This is the third section of Part Fifteen of a series of articles looking at creating a set of Starfinder feats under specific constraints.  You can read along as we convert every feat in the PF core rulebook to Starfinder (and  share my thoughts on that process, as a developer and writer)— or you can just look at the finished feats (as they are written, and I have time over the holidays to update the list) here.

We’re still cruising through the “Greater” spells from the PF core rulebook in our roughly-alphabetical run-through, and we’ve come to Greater Spell Focus, and Greater Sunder.

Starfinder has a non-Greater version of Spell Focus, which in fact is scaling, so it stands to reason the designers felt they didn’t want additional bonuses to be available at the cost of additional feats (changing hats… nope, we sure didn’t). That leaves us in the same situation we’ve been in with combat feats many times in this project–we need to create a feat that feels useful and makes sense to be called “Greater Spell Focus,” but that doesn’t increase the maximum bonuses a spellcaster can pick up.

However, it’s worth looking at how spells operate differently in Starfinder compared to PF. For example, spells tend to do flat damage instead of scaling damage, and spells are less likely to take a foe entirely out of a sight on a failed saving throw. That’s not universal (hold person is still among the most powerful lower-level spells – if I were designing it today, I’d have it end if the target takes damage). But it does mean we can slightly increase the potency of lower-level spells without it being as unbalancing as it would be in PF. Though, we still must do so very carefully.

GREATER SPELL FOCUS
You can make your weaker spells closer in power to your strongest ones.
Prerequisites: Ability to cast 3rd level spells, character level 7th, Spell Focus.
Benefits: When you cast a spell that is 2 or 3 levels lower than your highest-level spell, the DC of the spell increases by 1. When you cast a spell that is 4 or 5 levels lower than your highest-level spell, the DC of the spell increases by 2. When you cast a spell that is 6 levels lower than your highest-level spell, the DC of the spell increases by 3.

Next is Greater Sunder, which has the same issues as Greater Bull Rush, Disarm, and Grapple. And like those, we want to look at the utility of Sunder in Starfinder. An important difference between the two systems is that item levels mean even “mundane” equipment at high levels have impressive hardness and hit points. Also, Starfinder’s sunder only functions on held items, removing armor as a legal target, so the maneuver is at most half as useful as the PF version.

Further, unlike in PF there’s no size modifier to a creature’s defenses against combat maneuvers. Starfinder makes it a more difficult attack against EAC or KAC, so it should never be easier to sunder a foe than just hit them.

So if we want to convince a character to spend two feats on a Greater version, it had better have a pretty strong benefit, still without unbalancing max bonuses or increasing the sunder damage.

GREATER SUNDER (Combat)
Your sunder maneuvers hurt them more than they hurt you.
Prerequisites: Improved Combat Maneuver (sunder), base attack bonus +6.
Benefit: When you successfully perform a sunder combat maneuver against an item a creature is holding, the creature also takes half the sunder damage. It applies any defenses or resistances normally. Alternatively, you can choose to do full damage to the target, and half damage to the sundered object (each still aplying their own defenses normally).

That has a real appeal — damage object and wielder with one attack– but doesn’t make it any easier to actually break the object while doing so.

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