What type of damage does the Destruction spell cause?

Sometime in the future, I'll be making a cleric (I like clerics), but I'm really curious about the Destruction spell.

I'll be wf (spare me the obnoxious comments I'll be getting just for that), focused on casting and healing, or combat in extreme situations (Divine favour, rage/GH/bard songs, Bladesworn, Divine Power... they can all add to a huge amount of melee goodness). I'm in a WF caster guild, and so looking at the (new, to me at least) cleric spells, I saw that destruction deals damage to a "failed" kill. And to me, 10d6 is still awesome compared to the damage that inflict wounds does... though I suppose someone can tell me the joy of Harm?

But if, say, it were negative-based damage, like the necro spell Chill Touch (or something like that), then the Life Magic enhancement line should in theory enhance Destruction's damage output of a failed outright kill.

I just wanted to know if I could then make a build focused on life magic so I could still excel at healing, because my favourite spell still benefits from my enhancement choices?

In theory you are right, it should receive a damage increase on a failed Destruct, but since the damage output is rather minimal, I wouldn't really focus on that. Rather, focus on keeping your spell DC pretty high so you don't even fail those Destructions.

The Life Magic line of enhancements does in fact increase the % effectiveness of your healing and negative energy spells. So, if you want to build around healing but still enjoy your favorite spell, you can in fact do that. Honestly, I've never bothered to track what kind of damage my failed Destructions do. If you need to do DPS via a spell, Harm is far superior, obviously.

Sorry, no luck. The damage caused by Destruction is untyped damage, not negative energy damage. The only way to increase the damage of your destructions is through a potency 7 item. Those are very, very rare and, to the best of my knowledge, sup. potency 7 isn't in the game yet.

Destruction does ridiculously low damage (compared to a mob's HPs) on a save, and there's no point trying to improve it.
So yes, use Harm instead if you want damage, it's much more efficient.

Harm is damage goodness and really the only straight damage spell I try to use on my cleric. Was doing a POP run this weekend and always use it on the end guy. Thought I saw a crit of 1342 in a funny color lettering, when I checked the log after the fight it was confirmed. I didnt know that type of damage was possible, might have been due to added envirenmental affects, Im not sure.

Would like to know myself as Ive only seen crits in the low 600s with maximize on. Anyone seen this before?

Yeah, if you get a critical Harm off in POP when the plane shifts to Mabar, it will do double damage and show up as a purple number instead of red. I posted a pic of mine a while back in this thread here. I love it when Mabar shifts in there. :)

Yah, the 10d6 from a Destruction save is not something to worry about. It might get the mobs aggro on you, UNTIL some melee actually hits things. Anything worth casting a Destruction spell on will fail a save LONG before the accumulated damage from 10d6 takes it down. On a rare case the damage might be the last straw that kills the mob, but then unless you were last man standing, it was foolish to be casting it on a virtually dead mob in the first place. 10d6 good for 35 points. Buffed Harm doing 10 times as much, easily.