The Tavern

So I think there may be a split, but I know there's at least a significant portion of people who would rather see sandblast not rely on stones as ammo. And with various other ammo being removed, it seems like maybe stones could get the axe in the future, and then you have a problem of what to do with sandblast now. I think a fairly simple mechanic for sandblast to replace the 'use stones' part would be to have the damage itself be positional: you get the "with stone" damage at range 1, and you get the 'without stone' damage at range 2-3. Alternatively a slightly stronger version gives you the with stone damage at range 1-2. This would encourage earth elementalists to get closer to their targets, which is already kind of a central theme of earth - high damage, short range. And as far as I know, there's no other spell that does different damage based on the distance to target, so it's unique too!

I absolutely refuse to use the spell so long as stones are required to cast it, and the decision to make them a requirement has always baffled me. (Though, even if the stones requirement were removed, I still would strongly tend to avoid playing EE, simply because Conjurer gets more INT, and when playing spell-centric characters, I want as much INT as I can get.)

To the specific proposal: with stones removed as a requirement, there's no need to adhere to a binary proposition of stone vs. no stone. The damage could scale linearly: highest at range 1, and lowest at range 3.

I feel like that would be a significant nerf to EE. After all, Sandblast in its current state is useful well into Lair, and at that point stones are no longer much a limitation.

Then again, it would make the EE starts were you can't find any stones a lot more forgiving, which would be nice.

That could be fixed by making damage scale more strongly with spellpower.

Chain lightning, at least, also scales its damage with distance to target, but this spell is on the other end of the spectrum from sandblast on so many levels, that this one point of overlap really doesn't matter.