Blood Mage: Blood Pulse

[MarauderX]

With the Blood Mage paragon path the encounter power, Blood Pulse, has an effect "until the end of your next turn the target takes 1d6 damage for every square it leaves." Is that a separate 1d6 for each square, or does the movement happen as one action, i.e. moves five squares. It makes a difference because of bonus damage. If it is separate, it's (1d6+bonus)*x squares, while if it's one move, thats xd6 + bonus.

 

[keterys]

The latter is the safer interpretation. The entire power is (still) in need of errata, unfortunately.

 

[MarauderX]

This question isn't specifically in the FAQ. I would ask WotC directly via email, but it seems the site refuses to work properly no matter if I use Chrome or IE8.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I seem to recall a discussion of this on the WotC Q&A board a long while back and the gist of it IIRC was it pretty much HAS to be xd6+bonuses or else there are all sorts of absurd cheese that can be cooked up. I was vaguely thinking that there had actually been an errata on it, but there definitely has not been. I must have been remembering that discussion. In any case the DM is certainly justified in running it that way by RAW and well advised to do so!

 

[Camelot]

I would say that each 1d6 is a seperate roll, so if the target leaves 1 square, roll 1d6; if it leaves 5 squares by moving 5, roll 5d6 and deal that much damage, rather than (1d6)*5.

I've never seen any power where a damage roll is multiplied, so I don't see why this would be an exception.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would say that each 1d6 is a seperate roll, so if the target leaves 1 square, roll 1d6; if it leaves 5 squares by moving 5, roll 5d6 and deal that much damage, rather than (1d6)*5.

I've never seen any power where a damage roll is multiplied, so I don't see why this would be an exception.

The actual question revolves around whether or not it is a SINGLE attack, not how to calculate the damage. Some people have tried to interpret Blood Pulse as triggering a single 1d6+bonus attack for each square moved. This would mean if you pushed a target 4 squares it would be attacked 4 separate times, yielding damage of 4d6 + bonus*4, which is huge considering the kinds of static damage bonuses paragon/epic characters can get. Obviously its broken that way as its pretty trivial with that interpretation to be able to do several THOUSAND damage in a round by 30th level (and pretty easy to recharge BP for multiple shots to boot).

 

[keterys]

We do know that someone at WotC answered that he'd run it as not getting damage bonuses at all, so that the problem wouldn't come up, but as a RAW argument it falls flat. Sadly it's been a year since WotC stated that - the FAQ updated to include the information about adding the blood damage to every single damage roll, but left off anything about Blood Pulse.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree there is no real way by RAW it could get no bonuses at all, but considering each move action to be an attack vs each square of movement seems perfectly well within the written rules and makes the power STRONG but not utterly broken, though there are still some ways to combine it with very large forced movements (such as possible with a grasping javelin/tratnyr). Even so that yields maybe something nasty like a 20d6+bonus situation which is a bit crazy but at least it requires a specific item and another character to make a successful hit and use a daily item power to pull off.

 

[MarauderX]

Even so that yields maybe something nasty like a 20d6+bonus situation which is a bit crazy but at least it requires a specific item and another character to make a successful hit and use a daily item power to pull off.

Or a flying/falling target going 20 squares down. Epic can get that serious, and the important question to answer is whether bonus damage is 20*bonus damage or not, as 20d6 is far less.