The spell Animate Object .... worthless?

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Machine_Kiss
NPC
Posts: 17
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

The spell Animate Object .... worthless?

Post by Machine_Kiss »

You know, in all my time playing 3.0 and 3.5, I've never seen anyone *ever* take the spell Animate Objects (Bard6/Clric5/Chaos6).

The spell's supporting material occupies space on 2 pages in the Monster Manual. And still, I've never seen this spell used by anyone, ever. It's use seems so situational and completely trumped by Summon Monster spells. Ideally, it would be best used when you have a ton of hard metal in your immediate environment, but how often does that happen?

Anyone have any clever uses for the spell or is it indeed chaff? :sick:

Username17
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Posts: 29894
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

Re: The spell Animate Object .... worthless?

Post by Username17 »

The spell is chaff. The duration is craptacular and it's really high level for what it does.

There's lots of clever uses for the spell - an animated chest can open itself, an animated bridge can hurl everyone it into the ravine, etc. But it's also higher level than Telekinesis. If you had such a marvelous plan, Telekinesis would probably do just as well (or better), and it has more direct combat uses, and is lower level.

Animate Object is a bewilderingly useful utility spell - a more powerful version of knock - and they expect you to use a sixth level slot for that. Sorry, that just isn't happening.

There is a reason that the Ravid is CR 5 and casts Animate Object with a caster level of 20 as a free action every round - that reason is because it is honestly a third level spell at best.

It's like how noone casts Foresight - not because it isn't really good - but because you'd have to be on Crack to think that spending a 9th level spell slot on that was a good idea.

-Username17
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