Talk:Meltdown (3.5e Spell)

Ratings

	Leziad favors this article and rated it 4 of 4!
	Such a fun spell, it a SoD, a damage spell nd battlefield control all in one.

	Undead Knave favors this article and rated it 4 of 4!
	This is awesome.

	Tarkisflux favors this article and rated it 4 of 4!
	A level 9 mass SoD that bathes its survivors in flesh melting acid. What's not to love?

Fluff / Mechanics Disconnect

I don't think the part where this spell turns air into acid as dense as liquid, so that targets within it are taking damage as if they're submerged in it, is a particularly good fit with the duration. Gravity defying floating spherical pools of acid aren't out of line for a 9, but the fluff here isn't with it at all. Here's a few suggestions for you to take or leave:

1. Stick with the spherical acid ball thing, adjust fluff a bit, and make it non-permanent. So acid appears, instantly wipes anything that isn't strong enough to resist, and wears down lots of other stuff. Retains position and shape for duration, and just goes away a while later, leaving chalky white residue like a leaky battery behind. Probably a conjuration spell.
2. Stick with the transmutation angle and the permanence (changing duration to instant so it's not suppressible), but don't go with a sphere of acid. Go with a sphere area of effect where everything solidish is turned into acid and falls down, so you still have a pool of it that most people fall into and proceed as normal, but transmuted air hangs around for a bit so it's not totally useless against flying creatures. Instead it turns into a nastier version of acid fog (scaling damage, maybe half what you have for immersion) that also causes you to be sick... but since there's no oxygen really left in the area you start suffocating as well. The air would dissipate over time but only really apply to flying / water walking creatures anyway. Area might be ok to increase a bit in this setup to account for that. You still get acid swimming holes laying around post casting though.
3. Lastly, you could go with an evocation style setup where you just had an energy field that started breaking down everything in the area a la acid. Creatures that failed the save don't immediately dissolve into goop, but start taking damage and are sickened. The post decay goop could make the area slick per grease or something on top of the damage and sickening even. You don't get to keep large pools of acid afterward, but everything else is largely the same, though you could also have trailing damage after leaving the area if you wanted.

Anyway, my 2cp. Hope there's something useful in there. - Tarkisflux 02:17, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Went with option #2 of those. Do you mind looking again and seeing if it makes more sense now? - TG Cid 16:39, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I do. I did some reorganizing that I think makes it clearer as well as added some dispersion rules from obscuring mist (modified to stick around longer than that one though, you could make it last even longer than that and add in a "1/8th damage in a 50% greater area" line when it's half dispersed if you felt like it). Hope you think the changes worthwhile, or revert them if you don't ;-) - Tarkisflux 20:44, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

SRD Acid Entry

I haven't read the SRD acid entry in years, but ran across it this morning. Immersion in normal acid deals 10d6 damage flat, and exposure to fumes from a pool large enough to dunk a man in is treated as an inhaled poison that deals con damage. While the con damage is going to be easily resisted at this level and can be safely ignored (unless you just wanted to add on a point of con damage per round in the cloud), I think you could use the SRD immersion rules to boost the acid damage from immersion here to the flat rate since it's only an extra die really. Saves a tiny bit of calculation. - Tarkisflux 20:19, 15 February 2011 (UTC)