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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samurai" data-source="post: 6350352" data-attributes="member: 3850">I think it's fine within limits.  If you up both the hitting and damage by several CRs without increasing anything else, you have glass cannons that die very easily if they lose initiative, or kill the whole party if they win initiative.  Let's take an extreme example... a tribe of ordinary goblins, but each can cast Meteor Swarm 1/day.  If the PCs win initiative, the goblins are dead, and the PCs likely have no idea why "ordinary goblins" were worth so much XP.  If the goblins win initiative, it's a TPK, and it doesn't matter if they only had 8 HPs or so, because the party just got hit for 20d6+20d6 x number of goblins in damage.So, I think we can all agree that meteor swarming goblins are unbalanced, so then the question is where do you draw the line?  For me, I don't like 1-shotting a PC, where they go from fully healed to totally dead in 1 shot.  That's a danger the first couple levels, but as DM I'll try to fudge things or use average damage to make sure a 1-shot doesn't happen.  If you have given a CR-appropriate creature enough power to 1-shot a PC, it's crossed the line IMO.  And on the flip side, the rest of its abilities mean it won't be much of a challenge for the rest of the party after 1 of them dies, which means it is very frighting on round 1 and not much of a threat at all after that.My suggestion:  Don't skip a spell level, get rid of FoD in exchange for a 4th level spell.  I think Blight is a good choice, it is a single target necromantic spell like FoD that does more level-appropriate damage.</blockquote>

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