Casting on the Fly: Guide to Metamagic Feats

By Darkgolem

Metamagic Feats are the most useful Feats for a spell caster in Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach (DDO). Consider this; Metamagic Feats can (among other things):

• Effectively increase your spell points by ½.
• Allow you to affect opponents without letting them even attack or see you.
• Allow you to cause up to 1275 points of damage in 34 seconds, before counting any Enhancements.

These Feats can make you much, much more effective when used prudently and in the right circumstances.

Types of Metamagic Feats and Their Benefits

The following are the Metamagic Feats available in DDO, and how best to use them:

Empower Healing Spell Cure spells heal ½ more damage but cost ½ additional to normal spell points costs. This additional healing also applies to this spell when used to damage undead. This is a very useful Feat. In effect, you can reduce your recharge times on your cleric spells by ½ because each use of the spell gives more heal for the casting. Remember that if you are healing more than a person's maximum hit points, you are wasting spell points. This means when using this Feat, use lower level spells so that you are not overhealing. Often a wand used to “top off” hit points can be effective in a combat situation, while using Empowered Healing for healing a lot all at once.

Empower Spell and Maximize Spell Empower Spell causes ½ more damage but costs twice as many spell points than normal. Useful, but mainly meant for situations when an opponent heals quickly, or when something absolutely must die right now. I recommend getting Maximize Spell first if you want this option. Maximize spell causes twice the damage but costs three times as many spell points than normal. In any situation where you must kill some thing quickly due to healing ability or desperation, Maximize is better than Empower. Besides, in any situation where you don't need to do those things, Maximize and Empower are not desirable due to cost. However, for added emergency damage capacity, if you really want to be able to put down some hurt, take Maximize then Empower.

Enlarge Spell One of the most useful of Metamagic Feats, this allows you to double the range of your spells, but the spell will cost ½ additional spell points. This allows you to cast spells on opponents without them being able to see you if the spells are of medium or long range to start with. Also, Enlarge Spell can keep you out of the range of opponents who could cast spells at you in return—very useful for spell duels. The only big issue with this Feat is that often you can cast spells beyond your visual range, preventing you from knowing if you hit your target, especially if your target is a point on the ground rather than a creature.

Eschew Materials Spells do not use spell components, but cost an additional 1/3 spell points. This Feat would be more useful if spell components were not so relatively inexpensive, or if it was harder to carry large stacks of spell components. Exotic components for spells such as Teleport, Dimension Door and Stoneskin are not affected by Eschew Materials. The only benefit I can imagine for this Feat would be if isolated from any stores for a long time due to an extended adventure.

Extend Spell Spells lasts twice as long but cost an additional ½ to normal spell points cost. This is the most useful Feat in the game. You benefit from this Feat any time you cast a spell multiple times in a quest since you have to cast it only half as much. In effect, if most of your spell points are spent with spells that you are recasting, and they have durations (i.e. Haste) you should be using this Feat. The only drawback to Extend Spell is that at the time of the writing of this guide, certain spells charge extra spell points for this spell while gaining no benefit. Note that spells that have wasted usage are less benefited by this spell. For example, if you only need protection from evil for one encounter, and you extend it, you will probably have many minutes of extra protection that are not necessary.

Heighten Spell The spell level is increased to the highest level you can cast, and the spell point cost of the spell is increased to that of the highest level you can cast. This Feat is excellent for any spell which is “all or nothing” in effect. For example, crowd control spells like phantasmal killer or charm spells like Hold Person. In effect, all your spells have the highest DC (difficulty check) you can cast. Like Extend Spell, there are spells that apply the cost of Heighten Spell without providing benefits. These would be any spells that provide no save, or do not need a save (such as Haste).

Quicken Spell Spells cast under the Quicken Spell Feat are cast with a short duration and cannot be interrupted, but the spells cost twice as many spell points than normal. The animation for spells takes ½ half as long as normal when using Quicken Spell. Because spell casters often have many skill points, and not many critical skills to put skill points in, a skill point should always go into Concentration. The manner in which Concentration is applied in game results in spell casters almost never failing Concentration checks. This reduces one of the advertised benefits of Quicken Spell. Unfortunately, Quicken Spell does not affect the recharge time of spells, limiting the spells that benefit from this Feat. Overall, this Feat is not very useful. The (eventual) highest level spells in the game, if following the pattern found so far in DDO, will have extremely high casting times, as much as 24 seconds for 9th level spells. This may result in Quicken Spell in being more useful.

How Enhancements Affect Metamagic Feats

Some Enhancements reduce the costs of the Heighten, Empower and Maximize Spell Feats. These Enhancements reduce the total costs of spells under effects of these Feats by a percentage each time they are used. For example, Improved Empowering 2 reduces the spell points cost of a spell by 15% when it is cast with Empower Spell. So if Fireball was empowered and cast with Improved Empowering II, the cost of the Fireball would be 34 spell points [20 (the base spell cost) x2 (Feat cost) / 1.15 (because of the Enhancement)]. The first version of these Enhancements reduces costs by 10%, and each additional version (II & III) reduces costs by 5% more. Improved Maximizing III is not in DDO at this time, but this may be added at higher levels.

Players should select Metamagic Enhancements if they specialize in damage or all-or-nothing spells. For example, a caster specialized in crowd control and charms is rewarded for choosing the Improved Heightening Enhancement. At 10th level, his Charm Person spell costs 5 spell points per cast when he uses Heighten Spell. The result is that he'd get 4 extra casts of charm person per full spell points pool.

To a generalized caster who uses all sorts of spells without using any Metamagic Feat each time, other Enhancements will be more useful. For instance, the spell points bonus Enhancements (such as Energy of the Zealot) are more beneficial to her.

Parting Thoughts

Want some spells to go with these Metamagic Feats? Check out Spells Guides portal! Wizards get extra Metamagic Feats, so they can accumulate more than any other class. Learn about wizards in our Wizard Portal! For more spell casting basics, read Sacred and Sorcerous.

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