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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7038114" data-attributes="member: 6683613">I think the difficulty "some people" are having imagining that others play D&D differently than they do is already a warning sign that "some people" are standing on shaky ground. "Some people" might want to reconsider a position which assumes their exact playstyle is the correct way to play the game.But since "some people" asked: No caster in our party has burning hands itself. However, the bard has thunderwave, which he most recently used on a big swarm of crawling claws and before that on a giant crayfish thing. And the wizard has magic missile, which he casts at... well, pretty much everything. If "some people" think we're doing it wrong and that spells should be balanced assuming we're only ever going cast fireballs and firebolts with nothing in between... well, that's "some people's" problem, not ours.Why do you assume that a 9th-level spell slot is a constant unit of magical energy? D&D magic doesn't run on energy that way; if it did, we'd be using mana or spell points, not slots. And how on earth is burning hands supposed to be "confining" its energy? It's not confining anything; it's spraying it everywhere! Surely if you call up a fire as hot as you say, it's going to spray farther than 15 feet. So that makes two pieces of evidence that a 9th-level spell slot is not intended to be a constant unit of magical energy: burning hands does not deal as much damage as meteor swarm, and consistent with that lesser damage, it does not spread as far. If you like, you can think of it in terms of performance optimization: a meteor swarm spell is optimized for a 9th-level slot, so it's getting the most out of it, whereas a burning hands spell is optimized for a 1st-level slot, so there's a massive amount of waste at higher levels. It's like trying to drive 60 mph in first gear. Now, perhaps a wizard could do some research to optimize the burning hands effect for 9th level, creating a new meteor spray spell that did 40d6 damage and probably also a larger area of effect. But he wouldn't be able to cast this new spell in lower-level slots. That's the price of efficiency.</blockquote>

Verification