Spell Redesign: Hail of Thorns — Ash of Creativity

Back in the day, we thought casting this spell would apply it to a single piece of ammunition. If you missed with that one, too bad! The spell’s wasted. We were new to the game back then, and a little less careful about reading the rules. Casting the magic on the ammunition seemed pretty natural! While harsh, our lax readings of this spell also yielded some benefits. For instance, we didn’t notice it was a concentration spell, because why would we assume a spell which had an instantaneous effect upon meetings its condition forced you to concentrate on it?

Poorly-Aged Math

You never seem to know whether a trpg’s math has gone the way of wine or milk until you uncork the phb and take a swig. This bottle’s from 2014, and it already smells like rotten eggs. Hail of thorns initially looks like a good spell, and frankly, that’s because it is (when you first get it). It deals an extra d10 of piercing damage, it gets added to a ranged weapon attack, and you get to cast it as a bonus action. Oh, and it explodes on critters within 5 feet of the target. It feels like the ranger gets a whole bunch of ways to layer damage and effects, perfectly tuned to their present circumstances. Once you go up a level or two, things start to change; hunter’s mark pops off on every successful attack against the selected enemy, whereas you could miss several times before getting hail of thorns to finally pop off. Getting the damage to explode is nice, but all affected are offered a Dex save to avoid half the damage. Single digit damage values are still effective at 2nd and 3rd level, and attaching them to a ranged weapon attack will see you downing enemies in far fewer strikes. Besides, the enemies don’t have bonuses high enough to make the saves except by luck (basically flipping a coin, but it’s weighted in your favor).

Once you get to 4th level or so, the enemies stop falling so easily, and the spell is roughly as effective when the enemy fails their save as when they succeed; an extra 4-8 damage just isn’t as important at those levels. Understand though, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can rebuild this spell; we have the technology.

Rangers don’t get many spells to begin with, but they also don’t have a massive list to pick from to begin with. Because they have a spell which already works for all combats, including a few niche spells which can outperform it in niche ways isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Hell, this is the one advantage of making hunter’s mark a spell (bad, dumb) over a class feature (good, obvious choice). The rest of your choices are just which circumstantial improvements over hunter’s mark you want (you could do this with hunter’s mark as a class feature too, just forget you read any of this).

So let’s go back over the problems:

Damage which is good for the level the ranger gets this (2nd level) becomes tedious by the time they can scale it (5th level). In other words, single digit values.
The range doesn’t scale. This was a red herring for the redesign; turning this thing into an mediocre area blast very quickly turns it into a friendly fire concern. But without it, scaling damage maintains this spell as a niche precision damage spell with area damage as a treat.
The spell offers a save to half the damage. Becuase rangers aren’t going to focus on their Wisdom scores as much as their primary physical score(s), the DC for this save is hardly going to be impressive. They have a significant chance of rolling a 3 or lower for the spell’s damage, which then gets halved to 1 on a success. Not a devastating roll around level 2-3, but it becomes an unacceptable waste around level 4-5.
Rangers are afforded virtually no means of padding spell damage with static values or additional opportunities to adjust their damage rolls.

The funky thing is, hail of thorns scales well. I genuinely mean really well. As you can see, the damage goes up by 1d10 per level. 2d10 isn’t amazing for a 2nd level spell, but take the bonus action to cast, the ranged attack, and the detonation radius into account, and it’s reasonably competitive with other 2nd level spells. Not the best, but I’m not putting it in the doghouse just yet. Rangers are half casters though, so they regrettably can’t take full advantage of this scaling. They’re 5th level by the time they have access to 2nd level spells, and as mentioned earlier, this is competing with the constant and consistent damage of hunter’s mark. The opposed spell gets to scale by virtue of an increasing number of attacks, which rangers can acquire far earlier than higher level spell slots.

While figuring out how to redesign this, I was tempted in a few different directions. Make it a 2nd level spell dealing 3d10 damage, keep it as a 1st but increase base damage to 2d10, make it a cantrip for crying out loud and change the damage to your Wisdom modifier, there were plenty of angles. Here’s what I’m thinking:

Increasing base damage inflates its value at low levels even higher, but only delays the inevitable point at which it becomes a poor choice at higher levels. If I make it competent for level 5, it one shots critters at level 3 and down. That’s practically the definition of a 2nd level spell (in this context).
Scaling the range along with the damage introduce friendly fire concerns, while barely addressing the lacking damage values and diminishing the spell’s niche. You pick this spell because you want a precision strike to have some collateral damage, turning it into an area blast is going to force comparisons with the rest of your area blasts.
Turning this thing into a cantrip complicates matters by making me introduce cantrips to rangers, which I admittedly like and am now thinking of as I type this. I know for a multitude of reasons this can’t be the redesign or replacement though, so the cantrip will be added as a fun footnote.
Padding damage intrinsically, such as with a ranger’s Wisdom modifier could make this a powerful competitor with hunter’s mark, ensuring the damage is practically always a step above what the aforementioned could offer. I’d be tempted to attach concentration to it, if I was really concerned about players stacking these hunter’s mark and hail of thorns.

My Version (Better)

The theme of thorns exploding outwards is very easy to work with. Evocative! Exciting! Ranger magic excites me. As such, my primary concern here was just removing the primary competition with every ranger’s favorite spell and degenerate the restrictions on damage.

I realized the Dex save was literally only there to scale it poorly; at low levels, the spell maybe goes from overkill to getting a hefty chunk of damage. At mid level, it turns the thing into a massive opportunity cost. So we get rid of the Dex save, we get rid of the absolutely moronic cost of concentration for a 1 time effect, and leave it be.

My Version (Even Better)

Now we’re talking. I mean this might be too strong, but I find damage over time effects to be a healthy means of balancing spells to stay competitive. I mean, that’s what hunter’s mark is, for instance. Now the difference between these two is hunter’s mark allows you to keep pricking enemies for an extra 1d6 per hit for hours on end, whereas this offers you a much faster damage over time effect. Of course, the DOT effect can be cleared early on this effect, and still requires you to attack them individually for said extra damage.

Bonus Cantrip

Ah, take it or leave it. I don’t know how I feel about this one. It’s an iteration of something I found much easier to accomplish in a card game!