Magic Missile vs. Other Spells

[ro]

Magic Missile hits with its 1d4+1 damage (3.5 average) every time (except against Shield). How does this compare with other spells like Blight, Disintegrate, Scorching Ray, and Vitriolic Sphere that do high average damage but with attacks or saves to overcome?

Along the same lines, how likely is it for such spells to do damage against enemies a character is expected to face from level to level? Presumably as PC level increases, so does enemy CR. Is it easier to target AC or Dex or Wis or Con saves during certain tiers of play?

 

[mellored]

MM is very good at level 1, not bad at level 2, but, like all damage spells, falls to scale well.

MM at level 3 does 5d6 damage (effectively). Fireball does 8d6, or 4d6 if they succeed, to each creature in the area. And a fighter can do 6d6 with his action surge.
MM at level 7 does 9d6 (effectively). Finger of death does 18d6, or 9d6 (effectively) if they succeed, plus gives you a zombie. And a fighter can do 9d6 with his action surge.

The hit/failed save rate is 50-70%, depending.


Overall, caster's shouldn't be casting many damage spells, except for the occasional AoE against a group. Generally, weapon users do damage, casters have utility.
Warlocks and monks are somewhere in between.

 

[bid]

Magic Missile hits with its 1d4+1 damage (3.5 average) every time (except against Shield). How does this compare with other spells like Blight, Disintegrate, Scorching Ray, and Vitriolic Sphere that do high average damage but with attacks or saves to overcome?

Empowered evocation.

MM uses the same damage roll for all darts, an high level evocation wizard would do 1d4+6 per dart.

 

[paulclarksaintjohn]

Sorcerers can change the equation. A sorcerer can use quicken spell to cast the attack spell as a bonus action and cast True Strike as a cantrip. True strike gives you advantage on your attack roll on your next turn so its a two turn attack. You can set up a continuous attack plan where you quicken attack spells each turn and cast True Strike as your cantrip. After the first round, all of your attacks have advantage until you run out of sorcerer points. Works well for longer battles. You need to concentrate on the "boss" monster or the monsters with higher hit points. With True Strike, you select your target the turn before you attack. You loose the attack advantage if another player kills the monster you targeted. If its the boss, or the 200 hit point bad guy, that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can switch to an area attack spell if this happens.

 

[Blue]

Sorcerers can change the equation. A sorcerer can use quicken spell to cast the attack spell as a bonus action and cast True Strike as a cantrip. True strike gives you advantage on your attack roll on your next turn so its a two turn attack. You can set up a continuous attack plan where you quicken attack spells each turn and cast True Strike as your cantrip. After the first round, all of your attacks have advantage until you run out of sorcerer points. Works well for longer battles.

Actually, True strike only gives advantage on your next attack roll, so it's not "all of your attacks have advantage". Also it takes 2 SP each time, so you can do it for max lvl/2 rounds in a row before you need to start sacking slots for more SP.

And, as a concentration spell, True Strike precludes you from having any other concentration spell up which is a fairly large hit to what you can do for your party, especially consider the opportunity cost may be a twinned Haste or other twinned buff.

It's a fine thing to do as a signature move for a particular sorcerer, but I wouldn't consider it general advice.

 

[paulclarksaintjohn]

If you are using the True Strike/ damage spell technique, all of your attacks have advantage. Each turn you cast True Strike as your action spell and the quickened spell as the bonus spell. The first turn the quickened spell does not have advantage. Starting with your second turn, you cast True Strike to give you advantage on your next turn and your quickened Spell has advantage on its attack. I agree that its a special circumstance but it is a consideration when you are looking at magic missile vs other spells. True Strike basically sucks as a spell. Most times you could use True Strike, you can just attack twice which is always better. The sorcerer using Quicken spell is about the only time I think it is worth using as a spell. The only other time would be if you had a high level, high damage spell that has an attack roll, you have a buff round, and you do not have another spell slot to cast the spell. I have never taken it as a spell but I am thinking of creating a chromatic orb sorcerer for a short game to see how well it works. I want to see if the flexibility of being able to change the damage type on the fly is worth the lower overall damage output.

 

[mellored]

The only other time would be if you had a high level, high damage spell that has an attack roll

There aren't any.

Scorching ray is the only real attack spell, and that scales with extra attacks, not a single roll.
The only other one that is really helped is Contagion, but that has other issues.

 

[balzebub]

Magic Missile in my opinion just doesn't scale well. Decent at low levels but it's always better to throw a higher level attack spell than a magic Missile using a higher level slot. Hence beyond the first few levels, my wizard never uses it.

Sent from my MI 6 using Tapatalk

 

[Cognomen's Cassowary]

Magic Missile hits with its 1d4+1 damage (3.5 average) every time (except against Shield). How does this compare with other spells like Blight, Disintegrate, Scorching Ray, and Vitriolic Sphere that do high average damage but with attacks or saves to overcome?

With the chance for a miss or a made save, as well as the relative resistances of damage types, factored in, magic missile is reasonably good through the first three spell levels. If your group plays magic missile with a single roll and each dart doing the same damage, it also benefits disproportionately from things that increase damage, such as evocation wizard's empowered evocation and wild-magic sorcerer's spell bombardment. On the other hand, enhancements for other spells--features and conditions that grant advantage to you or disadvantage to your targets--are more common. Thus, magic missile's value depends to some extent on class features, party composition, and setting and situation.

Generally, it is about even with scorching ray at second and third spell levels, after which scorching ray begins to pull away. At third spell level, lightning bolt can frequently serve as a single-target spell that does more damage than either of them. At fourth level, both vitriolic sphere and blight (weaker, but actually single target) will average more damage against a single target than any of the scaled-up earlier spells. There is, however, a big wrinkle with scorching ray: if you have a way to get repeated advantage, as by inflicting the restrained condition or casting greater invisibility on yourself, scorching ray will do the highest damage against a single target right up until disintegrate comes online. There is nothing much to compete with disintegrate, except for meteor swarm, which blasts everything else out of the water.

Along the same lines, how likely is it for such spells to do damage against enemies a character is expected to face from level to level? Presumably as PC level increases, so does enemy CR. Is it easier to target AC or Dex or Wis or Con saves during certain tiers of play?

I delved into this a bit for my wild-magic sorcerer guide. The "generalized percentage" I make reference to is in comparison to a 60% overall chance to deal full damage with a spell. For example, the enemy will fail a strength save 56.28% of the time, if a random spell targeting any of the saves or AC would deal full damage 60% of the time. Generally. Basically, higher percentages are better from your perspective.

Str starts high, rises steadily, and finishes high. However, proficiency in Str saves is only common at a couple of very high CRs. Str's generalized percentage is 56.28%.
Dex starts high, slowly declines, and finishes low. Proficiency in Dex saves becomes common around CR 10. Generalized 66.54%.
Con starts high, rises steadily, and finishes high. In addition, proficiency in Con saves becomes common around CR 9. Generalized 47.01%.
Int starts low, rises slowly, and finishes low. Proficiency in Int saves is only common at five CRs with 12 being the lowest. Generalized 71.02%.
Wis starts moderate, rises slowly, and finishes low. However, Wis saves are common or semi-common at every CR from 8 upward. Generalized 57.06%.
Cha starts low, rises steadily, and finishes moderate. Cha saves are common at every CR from 9 upward. Generalized 54.47%.
AC starts high, rises slowly, and finishes moderate. However, there is no such thing as proficiency in AC. Generalized 67.62%, which I raise to 72.62% when generalizing a spell's damage, because of the chance to crit.

Taking that all together, considering the entire CR spectrum, the preference for targeting should be AC (72.62%), Int (71.02%), Dex (66.54%), Wis (57.06%), Str (56.28%), Cha (54.47%), and finally Con (47.01%).

To break it down into tighter groupings, moving from best attribute to target to worst . . .
At CRs lower than 1, target AC, Int, Cha, Str, Wis, Con, and Dex.
At CRs 1-4, target AC, Int, Cha, Wis, Dex, Con, and Str.
At CRs 5-8, target Int, AC, Cha, Wis, Dex, Con, and Str.
At CRs 9-12, target AC, Dex, Int, Str, Con, Wis, and Cha.
At CRs 13-16, target Dex, Int, AC, Str, Wis, Cha, and Con.
At CRs 17-20, target AC, Dex, Int, Str, Wis, and then Con and Cha in a tie.
At CRs 21-24, target AC, Int, Dex, Wis, Str, Cha, and Con.
Against a tarrasque, if running away isn't an option, target Dex; Int; Wis and Cha tied; Str and Con tied, and AC sort of tied with them. (The tarrasque is unaffected by all ranged spell attacks and has a chance to reflect them back at the caster, so don't even try. It also has advantage on saving throws against spells, legendary resistance, and resistance to nonmagical weapons, among other things, so there aren't really a lot of ways that fighting it doesn't look like suicide.)

I hope that helps you answer some of your questions.