Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 6268489" data-attributes="member: 2525">First, who cares what happens at 20th level? Seriously, most campaigns don't ever get that far, and the issue focuses on where most campaigns will experience the issue.  So it's nothing like the 5d8.Second, saying 5d8 with three exclamation marks (and multiple times too) doesn't actually make it more than it is - and what it is, is low damage in this context. 5d8 is about 22.5 damage.  It's only 22.5 damage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!For a 20th level character, this is not particularly meaningful.  Due to bounded accuracy, their attack role is still sometimes failing (for zero damage), and the monster they are attacking has a lot more hit points, and often has a lot more means to be outside the range of that spell (but likely still in the range of a crossbow).  Meanwhile, they have so many spells, which do so much more damage at those levels, that it's even more silly to be putting three exclamation marks next to 22.5 damage for a regular attack spell requiring an attack roll at 20th level.  Bottom line, your 20th level character won't be common, and even when they do come up, they won't be using this spell much anyway.  They're going to wish they had a longer range attack when facing that ancient red dragon.So we're really talking about much lower levels - levels at which the crossbow does around the same damage.  Because ability scores naturally go up but they max out at 20 this way, and because Dex is generally the second best score for a mage, we're talking about +3 to +5 damage for their crossbow (which has a much longer range than the ray of frost).  So that crossbow is doing better damage than the spell at low levels, and continues to roughly keep up through 9th level.  From 10th to 14th level it starts to do about 4-5 points damage more than the crossbow, which just so happens to be the levels where that 4-5 extra damage becomes less meaningful as hit points continued to go up, your other spells continue to do more damage, and your attack rolls are still failing sometimes due to bounded accuracy. And that's also around where most campaigns seem to end, according to survey data.Bottom line, for most campaigns, it's a very marginal difference.  An awful lot of people will want to choose a different cantrip than an attack cantrip, particularly once they start to crunch the numbers and see how little difference it makes relative to the crossbow, and the added range of the crossbow. I am glad you like the attack cantrips and think they do AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! amounts of damage.  But my mages will never be taking any of them, unless they find a scroll of them.  They're not good spells.  I'd much rather have minor illusion, light, read magic,  and mage hand.</blockquote>

Verification