ok, I have a negative energy cleric. We'll pretend he is level 10. this is 5d6 negative energy per round. My question is how Variant channeling works. if I take the "murder" variant it says the following:
Murder: Harm—Creatures gain a bleed effect equal to your channel penalty.
Does this mean I get:
5d6 neg energy plus another 5d6 bleed at the enemies next turn?
or
5d3 neg energy plus 5d3 bleed at the enemies nest turn?
or
Something else?
Thanks
It's 1/2 of 5d6 negative energy (and that means you roll 5d6 and halve it, rounding down, not rolling 5d3 or 2.5d6 or whatever else), and Bleed equal to your "Channel penalty" which at level 10 is 3.
It's 1/2 of 5d6 negative energy (and that means you roll 5d6 and halve it, rounding down, not rolling 5d3 or 2.5d6 or whatever else), and Bleed equal to your "Channel penalty" which at level 10 is 3.
Ok next question would be, What is "channel penalty" and how does that work?
A Channel Penalty is defined in the general rules for variant channeling. It starts at 1 and increases every 5 levels (2 at 5th, 3 at 10th, 4 at 15th, 5 at 20th).
Ahh gotcha, That's kinda horrible then. At level 20 you would do 5d6 +5 bleed instead of 10d6. So max 35(1 rd) vs 60 (instantly). All the targets would have to bleed 6 rounds for it to equal out. That is garbage....
Yes, most (not all--daze is pretty awesome) of the variant channeling is garbage.
Oh, and all non-stacking bleed effects (which is almost all of them) are garbage, too.
Even still, you should not judge by max damage, you should look at average.
Average damage of 5d6 is 17.5. Average damage for 10d6 is 35. It would only require 4 rounds to make that worth it--but well, that's still not going to happen.