10 Year Flaws: Scaling Spell Damage

One of the things I find fascinating about 5e is how deeply embedded some of its design flaws have become.

Take blast spells as an example. It's been obvious for years that they don't do enough damage at higher levels. Why hasn't this been fixed? I have no idea, but let's do it.

If you doubt my perspective, here's a video from Treantmonk that breaks it down.

To solve this problem, I started by comparing the projected damage of spells against the observed hit points of creatures in the Monster Manual. Thanks once more to Paul Hughes over at Blog of Holding for compiling that data.

So, how does spell damage compare to monster hit points? It's not great. It works out well at low levels. If you play D&D only from levels 1 to 7 or so, blast spells are handy tools. They tend to hit as hard as necessary to feel worthwhile.

I used the hit point for a monster that would appear in numbers equal to the party's size to create a typical encounter.

I found that in tier one, a caster's most powerful spell would blast away about 40% of a creature's hit points. That felt right for a single target spell. At higher tiers, things turn sour. That baseline damage drops to 30%. Blast spells grow weaker as you level up. That's a 25% drop in power!

Things are even worse if you rely on upcasting spells to deal damage. Let's take a look at good old magic missile. If I cast it with a higher level slot, how does that look compared to monster hit points?

Terribly! It's not too bad at tier 1, with the spell zapping about 35% of a creature's hit points, if we aim for a CR that puts an equal number of monsters against the party. It's dreadful beyond that, plunging down to 20% or less at higher tiers.

Why is this a problem? As damage spells struggle, it puts more pressure on casters to use control spells that shut down encounters. Owing to its long history of accumulating, rather than refining, content with each new edition, the game is stuffed with spells that essentially deal infinite damage by removing a creature's actions.

The result is an arms race that bloats the game. Creatures gain a thick layer of resistances and immunities to combat conditions. Legendary creatures gain free successful saving throws. The most powerful control spells are often complex, filled with corner cases or special rules that slow down the game but end with the same net result - the target loses its actions.

To be clear, high level control spells are still a problem, but we'll get to those next week. For now, let's focus on getting blast spells up to par.

I think the proportion at tier 1 is a good starting point. If we want to preserve that at higher levels, we need to balance spells so that their baseline damage per slot level is 12. Area of effect spells should do about 70% of that damage.

So what does that mean for something like magic missile? Here's a revised version with better scaling:

Magic Missile

Level 1 Evocation

Casting Time: Action

Range: 120 feet

Components: V, S

Duration: Instantaneous

You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart strikes a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 Force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.

Using a Higher-Level Spell Slot. Each dart gains a +3 bonus to damage for each spell slot level above 1 .

There you go! I went with a flat bonus to damage to keep the die rolling reasonable. This might seem like a huge jump in power, but keep in mind that blast spells are dire at high levels. They are bad to begin with, and spells scaled up with higher level slots are even worse.

Bringing damage into a good place makes it a viable competitor for control spells, which we'll talk about next week.