When Is Contagious Spell Worth Using?

[HeraldOfExius]

I was looking through Pathfinder's metamagic feats, and I came across Contagious Spell (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/metamagic-feats/contagious-spell-metamagic). This makes it so that anybody who fails their CL check to dispel the spell by 5 or more gets hit with the spell as a result. While I think this is a neat concept for a metamagic feat, there are a few issues that I can see with it:

It depends entirely on your enemies attempting a specific course of action. If nobody attempts to dispel the spell, then you wasted it.
The spell is otherwise unchanged. It doesn't gain any other effects that make it sick around longer or otherwise encourage people to attempt to dispel it. And if they do attempt to dispel it, then it's no harder to remove than the spell would have been anyways.
It increases the spell's level by 2. This wouldn't be as bad if it did more than just give you the chance that it might do something if somebody else gets unlucky when attempting to remove it.

So when would this actually be useful? Is it just a GM mechanic meant to spice up a dark setting (being from Horror Adventures), and it's attached to a feat so that it has a mechanical definition rather than being pure fiat?

[Selion]

I was looking through Pathfinder's metamagic feats, and I came across Contagious Spell (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/metamagic-feats/contagious-spell-metamagic). This makes it so that anybody who fails their CL check to dispel the spell by 5 or more gets hit with the spell as a result. While I think this is a neat concept for a metamagic feat, there are a few issues that I can see with it:

It depends entirely on your enemies attempting a specific course of action. If nobody attempts to dispel the spell, then you wasted it.
The spell is otherwise unchanged. It doesn't gain any other effects that make it sick around longer or otherwise encourage people to attempt to dispel it. And if they do attempt to dispel it, then it's no harder to remove than the spell would have been anyways.
It increases the spell's level by 2. This wouldn't be as bad if it did more than just give you the chance that it might do something if somebody else gets unlucky when attempting to remove it.

So when would this actually be useful? Is it just a GM mechanic meant to spice up a dark setting (being from Horror Adventures), and it's attached to a feat so that it has a mechanical definition rather than being pure fiat?

Thinking for a moment of wasting 32k gp for a contagious metamagic rod and using it on night terrors... uhm... delicious (maybe in a couple of years i'll be high level enough to perform this)

On topic: basically any permanent or instantaneous effect which requires a CL check to be removed, namely Bestow Curse seems to be a good candidate, especially with custom curses.

[Feantar]

Couldn't you...use it the other way around? Pay for an expensive permanent effect, then extend it to other people who intentionally fail their dispel rolls (well, lower the caster level to the absolute minimum).

[HeraldOfExius]

Couldn't you...use it the other way around? Pay for an expensive permanent effect, then extend it to other people who intentionally fail their dispel rolls (well, lower the caster level to the absolute minimum).

Nope. It only works for harmful effects.


You can apply Contagious Spell only to targeted spells that are harmful to their target and don’t have a range of personal; a contagious spell never spreads to someone who would benefit from being the target of the spell.

[Psyren]

It depends entirely on your enemies attempting a specific course of action. If nobody attempts to dispel the spell, then you wasted it.

Well, exactly - you should know, long before you're able to get this effect as a feat or a rod, whether dispels are a common enemy tactic or not.

More likely it's a tactic that's going to be used by enemy casters however, to spice up the painful or annoying debuffs they put on the PCs.

[Rynjin]

Metamagic falls into two categories: utterly worthless, or nearly godlike. There is basically no middle ground.

This is one of the former.

[Jack_Simth]

So when would this actually be useful? Is it just a GM mechanic meant to spice up a dark setting (being from Horror Adventures), and it's attached to a feat so that it has a mechanical definition rather than being pure fiat?It smells of plotinum, yes. Goes well with Conditional Curse, Major Curse, or Greater Bestow Curse, all of which have unusually high dispelling requirements (based on the save DC, rather than the caster level, and a boost besides).

[Flame of Anor]

Seems like it might be better as a non-metamagic feat. Something like:

When an enemy fails to dispel an ongoing spell you cast, you can (as an immediate action) lose a prepared spell or spell slot of no more than one level lower than the spell in question, and have the ongoing spell affect the would-be dispeller too.

[Selion]

Now that I'm thinking about it, this metamagic feat applies a debuff only to people who have ways of dealing with it, because they have dispel magic/remove curse on their spell list, so, even if someone fails the CL check, they can simply try again on theirselves without downsides and than trying on the "patient zero". No way of spreading a curse infection like this, this feat is only useful to DM to give a bad day to some players

[Psyren]

Metamagic falls into two categories: utterly worthless, or nearly godlike. There is basically no middle ground.

This is one of the former.

Indeed, and there are some that are both. When you don't need them, metamagic like Still/Silent/Logical/Intuitive Spell, and ones like Coaxing/Threnodic are useless, but when you do, they let you deal with threats and situations where you'd otherwise be powerless.