Scotty's idea on modifying spells made me think about this spell.
Basically... It's useless. I've even derided it IC in Ahmed's book :D.
Compare to Poison or Enervation from the same school.
Poison:
2d6 total STR damage on failed saves.
Enervation:
-1d4 char levels, unremovable except by Restoration, which you can't have as an "instant counter" item, AND it has range "short" not "Touch".
Contagion:
Touch them. They get a disease. This has no effect throughout the entire battle. Afterwards, either you've beat them, or they chug a health potion (PC) or have a minor inconvenience 10 minutes later (Monster)
Could this be altered to have an additional effect that might actually be worth using? A random poison, Str and con drain on apply, anything?
Currently the only possible use for it is "A Talonan wanting to slap random things with plagues". We have a lot of modded spells, but this one seems to have been missed.
Poison is transmutation, son.
I've seen contagion -wreck- monsters. Its a really useful spell when applied correctly. And if you get a little lucky.
You can't really compare it to Poison or Enervation, they are both higher lvl spells for a cleric. If you're a druid, then yeah, use poison.
The highest DC contagion can give you is DC 16, due to the constant DC of the diseases it offers. Lowest is 12.
Really? How? You have a 5 minute wait before you get any result. Sure you're not mixing it up with Infestation of Maggots (which is deadly)?
Also, it's a L4 Wizard/Sorc spell, I was noticing it off a Wizard spell list. That's why I compared it to Enervation. Poison just happens to be a l4 spell off another class.
BioWare diseases on EFUA are a joke, since it takes a number of game hours before it starts to do anything, and game hours here are over 20 minutes.
Dunno how much you can toy with the effect, but I do recall the custom disease I saw in EfU in the past (the one I encountered halved my move speed without even an action on the part of the aggressors, badass). While I don't recommend that as it wouldn't be balanced compared to Slow, couldn't you implement a disease that did stat damage immediately assuming one failed the save?
This spell is absolutely terrible and any improvements made to it would be awesome.