Just griping about dirge

[neain2008]

As written "For every two caster levels you have, this creature takes 10d[4/6/8] Negative damage and 10d[8/10/12] Sonic damage every 3 seconds (Fortitude save for half damage). In addition, enemies affected by Dirge may be slowed by 5% if they fail the Fortitude save. Duration: 18 seconds"

This looks decent as 10d8 averages out to about 45 damage and 10d12 averages out to 65 damage. Per every 2 caster levels, you deal about 110 damage every 2 seconds. so at 20, you have 10*110 or 1,100 damage every 2 seconds. This is quite decent and manageable since it takes a few seconds for the first tick to even hit. At 30 this should go up to 1,650 damage every 2 seconds. Not that good anymore since its hitting things that prolly have 10k+ hp, but it's still not horrible damage and I would toss it out in a boss fight.

Reality time, as far as I can tell it's doing 10d8 neg and 10d12 sonic damage and modifying them by spell power... which means its hitting for ~150 negative damage and ~200 sonic damage every 2 seconds. Why not fix the text and say "don't take this, it won't do decent damage unless you're in EN and even then you will be doing better and faster DPS with melee even as a spellsinger."

[cru121]

Does Dirge still heal enemy undead?

[Tilomere]

Why not fix the text and say "don't take this,

Ohohoho. I guess that answers the question I asked a month and a half ago. I'll take that as a "no."

You can try something interesting with it through. Dual wield dust/ashe/ooze/vacuum weapons or LGS and swap them out after casting dirge to see if it repeatedly debuffs everything around you. Hmm, my wizard is in fatesinger this life, maybe I'll kick the tires if I remember.

[neain2008]

yeah, honestly adding in spell power to the stated damage of silly numbers of dice might be ok... might... can think of ways to abuse it as a bard. run through a quest dragging a ton of mobs and just dirging every once in a while and killing everything because it's ticking for 3K+ 9 times (assuming about 300 spell power which is what I was running this last bard life when I hit 20). That being said... since it takes ~1-3 seconds to start ticking it may be fine. But at end cap with ~900 spell power that's ~13.5k per tick and even things in sharn don't have enough hp to last more than a couple of ticks. (don't pay to much attention to my math, it's really fuzzy and im using absurdly rounded numbers based on the first post I made. But it should be around the correct ballpark)

I would like to see the stated damage even without spell power. That would make it decent in low-level epics where I always seem to have issues dealing relevant damage.

[neain2008]

Does Dirge still heal enemy undead?

yes it does. but since its only healing them for ~150 damage... its not doing much damage to your dps on them.