D&D 5E Best Blaster Cantrip

Rub said:

While I think Vicious Mockery has the best buff, the damage is a little disappointing.

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I think you have it backwards. Except for classes that buff their cantrips, all cantrip damage will be disappointing compared to DPR focused characters.

So you can either do a small bit more damage that 95% of the time won't kill the creature quicker when you also consider the other character's damage, or you can add a debuff to the foe that can reduce healing resources and occasionally even keep someone up and in the fight.

Think of it like this - if you do 50 or 99 points of damage, it's still two actions to drop someone with 100 HPs. So in a vacuum with nothing else happening they are equally effective. Damage alludes to this, but the real metric to compare is "how many actions do they get until they drop".

The extended bit of this is that if the rest of your party (say at 6th) is putting out 90 HPs of damage, the difference between 2d10 (9) or 2d4 (5) is 4 points, less than 5% of total damage per round. If that's not the threshold to kill them (at any point, including in later rounds) sooner then the lower damaging cantrip, it's not making a difference. But that debuff has a chance of making a difference every round.

In other words, if you are trying to contribute meaningful amounts of damage, a cantrip without support is not the way to go about it so you might as well go for some other bonus from it.

Grue AC said:

Have you looked at Frostbite? It's Vicious Mockery for someone wanting more damage than utility.

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I like Frostbite, but I put it a little under Vicious Mockery. It averages 1 point more per die (so 4 HPs at 17th), but cold is more often resisted or immunited (immunized? have immunity to.). Also the debuff is most effective against the foe with the most dangerous attack rolls, and if that's a weapon attack then CON saves are a lot likely to be higher and/or proficient then WIS saves.

But it's still good, especially if you have a feature or feat that boosts cold which is more likely than psychic.