[PF] How useful is the spell Poison in conjunction with Contagion?

[mistformsquirrl]

So, I had a thought - I have an Oracle set up like a Death Knight that I'm hoping will get into a game soon... I really like my general set up and I took Contagion for thematic reasons.

Now however I'm considering 4th level spells for the future*... and Poison is catching my eye. 1d3 Con damage per round for 6 rounds is potentially quite a lot, and combined with Slimy Doom from Contagion, that could really add up fast.

I also have a Spell Storing weapon, so Contagion can be cast long before I get into any given encounter, and activated when I hit something with my weapon.

That said... is Poison going to be worthwhile in this scenario? Or is there maybe something better later on in the same vein? Or am I better off just beating on them with Divine Power and Bull's Strength up instead?

My big concern is that it's a Fortitude save, and while I have 18 Charisma, I'm not sure if that's really going to be enough to make it stick at level 10+ (when I'd probably first get the spell).



*I'm Human and using the Human "Extra spell known each level" thing - right now I'm level 8 so it only applies on up to 3rd level spells, but as a bonus spell later...

[Psyren]

The difference between diseases and poisons is the onset and duration/frequency. Diseases typically take a lot longer to get going, and act much less frequently (e.g. daily checks, instead of checks per round) but they tend to last until you get rid of them, or at least for a long time. Poisons, meanwhile, act fast and end fast.

In general, diseases are a terrible choice for PCs because they take so long to take effect. For example, your disease of choice (Slimy Doom) takes a number of days to even do anything, and then the target would get a daily save to remove it. In that amount of time you could just kill it some other way. So Contagion is a much worse spell than Poison for a player to use for that reason.

If you want to combine a different kind of debuff with a poison, a Curse or Hex would do the trick.

[mistformsquirrl]

In Pathfinder the disease onset is negated when used by Contagion - so you get the first tick of ability damage immediately assuming they fail a fortitude save. (It's true though that you're highly unlikely to see any of the followup hits occur, it's pretty much one shot of ability damage in practice.)

I checked that out before picking up Contagion just to make sure I wasn't doing something incredibly dumb there >_>

[Psyren]

You're right about the onset, but a daily frequency is still far too slow for PCs to use. That spell is meant for NPCs to use on the players.

[TuggyNE]

In Pathfinder the disease onset is negated when used by Contagion - so you get the first tick of ability damage immediately assuming they fail a fortitude save. (It's true though that you're highly unlikely to see any of the followup hits occur, it's pretty much one shot of ability damage in practice.)

That's actually the case in 3.5, too.