[RPG] How does Divine Source work

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Reaching Archmage 4 I can choose Divine Source which is suggested in many builds since it is (apparently) very powerful. I have read this now a few times but do not really understand how it is working and how to apply it.

  1. You can grant divine spells to those who follow your cause, allowing
    them to select you as their deity for the purposes of determining
    their spells and domains.

    • Many of the domain spells are not divine; do the arcane spells change somehow to a divine source or something?
    • If I want to grant divine spells from the chosen domain to my paladin (of Iomedae) he has to choose me as his deity. Will he lose the favor of Iomedae? Does he have to pray to my wizard from now on?
  2. Since I am a wizard I have most of these spells on my list already. So is the main advantage to get some divine spells on your list and one more spell slot via the SLAs?

    Each day as a spell-like ability, you can cast one spell of each level
    equal to or less than your tier (selecting from those available to you
    from your divine source domains).

Best Answer

So divine source is powerful to you (as long as you have some neutrality). To followers, until you have tier 9, not so much.

You get to pick two domains. You have to choose any alignment domains matching your own alignment first, but if you have some neutrality, you get to pick at least one domain freely. If you are true neutral, you get to pick both freely. If you have no neutrality, you are forced to pick an alignment domain for both, and they miss out on the most powerful feature of divine source.

From these two domains,

  1. You get to cast the spells from that domain whose level are not above your tier (so the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-level spells from each domain at tier 4). Even if they aren’t otherwise on your list. That’s really nice; you get two new spells per tier that might have otherwise been completely inaccessible.

  2. In addition, for each spell level that’s not higher than your tier, 1/day you can cast the spell from one or the other of the domains as a spell-like ability. That is a really big deal: spell-like abilities don’t have components, so feel free to grab domains that have expensive components and go to town.

(Note that the wording is unclear, and it may have been the intent that the spell-like casting is just how divine source lets you cast these spells, not a separate feature from the ability to cast them as spells normally. However, as-written, they seem to be separate and you get both the ability to cast these spells as spells from your normal slots, plus the ability to cast a spell of each level as a spell-like ability from its own daily pool.)

For followers, it’s a much less good deal. You might offer an unusual selection of domains (if you are true neutral), but that isn’t really all that valuable (you could be a cleric of an ideal for that). The cap on spell levels to your tier makes it a pretty terrible option for most would-be followers. Also, note that divine source gives followers no new ability to have domains in the first place: they have to have levels in cleric or something similar for it to mean anything.

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