New Vorpal Functionality

Verghazrin was kind enough to host a battle royale PK quest last night which was a great testing grounds for the new functionality we gave vorpal.  It generated a fair bit of discussion both last night and this morning, but some of the suggestions or criticisms seem to be rooted in misconceptions on how vorpal weapons now work.  So as to make it unambiguous, here's how everything is laid out:

Class	Recharge	Spell	Relative Damage	Damage Potential
Mage	2	acid blast	10	5.0
Cleric	2	smite	8.3	4.2
Monk	3	lightning bolt	1.3	0.44
Warrior	4	fireball	2.7	0.66
Barbarian	5	N/A	N/A	N/A
Psionicist	2	mind blast	8.3	4.2
Druid	2	natures wrath	7.1	3.6
Ranger	5	lightning bolt	1.3	0.26
Rogue	3	N/A	N/A	N/A
Bard	3	deathsong	7.1	2.4
Wildmage	2	wildfire	4.9	2.5
Warlock	3	ravage	7.1	2.4
Necromancer	2	decay	6.3*	N/A
Templar	3	flamestrike	4.6	1.5

Recharge is the time (rounds of combat) it takes for the vorpal to "recharge."  Once a vorpal weapon is recharged, it will discharge (cast its spell) on the next hit, then recharge again.
Relative Damage is a figure of merit expressing how much damage each class's vorpal spell will do.  The higher this number is, the more damage a single vorpal discharge will do.
Damage Potential is the Relative Damage divided by the recharge time.  It gives you an idea of how much damage a class's vorpal spell will do over time.  Necromancers' Damage Potential is a bit trickier to calculate since their spell does damage over time.

Whenever a vorpal weapon discharges (mind you, "discharge" is a term I just made up now), it casts your class's vorpal spell at the level of the weapon and won't discharge again until the recharge time is up.  However, this recharge time is attached to the character, not the weapon, so a dual-wielding ranger will not get double discharges, and swapping out vorpal weapons very quickly in combat will not let you get a bunch of free spell casts.  Incidentally, a side-effect of these new vorpal spells is that other special weapon properties (chill, flame, shock, poison, and others) are now also limited by each class's recharge time.  This side-effect will be removed soon so that chill/flame/shock/poison/etc work the way they used to.

We are fairly confident in how this new vorpal is working for the time being and we do not consider the feature to be still in the testing stage.  We aren't looking for unsolicited feedback on what classes should get what spells or recharge times or anything like that; however, we will be keeping an eye on how vorpal weapons get used and, if necessary, can tweak things.

With that being said, we are considering tweaking necromancers after last night's quest.  One of the leading suggestions was to make necromancers' vorpal be like judgment but with necro spells instead of maledictions.