I admit I may be a bit intolerant in the potential imbalance in any changes the game has made from the original rules. Disintegrate is one of them that has been bothering me a lot recently.
When you're hit by a disintegrate ray, you're allowed a save. According to the original rules:
"A creature or object that makes a successful Fortitude save is partially affected, taking only 5d6 points of damage."
However, in DDO, you take 5d6 less damage from the total damage. In this case, when a 15HD beholder hits you with a disintegrate, you take 30d6 damage on a failed save, and 25d6 damage on a success. No real difference, yes? My paladin has +18 fortitude on level 10, which is quite awesome to tell you the truth. It can probably pk one or two beholders with a luck not so bad in a PnP game. However, he just can't stand against two attacks in the game, whether he makes the saves or not.
That's not a big problem, I mean, a beholder from the PnP game is CR13, but if you want its attacks to be fearsome, you can raise its CR to 20. I'm totally fine with that. A CR20 monster should be like that. But if you use disintegrate in this wrong way, and still insist that the beholder's CR is like 14, then it just doesn't make sense. Such a beholder is not for a level 10 or level 14 group to challenge, they're for level 20. Heck, do you ever put six CR20 monsters in a level 10 dungeon?
I see many mistakes made in this game due to misinterpret of the rules. I'm glad that web and glitterdust are never subject to spell resistance, not like what they were two years ago. That's very good. But I believe there're far more things that the designers need to take care to get rid of the imbalance in the game.
Comments are welcome. Thanks for reading.