How would you make blasting worthwhile?

[nedz]

These are things I'd want available via feats--probably not as a blanket modification to all spells of that type.

Agreed — but one feat or five ?

[Just to Browse]

Blasting is fine if you optimize, but evocation spells are what suck. The solution is to make better evocation spells and re-level the ones that are inappropriate.

[Troacctid]

Agreed — but one feat or five ?

Based on existing, comparable feats? Definitely five.

[Theomniadept]

Blasting isn't without viability: Hail Storm does damage in an area and also create difficult terrain, so blasting with added effects is really the cream of the crop. Otherwise, it needs augmentations, like an Explosive Spell Fireball, which adds fome battlefield control to an otherwise mostly 'meh' spell.

As to the points of resistance/immunity, Frost Mage is a PrC that makes your cold spells ignore all resistance and immunity; the feat Searing Spell does the same for fire.

[Waker]

You have a few options. You could overhaul the whole spell system and add rider effects on spells, buffing some and so on. Or you could institute a wound system. Seharvepernfan and Extra Anchovies made one suggestion, another would be to steal a mechanic from the D20 Star Wars. There is a Damage Threshold where if a character takes an excess of this number is penalized on all rolls, having the threshold exceeded multiple times stacks penalties. You determine threshold by taking your Fortitude, adding Armor and any relevant modifiers like feats.

[Jack_Simth]

Stinking Cloud won't help you if you're trying to sink an enemy ship before they sink yours for instance.

Actually, it can - by cutting down how many people on the enemy ship are shooting back (on a failed save for those subject) or making it harder for them to target you (as it blocks vision even if they pass the save) ... which is exactly what it's used for in pretty much any combat.

[Extra Anchovies]

Actually, it can - by cutting down how many people on the enemy ship are shooting back (on a failed save for those subject) or making it harder for them to target you (as it blocks vision even if they pass the save) ... which is exactly what it's used for in pretty much any combat.

But then, you won't be fighting many ship battles when there's no wind, and when there is wind the ships will both be in motion. Effects that you can tie to the enemy ship (such as target: object spells) and instantaneous effects that do their thing once and are gone (like fireball) would be more useful; you'd get two rounds at best out of Stinking Cloud.

[Curbstomp]

A Warmage who enters the Warmage Prestige Class is a very strong blaster. Especially if you utilize an alternate class feature to get a handful of Wizard spells tacked onto your spell list. Human with good feat selection will be quite powerful.

[Curbstomp]

Also if you want to make saving throws not matter so much... look at Tainted Scholar. Your PC can get some really high bonus spell counts and save DC's 35+ in non-specialty schools. I played one epic Tainted Scholar blaster whose base DC was 70 on 0-level evocation spells at 20th level. Of course he was actually min-maxed in (evil) evocation.

[Jack_Simth]

But then, you won't be fighting many ship battles when there's no wind, and when there is wind the ships will both be in motion. Effects that you can tie to the enemy ship (such as target: object spells) and instantaneous effects that do their thing once and are gone (like fireball) would be more useful; you'd get two rounds at best out of Stinking Cloud.

Ah, but the effects last for 1d4+1 rounds after leaving. Even if the fog cloud gets dispersed almost immediately because the natural winds are 22 mph... I'm trading one action from myself for 1d4+1 actions from some number of enemies. That'll usually be worthwhile, especially if I can follow it up with something else.

[Gemini476]

The biggest issue with blasting in 3E is probably just in the amount of damage it does. It was decent enough in prior editions, after all. (But then again, saves used to scale in the opposite direction.)

It used to be that a monster with equal hit dice to you had Xd8+Y hp, where X is the number of hit dice and Y is usually between 0 and 3. Hit Dice were very very roughly equivalent to a challenge rating, although DM adjucation for what was and wasn't an appropriate encounter was pretty important.
In the light of something having only Xd8 hp, doing Xd6 damage with your damaging spells seems pretty good.

Now, however, rather than Xd8 it's XdY+X*Z where Y is the size of the hit die and Z is the monsters constitution modifier. (Which also maxes out at infinity rather than what, +3?) It doesn't scale exactly with CR, but monsters tend to have hit dice in excess of CR rather than less.

Doing Xd6 damage to a target with Xd8+X*3 hit points, for instance, is a lot less appealing. In that specific case you're killing them in an average of three spells, which is a lot more than the one-maybe-two of AD&D/Basic. (And, again, blasting was more useful since opponents got better at saving as they went up in level and damage sticks around to help the Fighter rather than being the all-or-nothing of a save-or-die.)

To make blasting as useful now as it was then, making it do a base (1d6+Int)/level damage rather than just 1d6/level might be a good if overly strong start. Going with secondary stats would probably be smarter, since your Int is probably going to be higher than their Con, but Wizards are pretty SAD as is so it's not all that much of an option.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

1) Use swarms as enemies. Most blasting works on swarms but most debuffs don't.

2) Use undead and constructs as enemies. They got many immunities to debuffs but lower HP than normal.