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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ancalagon" data-source="post: 9267529" data-attributes="member: 23">In my not immodest experience with blasters, both as a player or GM, my feelings on first level damage spells and ice knife in particular are:On ice-knife:  I've had a player friendly fire the fighter with this, not having read the spell properly.  (I am not sure to this day if allowing this to happen was a good or bad call as a GM).  More in general, what I've found is that the increased single target damage (2d6+1d10) is not worth the "weakening" of the AOE portion of the spell to only 2d6 with no special effect, unlike burning hand (more damage) or thunderwave (forced movement).In general:  I've found that level 1-2 AOE damage is rarely worth using past the levels you get it at, and this is particularly true of level 1 damage spells at tier 2 and above.  Why use a precious level 1 slot for damage, when you could be using a cantrip that does almost as much damage?  And if a group of foes are clustered together, are you, a level 7 mage, going to waste this precious opportunity to iceknife them?!? No!  You're going to trap them in an Evard's Black Tentacle spells, or blast them with fireball, or at least muck them up with a web spell. I think that's the issue here - it's not worth the slot (because those level 1 slots have a lot of utility/defensive potential), it's not worth the opportunity to hit a cluster of enemies, and at a certain point, the damage is not worth it - if you ice-knife a pair or trio of ogres... are you really helping?  They have so much hp, all you are doing is making them mad.</blockquote>

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