D&D General Twin Guiding Bolt vs Ice Knife?

[Horwath]

Also why I usually don't bother upcasting damage spells except a few/situational.

that is the problem, it should be worth it.

 

[FrogReaver]

RAW it seems fine. It only targets 1 target and isnt self.

Not my reading of RAW. IMO it targets the initial creature and every creature within 5 ft of it. Much the same reason chaos bolt cannot be twinned. 5e is written in natural language - looking for keyword 'target' is the wrong way to do things. IMO.

 

[FrogReaver]

Anyways, to answer the OP.

*Without knowing the rest of the spell loadout
Guiding Bolt - because ice knife cannot easily be used when an ally is within 5ft of the enemy you want to target. Simply put there's just more situations guiding bolt will be useful in - and even in situations where they are both useful it takes alot of targets in the small aoe before ice knife is clearly better than guiding bolt.

Now, if you already have 1 good single target 1st level damage spell - magic missile, chromatic orb, etc - then i'd lean much more toward ice knife.

 

[FrogReaver]

One useful rule of thumb for comparing aoe to single target (though not 100% accurate) is to 'discount the aoe damage on targets after the first at 50%'.

So if with ice knife you did 1d10+2d6 to the initial target and 2d6 to a subsequent target then for comparison to single target damage you would count that as 1d10+3d6 = 16 and assuming a 60% hit chance that's 9.6 adjusted DPR. Guiding Bolt would do 14 and grant 1 ally advantage, a decent guess is the ally does about 10 damage per hit. So 24% improvement in accuracy means a +2.4 DPR increase on the 8.4 DPR of the Guiding Bolt = 10.8.

Hitting 3 targets with ice knife would push it's adjusted DPR to 11.7.
Though 1 target for it is abysmal at 7.5 DPR.

 

[Ancalagon]

One thing ice knife has as an AOE over thunderwave or burning hand is range. It still is weak, but there is that.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

One thing ice knife has as an AOE over thunderwave or burning hand is range. It still is weak, but there is that.

Most mages prefer not to find themselves in a position where Thunderwave is an option!

 

[Blue]

Personally I like Guiding Bolt, but it doesn't upcast well. It works better with quicken though - if it hits you can follow up with a quickened fire bolt with advantage.

If you cast a bonus action spell (such as quickened Fire Bolt) you can only (have) cast a cantrip using your action - which means you couldn't have cast Guiding Bolt.

You can reverse it - quicken the 1st level Guiding Bolt, and then cast a Firebolt.