A Better Spell Damage Guide

Ath-kethin · Dec 4, 2018

I've said it before: I think the best sign that 5e is an incredibly well-designed and balanced system is that people actually whine about how fighters are too powerful compared to wizards.

Yunru · Dec 4, 2018

Ath-kethin said:
I've said it before: I think the best sign that 5e is an incredibly well-designed and balanced system is that people actually whine about how fighters are too powerful compared to wizards.

Apologies, but my initial chart is both too powerful when compared to the Fighter's damage, and an exact(ish) match for how the worthwhile damage spells currently in the game scale.
In other words the current best spells are too powerful by a serious magnitude.

Of course, the guildlines they have currently are half of what they should be.

EDIT: Right, separated out my personal from the vanilla one.

dave2008 · Dec 4, 2018

Yunru said:
Apologies, but my initial chart is both too powerful when compared to the Fighter's damage, and an exact(ish) match for how the worthwhile damage spells currently in the game scale.
In other words the current best spells are too powerful by a serious magnitude.

Obviously worthwhile is subjective, but what spells are you basing this on? I am guess your buffing the damage in some manner as one of your examples, magic missle, does only 38.5 damage as written (1d4+1 x 11) at 9th level, which is a 3rd level spell damage in your table. Also, the most powerful damage spell in the game (Meteor Swarm) only does 140 avg. damage to multiple targets, much less than the 9th level damage of your table. Similarly, the highest damage single target spell (disintegrate) does 105 avg. damage at 9th level, which is between a 6th & 7th level spell on your chart (and about a 1/3 of the damage of your 9th level spells)

IMO, a spell damage table should just respond to the damage as written. Am I missing something?

the Jester · Dec 5, 2018

So you want to make casters even more powerful? Bear in mind that their versatility and ability to do non-combat stuff with magic is a huge advantage already.

Zardnaar · Dec 5, 2018

High damage spellcaster is called a warlock.

Its the other things spellcasters can do or if damage is a thing its a burst (daily slot) or an AOE.

Although I think looking at 18 rounds a day is more useful than 30+ IMHO. 5E combat is easy, 2 or 3 rounds is the norm and I suspect most groups don't go with 6-8 encounters probably more like 4-6 and I have seen less and the WOtC adventures don't follow the 6-8 thing either. Basically its fine as is.

Yunru · Dec 5, 2018

dave2008 said:
Obviously worthwhile is subjective, but what spells are you basing this on? I am guess your buffing the damage in some manner as one of your examples, magic missle, does only 38.5 damage as written (1d4+1 x 11) at 9th level, which is a 3rd level spell damage in your table. Also, the most powerful damage spell in the game (Meteor Swarm) only does 140 avg. damage to multiple targets, much less than the 9th level damage of your table. Similarly, the highest damage single target spell (disintegrate) does 105 avg. damage at 9th level, which is between a 6th & 7th level spell on your chart (and about a 1/3 of the damage of your 9th level spells)

IMO, a spell damage table should just respond to the damage as written. Am I missing something?

At 1st level, a Magic Missile does the equivalent of 3d6 (3d4+3).
At 3rd level, a Fireball does 8d6 to an area, still slightly higher than predicted.
At 4th level, a Sickening Radiance does 8d10, assuming that it lasts two turns, which is slightly more than listed (which makes sense because no half on failure).
At 5th level, Animate Objects does far too much damage even for my chart, Cone of Cold does 8d8, which is slightly less than predicted.

Skipping some for now because of real world obligations;

At 9th level, Meteor Swarm does 60d6 damage, 3.5 behind predicted.

dave2008 · Dec 5, 2018

Yunru said:
At 1st level, a Magic Missile does the equivalent of 3d6 (3d4+3).
At 3rd level, a Fireball does 8d6 to an area, still slightly higher than predicted.
At 4th level, a Sickening Radiance does 8d10, assuming that it lasts two turns, which is slightly more than listed (which makes sense because no half on failure).
At 5th level, Animate Objects does far too much damage even for my chart, Cone of Cold does 8d8, which is slightly less than predicted.

Skipping some for now because of real world obligations;

At 9th level, Meteor Swarm does 60d6 damage, 3.5 behind predicted.

I don't have time at the moment to comment on all of them, but meteor swarm does 40d6 damage (20d6 fire and 20d6 bludgeoning). Not sure where you getting 60d6. It is also intentionally OP (just like fireball at 3rd, both of which I don't like). Fire ball cast at 9th is only 14d6.

EDIT: Ok, you are cherry picking certain spells at each level. I get it now. I now the designers have made certain "signature" spells OP so that may be what your seeing. I don't agree with that design approach and would rather they all followed the DMG guidelines.

Gadget · Dec 5, 2018

I realize that this is just looking at pure damage for spells, and I agree that most damage spells past level three are sub-par for the cost (limited resource, bounded accuracy makes monster HP scale much better, etc.). Heck, some of them at lower levels are very sub-par (Witch Bolt, Vampiric Touch, to name a few). But shouldn't we be looking at other factors spells bring to the table as well? Such as infliction of conditions, debuffs and such that weaken or hinder an opponent beyond HP attrition? In my mind this is where the spell caster should have primacy, if hp damage is lacking (and I kind of agree that it is, except in certain 'overclocked' spells like fireball).

This seems to be where designers have dropped the ball. Witness the numerous necromancy spells that do nothing but a moderate amount of damage for their level--and nothing else. Or the overvaluing of ongoing damage in spells like Acid Arrow, Witch Bolt, Vampiric Touch, Immolation, Enervation and the like. Is this due to the condition tracking fatigue of 4e? I'm all for spell casters not being the kings/queens of pure damage, but many of the spells they get are just that, and the worse for it, imho.

Yunru · Dec 5, 2018

dave2008 said:
I don't have time at the moment to comment on all of them, but meteor swarm does 40d6 damage (20d6 fire and 20d6 bludgeoning). Not sure where you getting 60d6. It is also intentionally OP (just like fireball at 3rd, both of which I don't like). Fire ball cast at 9th is only 14d6.

EDIT: Ok, you are cherry picking certain spells at each level. I get it now. I now the designers have made certain "signature" spells OP so that may be what your seeing. I don't agree with that design approach and would rather they all followed the DMG guidelines.

My thoughts went similar to Gadget. I decided that pure damage spells were seriously underpowered compared to their equivalent non-damage spells. From that I worked out a rough chart (initially just for my game), and from that I noticed that all the damage spells worth taking fitted it exactly. And yes, they're cherry picked because about 90% of damage spells are crap, and it's the non-crap ones that I noticed fit my model.

I actually misread Fireball as 30 dice of each, oops. Somewhere between my vanilla and my 6-attack chart then for Meteor Swarm (since it should be doing ~20d6 by my vanilla chart and ~60d6 by my 6-attack chart).

Edit: Also damage at higher levels would/could increase respectively, so a 9th level fireball would/could do 20d6.

Blue · Dec 5, 2018

Yunru said:
In order, for 1 a large amount of damage can mean a lot of waste damage. For 2 I haven't really considered anything other than the average damage the table's are based off of. I did try doing a more standardised system, but it was an unholy, incomplete beast so I old yeller'd it and decided to eyeball things. 3 relates somewhat to 2, where I decided that range should be a damage-decreasing factor. Either that or increase weapon damage. I seemed to have somewhat addressed 4 in the above, not much more to add.

Now with your revised table ... damage seems too low on the high end. There is definitely a resource rarity that would come into play. The opportunity cost of not casting some other high level spell is large.

Slightly over 100 HPs for a 9th level single target spell is laughable compared to the foes at that level.