Time Ravage: Getting Old Sucks
Usable By: Wizard
Spell Level: 9
School: Necromancy (dunamancy:chronurgy)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 90 feet
Duration: Instantaneous
Components: V, S, M (an hourglass filled with diamond dust worth at least 5,000 gp, which the spell consumes)
You target a creature you can see within range, putting its physical form through the devastation of rapid aging. The target must make a Constitution saving throw, taking 10d12 necrotic damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. If the save fails, the target also ages to the point where it has only 30 days left before it dies of old age. In this aged state, the target has disadvantage on attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws, and its walking speed is halved. Only the Wish spell or the Greater Restoration spell cast with a 9th-level spell slot can end these effects and restore the target to its previous age.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
If you remove all the fluff, Time Ravage is a 90 ft. range single target Con save or take 10d12 damage and disadvantage on everything. The spell design guidelines presented in the DMG put the damage a single target 9th level spell should be doing at 16d12. When all you’re getting is a narrative death down the road, you have to wonder: how much power is flavor worth?
I think that answer is going to vary person to person, but to me, it’s not enough here. Time Ravage feels like a 5,000 gold way to eat a legendary resistance, or try to execute a massive hit point creature, and there are more efficient ways to do that. Disadvantage on everything may sound amazing, but it ends up being uniquely powerful on characters who want to force subsequent saves, or against creatures making lots of attacks. Creatures like dragons with breath weapons will be hurt by it, but not in the ways they’d be hurt by a Meteor Swarm. Not in the ways they’d be ruined by a full duration True Polymorph.
Time Ravage is close to good enough, but the kind of stuff you’ll find its best against is going to end up being lieutenants or narrative villains. By this tier of play, you have way more efficient ways to kill people, granted this can get around Resurrection effects by killing with old age. Waiting thirty days to kill somebody when you have access to a spell that can literally cause the apocalypse seems underwhelming.
Rapidly aging a creature as a form of damage is cool, but with how low the damage numbers are here compared to where they could be, and the effects being middlingly powerful (especially in groups that are often imposing disadvantages anyway), I think Time Ravage lands somewhere in the middle of the road as far as 9th level spells are concerned. This isn’t nearly as terrible as something like Power Word: Kill, but it isn’t going to snap any semblance of encounter balance in half like Wish or Meteor Swarm. It's fine, but fine isn’t really good enough to justify a home on a level 17 wizard’s character sheet.
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