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10 Year Flaws: Scaling Spell Damage
🕑 Added 2025-09-04 17:32:29 +0000 UTCOne 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.
Comments
Douglas Terbush
For blast spells why not increase the hit die at certain spell levels cast If a blast spell does 6d8 at level three spell slot then at level four spell slot it changes to 6d12 and then level five spell slot its 6d20. Less slots available to casters, increase the damage die for each slot. So say you have a party of four level 12's who get predated upon by a herd of 5 ascomoids. That is a hard encounter. The mage could cast a level four cast and do 6D12 or up to 72 vs the old way of 7d8 and up to 56 points. The damage doesn't go up exponentially but noticeable enough to be a wow. Bringing out the D12's or then the D20's opens up the eyes. A level four cast would cut the Ascomoids hp's by a 1/3rd and a level five cast would cut their hit points by 2/3rds. You could set up a mechanic when you max the damage to D20, now you get spell penetrance activated. You could also set a cap for the type of die for a level 1 spell, maybe you start at D6 and it caps at D10 and then its spell penetrance afterwards.
Lorenzo A. Ricciardi
Swinginess of 5e combat is definitely something to address. Average DPR can be very misleading, and some 5e monsters design is simply stupid: averaging "offense" and "defense" may lead to glass cannons with excellent TPK chances or overly tanky monsters for a total slugfest.
Olivier Grégoire
I feel like you're analyzing in a white room and totally missing the point of a group comboing at higher levels. Characters at level 15-20 all attacking with advantage and the vulnerable damage type, various buffs or debuffs that are passively applied, and such things. To me, higher hit points in the way you describe it is *not* an issue. For most of the combats I had at higher levels, the monster was at 100% hit points for 1-2 rounds because we had to mitigate his protections or apply buffs, then in 1-2 rounds the monster was down. The power level of blast spells is really okay.
Lorenzo A. Ricciardi
To me this seems the right solution to the wrong problem. I agree that the scaling in 5e is terrible (most spells' design is terrible IMO), but we need to keep in mind that spellcasters have an ever growing amount of spell slots. If a spell slot of a given level is designed to deal up to 12dmg per spell slot, high level characters won't have enough high level slots to deal the "required" amount of damage on a typical adventuring day and the given action economy. More than buffing the damage per spell slot, to me it seems more reasonable for spellcasters to be able to cast multiple low level damage dealing spells per round. Same effect, different mean.
