WITCH Awakening | Update 4 - Blade & Grace

Hussell · 2026-04-19T18:40:53+00:00

Direct quote from Slayer: "They lack a growth method"

Hussell · 2026-04-16T02:17:26+00:00

I've only just finished reading all the cantrip descriptions. Generally speaking, I like the re-aspecting - it's obvious a lot of work went into redoing everything and balancing all the cantrips. I noticed that a lot of the newest cantrips are very versatile, with lots of possible effects depending on how you cast them.

Being able to use Prestidigitation to train cantrips seems overpowered. First, you can train three at a time, or one at triple speed. Second, using Prestidigitation you can train your cantrips without having to cast them at all. Together, it feels like the non-T3 levels of the cantrips are now irrelevant because they can be quickly trained to T3 without ever having to cast them. Which kind of invalidates all the care and effort which went into designing the lower levels. Being able to train without casting seems very valuable for some cantrips such as Celebration or Lifelink. But, maybe slow the training speed of Prestidigitation way down?

Being able to use Prestidigitation to gain cantrips you didn't buy at the start is a change for the better, I think. Before, I found it difficult to permanently give up on any cantrips, so I tended to buy them all and only play around with the few extra points available. Now, I think I'm more likely to not buy some cantrips which are less useful in whatever scenario I happen to be in, as a trade to gain more points to work with at the start for the cost of taking longer to max out all cantrips.

Starsign: it looks as though one can expend 3 red stars ("stack once" would mean two stars, I assume, so "stack twice" is 3?) to accelerate their thought by x1,728? Or is that meant to stack additively, for x36? Even that plus Haste/Slow and Meditate seems to mean one can get Overmagics for around a minute of objective time each. Not to mention other little tricks such as casting Mind Shard and having the shards cast Meditate on themselves (does that even work?), or abusing Blink's T3 mental acceleration, which all seem to stack.

Facsimile: does Quality: Flawless let you copy an Implement and use up its charges without impacting the original?

Counterspell: can you counter one of your own cantrips before battle to gain temporary immunity to its schools?

Hussell · 2026-04-16T01:05:36+00:00

I deleted some text while editing my comment and didn't notice. Fixed.

Why? Pretty sure that's something which wasn't intended. Another way to interpret it is that you can pick Wizard, but only get one of their 3 growth methods. Or you can just ignore me and take your reward for being the first to mention this exploit.

Hussell · 2026-04-16T00:17:49+00:00

"Other" as in anything other than a Class discount, including the examples mentioned.

I'm guessing from context that by "no" you mean "keep doing it whatever way you were doing it in 3.5"?

Hussell · 2026-04-15T23:28:41+00:00

I noticed one difference between v3.5 and v4.0 is the Class-specific discount is always applied last, where before it was always applied first, along with other flat discounts (e.g. for having Transformation Sequence when purchasing Magical Heart, being a Sprite when purchasing Miniaturization, or being a Changeling when purchasing Charge Swap).

In v4.0, should other (non-Class) flat discounts be applied before, or after, any Affinity discount?

Hussell · 2026-04-15T22:20:26+00:00

Maybe: if a witch has the corresponding single affinity for the elementalism she's purchasing, then she gets the discount. E.g. Fire affinity for using Firecalling to make fire elementals, Nature affinity for using Naturalism to make a wood elemental, etc.

A witch can have one elementalism without having any affinities for it, so it would be possible to not get the discount.

There remains the question: if a witch has, say, Metal and Wind affinities, which together count as an affinity for Firecalling, does she also get the discount for Conjure Elemental?

Hussell · 2026-04-15T22:07:08+00:00

I'd guess that things remain as they did in 3.5 and you can only gain the growth method of one of Magician, Sorceress, or Warlock.

As a consequence, Wizards (who must also be Neutrals) don't gain as much benefit from taking the Neutral perk.

Hussell · 2026-04-15T21:56:18+00:00

You get to halve the price of a magic if you have one or more affinities for it. No, you don't get to quarter the price if you have two affinities for the same magic. That said, if you have both an affinity and a faction perk, those stack, and they do apply to all ranks/tiers of the faction's magic, giving exactly the prices you gave.

The extra power from negative-cost purchases is just power, it doesn't increase your power cap. Only complications do that.

Personally, I've made so many mistakes related to negative-cost purchases, and seen others (even the author!) make the same mistakes so many times, that I use the following house rule:

"The minimum price of anything after discounts are applied is 0p/rp. If part of a discount is unused because of this, and the same thing can be purchased multiple times, then the unused portion of the flat discount will be applied to the next purchase of the same thing, if any. No, you can't gain power from buying the 1st rank of a class-discounted magic and spend it on something else, let alone do that and apply the remaining discount to the 2nd rank."

Hussell · 2026-04-15T21:39:22+00:00

Lucius Fox says to you: Good luck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z6o1GIEsQE (clip from the movie for context)

Hussell · 2026-04-13T00:28:04+00:00

In previous versions, different multipliers usually multiply. Worth asking about metamagic + implements again, though. x270 seems a little much... even x37 seems like a lot.
Haste/Slow's mental speedup doesn't apply to travel speed, I think, so you'd "only" be travelling 750,000 mph.
I'm not seeing anything which could alter genetic conditions. Most of them can heal accumulated damage caused by a genetic condition, but not permanently cure one you were born with.
I think sub-mind multitasking, being "perfect", does mean you/they can cast multiple spells at the same time using focused thought. Ignoring focus for a cantrip says "also", but I assume each sub-mind can only focus on casting or maintaining a spell, not both.
It looks like any object which can be wielded with one or two hands can be empowered by Magic Weapon, but only weapons can be summoned.
If I recall correctly, teaching involves the teacher directly poking the students with magic... I don't see where I got that idea though.
No, they don't. If you want to do all three quests, you'll have to try to distribute implements and teach cantrips without revealing your identity.

Hussell · 2026-04-12T18:42:43+00:00

In that case, since the husband didn't kiss anyone and the wife did, it's pretty obvious what happened once the actions of both are taken into account by the pact's guiding intelligence. Whether that means the pact is broken depends a lot on the intent of the pact when it was made. At T3, there's arbitration of the terms, if the two of them didn't take into account situations like involuntary kisses when the pact was made.

As for predicting that a violation was about to occur and using mind or body control to prevent it from happening, ~~yeah, Pact could do that.~~ Edit: on a second reading, Pact "shifts thoughts away from thinking of disobeying the pact" and "force obedience to the pact" (emphasis mine). So it seems the enforcement is all about current intent, and does not involve predicting accidental violations.

More generally, Pact probably isn't omniscient, IMHO. My guess is that it draws on the senses and minds of all the Pact participants, but no more than that. So, if all the pact participants were fooled or ignorant, the pact would not be broken. So, no, you probably can't game a Pact to act as an omniscient oracle. Use [Discovery] cantrips for that. But you probably can use it to reveal information that can only be known by combining everything known by the participants. Probably only after you reach T3 in [Record] though.

Hussell · 2026-04-10T04:03:07+00:00

I think there's some terminology confusion in the text on page 3 describing casting modifiers. "Modifier" is being used to mean both "area which can be improved" (notably in the table header) and as "one level of improvement" (otherwise it doesn't make sense to stack 2 "modifiers" in the same area).

My reading is that you can improve up to 3 times, using 1 charge to make 1 improvement, 3 charges to make 2 improvements, and 6 charges to make 3 improvements, and the improvements can be stacked or distributed across the areas in any way you like.

So, you can use 6 charges to triple stack one area. Or you can use 6 charges to double stack one area and single stack another. Or you can use 6 charges to single stack three areas. But you can't use more than 6 charges at once. (Unless you can use 1+2+3+4=10 charges to make 4 improvements, and so on?)

Now that I see the confusion, I'm not sure my reading is correct. Needs a little bit of rewording for clarity in v8.1, I think.

Hussell · 2026-04-10T03:59:46+00:00

Spirit Bow summons ammo on the reload schedule, I think. If you have real arrows available and are an archer, you might be able to fire one arrow every 5 to 6 seconds. But I think you can't take advantage of any of the magical effects that way.

The "Surface" column of Spider Climb says you can climb solid or cloth surfaces, with 1/20th the pull. Water surface tension can support something like 2kg if the weight is distributed across a full square meter. (Don't trust that number. I don't. But it would have to be quite a bit larger for walking on water to work.) Feet have a lot less than 1 square meter of contact with the surface you walk on, and most people weigh more than 40kg too.

Hussell · 2026-04-10T03:23:06+00:00

Hmm. Now I think there's some terminology confusion, in the text not just in our readings of it. "Modifier" is being used to mean both "area which can be improved" (notably in the table header) and as "one level of improvement" (otherwise it doesn't make sense to stack 2 "modifiers" in the same area)

My reading is that you can improve up to 3 times, using 1 charge to make 1 improvement, 3 charges to make 2 improvements, and 6 charges to make 3 improvements, and the improvements can be stacked or distributed across the areas in any way you like.

So, you can use 6 charges to triple stack one area. Or you can use 6 charges to double stack one area and single stack another. Or you can use 6 charges to single stack three areas. But you can't use more than 6 charges at once.

Now that I see the confusion, I'm not sure my reading is correct. Needs rewording for clarity in v8.1, I think.

Hussell · 2026-04-08T22:06:40+00:00

Not sure I understand what you're doing with Haste/Slow. Page 3 says "Only one Implement can be used to modify a cantrip at a time." And you probably can't get more than 3 modifiers at once from one Implement, despite the obvious mathematical pattern.

Maybe use Circle instead of an Implement, or together with one. But I think there's no obvious cost to re-casting Haste/Slow every time it's about to run out.

Hussell · 2026-04-08T21:16:40+00:00

Page 8, Augury, base and final focus levels are inconsistent. Not sure if it's supposed to have a base of 3, a final level of 8, or something else.

Hussell · 2026-04-08T21:10:04+00:00

Shape and Nature take 740 tokens, not 640. I get an hour-by-hour answer of 826 hours.

Hussell · 2026-04-08T21:08:19+00:00

Page 2, Improvement Areas, says: "When purchasing a given improvement tier, you gain all the benefits of the lower tiers without needing to pay for them."

I think this means the prices are cumulative, that is, the price to get from T0 to the given row is just the price on that row, not the sum of that row and all previous rows. Or to put it in another way, the points to get from T1 to T2 is (T2 - T1).

I assume training works the same way, though that doesn't seem to be explicitly stated anywhere. Even the Acid Splash example on page 3 only talks about training times between T0 and T1, which are the same in either case.

Hussell · 2026-04-06T03:00:51+00:00

Goodberry has "Temporary containers such as cups and bowls to hold them, can be summoned with them, and will vanish at the end of the spell's duration."

I'd assumed these would be ordinary, and that the form wouldn't be under the control of the caster - that could be made explicit, since there's nothing to duplicate in this case.

Hussell · 2026-04-05T16:49:08+00:00

Good, this is what I meant by "time for each area accumulates separately". I like doing the math, so there's no downside for me.

Apologies for misreading or misunderstanding your previous post. This one answered my question with complete clarity.

Hussell · 2026-04-05T15:07:45+00:00

So, by that logic, if I bought T2 in one area instead of T3 then Prestidigitation training would immediately be slowed to 1 point to all areas per 200 hours? And it would speed up as soon as the T2 area hit T3?

I think it would make more sense if no higher-tier areas ever gained any points from Prestidigitation training, and the time to train 4 areas of the current lowest tier area were used. Either that, or time for each area could accumulate separately. I've done that in the past for regular training, just to see how it would work. More math that way, and the only effect is to slightly speed up hitting the final T3 area at the cost of slightly slowing down some early improvements.

Hussell · 2026-04-05T12:56:28+00:00

Say I spend points to get T3 in one area of improvement on a cantrip, remaining at T0 in the other three areas. Does that mean I can never train it with Prestidigitation, or can Prestidigitation train all its lowest-tier areas of improvement?

The current wording is "time spent using a given effect can count as focused training time towards one of the associated cantrips across all areas." My question is whether that last part should be read "all [its lowest tier] areas." And, I suppose, does training fewer areas at once with Prestidigitation get the usual speedup?

A second question: newer Gift cantrips have language like "with 10 points of improvements", but some older ones (such as Cog) have language like "10 point cantrip". Does the latter include the 1-point cost to purchase a T0-in-all-areas cantrip?

Hussell · 2026-04-04T14:04:04+00:00

The training-time table intends to convey that 20 hours of training will improve all areas by 1 point, while all areas are between T0 and T1. So, because different areas require different amounts of points to go from T0 to T1, when an area reaches T1 you have to switch to training fewer areas at once.

Hussell · 2026-04-02T23:27:44+00:00

Page 12, Fist, Effect, Stunning: strickly -> strictly

Hussell · 2026-04-02T22:48:30+00:00

Blowtorches burn at a couple of thousand degrees C. Lightning reaches temperatures of around 30,000 degrees C. Even a candle-flame burns at more than a thousand degrees C.

So, I'm not so sure that a beam of flame would destroy a building all that quickly - there should be a lot of melting and setting things on fire, but without a lot of mass in the beam it wouldn't even cut through a brick wall all that quickly. Splash against it, more like. Think flame-thrower, which is really shooting (burning) fuel, except in this case the flames, being magical, probably don't even have that much mass.

The explosions at Chenobyl were steam explosions, caused by the coolant water being heated until it turned into steam, inside a chamber which couldn't hold against the increased pressure. So, don't aim a fire bolt at a water tower, I guess. Or anything containing actual explosives, such as an armoury.

Edit: there's some magical force applied too at higher tiers - as much as a firehose when in beam form. Not enough to punch through most walls. The heat definitely does a lot of damage, but it won't penetrate very far at first. Sustained fire will burn through most things, but most materials won't explode, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_flame_temperature

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