Contagion

[Egon the Monkey]

Scotty's idea on modifying spells made me think about this spell.
Basically... It's useless. I've even derided it IC in Ahmed's book :D.
Compare to Poison or Enervation from the same school.

Poison:
2d6 total STR damage on failed saves.

Enervation:
-1d4 char levels, unremovable except by Restoration, which you can't have as an "instant counter" item, AND it has range "short" not "Touch".

Contagion:
Touch them. They get a disease. This has no effect throughout the entire battle. Afterwards, either you've beat them, or they chug a health potion (PC) or have a minor inconvenience 10 minutes later (Monster)

Could this be altered to have an additional effect that might actually be worth using? A random poison, Str and con drain on apply, anything?
Currently the only possible use for it is "A Talonan wanting to slap random things with plagues". We have a lot of modded spells, but this one seems to have been missed.

[Efu_Executioner]

Poison is transmutation, son.

[PanamaLane]

I've seen contagion -wreck- monsters. Its a really useful spell when applied correctly. And if you get a little lucky.

You can't really compare it to Poison or Enervation, they are both higher lvl spells for a cleric. If you're a druid, then yeah, use poison.

[Efu_Executioner]

The highest DC contagion can give you is DC 16, due to the constant DC of the diseases it offers. Lowest is 12.

[Egon the Monkey]

Really? How? You have a 5 minute wait before you get any result. Sure you're not mixing it up with Infestation of Maggots (which is deadly)?

Also, it's a L4 Wizard/Sorc spell, I was noticing it off a Wizard spell list. That's why I compared it to Enervation. Poison just happens to be a l4 spell off another class.

[ScottyB]

BioWare diseases on EFUA are a joke, since it takes a number of game hours before it starts to do anything, and game hours here are over 20 minutes.

[Semli]

Dunno how much you can toy with the effect, but I do recall the custom disease I saw in EfU in the past (the one I encountered halved my move speed without even an action on the part of the aggressors, badass).  While I don't recommend that as it wouldn't be balanced compared to Slow, couldn't you implement a disease that did stat damage immediately assuming one failed the save?

[Caddies]

This spell is absolutely terrible and any improvements made to it would be awesome.