesterday I was asking some others about the resplendent device effect and the implement type of device, and I of course found out that they are used to temporarily expand your mote pool. The implement effectively allows you to have more motes in your costume/device, while the resplendent device effect allows you, for a single turn, have more motes for your illuminations (store one, and then use the same motes for the stored one as another).

What I'm curious about is under what circumstances would someone choose one of those options rather than another (a different kind of device in the case of the implement). The implement, of course, could theoretically be useful if you wanted to have more motes in say, nimble and weightless, but what about the resplendent effect? The fact that it takes a full round action to invest in it means that it likely is only a single use per encounter thing. I mean, why bother wasting a turn to invest in it when you could instead just go ahead and use the illumination? Am I missing something here? Am I perhaps just inexperienced when it comes to tactics and theoretical situations? Or do you guys think that the effect ought to be stronger?

Like I said in explaining it, Resplendent, set up ahead of time, basically has a cost of dropping your mote pool until you activate it, for a benefit of having your mote pool back afterwards.

Let's say you set up a max-power Might (Charisma) Pulses Surge (assuming for these purposes that that adds up to half your mote pool, for easier math). You set this up ahead of combat, so the action cost is meaningless.

First round of combat, you have half your mote pool available. You do something that has no mote requirement - doublemove to a better tactical position, say, with your Swift spent on a Courage + Awakening + Echoes in case someone tries to attack you.

Second round, you use your Swift action to release the Might (Charisma) + Pulses that you had in your Resplendent, giving all your allies a Charisma boost. Using that normally would leave you with half of your mote pool left, but you'd still have both a Move and a Standard left. However, since you released this from a Resplendent Device, you still have all your motes. So you use half of them on a Carnage + Ramparts to wall off your enemies and keep you healthy, and the other half on a Tremors + Explosion to hit them into the wall and, if you lined up the wall as well as you should have, do 2d6 per mote.

If you didn't have the Resplendent, you would have to choose to give up either the Charisma boost that makes the saves harder, the wall that lets you boost your damage like that and keep the enemies in place, or the blast that does the actual damage. Or just put less motes into each and have an overall weaker effect - less damage, less range, less save-boosting, and a smaller amount of wall to work with.

I spent a while looking at the Resplendant effect and I can say I think you are misinterpreting just how it works, its not a major problem though. When you invest motes into the Resplendant effect to store the illumination you do not actually expend the illumination from what I can tell, it stays on your list of readied illuminations rather than counting as being used. You have to waste a round readying it but it allows you to use an illumination during the encounter without expending it and making it unavailable for later.

Hope that helps and I wasn't greviously mistaken

Actually, illuminations aren't expended when used. The readied ones, you can use as much as you like within the limits of action economy and your mote pool.