Blast of Flame is lower level than Cone of Cold, and other than capping out earlier (10d6 rather than 15), is better in that it ignores SR!
Cone of Cold is already at best a mediocre spell, at worst underpowered with little reason to take it aside that in core its the first real cold spell, and the only 5th level damage spell. But if you can take Blast of Flame as a 4th level spell theres even less reason to bother.
What reason is there for it being a conjuration though?
Because the designers have made another poor decision.
My guess is, they decided there needed to be more attack spells that bypass SR (which I dont mind at all) and that there needed to have some non-evocation deccent damage spells (which isnt inherently bad neccesarily, although its funny since in 3.5 they made such an effort to "balance" the schools by giving each one tight niches, including making just about every deccent-damage-up-front spell Evocation, but which they are going back on now). And instead of trying to do those things in a way that maintains consistency and in-game logic they just...do it.
and cold can be done by creating ice
The spell doesnt say anything about ice tho. In fact I cant think of very many ice spells.
A Conjuration that created ice and did some damage in the process would be fine, but it shoould be offensively inferior to similiar evocations.
Fire, well, a lump of white phosphorus will do for that
Eh...again, the spell says nothing about phosphorus. Its creating fire out of nothing which in Dnd is Evocation's thing. Once again, a spell that say conjured a ball of phosphrus that did minor damage on impact and some continuing fire damage would be fine as a Conjuration, but simply creating an orb of sourceless fire that does at the cap direct damage is an Evocation thing.
FORCE?! These are somehow conjurations, when Force has ALWAYS been an evocation effect, that's why Wall of Force is an Evocation, not an Abjuration.
Well, Mage Armor is a Conjuration. And there are many force Abjurations. And I think WOTC is (annoyingly) moving more and more towards Force as being a very physical designation, for some reason. I'd rather Force were just untyped, no strings attached magical energy.
From a general-logic standpoint, I could see many Force spells as Conjurations. Truthfully, from a logical and general-fantasy perspective, Evocation never really should have existed as such, since everything it does can fall well within the idea of Conjuration (and the rest go to Transmutation).
However, there is basis for it, it does work, and DnD had a pretty good paradigm going for Evocation/Conjuration (although theres always been spells in each that should've probably be switched, and they really could do more with Evocation to make it more distinct). I just dont get why *now* they decide to start putting it all under Conjuration which makes Evocation redundant and from a characters perspective, wrecks the whole logic of the schools of magic.
