Cyrion
2009-08-31, 10:05 AM
In all of the discussions of good blasty spells, nobody ever mentions this one, and I wonder why. My thoughts on it:
Pro
1. Force damage- takes out incorporeals and few things are resistant.
2. Damage on consecutive rounds
3. Can dish out 3d6 per level (assuming you keep the spell to completion)
4. Maxes out at 30d6 (ditto) for an average 105 points of damage
5. 3 & 4 mean it levels reasonably well
6. You can attack spread the damage across multiple opponents if convenient.
7. It's a good candidate for holding an action in rounds 2 and 3 and auto-hitting a caster to disrupt a spell.
Con
8. It's a concentrate-to-maintain spell. That can be solved by a sonorous hum (quickened if you want to keep it all a one round action package). Also, if you're in a situation where you're going to be blastin, are you really losing much if you maintain concentration?
9. It's susceptible to both SR and a reflex save. So are many evocation blast spells. Not much to do about the reflex save, but a good caster level can reasonably be expected to get past SR.
Why isn't this a more popular blast spell?
Pro
1. Force damage- takes out incorporeals and few things are resistant.
2. Damage on consecutive rounds
3. Can dish out 3d6 per level (assuming you keep the spell to completion)
4. Maxes out at 30d6 (ditto) for an average 105 points of damage
5. 3 & 4 mean it levels reasonably well
6. You can attack spread the damage across multiple opponents if convenient.
7. It's a good candidate for holding an action in rounds 2 and 3 and auto-hitting a caster to disrupt a spell.
Con
8. It's a concentrate-to-maintain spell. That can be solved by a sonorous hum (quickened if you want to keep it all a one round action package). Also, if you're in a situation where you're going to be blastin, are you really losing much if you maintain concentration?
9. It's susceptible to both SR and a reflex save. So are many evocation blast spells. Not much to do about the reflex save, but a good caster level can reasonably be expected to get past SR.
Why isn't this a more popular blast spell?