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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Banshee16" data-source="post: 5798034" data-attributes="member: 7883">Stop putting words in my mouth.  Pre 3e, fireballs, lightning bolts, etc were staples of every mage and useful even at very high levels.  Capping them at 5d6 will make them tools of the vermin exterminator, nothing else.</blockquote>Exactly.  This is part of my concern.  Fundamentally, those who loved 4E are looking for something different in D&D than those who didn't care for the new edition, I think.  I'm not sure how WotC will reconcile the two positions.Fireball *was* designed as a deadly spell.  In 1E there was no damage cap...or it was 25d6 or something like that.  As such, it was exceedingly deadly.In 2nd Ed. it was capped at 10d6......but hp dramatically slowed in advancement at lvl 9 or 10, and during the "name levels" characters would gain a max of between 1 and 3 hp, depending on class.  So the spell didn't do as much as in 1E.....but it wasn't just for vermin killing.  And the lower max hp meant it could still be dangerous to a high level character, and in any case, could still sap a decent proportion of a character's total hp.In 3E, hp became massively inflated....and the damage cap remained the same, so in theory the spell became far less able to scale at high levels.And in 4E, yeah, it was for mopping up vermin.So whether or not Fireball was intended to be a powerful spell depends on what edition you're talking about.Banshee[/QUOTE]