A Balewind Vortex is a terrifying sight on the battlefield, a swirling, violently swaying cyclone of fell energies that can be summoned by a wizard to use as a platform for more effective spell casting. It is intended to boost the distance between the Balewind Vortex and the Purple Sun’s setup. Summoning the Balewind Vortex does not count towards a wizard’s casting restrictions for the turn, and every Wizard knows the summon Vortex Spell and can dismiss it for free.
The summoner with Familiars is treated as a model, meaning they can go on the vortex without being affected by melee. Lord Kroak, while on the throne, summoning the Balewind Vortex allows him to cast celestial deliverance at 3D6x2″ (+8″ with the Astrolith). It gives enough substantial buffs for its cost.
A Wizard on a Balewind Vortex can attempt to cast an additional spell in each of their hero phases (including the turn in which the Summon is cast). The Balewind Vortex can be cast by a wizard with 10 or less to add +1 to casting, +1 to saves, and an additional 6″ range to spells.
The feat increases spell DCs, not caster levels or anything else. Summon Monster does not have a saving throw. The Balewind Vortex can be summoned with a spell with a casting value of 5 and a range of 3, but it does not increase spell DCs or caster levels.
📹 9 Underrated Spells that are Actually Overpowered in Baldur’s Gate 3
First up is Witch Bolt. Witch bolt is a level 1 evocation spell that deals 1d12 lightning damage. What makes this spell underrated is …
📹 Sorcery Buffs/Nerfs! Reviewing The Spell Changes. Patch 1.13 Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
PVE ONLY. Ranking the 7 DLC sorceries that got changed. DLC VIDEOS- …
Witch bolt is decent single target spell for a single cast, but is a concentration spell. You can’t haste it, you can’t upcast it for free, it will never have the output of a good AOE. It does have its purpose for times when you don’t want to injure a close by friend or random civilian ext. But when your in a room full of enemies and nothing is in your way, you can clear everything in 1 turn with chain lightning.
I will admit if you can combo off someone and hit a wet target, dealing 144 lightning damage could end some fights pretty quickly, especially if you twin cast as a sorcerer. Not to mention that it could benefit from all the crit reduction effects and just crit on like a 17 easily enough. Rest of the spells I have never really slept on, but good list, glyph of warding I didn’t realize had a sleep version that was just dex save or sleep, that’s amazing.
Glyph of warding also has some properties that are interesting. Since it only triggers once ENEMIES are on top of it (not neutral characters with a yellow outline) you can start a fight with create water + lightning/ice glyph on top of them before the fight starts. Then you start the fight with a attack, and the glyph will immediatly pop into them doing double damage, and u’ll still have your action that started the fight (that could be any other spell or attack)
Surprised Darkness didn’t make the list. Very nearly an “I win” button. The AI doesn’t really know what to do if all your team is inside of it, so it just dashes and sits at the edge. While your team can step out and take pop shots, or some things like the Imp and Spirit Weapon are immune. Then theres devil’s sight and such, but since the AI just stands there you can use spells like cloudkill or spirit guardians to do free damage each turn. Another good spell particularly later on is Slow, it reduces enemies to 1 attack and many enemies have terrible Wisdom saves and can affect a lot when upcasted. Also many of your undead are immune to poison, so you can send them in to fight things in cloudkill and the like.
Despit this article making witch bolt seem good. it’s probably the worst spell ever. at level 3 you get 3d12. lightning bolt does 8d6. it’s not even more than chain lightning at level 6 either. chain lightning does 10d8 to a potential of 4 targets while witchbolt does 6d12 to one guy and breaks concentration. don’t spread misinformation just because it’s a lightning spell and can do crazy damage to wet targets.
Glinstone nail can be very useful even in post endgame/NG+ for the right type of build. I run an absolute glass cannon INT/FAITH character that doesn’t equip any real weapon and occasionally runs with seriously negative defenses. When you one-shot almost everything and almost everything one-shots you, having an extremely cheap, good tracking, decent range spell is pretty great for overworld exploration and the like. I tend to run Nail and Discus as general plinkers for killing random things from as far away as possible. It disappears immediately when I know I’m going to fight a boss, but it works well for what it seems intended to do. That being said, I do wish that it (and many other things in the DLC, honestly) were available far earlier in the game. I know that it’s not how FS does DLCs, but it would have been nice to see some of the content intermixed with the base game, considering that ER is a long open-world game. There’s a lot of very fun builds made possible by DLC items that you either can’t do until NG+ or need to use a friend to mule items to a new character. I just started a new game with a naked blue dancer charm Dryleaf Arts/Footwork character and am absolutely loving it. It’s just unfortunate that FS seems to think that you shouldn’t be able to do that by default.
Ok going to explain impenetrable thorns so you know what your problem is or why you get some weird results with it sometimes. The spells code spawns three invisible bullets ABOVE the players head about 2 meters up. The bullets fly forward to a target and drops smaller bullets to the ground. This is where the thorns animation and damage come from and at the end the starting bullets drop and thats where the bigger thorns and damage come from so the spell isn’t actually traveling along the ground like you see. Now to explain why big enemies and elevations cause problems. For the big enemies that invisible spell bullet I was talking about thats above your head? Ya that is hitting the enemy and dropping to the ground where the damage actually takes place and if the bullet hit box on the ground doesn’t hit the enemy it does nothing (stopping short). That’s why the spell just stops in front of some enemies. As for going past them that’s the code being weird and passing through the enemy. I’m sure you have seen plenty of spells do it. Now for elevation! The spell bullets are not allowed to trigger if they are to high or low from both the starting X, Z axis (horizontal plane) or previous bullet. This keeps the spell from breaking animation and giving you advantages by doing it in weird places. Example if standing on a ledge above another player is farum azula and attacking them with thorns that spawn out of seemingly nowhere. Fallingstar Beast jaws weapons skill can do this
Does Glintstone Nails’ compete with rock sling in terms of poise damage? I feel like Glintstone Nails could carve out a nice niche for itself by being a magic damage version of Rock Sling for poise damage. Though it probably won’t be able to compete with Rock Sling’s range which is stupidly long with the arrow’s reach talisman. However, iirc correctly only the Loretta spells can reach further than Rock Sling’s max range. That max range is literally only a couple steps short of max lock on range, so unless you’re good with free aiming theirs not much use to that extra range Loretta’s spells have.
Vortex is mainly for pvp imo. I do use it sometimes in pve but its best for seperating or punishing gank squads in invasions. Or if people are bad with spacing in duels. The aoe size is insane and damage is really good on it though so dont sleep on it for pve either. Ive been using a lot of the new spells tbh. Only old ones i use is adulas moonblade and the moonspells
The benefit to the Finger Sorcery builds I think is going to be if you’re running the Impenetrable Thorns spell too with 80 Int AND Arcane to maximize the scaling damage buff alongside the Bleed buildup buff from the Arcane scaling. In my tests, it just flat out gives the same damage buff to spells as Lusat’s staff at 80 Int without the higher FP cost, and it’ll boost the finger sorceries as generic spells to sling out while also having higher bleed buildup with ImpThorns.
Vortex of Putrescence is very good in PVP. So many people can not handle this spell while also fighting you and they’ll just tank the damage which will usually allow you to land a good combo on them securing the kill and pacifying nearby chronies with damage as well. It works super well against shielded PVP players also. The other Putrescence spell is also surprisingly good at PVP. Also I played with some thorns and at Point blank the spell seems to just project out as if the enemy were like 30 ft away. Kept happening to me this morning wasn’t fun. I said it last night and I’ll say it now. They did special nerfs once that only affected PVP and I wish that’s the same treatment thorns would’ve gotten.
Honestly, its cool they made all the thorns track, but you hit the nail right on the head with it being inconsistent with bosses. With Radahn, it literally will go off right in front of him, or more annoyingly, right behind him. I’d rather it be how it was before. Its cool I can cast it from far away now, but it feels worthless if it doesn’t hit the enemy regardless.
I really like the changes to Impenetrable Thorns because it was too strong. Not sure that I like them tracking now. I kind of liked that it had a pattern it would follow rather than all the bullets trying to hit the same target. I had this invader that was very squirrely and the thorns were able to keep catching them until they cornered themselves and died.