Talk:Mirror Shadow (3.5e Spell)

Posted on the Boards:

This spell was taken from the Wizards Boards with permission, here is the thread related to this spell: [1]

--Green Dragon 13:33, 26 March 2006 (MST)

Alterations

This spell gave six metamagic feats to every spell that the caster cast. The trick was, there was no spell level limit. That's unlimited broken. For sanity's sake, I limited these spells to third spell level. --Dmilewski 18:41, 1 March 2007 (MST)

All that metamagic is still stacking up to +10... so it'll require a level 13 slot for a level 3 spell. There's no way that a single classes wizard could ever hope to gain what this one spell gives through normal feat selection... 5 metamagic feats, x3 melee damage (what, at least three more feats), and effects of a huge mirror image spell? Hello broken. Also, it lasts for 100+ rounds! This is broken even at 3rd level spells.

Look at it this way. Compare meteor swarm and a fireball used after casting this spell, both at 17th level.

• Meteor Swarm does 24d6 damage (somewhere around 85 damage on average) in a 40-ft spread, with a range of 1080 ft.
• Fireball (after casting this spell) will do 60 damage in a 40-ft spread, with a range of 2160 ft. (a normal fireball does about 35 damage on average)

So let's look at a not-so-average encounter. Two level 17 wizards try to outdamage each other. They each plan to use up their one level 9 slot, and all of their level 5 slots for fireballs.

• Wizard 1 casts Mirror Shadow followed by five fireballs.
  • 60 x 5
  • = 300 damage
• Wizard 2 casts Meteor Swarm followed by five fireballs.
  • 85 +
  • 35 x 5
  • = 260 damage

So that's not so bad, they're actually pretty close. Now let's see what it looks like when they both expend all of their L1 - L3 spells on fireball (dealing average 35/max 60 dmg), scorching ray (dealing average 42/max 73 dmg), and magic missle (dealing average 18/max 25 damage).

• Wizard 1 casts Mirror Shadow followed by five fireballs, scorching rays, and magic missles.
  • 60 x 5 (= 300) +
  • 73 x 5 (= 365) +
  • 25 x 5 (= 125) +
  • = 790 damage
• Wizard 2 casts Meteor Swarm followed by five fireballs, scorching rays, and magic missles.
  • 85 +
  • 35 x 5 (= 175) +
  • 42 x 5 (= 210) +
  • 18 x 5 (= 90) +
  • = 560 damage

So Wizard 1, using Mirror Shadow, is dealing ~250+ damage over Wizard 2. And that's only calculating the first 26 rounds, with no bonus spells. Not to mention that Wizard 1 is misdirecting his opponents (due to the mirror image effect), and he gains x3 to any melee damage rolled. Not that great, but what about running this x3 melee damage through a wizard using Tenser's transformation?

Anyways, just a few thoughts. This spell isn't that great, I think. --Othtim 00:34, 17 February 2008 (MST)

• This spell is not ninth level material, even including ninth-level spell effects. However as we all are well aware, direct damage spells are woefully underpowered. This does alleviate that. However, nobody will actually use this for direct damage spells - they will use them to increase the power of area-effect Save or Dies. As those are usually limited to Eighth Level spells, leaving it up to Sixth or Seventh will not "break" the game.