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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eric Finley" data-source="post: 4823974" data-attributes="member: 83401">This is actually an area of ongoing, if intermittent, contention.There are really only two credible interpretations.  Which one seems more valid basically depends on your value system - neither one is unambiguously more "proper" than the other.  (As support for this last point, the number of supporters of each side does appear to reach rough parity, each time it comes up, though the personality types on each side seem to cluster.)Interpretation one: What matters is that the damage is rolled, rather than a nonrandom number.  (I'm avoiding "static" because that's got a specific meaning.)  This tends to be favored by rules literalists, and character optimizers.  Tends to be disfavored by field-levellers and mathy types.  Interpretation one is currently supported by a Customer Service ruling which is slightly less ambiguous than those in support of interpretation two.Interpretation two: What matters is whether the damage is the immediate result of an attack roll, or whether it's due to some other (usually lasting and/or conditional) effect.  Interpretation two is generally supported and opposed by the opposite people from the broad lists above.  Interpretation two is also supported by an interview, I believe at GenCon a while back, with one of the designers (possibly Johnathan Tweet, I don't recall).  I'd have to go back to those argument threads to find the specific sourcing.I am personally of the opinion that interpretation two is the correct one.  This is based on some excellent analysis work both here and over on the WotC forums, where it was demonstrated for a number of powers that the powers which include secondary damage are indisputably stronger than other powers of their class and level, if you include the bonuses... but are essentially comparable if you don't.  (For example, Flaming Sphere breaks even with other powers of its level after the first one or two sustain actions; it's inferior right off the bat, but superior if you keep it up awhile, which is the whole point of it being the sustained one in the bunch.)This goes for several otherwise-very-powerful things like the fighter's Rain of Steel stance; when the rule of thumb is "you didn't have to roll to hit, you don't get the bonus damage" then they tend to come out quite neatly versus the other powers of their class and level.There's also the Invoker's Grasping Shards at-will, which suffers from a huge discontinuity under interpretation 1: at 20th level, it's distinctly unimpressive, because unlike every other available power it has not gained the benefit of damage bonuses (because there is no die roll).  Then at level 21 it has a relatively trivial die roll added, and jumps tremendously due to this ruling.  Whereas if it had added comparable bonuses all along, then the damage die simply adds its value to the power, for a precisely equivalent upgrade to every other At-Will as you hit level 21.The interview basically said that the whole thing should revolve around the phrasing that damage bonuses accrue "when you use" a power.  With the point being that you are only "using" the power during the actual action you used to do so.  Almost always this involves an attack roll.  All of your examples occur outside of the action taken to use the power, and do not involve an attack roll, so they would not (under interpretation II) gain the bonus damage.Note that the sustain:standard on Flaming Sphere does require an attack roll and take an action to perform, so it clearly gains the bonus.  Even powers which roll an attack and "consume" only a free action still occur during the context of an action you are taking; the type of action doesn't matter.Without having seen someone run the stats on it, I would be leaning toward the one in post #3 as well.  But since I am interested in making sure that there are as few "hidden suck" and "hidden super" powers as possible, so that players' decision spaces are maximized, and since I'm equipped to check the math and have done so... I'm sold on interpretation two.</blockquote>

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