Staff Nexus questions...
Staff Nexus questions...
So I understand that until you get your first magical staff. you make do with the makeshift one you created.
Questions:
- Do you have to have to expend a spell slot in order to cast cantrips from the makeshift staff? The linked rule says you don’t have to expend any charges, which seems to imply that the staff must have a charge in order to cast any cantrips.
- I assume that once you add the cantrip and 1st-level spell to the staff they can never be changed. The text on page 142 of the APG doesn’t say that you can, but I’m new so don’t know if there’s some other text elsewhere that allows this.
- If true, and considering that these spells can never be changed, I’m thinking of Shield and Mage Armor as my spells. However reading through spells True Strike also seems to be a good option. Although not sure how good that would be for my Illusionist specialist (with Enchantment as other spells I’m focusing on). Thoughts?
Thanks in advance for any guidance you may have!
Cynical's answered the question well, though i'd like to chime in and warn against using Mage Armor as your staff spell. Since it's always going to be level 1, you won't be getting any benefit from it once you've runed up your robes to a basic level of enhancement. Plus, since it's a spell that lasts all day, there's little benefit in putting it in a staff to begin with, as the main benefit of being able to "spam" the spells inside of it would be wasted.
Yikes! I think I'd forgotten that the heightened version of the spell is the spell slot, not caster level like cantrips. Thank you.
For the question about cantrips, nope! The extra cantrip is yours to cast freely, with or without charges remaining on the staff.
For the note on changing spells I don't think you can normally through the feature itself, though you could retrain into the same feature with different selections down the line if needed.
For your last point, since you can technically retrain by taking some of your downtime to basically roleplay as tweaking/re-carving runes on your staff, I don't know if this is as much a worry for you. You can get good mileage out of things like magic missile as a fallback damage spell, true strike is a also great for trading higher level spell slots that you may not have as much use for at the time for getting your hits to land if you pick up any attack roll spells.
For level 1 spells on the staff that aren't True Strike/Magic Missile, I've always liked: Befuddle, Gust of Wind, Grease, Shockwave, Command, Mud Pit as these mostly stay useful with using those level 1 spell slots and extra charges you can get. Mostly depends on what flavor you're going for and potentially what staff you want to craft, or are able to get to upgrade your makeshift staff into.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll check them out.
Wow! Befuddle seems really powerful if it lands, even more so the larger their failure gap.
However this brings up a question: From the spell, "The target is clumsy 1 and stupefied 1." Since those two linked conditions don't give a duration, nor state that each round the condition is deprecated by 1, how long do they last? It would seem "until cured by a spell" since even the resting rules don't state that they reduce those conditions. Is that true!?
Befuddle has a Duration listed on the spell of 1 round! So next turn, when your turn starts, it would go away.
If a spell’s duration is given in rounds, the number of rounds remaining decreases by 1 at the start of each of the spellcaster’s turns, ending when the duration reaches 0.
I'm not incredibly experienced, but for the first question, AoN cites Core Rulebook pg. 592 as:
If a staff contains a cantrip, you can cast that cantrip using the staff without expending any charges. The cantrip’s level is heightened to the same level as cantrips you cast. So I don't believe a cantrip requires charges to cast, even from a Staff Nexus staff.
And I'm also not seeing any contrary guidance on the unchangeability of the Staff Nexus spells, which quite frankly is a little odd to me, given the rest of the system's more flexible approach.