Edoras wrote:
Making it so that poison reduced constitution instead of strength would, IMO, make poison practically useless. Strength is a much more debilitating stat to lose points in mid-combat than CON is in the majority of cases, because it reduces damage output and also potentially might make you drop your weapon, recall potion and/or be unable to move because of weight. Losing CON mid-fight certainly has an impact in the temporary hit to your fort save, but unless I'm mistaken even the temporary hit point loss would only affect your maximum, not your current hitpoints, and even then if it affected current HP instead of max it would still be barely noticeable.
Having a look at poison now, it was nerfed to only reduce str by 1 point at some time. You'd be better served to cast chill touch. Plague is literally doing more damage to dex than poison is to str.
Edoras wrote:
In addition, the only way in which a spell that targeted CON or fortitude would be truly scary is if you the hellion was in a group with a sorcerer or someone who had petrification scrolls, and frankly, petrification doesn't need any more buffs. I'd rather that all of the hellion's spell were made to be useful in their own right without inadvertently making petrification more powerful by proxy.
Hellion already has curse which debuffs all saves. Why is a con based poison scary? Hellion already has 2 spells other than poison that can do str damage, weaken and chill touch.
Edoras wrote:
Lowering plague's cast time and making it only spread to the plague person's group would be a meaningful buff to the spell, given that right now it truly is, as has been mentioned, only good pre-combat and to grief people, as there's no legitimate good usage of plague outside of prepping a weapon that doesn't break the rules of the game with regard to newbies.
I'd be all right with plague losing the ability to spread to other players, and to be cast on fountains. Even I'm a little wary about casting plague on fountains. If the dex damage was buffed a little, or stayed the same, doesn't matter if the cast time is lowered so it could be effective in battle, and instead of a once per tick whatever it does now, maybe it could do a move based DoT like poison does to HP right now.