Illusions, Michael: A Mini-Guide to the Magic Trick Feat

Illusions, Michael: A Mini-Guide to the Magic Trick Feat

Table of Contents

• What’s Magic Trick?
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Daylight
• 🔥 Fireball
• 🥏 Floating Disk
• 🪬 Mage Hand
• Obscuring Mist
• ✨ Prestidigitation
• 🛡 Shield
• 👤 Unseen Servant

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What’s Magic Trick?

One whole bundle of fun, that’s what! No, really! Like its predecessor Equipment Trick, Magic Trick is a subsystem unto itself. The bare bones of both feats are that you take the feat, select which spell or piece of equipment you’re specializing in, and then—if you meet the other prerequisites—you unlock some new functionality for your specialty spell. If your fireball previously detonated in a 20-foot radius, well, now you can contract that radius in order to deal higher damage in a localized area! If your mage hand previously lifted only 5 pounds of material, now it can lift 25 pounds. Although tricks are often only modest quality of life improvements, they can add up over time, and there are some incredibly powerful tricks among the bunch.

GM s, if you want my recommendation, Magic Trick skews toward the underpowered side. I think you’d be well within your rights to allow the Magic Trick feat to grant one new spell specialization per 5 caster levels, and to allow players to sacrifice one of those spell specializations to ignore the prerequisites of one trick. This will keep the feat fun, flavorful, and progressing without forcing players to swallow bad skill feats (lookin’ at you, Deft Hands) or combat/metamagic feats that they aren’t likely to use.

Strengths

• You get new, free abilities! Not every magic trick can be unlocked by doing things that your character would normally be doing, but some can—and who doesn’t love new stuff, even if it’s just for flavor?
• Some of those abilities are gamechangers! Magic tricks have the potential to radically change how spells are used. Mage hand isn’t a fantastic spell in high-level play, for example, but what if it were able to disable traps from 150 feet away? Isn’t that worth investigating? Or what if you could ride your floating disk like a magic carpet over a pit of lava? All these things are possible with the feat!
• Magic Trick utilizes common, low-level spells to great effect. Nearly all spellcasters—but especially psychic and arcane spellcasters—have access to the spells that Magic Trick governs, and most are cantrips or 1st-level spells. Magic Trick is therefore broadly useful to many types of Pathfinder PCs at little cost, and can make for flavorful encounters if given to NPCs or enemies.

Weaknesses

• Some of the prerequisites are bad. Unless you’re playing a cleric, skill ranks are easy enough for most classes to invest, but feats are a different story—and Magic Trick really likes asking you to invest in feats you may not want or need. Widen Spell, Deceitful, Shield Focus on full casters…the gang’s all here!
• Again, GMs, I’d recommend you grant some leniency around the more onerous prereqs. No one’s watching 1e anymore. You can be merciful.
• Not all of the tricks are useful. Sure, some are gamechangers, but some are also real stinkers. The good news is that you’re not required to build toward any particular trick! If you don’t like one, simply don’t invest resources in unlocking it.

Daylight

Vessel of Light

No prerequisites. If there’s any reason to take daylight’s magic trick feat, it’s Vessel of Light. Sure, most classes that get daylight also get brightest light, a 4th-level spell that lasts for hours/level with otherwise identical effects, but why not get that hours/level duration with a 3rd-level spell slot instead? You can use a lesser extend metamagic rod to double that hours/level duration to cover an entire adventuring day relatively early in your career, automatically nullifying darkness spells up to deeper darkness, or you can continue to Heighten daylight so that it beats darkness spells of higher levels while retaining its long duration. Vessel of Light alone makes a great case for this feat, but it really clinches the deal if you can foresee yourself using other daylight tricks.

Blades of Light

Requires 6 ranks in Knowledge (Religion). This one is interesting! Daylight is normally a strict battlefield control spell—it has no functions other than illuminating dark places and countering spells with the darkness descriptor. Using it as a fairly potent melee damage buff against undead and evil outsiders (two of the more common enemy types in higher CR tranches) seems like a perfectly acceptable application of the spell to me. The bonus is untyped—that is, stackable with other bonuses, holy enchantment notwithstanding—and not terribly expensive as a 3rd-level spell, especially if you’re an aasimar and have a racial daylight spell-like ability.

Barrier of Light

Requires Shield Focus. Barrier of Light does two things: first, it doubles the range of daylight, but changes its area of effect to a cone, rather than a circle. Second, it allows you to discharge the effect in order to attempt to blind creatures within the cone. Both of these effects are only dubiously useful. While it can be tempting to use a cone for targeted searches in darkness, combat encounters generally work best when the entire battlefield is illuminated, rather than only a section. The targeted blinding, meanwhile, will likely function quite well in early levels before dropping off steeply in effectiveness in the double digits as monster Fortitude saves rise and your own save DC remains static. Not a great long-term investment, in my view.

Burst of Light

Requires 6 ranks in Spellcraft or worship of a deity with the Sun domain. While it’s certainly nice to have the option of destroying enemies with vulnerabilities to natural sunlight, it likely won’t come up often enough to matter much. Still, Burst of Light is a daylight magic trick that you can almost stumble your way into by accident, so I won’t say no to having it on board.

Convincing Halo

Requires 3 ranks in Knowledge (Religion). Convincing Halo is not one of the more universally applicable magic tricks, I’m sorry to say. Most Pathfinder PC parties will be some shade of good-aligned, so good-aligned outsiders will be naturally inclined to help irrespective of your skill bonuses—which are pretty shrimpy anyway. You’ll gain access by default if you’re building toward Blades of Light, though, so keep that in mind if you do ever run across any good-aligned outsiders that you need to sway to your cause.

Pin Sunlight

Requires Precise Shot. Oof. This one’s rough. First off, why would you want an enemy’s body to be the origin point for your daylight spell? Isn’t the whole point of casting spells that you or your allies get to control where they’re positioned for maximal effect? Do you really want an enemy running off the battlefield, glowing like a maniac and plunging your party into supernatural darkness, when you could have kept the spell effect with you the whole time? And what about if the enemy passes their save? Now, instead of having an automatic counter to that supernatural darkness, you’ve all but wasted a 3rd-level spell slot on some crummy dim light in a puny radius. Nah, nah, nah.

🔥 Fireball

Concentrated Fire + Cluster Bomb

Requires Selective Spell or Widen Spell and 6 ranks in Spellcraft.

Concentrated Fire and Cluster Bomb are okay on their own, but when combined create a truly awful nightmare of fire damage. Some spell combos or builds can achieve low thousands of damage per round; this combo can easily jump into multiple thousands. How does it work? Well, Cluster Bomb alone deals 2d6 damage per 2 caster levels—the same scaling as base fireball—in a 10-foot radius. But Concentrated Fire can tighten that radius to 5 feet to add +1d6 fire damage to each fireball, yielding 3d6 damage per 2 caster levels. A Widened fireball doubles the radius, increasing the Concentrated Fire bonus damage to +3d6 to produce 5d6 damage per 2 caster levels. Add in Empower Spell, Heighten Spell, some caster level bonuses, and a few of the buffs that sorcerers can get for each die rolled, and you’re looking at absolutely monstrous damage in a small radius. Fire resistance penalizes this combo more harshly than base fireball, since damage is subtracted from each mini-fireball. If you’re facing an enemy without, however, they should prepare to burn and burn fast.

Sculpt Flames

Requires Reach Spell and Selective Spell. Sculpt Flames is a lot of fun, essentially allowing you to draw a snake-like path that your fireball is going to travel along to deal damage once it explodes. The trick has two purposes: first, to hit enemies more effectively when they’re hiding behind cover, far from their allies, etc., and second, to avoid hitting allies. While you could theoretically avoid hitting allies using Selective Spell, that does raise the spell level by +1, and it doesn’t do a better job than Sculpt Flames anyway. As for hitting difficult-to-reach enemies, Sculpt Flames sets a new bar for blasting flexibility—it feels a lot like the kineticist’s Snake form infusion, and that’s a great ability to have when you need to bend your blasts like Beckham. Getting one line to travel through multiple enemies should be pretty easy in the end, especially once you’re getting 12+ contiguous squares of fireball.

Alchemist’s Inferno

Requires 9 ranks in Craft (Alchemy) and Spellcraft. Alchemist’s Inferno is, unfortunately, a real stinker. If only the damage weren’t halved, it would get a pretty good rating—20 gp in exchange for lighting enemies on fire is a decent trade at 9th level. When you deal only half damage with the initial fireball and receive no scaling immolation damage, however, it quickly becomes apparent that this trick has no real niche, even for evocation specialists.

Where There’s Smoke

Requires 6 ranks in Craft (Alchemy) and Spellcraft. Half damage again—instant red. If you want smoke, use pyrotechnics + ashen path, not a smokestick.

🥏 Floating Disk

Disk Rider

Requires 3 ranks in Fly. Even though your disk has to remain relatively earthbound at this point, low-altitude flight still has a number of advantages over walking, notably avoiding difficult terrain and other ground-based battlefield control effects like burning sands or spike stones. Floating disks can absolutely travel over liquids, too, so you’ve got the equivalent of an hours/level water walk packaged in here! Spurn Gravity, one of the later upgrades, will unlock even more of your disk’s airborne potential.

Drifting Defense

Requires Mobility, shield proficiency, and 6 ranks in Fly. Sure, it wouldn’t be any fun to buy into Mobility as a caster, but what a trade-off! Casters are well-incentivized to stay on the move in battle, since getting pinned down often means death; doing so now with Defensive Disk activated means that you automatically receive a +4 shield bonus to AC anytime you take a move action to travel 10 feet or more. This combo ensures that your shield lasts hours/level instead of the base spell’s minutes/level—a huge upgrade.

Spurn Gravity

Requires 6 ranks in Fly. Awww, yiss. With minimal investment, your floating disk becomes a magic carpet! You have to return to the ground by the end of your turn unless you’re on the Astral Plane, but that’s not much of a limitation when you’re using Spurn Gravity to parkour over walls, traverse pits or chasms, and reach ledges. The option to convert floating disk from an hours/level spell to a rounds/level spell is also incredibly useful—you’re essentially getting a 1st-level fly spell at that point, and I’d rather spend multiple 1st-level spells than one 3rd-level spell any day of the week!

Defensive Disk

Requires shield proficiency and 3 ranks in Fly. Defensive Disk is a really good magic trick, but the question of who could use it effectively is difficult to parse. Full arcane casters will have the most spell slots to devote to floating disk, as well as the lowest AC values, so they’re likely to want the effects of shield most often, but the occultist is the only class that receives both shield proficiency and floating disk on their spell list. If you’re willing to burn a feat on shield proficiency, Defensive Disk (and especially Defensive Disk paired with Drifting Defense) do wonderful things, permitting you to maintain the equivalent of the shield spell for hours/level.

Expanded Disk

Requires Heighten Spell and 3 ranks in Fly. Pathfinder PCs won’t often remain Large-sized for long (barring things like permanency + enlarge person) making Expanded Disk more of an NPC/enemy ability. If you want to increase your size category regularly, it might be worth considering, but most casters are looking to get smaller, not larger.

Force Check

Requires Catch Off-Guard or Improved Bull Rush and 3 ranks in Fly. Nah, nah, nah. The floating disk tricks will appeal primarily to casters, and they shouldn’t be attempting CMB checks of any kind under any circumstance.

🪬 Mage Hand

Reaching Hand

Requires Precise Shot or Reach Spell. Another spice meatball for your consideration.

Mmmm. Under the tender influence of Reaching Hand, mage hand reaches a maximum range of 150 feet at CL 20, which (when combined with Powerful Hand and Subtle Hand) can allow you to make some truly interesting adventuring choices. Unlocking a door or disabling a trap? Why not do it from 100 feet away, just in case you fail the check? Cautious about a new room? Roll a 20-pound rock into the room to generate some noise and draw enemies out! Lots of applications for the creative, and the swift action cost shouldn’t be difficult to pay outside of combat. Congratulations: you’re officially approaching aetherkineticist levels of telekinetic manipulation.

Subtle Hand

Requires Deft Hands and 6 ranks in Disable Device and Sleight of Hand. Arcane tricksters and eldritch scoundrel rogues are undoubtedly the intended audience here. Disabling traps, opening doors, and picking pockets from a distance is the ultimate pipedream for sneaky caster types. The Deft Hands requirement is unfortunate, but it does at least improve checks that rogues might already be making on a regular basis.

Powerful Hand

Requires 3 ranks in Spellcraft. More powerful telekinesis, ho! An 18th-level caster would be able to pick up 35-pound objects, which is a quite the upgrade to mage hand’s base 5-pound limit. You do run up against mage hand’s weight limits quite often when using this cantrip, so I won’t object to this trick in the slightest.

Dirty Magic Trick

Requires Improved Dirty Trick and BAB +1. Combat maneuver builds are obviously not the normal purview of ¾-BAB classes, but rogues with the underhanded trick rogue talent and the Surprise Maneuver feat can become surprisingly adept at pulling people’s pants down, throwing pocket sand in their eyes, etc. from range instead of from melee. The only downside is that Dirty Magic Trick can’t be reduced to less than a standard action. Still, if you’re a dirty trick specialist, you want this feat. Kitsune Tricks, Fox Trickery, Superior Dirty Trick, and Dirty Trick Master are excellent adjuncts to the playstyle.

Ranged Aid

Requires BAB +1. Aid another builds are perhaps even rarer than combat maneuver build—see this guide for more info on how to build one. Assuming you do, however, one of the major limitations of aid another builds is that you need to remain right next to people in order to aid them. No longer! Mage hand’s magic trick should be all but mandatory for those going this route—much like with Dirty Magic Trick, adding 30 feet or more of range to an ability that is normally melee-exclusive does huge things for the playstyle.

Throw Punch

Requires Improved Unarmed Strike. Since Throw Punch is explicitly a melee attack made at range (potentially a lot of range, if you have Reaching Hand) it could be used quite effectively by stalker vigilantes, rogues, slayers, and other dedicated sneak attackers who want options for hitting vital areas with their force palm. And because sneak attack deals damage of the same type as the attack, it seems likely that you could sneak attack with force damage! That would be a great pick-up; force damage bypasses DR and hardness.

Obscuring Mist

Obscure Self

Requires 6 ranks in Stealth. Even though enemies will be able to infer where you are within your portable cloud of mist pretty easily, they won’t be able to see you to target you; Obscure Self therefore acts more or less as a 1st-level displacement spell against ranged enemies, or as a 1st-level blur spell against melee enemies.

Best of all, the miss chances you get can’t even be beaten by true seeing! Obscure Self’s rating is obviously predicated on you having some means of seeing through your own fog—ashen path, a goz mask, fog-cutting lenses, etc. will all work—but if you’re going down this road, you may as well just buy a saltspray ring to enjoy a larger mist radius, the ability to make Stealth checks, and no limit on daily uses. Saltspray rings are low-key one of the best cheap items I know of in Pathfinder.

Clinging Mist

Requires Extend Spell and 6 ranks in Spellcraft. Obscuring mist becomes a much more useful spell when enemies continue to take a 20% miss chance even after they leave your area of mist, but the double-edged sword implicit in the rules text here is that all creatures take that miss chance, including you and your allies. Since obscuring mist is placed in a burst around the caster, this clause makes Clinging Mist a little tricky to use effectively, but it’s fantastic if you get caught alone and just need to lay down some cover while you escape. If you have ashen path or other anti-fog tactics available, Clinging Mist is literally nothing but upside.

Hydrating Mist

Requires 3 ranks in Survival. Hydrating Mist’s hydrating effects are minimally useful—how often do you need to save against environmental heat effects?—but the no-save -4 penalty against electricity damage and effects is another thing entirely. If you have an aerokineticist with Lightning Blast, an electricity-focused evocation wizard or sorcerer, etc. on your team, you may just have become their greatest friend in the world. It’s not clear to me by RAW whether Clinging Mist stacks with Hydrating Mist, but if so, the Clinging + Hydrating combo probably rises to blue status.

Mist Screen

Requires Heighten Spell. Walls are universally useful in Pathfinder, and I defy you to find another example available as a 1st-level spell. I wouldn’t say there are a multitude of circumstances in which a wall of obscuring mist will beat the spell’s normal area hands-down, but having options is always lovely.

Obscure Terrain

Requires Selective Spell. Another fun magic trick! Turning your obscuring mist into difficult terrain rather than concealment could certainly have its uses, although as with all obscuring mist tricks, you need to remember that you begin at the center of your own mist cloud. Could be interesting to foul up charge lanes, at the very least. The clause about ignoring the difficult terrain with a move action is interesting; casters will probably end up doing a move to ignore, a 5-foot step, and a standard to cast a spell, as they normally would, but martials are locked out of full-attacks if they choose to do that—for them, it’s a “rock vs. hard place” tradeoff between following 5-foot steps and making the most of their offenses.

Quenching Mist

Requires 6 ranks in Spellcraft or water subtype. Huh. Quenching Mist feels (appropriately enough) like a scaled-down version of quench, a fun 3rd-level druid spell. I’d primarily use quench for dispelling magical fire effects like walls of fire or incendiary clouds, but Quenching Mist has an unfortunate limitation in that it affects only Medium-sized or smaller magical fires. So…flaming sphere? Heat metal? What can you really do with that size restriction? It’s not totally useless, especially since you’d typically pick it up for free with most casting classes, but I know its uses, and they are few.

✨ Prestidigitation

Lasting Changes

Requires Extend Spell. Lasting Changes is unquestionably the best magic trick for prestidigitation, but that’s not saying much, since this spell’s tricks are pretty weak. I guess you can now preserve food or create culinary taste-scapes much more easily?

Chromatic Savant

Requires 3 ranks in Disguise or gnome race. Chromatic Savant is plenty of fun for disguises, tattoos, and the high fashion business, but its one real use in an adventuring party is as a magical spray-paint can. Want to mark the right direction in a maze? Prestidigitate some color onto the wall. Want to warn people away from your property? Prestidigitate some dire, colorful warnings onto your house.

Repulsive Flavor

Requires 3 ranks in Craft (Cooking). Bogus skill prereqs notwithstanding, Repulsive Flavor is a decent magic trick, essentially giving your entire party a +2 AC and CMD bonus against bite attacks for an hour at a time. With Lasting Changes, that’s a nifty little pickup.

Thaumaturgic Aesthetics

Requires Deceitful and 3 ranks in Bluff and Disguise. Can we all agree just to stop assigning bad skill feats as prerequisites for things? Does anyone ever take Deft Hands? If you can take a hard swallow and get past that, Thaumaturgic Aesthetics has enough panache to stop a bus full of Errol Flynns in its tracks, but doesn’t serve much of a mechanical purpose unless enemy spellcasters or magehunters are regularly trying to identify spells that you cast.

Adjust Scent

Requires 6 ranks in Survival. Even though Lasting Changes + Adjust Scent can give you the equivalent of a janky negate aroma, I’m almost positive that it’s not worth it. Most enemies that can pinpoint your location with scent would be able to do so through other means, as well, such as tremorsense, blindsight, or true seeing.

Minor Levitation

Requires 3 ranks in Spellcraft. Levitate is already a very poor spell. Know what’s even poorer? Levitating one pound of material. Yeah, no thanks.

🛡 Shield

Instant Cover

Requires 6 ranks in Spellcraft. Instant Cover is a lot of fun! Think of it like the shield spells that Dr. Strange uses in all of his MCU movies. It’s an immediate action, so you can pull it up to soak a huge hit (or a few hits, if it survives the first attack) before it fades. For high-level full casters who have 1st-level spells to burn, Instant Cover does amazing work as one more layer of defense to add to mirror image, blur, displacement, stoneskin, etc. Heck, you can even use it to soak a disintegrate if you need!

Reflective Shield

Requires 9 ranks in Spellcraft. If you’re a full caster in this trick for Instant Cover, you’re likely to unlock Reflective Shield almost by accident, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not still fun. I dunno, most high-level spellcasting enemies will be able to identify that you’ve cast shield and understand intuitively that magic missiles won’t work on you…but if your GM isn’t super familiar with those rules? It’s a fun “I know you are, but what am I?” power to pull out for a laugh.

Friendly Shield

Requires Bodyguard. Woof. I mean, I don’t think the design intent here is bad, but Bodyguard is one of those feats that’s typically relegated to very specialized builds that have beefed up their aid another bonuses. If you’ve built for Bodyguard, though, chances are that you want your AC bonus granted through aid another to be quite a bit higher than just the +4 that Friendly Shield will grant. I’d say there’s a niche here, but just barely.

Force Bash

Requires Improved Bull Rush and Improved Shield Bash. Force Bash is a non-spell ranged attack that deals force damage, so about the only use that I could foresee is for classes with sneak attack dice. Why? Well, when you deal damage for a sneak attack, the sneak attack dice inherit the damage typing of the triggering attack. (Deadly Aim would also apply, for those interested.) What that all adds up to is massive force damage, effectively bypassing a huge portion of bizarre enemy defenses. Incorporeal? Doesn’t matter, they just got sneak attacked for full damage. DR 50/—? Doesn’t matter, they just got sneak attacked for full damage.

Force Equipment

Requires Equipment Trick (Shield). I’m fond of Hurl Shield, Little Wall, and Ricochet Shield, but why would you not have simply built for a normal thrown shield PC? Nothing here specifies a damage type or damage die size, so I’m inclined to think that you revert to the improvised weapon rules, which would probably enforce bludgeoning damage and a die size of 1d6 or so.

👤 Unseen Servant

Phantom Decoy

Requires 6 ranks in Disguise. An unseen servant wearing armor is going to be criminally easy to hit, but that’s not really the point: the point is the hardness of the armor! Something like living steel has hardness 15 (hardness 30 with reinforce armaments!) and heals some HP every day, plus whatever you can muster through mending or make whole. Add spy eyes to your walking sets of armor, slap on Unfettered Servant, and you’ve now got semi-autonomous, semi-tanky arcane eyes wandering around, relaying information back to your group. Just, uh…don’t expect it to be stealthy.

Unfettered Servant

Requires Reach Spell. Unfettered Servant is among the better magic tricks for this spell, mostly because increasing any spell’s range from close to long is…enormous. Even at 1st level, you’re gaining, what, about a 1700% increase in range? In addition to classical trapfinding, Unfettered Servant is a great way to flush out enemy ambushes long before you ever get close to where the ambush is being staged. At the very least, it’s nice to be able to tell it to stay far back from combats to ensure that it doesn’t get ganked by stray fireballs.

Unseen Apprentice

Requires Combat Casting and 3 ranks in Spellcraft. Given that most full casters selecting the Magic Trick feat will also have Combat Casting and Spellcraft ranks, Unseen Apprentice is one of those tricks you might unlock purely by accident. And it’s…fine. It’s just fine. A +1 or +2 bonus to concentration checks is about on par with a trait, and you still run the risk of the unseen servant getting randomly blasted apart by AoE damage.

Unseen Assistant

Requires 3 ranks in Profession, Perform, or Craft. Before you get too excited about Unseen Assistant, Spellcraft isn’t part of the purview of the trick, so having your servant help out with wondrous item creation is verboten. (Cooperative Crafting is also off-limits, since I don’t know of any effect that can grant that feat to an unseen servant.) While these skills aren’t typically a huge part of what Pathfinder PCs do, but if you summon enough servants—there’s not technically a limit on how many you can summon, other than spell slots—you can muster an army to put on performances, run shops, collect herbs, construct buildings, churn out horseshoes, or do anything else you might need done with Profession, Perform, or Craft. Could be cool!

Unseen Warrior

Requires BAB +3. Without any means of improving the numerical bonuses (whether through rings of tactical precision, benevolent armor, the Helpful trait, etc.) it can’t quite attain the upper blue echelons, but it’s still a solid power for granting a +2 AC bonus 1/round against melee aggressors, especially if you have multiple servants summoned concurrently. Simply convert all your servants into warriors, then have them cluster around you and buff your AC or attack as needed.

Unseen Squire

Requires armor proficiency. The unfortunate reality of the armor donning rules in Pathfinder is that if you’re not sleeping in your armor (whether through the restful or comfort enchantments, the bed of iron spell, wearing light armor that doesn’t cause the fatigued condition, etc.) you’re going to get screwed by sudden encounters regardless of how quickly you can don your armor. Even for light armor with the aid of your invisible squire, 5 rounds is still an eternity to wait in an active combat.