D&D Players Figured Out How to Do More Than 600 Damage in a Round With the New Rules
Even at lower levels, this spell combo in D&D 5.5E is pretty busted. Don’t worry, it’ll be a while before they try to fix it.
Yesterday was an unleashing of the hounds for D&D 5.5E. WotC cried havoc and let slip the embargo date, which means that those who make D&D videos with advice or new classes or what have you, who had been straining like greyhounds at the slip can now venture once more into the breach of revealing D&D rules without breaching the terms of their NDAs. And if you think this metaphor is straining credulity. Buddy lemme tell ya, D&D 5.5E has some broken combos. It hasn’t even been a day and people have already figured out how to deal more than 600 damage in a round.
Of course you have to be high enough level to cast 9th level spells. But here’s the weird part. You don’t even need to cast a 9th level spell. And even before you get to those most unlikely of levels, you’re still doing hundreds of damage per round and just annihilating enemies.
How, you ask? Well, let’s lend the eye a terrible aspect and see for ourselves.
D&D 5.5E – So You Wanna Do Some REAL Damage, Eh Kid?
It all comes down to a spell that everyone said was “probably overpowered” in Unearthed Arcana Playtest 8, but no one worried too much about because it would “definitely get toned down.” Spoiler alert, as of the 1st printing of the Player’s Handbook 2024, it didn’t.
The spell in question is a rewritten Conjure Minor Elementals. The spell Conjure Minor Elementals first appeared in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and it let you summon some elementals to fight for you. Fine. Great. But the new spell was reimagined. No longer do you summon multiple elementals who fight as discrete entities. Instead you make a damage-boosting aura, represented by elemental spirits, as follows (emphasis ours):
You conjure spirits from the Elemental Planes that flit around you in a 15-foot Emanation for the duration. Until the spell ends, any attack you make deals an extra 2d8 damage when you hit a creature in the Emanation. This damage is Acid, Cold, Fire, or Lightning (your choice when you make the attack).
In addition, the ground in the Emanation is Difficult Terrain for your enemies.
Using a Highter-Level Spell Slot. The damage increases by 2d8 for each spell slot level above 4th.
This is how the spell appeared in Unearthed Arcana, and it’s how the spell remains in the Player’s Handbook, according to various people with their hands on the actual book. Conjure Minor Elementals is a 4th Level Druid and Wizard spell. That means players get access to it a 7th level, and by 11th level, you can already be rolling, potentially 12d6 + 36d8 points of damage in a single round, which is what we in the business call “a Warhammer number of dice”. And it just gets better from there.
According to white room theory math, which, as we all know, is the only math that matters when calculating how good or bad something is in a tabletop game, at the highest levels, Conjure Minor Elementals could allow a character to potentially churn out well over 600 points of damage in a single round. And then keep going if there’s still a fight happening after that.
Here’s how it works. First you have to get to 17th level, which you’ll never do. And then you upcast Conjure Minor Elementals with your 9th level slot, for a total of 12d8 points of extra damage per attack to an enemy within your emanation. Which means someone 15 feet away, and depending on what you’re fighting, that can be dangerously close. But what can a pile of ash do from 15 feet?
Anyway, once you’ve established your aura of elementals, you upcast Scorching Ray, a 2nd level spell that is just as surprised as you are to be stepping into the limelight like this, at 8th level, giving you 9 total attacks. Then, and again, remember we’re using White Room Theory Math the only math that matters, you assume that each attack hits.
Each attack does 2d6 points of fire damage from the scorching ray, then you have 12d8 points of damage from the conjured minor elementals. Multiply by 9 and you get 18d6 fire damage and 108d8 acid/cold/fire/lightning damage, for with an average of 549 points of damage. And since we are crafting the perfect scenario we’d’ve cast a 7th level Crown of Stars beforehand (it doesn’t take Concentration) for an additional attack as a bonus action that deals 4d12 (from the spell) and another 12d8 (from Conjure Minor Elementals), for another 80 or so average damage, bringing your total up to 629 points of damage to a single target, or distributed if you’re feeling generous because those are all attacks that you can do to anyone, and nobody wants to have 12d8 damage dealt to them on principle.
Sure, you’ve spent your 9th, 8th, and 7th level spell slots for an incredible nova. But whatever you spent them on is dead.
And I’ll be sad to see this fixed. Honestly, D&D would be no fun if there weren’t corner-case over-optimized “well technically you can do this” things that explode into nonsense. You’ll see a lot of people complaining that this is somehow broken. And that it’s ridiculous that Fighters can’t do comparable things – I agree, it is ridiculous, Fighters at 20th level should cut a mountain in half.
But even at lower levels, at 11th level, you can cast a 6th level Conjure Minor Elementals and a 5th level Socrching Ray or even 5th level versions of both and still do 150 points of damage on average. And without as high a resource cost. You might eventually GET to do that in a game. But why not let people have their overpowered fun? The reason it stings is when you see other classes, like the Paladin, lose abilities that let them be outrageous for “balance” reasons.
Even if WotC eventually does fix this, there’ll always be some new broken combo unearthed from someone’s weird interpretation of the rules. For now, at least, marvel in the possibilities.
And remember, D&D 5.5E isn’t even officially out until September 17th. Wonder if we’ll see Day One Errata?
