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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tessarael" data-source="post: 9803860" data-attributes="member: 12909">If you're in melee, your Scorching Ray ranged spell attacks will be with disadvantage on the attack roll, unless you have the Spell Sniper feat to cast ranged spell attacks in melee without disadvantage.You're talking a 7th level spell slot with Scorching Ray, so that is 7 rays doing 2d6 + the additional damage from Conjure Minor Elementals if you target is within 15'. If you cast Conjure Minor Elementals with a 7th level spell slot as well, that's +5d8 damage per ray. 206.5 damage if they all hit, or 118 damage if say 4 out of 7 hit.Compare that to Disintegrate cast with a 7th level spell slot, which does 13d6+40, 85.5 damage. CME + Scorching Ray is more effective for damage output that Disintegrate, and more reliable for damage too, but it does take two rounds to do it, as Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray need to be cast on separate rounds. Two Disintegrate spells is 171 damage if both hit.This is an issue with damage riders like Conjure Minor Elementals. If you have too few attacks per round (in particular if you only attack once), then their benefit is limited and not worth it. If you have too many attacks per round, then effectively the benefit is multiplicative, as you've got the number of attacks per round scaling with spell slot level for Scorching Ray, and the damage rider increase scaling with spell slot level too.So as a DM, if you gave me a build like that, I would nerf it by saying that either Conjure Minor Elementals doesn't scale with spell slot level above level 4, or that the benefit is limited to at most say 4 attacks. It basically comes back to what is reasonable scaling of damage with character level. Another possible way to limit it is to have Conjure Minor Elementals only proc once per turn on a target, so you could do it to 7 targets, but it would have to be 7 different targets, in which case they're taking 2d6+5d8 (29.5) damage each on average, which is only marginally better than Fireball.I would also be worried about builds where say you use Quicken Metamagic to cast two Eldritch Blast cantrips (grab it with the Spell Sniper feat) in the same round with a high level Conjure Minor Elementals running. At character level 19, with say a Warlock 2/Sorcerer 2/Wizard 15, that's 8 beams, each doing d10+7d8+Charisma modifier with the Agonizing Blast eldritch invocation. Assuming you have Charisma 20 for this, you're doing 336 damage if all attacks hit, no critical. It is a silly build, but again it illustrates the problem with the damage rider on too many attacks.</blockquote>

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