Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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Scultp spell does protect your party. I did it multiple times, even with ice storm.
BUT it only protect one ally per level of the spell. So ice storm would not protect the divine guardian if the whole group is around it. And then maybe the guardian was triggered against the group?
Another thing that will not work is the meta magic careful spell, because it only makes allies succeed the saving through.
I think the ally limit that's in the 5e tabletop rules isn't implemented in the game. I just cast a Fireball on the whole party after summoning four ghouls and no one took damage.
The sculpt spells description says that your party automatically passes their saving throws, but ice storm still does half damage on successful save. It also says "and take no damage from them", so maybe you're right and the divine guardian attacked us since I attacked it? I'm not quite sure. I should have checked the combat log.
Yeah, the half-damage-on-save with careful spell is mainly useful if you have a rogue with Evasion (takes no damage in those conditions).
Sounds like you ran into a bug somehow, because casting Evocation spells around your party is exactly what Sculpt Spells does (the whole point of taking Evocation spec is to be able to freely lob Fireballs into the melee). Or maybe you triggered a secondary effect since it would take a very specific scenario (plus a very high damage roll) to be able to one-shot a Guardian of Faith with Ice Storm. Even something like Wall of Fire only does the environmental damage if an evoker paints it over a party member.
Ice Storm is a little weird in that it will ignore Sculpt on a party member if you accidentally click on them, but it shouldn't hit anyone else in the party even then.
Sculpt spells says that your party automatically passes their saving throws, but ice storm still does half damage on successful save.
The saving throw clause is more for something like Gust of Wind, where the throw is for a knockback, not damage.
Do you have the latest update? I poked around and did see some older posts about Ice Storm specifically on the BG3 subreddit.
I'm playing on PS5, so it should auto update. But maybe it isn't fixed on this platform yet.
So does Fireball and yet that one does no friendly fire damage. Either Ice Storm is bugged or it's as the other commenter pointed out, Guardian of Faith detected a hostile action and triggered an attack on all nearby hostiles (your party), which dealt enough damage to it to kill it.
That's a good point. I'll drop it on my party again after my next long rest and see what happens.
I think if you cast an evocation spell that you got from a different class, then sculpt spells doesn't work
Ice storm is from the wizard class though. I got it by leveling up.