I mean it's not terribly exciting, is it? I can't tell you what the difference those had. Different type of damage, one scaled up with levels better I think?
The differences are fast among the two main tier 3 offensive AoE spells.
- Damage type and is not a useless differentiation, fire resistance is far more common, so skulltrap will be more effective against more creatures BUT the same applies to party members, meaning that is easier to protect your party members from the fireball
- The skull trap can be used as a trap and placed before combat
- Fireball has a much wide area
- Different saves
- Necromancer specialized mages can memorize more of skull trap and enemies has a penalty on their saves
- They scale to different level caps
- (...)
ough were hard counters - like petrifying look of Basilisk or level draining of Vampires (oh god, or semi permanent damage to attributes in Pathfinder, or mindcontrol in PoE1). That's just annoying - it doesn't have an interesting impact on gameplay, you just need to google
You are completely wrong saying taht they are annoying and not impact on the gameplay.
A petrified enemy is a enemy removed from the encounter.
Level drain reduce a lot of variables and is expensive to heal.
And on kingmaker, cloudkill is one of the best mid tier spells exactly due the attribute damage. It can damage d4 / round CON on enemy. 4 points of CON damage(maximized) means that all spells which target FORTITUDE saves has +10% chance of success per round, and it also reduces 2 points of maximum HP per level of the target creature. How it not impact in the gameplay? Hell, animate dead + maximized cloudkill can end the life of a lot of really powerful creatures in few rounds.
Do you know a nasty enemy cleric? if summoned soul eater deals a lot of WIS damage on him, he no longer can cast higher level cleric spells and the lower level will have reduced DC.
A maximized/empowered cloudkill which is possible to cast on kingmaker with rods, can deal 6 pts of CON damage per round or 3 if he makes the save. A lot of troublesome foes like the Jabberwock only got destroyed on my hard run thanks to cloudkill comboed with other spells like sirroco.
And you don't need to "google the solution", on BG2, there are a story mode and on kingmaker, you can make this effects end with a rest.
And mindcontroling, did you played PoE1 which for you is better than old rpgs? Cipher is one of the best classes because be able to mind control a enemy can make a outnumbered/outgeared/outleveled battle become in favor of your party. Taking control over enemies is far more deadly than just killing then.
