Space Cannon: what’s the best way to fall so fast you destroy the thing you hit?

[Malphegor]

So the roof-jumper feat from Cityscape lets one deal +1d6 damage for every 10ft you fall in a round if you hit something. So I was curious: what is the most efficient way to fall really really fast, assuming that boosting one’s fall counts for the purpose of this feat?

Given that fall damage in 3.5 is capped at 20d6, that means we only need to hit something from 200ft in the air before we start to surpass the damage that we too will take. We can’t take any method to slow our fall or the feat doesn’t work, but it looks like it’s okay if we mitigate the damage we take as I read it.

Uncapped damage. Go into orbit and space needle drop yourself on a foe, and assuming you hit, kaboom they become chunky salsa.

But I’m not sure the most efficient way to get a lot of speed while flying. Maybe a planar shepherd time bubble, maybe timestop, maybe a flight spell combo?

(also surviving the impact and being able to reasonably fly that high would be plusses too)

[SirNibbles]

Roof Jumper's Death from Above is a charge attack so you need to have line of sight to your enemy. Dropping from space is unlikely to allow you to do this.

[spectralphoenix]

Technically, you only need line of sight at the start of your turn. So it might be possible.

The simplest version would be to have two people, Alice and Bob, two pairs of Ring Gates, and a 'base' within 100 miles with a very large vertical shaft. Alice has the Roof-Jumper feat and is Tiny size or smaller and weighs less than 100 pounds. Ring Gates A1 and B1 are attached so that the entrance of A1 is on one side and the exit of B1 is on the other. A2 and B2 are at the top and bottom of the shaft.

Alice flies over the target, while Bob flies below her. Bob readies an action to 'catch' Alice with the Ring Gate assembly when she passes him. Alice executes her Death From Above attack, enters Ring Gate A1, falls down the shaft, passes through B2, and then falls the rest of the distance to the target and finishes her attack.

A more complicated version might have a portal at the base, with the exit directly over the entrance. In this version, Charlie would hold Gate A2 over the portal, readying an action to remove it when Alice exits the gate. Dorothy stands near the portal as well, readying an action to catch Alice with Gate B2 when she has fallen the desired number of times. This could result in uncapped fall distance, if any DM would ever allow such a thing.

[loky1109]

Aura of chaos + 1d2 weapon combo is better.

[Darg]

The feat is not a charge attack, it only qualifies as one for bonuses and penalties. You just need to jump down to use the feat.

The real issue is the time it takes to accomplish this. If we use rules equivalency then you can only fall 150 feet in the first round and 300 every round there after. If we want to use earth equivalent physics, you'd fall 500 ft the first round and 1000 every round thereafter (for nice round numbers). Overall, I'd say about 500ft is the maximum if you wanted to reliably splat something.

[Inevitability]

The feat is not a charge attack, it only qualifies as one for bonuses and penalties. You just need to jump down to use the feat.

The real issue is the time it takes to accomplish this. If we use rules equivalency then you can only fall 150 feet in the first round and 300 every round there after. If we want to use earth equivalent physics, you'd fall 500 ft the first round and 1000 every round thereafter (for nice round numbers). Overall, I'd say about 500ft is the maximum if you wanted to reliably splat something.


A falling character reaches terminal velocity (roughly 130
miles per hour, or nearly 200 feet per second) within the fi rst
round of a long fall. That means a character falls roughly
670 feet in the fi rst round. After that, a character falls about
1,150 feet each round.

If nothing else, the second DMG has slightly more favorable numbers. 67d6 is a solid amount of damage!