Nimbus of Light - OR, Underrated Lowbie Caster Spell

And for those of you with veteran status, or who know how to get to level 4 in an day, this probably doesn't matter nearly as much as it should, but you aren't the target of this post.

One of the problems that tends to plague divine casters who seek to focus on casting is that they either need to rely on a hireling or a party in order to actually get anywhere at low levels.

And for those that do, that's fine. You conserve a lot more resources that way, you contribute to a party, or you don't actually have to make much effort.

However, some people want to do something a bit different from making sure their cloudcuckoolander hireling doesn't die while keeping it buffed.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Nimbus of Light.

a 1d4 + 4 + 1 per caster level spell that, on paper, seems really weak. There are, however, four things that make it very useful at low level.

1) There is no to-hit to worry about. If the spell physically connects, the enemy takes damage
2) There is no save for the enemy to make for half or no damage
3) You can get an item from the tutorial quest that increases its damage by 20%
4) Built-in Enlarge like all of the other Ray spells, meaning you can hit almost any enemy that you can see.

Combine 3) with the Smiting enhancement, and you can deal some not-insignificant damage. At level 2, which is how you'll be experiencing most of Korthos and the beginning of the Harbor, it deals a max of 14 damage, which isn't bad considering that's probably more damage than you'd deal trying to hit the enemy. Weaker enemies will die in two casts, or less if you combine it with the Eternal Wand of Ray of Light.

Now you can dump STR and boost CHA as much as you need, you don't have to worry about walking up and whiffing enemies despite Bless + Divine Favor.

The spell should last well into level 3, as it's still going strong for me, namely due to Inflict Moderate Wound's extremely short range, unusually high SP cost, and its save for half damage.

In short, what I'm saying is, don't underestimate this spell for leveling purposes. At the same time, don't overestimate the spell either. Really, if you CAN hit the enemy with a heavy mace or a longsword, you're probably better off doing that. Except if you're facing slimes. Totally switch it in for slimes.

HATE SLIMES.

Aye, Nimbus is a solid lowbie spell, when paired with Searing Light it makes for a good 1 2 punch.

You also missed one rather important fact..

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Taken from DDOWiki
Note: This spell has no saving throw, and hits creatures with Spell Resistance every try. Coupled with its low spell point cost, long range, and relatively fast casting time, Nimbus of Light is a surprisingly effective means of damage against single, powerful enemies, such as bosses. This is especially true of enemies well defended against nonmagical attacks, such as an Inevitable. This is also true at high levels, when 4 SP will do an average of 27 unstoppable damage (plus applicable spell boosts), making several casts of Nimbus of Light bursts much cheaper and more total guaranteed damage than, say, Cometfall.

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Agreed, It's immensely undervalued if you skim it and fixate on damage dice.

Hahaha, I didn't actually know about that.

Awesome, Nimbus of Light is a surprisingly solid spell.

My quest to solo my way through to level 6 without using a weapon is going pretty solidly so far.

Superior Brilliance helps for an extra 75%. Nimbus does work well with Searing.


Now I agreed with you up till the point you said to dump STR.

If you get a wizard to get you Master's touch scrolls for you. You can pay them for it and give them to wizards to cast on you for martial prof in keen weapons like scims, rapiers, falchions and kukri. Keen increase critical range to 15-20. These weapons along with critical and moderate STR do lots of nice damage at low lvl. Especially if u take twf or power attack to swap out later. And once you get Divine Power clickie u r really hitting. STR works well with throwing weapons too.

Not to mention that Light damage is completely irresistible except by mobs that resist everything. This makes it a good all-around spell for a meele FvS to take for sniping archers and cowardly casters. I took it on my WF FvS, and I've never regretted it. With Maximize up, he can pretty easily take out those annoying far-off archer foes in a few casts that would have a melee throwing piddly axes at for ages.

The eternal wand is better damage in my experience although I use nimbus of light if the wand runs out.

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Originally Posted by morticianjohn

The eternal wand is better damage in my experience although I use nimbus of light if the wand runs out.

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It all depends on enchancements, but noone forbids you to use wand between spell cooldowns ;)


+1 for the OP for a nice informative and newbie friendly thread :)

I love hitting the clicky on Epic Ornamented Dagger and spamming 8sp Maximized, Eardwellered, enhancement boosted Searing Light and 4sp Maximized, Eardwellered, enhancement boosted Nimbuses of Light. 150 on the top and 100 on the bottom end for Nimbus for 4 spell points? Win.

These two spells are immensely underrated. Sure, Divine Punishment is 2100 damage over 7 ticks with a triple stack, but there's no better way to add in a bunch of DPS than with cheap Searing Lights and Nimbuses of Light. You can close to double your DPS with these two spammed on cooldowns.

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Originally Posted by Sgt_Hart

You also missed one rather important fact..

<quote about it bypassing SR>

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Eh, spell resistance doesnt block damage from spells, nothing special about Nimbus in that regard.

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Originally Posted by Vellrad

It all depends on enchancements, but noone forbids you to use wand between spell cooldowns ;)


+1 for the OP for a nice informative and newbie friendly thread :)

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For level 1 and 2 interrupting the wand spamming to cast a spell is typically a dps loss unless you happen to have superior brilliance, and/or maximize/empower. Maybe beyond that point it can be useful (or if you're out of wand charges) however you get soundburst, and bull's strength and other nice spells which make these levels fly by.

The problem for me with spell damage is the minimums not the maximums.

Mobs in DDO have far far far more HP than in PnP.

In DDO Weapons thanks to magical effects and super high str scores do far more damage than in PnP.

Spells do not.

I would ask the devs to consider changing damaging spells so they do a minimum damage on par with that of a Greatsword {not counting crits of course}.
Put a base 10 on the damage so instead of 1-4 +4 +1/lvl for Nimbus we get 10 + 1d4 +4 +1/lvl
This would not be a gamebreaker.
This would be a small change that would allow casters to actually deal out damage without using up all their spell points maximizing etc.
They would still run out of sps - Echoes could be switched off for spells that deal damage {cures vs undead obviously not counted here}.

Each spell Level thereafter the base damage could go up by 10 so:

Niac's, Burning Hands, Magic Missile, Nimbus etc would do 10 + their normal damage.
Scorching Ray, Soundburst etc. would do a base 20 before their normal damage.
Fireball, Acid Blast, Searing Light etc. would do a base 30
And so on and so forth.

Now spells like Melf's or Firewall would obviously work differently - I'd suggest a base 3/tick.
Then Melf's would do a base 6 each tick and Firewall, Acid Rain, Eladar's, Niac's and DP would do a base 12 or 15 /tick dependant on whether they're Lvl 4 or 5.
Base 18 for a lvl 6 spell, 21 for a Lvl 7 etc.

Also the base damage of instakill spells needs looking at when saves are made - The damage currently is rather low on many of them.
They cost a lot to cast and should deal a good portion of damage regardless - Instakill weapons have a base 100 dmg / hit - Why do instakill spells not?

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Originally Posted by firemedium_jt

Now I agreed with you up till the point you said to dump STR.

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I said to dump strength? Where?

I remember saying you COULD dump strength. I also remember saying "If you can hit with weapons, do that instead."

My problem with caster cleric is that 12-14 strength just isn't good enough for melee for me. Even with Divine Favor and Bless, I still feel very inaccurate, which makes me sad.

Also, having to depend on a wizard buddy to Master's Touch me all the time does not help my "My character is not decent if he can't solo low-level content" mindset. And I don't do well in statics because of my erratic playing time.

Plus, why bother with to-hit rolls when I can just nuke them? I have the SP to do it.

As for why I don't just spam the wand, well, those 50 charges go pretty quickly if you only spam the wand. However, if you go Nimbus of Light-Wand-Wand, or even just alternate the two, you save on wand charges and actually give them a chance to regenerate enough.

Also, this is more or less a petty reason, but the reason I rolled up a caster cleric is to... cast spells. If I'm Commanding an enemy to sit down and whiffing against them with a longsword, it feels like... I'm a melee-wannabe instead.

I can't change expectations. That is up to the Devs and D&D gods.

Even Wizards suck at damage at low level compared to melee's. It is the nature of the game going back almost 40 years now. Wizards have the most trouble leveling to 20. They have low hp and low damage output at low level. Wizards become the most powerful killers in the game at high level as they should. More so now with PM and self healing. Course they still need protection from melee's and tanks from bosses. Clerics are somewhere in the middle as they should be.

I would say even your expectations of Cleric and their "gimp" melee to hit is still better damage output than the Wizards at low lvl. If you know how to do it. Or have interest in it. It is not that complicated. It requires some work in your build. Your gear. And your tactics during combat. There are action boosts that affect 'to hit' or human versatility or racial prof in a weapon like Rapiers,scims. You can even take Power Attack and still hit for nice damage. It is on your feat list for a reason. You just have to know when to turn it off. You can splash a lvl of FTR. Even Wiz to cast Martial Prof. You can swap feats and enhancements throughout your leveling to 20. To take a toon Cleric to lvl with the perfect build and not favoring more melee at low to mid lvl only makes leveling and quest completion that much harder. A STR 14-12 base Cleric can still melee very well. The best damage in this game is critical damage and critical weapon effects like curse, seeker, paralyze, bone break, malodroid, Terror sw type stuff anyway using keen or IC-slash.

You think you should hit like a Melee or do more damage than Wizard with spells? Sorry. You are in the middle and always will be. And they love you when you keep the party from wiping.

You are like the goaltender in hockey. It is the hardest job in the game. The most critical and mind messing job. You don't score the goals, but you save the game.

Another great spell to use in conjunction with searing light and nimbus is Glyph of warding. Get a superior spark III clickie and that alone will take out quite a few of the mobs you run into at level 5. Use the other two ray spells to clean up afterwards.

Got that idea from another thread here and tried it out and it was fun to just nuke my way through content, instead of falling back on swinging an sword after a sound burst.

Now what i do is cast a sound burst, followed by the gylph so that they do not move and viola :D Fun stuff. Not sure it would work well after say level 9, but it is fun at the low level.

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Originally Posted by firemedium_jt

You think you should hit like a Melee or do more damage than Wizard with spells? Sorry. You are in the middle and always will be. And they love you when you keep the party from wiping.

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Again, where did I say I should hit like a Melee or do more damage than Wizard? I didn't. I'm not even sure where you're getting this.

The whole point of this topic was that, hey, Nimbus of Light is actually a spell worth casting. Sure, it's not as damaging as the wizard's spells, but it's reliable and doesn't do insignificant damage.

As far as melee goes, if I wanted to melee as a Cleric, I'd actually go roll up a melee Cleric instead of a caster Cleric. That's my answer to whiffing.

However, as a caster Cleric, I want to cast. Not melee. And Nimbus of Light actually lets me do it.

And it's fun. Try it sometime :P

@Mubjon I'll make sure to prepare explosive runes today -- I mean, Glyph of Warding :P Looking forward to level 5 now XD

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Originally Posted by Habreno

I love hitting the clicky on Epic Ornamented Dagger and spamming 8sp Maximized, Eardwellered, enhancement boosted Searing Light and 4sp Maximized, Eardwellered, enhancement boosted Nimbuses of Light. 150 on the top and 100 on the bottom end for Nimbus for 4 spell points? Win.

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^^^ This.

The cool down on these ray spells are short enough (~2 seconds) to chain spam for very little SP cost. Useful against bosses such as the one in eDa & Reavers where you can spam searing light/nimbus combo in between DP/heals.

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Originally Posted by Zachski

@Mubjon I'll make sure to prepare explosive runes today -- I mean, Glyph of Warding :P Looking forward to level 5 now XD

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I hope you enjoyed it, I am able to get about 19 to 24 dmg from that to multiple targets so it is pretty cool with me. Takes some practice getting it placed right. The good news is that you can cast and run at the same time. Not the damage of a fireball or acid blast, but it can take off about 20 to 25% of the health of low level mobs on elite difficulty or kill out right on normal.

I am going to try it on a low level cleric/wizard (6/1) with a 20% enhancement to see if it helps the damage any. That would be pretty cool if it did. I do have a higher level cleric/wizard I could try it too and see if it scales with caster level decently. It might be lacking at the higher level, but for the sake of testing it is good to know what spells can do what.

For a cleric that wants to be a casting cleric these low level spells are nice to have knowledge of.

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Originally Posted by Zachski

Again, where did I say I should hit like a Melee or do more damage than Wizard? I didn't. I'm not even sure where you're getting this.

The whole point of this topic was that, hey, Nimbus of Light is actually a spell worth casting. Sure, it's not as damaging as the wizard's spells, but it's reliable and doesn't do insignificant damage.

As far as melee goes, if I wanted to melee as a Cleric, I'd actually go roll up a melee Cleric instead of a caster Cleric. That's my answer to whiffing.

However, as a caster Cleric, I want to cast. Not melee. And Nimbus of Light actually lets me do it.

And it's fun. Try it sometime :P

@Mubjon I'll make sure to prepare explosive runes today -- I mean, Glyph of Warding :P Looking forward to level 5 now XD

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Yeah I did try it. Big fan of Superior Brilliance click. I have the range to hit especially if I had Elf sight which I don't. Nice for long range.

However, my returning throwing axe does almost the same damage for no sp cost if you don't dump STR. STR wands help.

Mid range crowd control and melee or a throwing weapon is a better SP combo for the party as a whole. And remember it is not just your melee. The group will not plow through mobs with you using light spells instead of crowd control.

Now what really concerns me on the forums is that you do not need to roll up a "Melee Cleric" to melee. Just don't dump STR. You have armor and Divine Power and Divine Favor. It is the only way to boost STR besides items. As for CHR there are lots of ways to boost turn undeads with enhancements and items. I would say that STR is more important than CHR, but that is IMHO. The loss of 1 or 2 turns can be mitigated in a build easily. Using scrolls and wands in between spell cool downs is not used enough by divines at low to mid lvl.

Why limit yourself to do only 2 when you can do all 3 to some degree at such a minor loss to the other 2. I will say that IMHO Casting and Healing is more powerful, but don't dump melee. It helps even at lvl 20 in 6 man parties more so than raids.

Now as for the Glyph that looks interesting.