Best 1st level combat spell for 1st level caster?

[Korak]

Ignoring PW:blind, I'll put in my vote for Color Spray.

 

[Archade]

True strike. It's ALWAYS useful. Personally, I like casting true strike on myself and lobbing great-swords at the baddies.

Really?? Our group almost never uses true strike, unless it's of the quickened variety.

 

[Ceska]

I vote for sleep, too.

 

[pallandrome]

Really?? Our group almost never uses true strike, unless it's of the quickened variety.

I find it incredibly useful for power attacking melee characters, and for attacking targets at stupidly long ranges. Nothing is quite as scary as watching a cackling wizard peg someone at 50 ft with a two-handed weapon. Being menaced by a fighter? Cast True Strike and then disarm his ass. True strike is good clean fun.

 

[Sejs]

Color Spray, Ray of Enfeeblement, Grease, Obscuring Mist, Benign Transposition.

If you want to deal damage, use a crossbow.

 

[mvincent]

My own preference is casting Enlarge on an allied spiked chain wielder (preferably with combat reflexes).

 

[jasin]

We tend to play a lot of lower-level games. I was wondering what people felt were the very best 1st level spells for 1st level casters intent on harming the baddies.

My overall choice would be color spray.

Grease is an excellent 1st-level spell overally, but not so much for a 1st-level caster.

Sleep is good, but it's very easy to hit the HD cap, even in the context of a low level game.

Fist of stone is very good if melee is your thing and/or you have a decent Str to begin with, but that's true only of a fraction of arcanists.

But color spray... it's only weakness is the realtively short range. Otherwise, it can take out outright multiple low-level enemies, or seriously hinder enemies of any level (assuming they fail the save).

BTW, does anybody think it's weird that color spray goes from unconscious to blinded to stunned... but stunned is a worse condition than blinded? Lose Dex, +2 to be attacked, drop everything, can't do anything vs. lose Dex, +2 to be attacked, suffer 50% miss chance. If the color spray result is "blinded and stunned for 1d4 rounds, then stunned for 1 round" it's near enough the same as "stunned for 1d4+1 rounds".

Oh, entangle is also a good one for non-wizards, if you have something (ranged attacks) to back it up with.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Color Spray is pretty great. It can take out a whole bunch of enemies in one shot.

 

[brehobit]

You mean Hail of Stone - and I believe it's better than magic missile. It's got a 5-foot burst, so you can catch more than one target, it does 1d4 per level of the caster (to a maxmimum of 5d4), so it scales up nicely until you can cast fireball or the like, and it doesn't require a hit roll or allow spell resistance. The downside is the expensive material component (chips of jade or something like that). I think it's also printed in the Spell Compendium.

Also, as I recall, it has a full-round casting time...

Mark

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Color Spray or maybe sleep.