Nettlekid
2013-09-20, 02:09 PM
I was looking through the Wyrms of the North archive on WotC's site, and happened upon this rather interesting pair of spells: Breathball and Breathdoom (https://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/wn/20030521a), at the bottom of the page. It seems like it has potential, and I want to see what the optimizers of the Playground can do with it.
Breathball creates an opaque, 5-ft sphere that acts much as your breath weapon. It lasts for 1 round/level or until discharged, either by you as a standard action or by a foe by touching it. When discharged, it explodes in a 20ft burst, offering a save but the DC is the Breathball spell's DC, not that of the breath weapon. It inflicts up to 90 points of damage from the breath weapon, and/or imitates a breath weapon's spell effect (if it has one) of up to 6th level. Even though the burst is pretty small, it's Long range, which means you can snipe at foes your normal breath weapon wouldn't be able to hit.
Breathdoom looks far more fun. The ball can be opaque or clear, and is permanent until discharged. It can be discharged by trigger, like Magic Mouth, so I expect that you could use it a lot and then blow them up all at once. The damage cap is upped to 120, and the spell level cap is upped to 8th.
The most important thing that stands out to me about these spells is that they are spells, not breath weapons. It specifically states that you are not using a breath weapon when you use these spells, so you aren't penalized by recharge time or other effects like that. The immediate application to this that I thought of was using a Dragonfire Adept's Fivefold Breath of Tiamat with this, because you aren't using the breath and therefore don't take the recoil damage. You'd probably want a custom item of this spell to do it, in which case the DC might be kind of low.
I wonder if this can be used with Metabreath feats (technically you don't have a Lingering Cold Breath, just a cold breath you apply Lingering Breath to, but it does say it mimics the effects of any breath weapon you employ, so it might count?) in which case you could pile on Metabreath feats without fear of a high recharge time.
So what does the Playground think?
Breathball creates an opaque, 5-ft sphere that acts much as your breath weapon. It lasts for 1 round/level or until discharged, either by you as a standard action or by a foe by touching it. When discharged, it explodes in a 20ft burst, offering a save but the DC is the Breathball spell's DC, not that of the breath weapon. It inflicts up to 90 points of damage from the breath weapon, and/or imitates a breath weapon's spell effect (if it has one) of up to 6th level. Even though the burst is pretty small, it's Long range, which means you can snipe at foes your normal breath weapon wouldn't be able to hit.
Breathdoom looks far more fun. The ball can be opaque or clear, and is permanent until discharged. It can be discharged by trigger, like Magic Mouth, so I expect that you could use it a lot and then blow them up all at once. The damage cap is upped to 120, and the spell level cap is upped to 8th.
The most important thing that stands out to me about these spells is that they are spells, not breath weapons. It specifically states that you are not using a breath weapon when you use these spells, so you aren't penalized by recharge time or other effects like that. The immediate application to this that I thought of was using a Dragonfire Adept's Fivefold Breath of Tiamat with this, because you aren't using the breath and therefore don't take the recoil damage. You'd probably want a custom item of this spell to do it, in which case the DC might be kind of low.
I wonder if this can be used with Metabreath feats (technically you don't have a Lingering Cold Breath, just a cold breath you apply Lingering Breath to, but it does say it mimics the effects of any breath weapon you employ, so it might count?) in which case you could pile on Metabreath feats without fear of a high recharge time.
So what does the Playground think?