WotC was very careful with summoning spells and polymorph spells which could allow casters to play like martials, and I imagine they were cautious with Flame Blade for this reason.Īll that said, flame blade is highly situational, and most cases where you would want to use it, there are equivalent or better uses for your concentration or spell slot. I also wouldn't want to buff it - if you make it a competitive option for general purpose use, you take the druid's spellcasting focus away from utility, summoning, and area control, in addition to potentially risking a 3.5-esque balance where druids do everything that martials can do and more. It's something that you can cast once for the entire fight, so you could use it as a way to fight in melee if it should be utterly necessary without either taking unnecessary damage from constant retreats and delaying death of the enemy, but the fight doesn't really warrant blowing your "powerful" spells on it. It matters because poison spray lacks range and has a crap damage type, whereas produce flame only does a d8.įlame blade does provide something that the druid doesn't otherwise get - a mechanism for dealing competitive, magical melee damage in case something shows up in your face and you can't easily get away (so produce flame is at disadvantage, or you really need the small damage edge it has on cantrips) and don't want to blow an action to disengage. Note that druids don't get firebolt, they get produce flame and poison spray. As it is that high spell level needs to pay for itself somehow. It might be overboard if this spell wasn't so exclusive. I'd say that it's possible to make the Attack action with it(Extras and all), use it with reactions and bonus actions, and possibly to give it a functionality with Wild Shape. Likely that it's the way it is because it's really only used by Druids, but even so that's not must of a justification.
Why is this spell so awful? The blade can't even be used for opportunity or bonus action attacks, so it's pretty much worthless. An eldritch blast two levels later deals 42 damage across multiple targets if one has the agonizing invocation. Then if one spends an 8th level slot at level 15+, one can have it deal 6d6, or 21 damage. Compare that to firebolt, a cantrip, which doesn't take concentration and deals 11+ damage at the same level. Out of a fourth level slot, level 7, one can attack for 14 average damage per turn in melee range. And it increases by 1d6 for every two spell levels past second. 2nd level is 3d6 fire damage for your action, comparable to a rogue's attack + sneak attack at that level. Concentration? This thing better be good. It's a concentration spell, bonus action, which allows one to spend one's action to make a melee spell attack.
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