The Highest Damage Spell in D&D 5e

hey everyone Chris here so I'm not going to make you wait until halfway through the video the spell and d and d that does the most damage is Spike growth now this requires that the players do some planning to make that happen but with some setup Spike growth can outdamage every other spell in the game even spells like meteor swarm and you don't need to be 17th level either so here's Spike growth and I'm just going to cover the basics first before I explain how to shred enemies to goo with his spell it's an action to cast has 150 ft range which is really good uses concentration and lasts up to 10 minutes though most of the time you're not going to need it for more than the length of a combat you pick a point on the ground and the area 20 ft around that point Sprouts hard spikes and Thorns so we're talking 40 ft across now there are multiple official methods regarding how to represent an area of effect spell on a battle map so depending which your DM uses the spike growth might look like this or it might look like this on the battle map the area is considered difficult terrain and that means moving one foot through a spike growth requires 2 ft of speed when a creature moves into or within the area of a spike growth takes 2D four piercing damage for every 5 ft it travels there is no saving throw and since this piercing damage comes from a spell effect you don't need to worry about a creature's possible resistance or immunity to piercing damage from a non-magical source the area is camouflaged to look natural so a creature that doesn't see the area when the spell is cast needs to make a wisdom perception check against your spell DC to recognize the terrain is hazardous before they enter it of course if you cast it during combat they will probably see that area I generally recommend this spell to any spellcaster that can get it which includes Druids Rangers Dow Genie Patron warlocks and if you're a nature domain cleric or a circle of the land Arctic or Mountain Druid you will get Spike growth automatically prepared so the very basic strategy for this spell is when you cast it you want to get like a number of enemies somewhere within the middle of the area of effect ideally creatures that can't fly and that need to move up to you so for example here's a bug bear and it wants to get close to us to use its Morning Star but because it's difficult to rain it's going to need to take the dash action to get other of Spike growth which would prevent it from attacking on that turn it's also going to take 8 D4 damage which is 20 damage on average which most of the bug Bears hit points now it could stay where it is and throw a javelin but we're talking five damage on average instead of 11 from its Morning Star and it's likely going to have disadvantage on the attack due to range so it's really a no- win scenario for that bug bear so even with this very basic strategy Spike growth is a very good spell not a huge damage spell though but it's a good mix of damage and Battlefield control a common strategy to get more out of Spike growth is to mix mix it with some kind of force movement so if you're a dow Genie Patron warlock you might take repelling blast as an invocation and then you would hit the bug bear with an alich blast and then you can push it 10 ft and the spike growth will add 44 to the damage of the blast that's an additional 10 damage since Dow Patron warlocks can also add bludgeoning damage to an Al blast it opens up the option to take the crusher feet so you could get another 5 ft of movement so you might push the bug bear 10 ft then pull it 5 ft back towards the middle of the spike growth and now you're adding 15 damage on average and the bug bear is still stuck in the middle of the spell effect on their turn a swarm keeper Ranger might use gathered swarm for 15 ft of force movement and there's enough kinds of force movement that I won't bother listing them but Force movement is a great way to get more out of this spell you can also push enemies who dashed out of the spell effect back in you start utilizing these kinds of strategies and Spike growth goes from being a very good spell to being a great spell not broken though but it can be broken so here is how you break Spike growth and make it the most damaging spell in D and D so let's say we have an enemy right here and we'll say it's grass the demon Prince so our character with Spike growth cast it right here and it doesn't matter if your DM uses circles or squares for the area of effect works just as well either way then party member number two is going to Grapple grass now the the great thing about grappling is that it's an opposed ability check meaning armor class doesn't matter and legendary resistances don't matter and you can make build decisions that pretty much guarantee that the grapple is going to work more on that later now we're going to use the grappling Rules From The Player's handbook they say that when you move you can drag or carry the grapple creature with you but your speed is half unless a creature is two or more sizes smaller than you now grass is large so our speed is going to be now I should mention right now that some DMS will allow you to drag a grappled creature with a movement of amount or even if you're moved with Force movement but we are talking about murky rules territory so I want to stick with our Grappler using their own speed to move then the rules aren't ambiguous this should work so now I'm going to show you how to break the heck out of this spell and do more damage to Grass than a meteor swarm a lot more so we're going to start simple our Grappler has a base speed of 30 so they can drag grass a total of 15 ft that is 64 or 15 points of damage on average by the way the math here is really easy 5 ft of movement equals five points of average damage 100 ft of movement you guessed it 100 points of damage on average but you know 15 damage isn't all that much so let's see how much we can increase that so let's say we already cast a long rer spell on a Grappler now their speed is 40 so they can move 20 ft while dragging that's 20 damage and let's say a Grappler is a toxi so now they can double their movement for their turn and this doesn't require anything from your action economy doesn't use your action or reaction or bonus action so it straight up doubles the 40 speed to 80 or 40 while dragging and that's 40 damage and that's not bad now let's say we have a third party member and on their turn they had cast haste on the toi Grappler haste doubles your movement speed so now we're doubling it twice once from feline agility and again from haste so 30 base speed plus 10 from long Strider 40 if we double it it's now 80 if we double it again it's now 160 and that's 80 ft of dragging for 80 damage now that is pretty great damage that's 32 D4 by the way now if you're thinking you don't have anywhere close to 80 ft to drag grass before leaving the spike growth well you can drag him here then drag him back here then back to here then back to here then here then here then here then here and we're right back where we started now I said this would do more damage than meteor swarm which does 40 D6 damage with a saving throw for half so that's 120 average damage on a failed save 60 on a successful one so if we assume say 50% chance of saving that's 90 damage on average and we're already in that territory but here's the thing we have just gotten started one movement of 80 ft is 80 damage on average but let's say we already had grass grappled at the start of our turn maybe we had Reed in action to Grapple him when he came in range and now it's our turn well we can now use our action to Dash and we just added another 32 D4 damage and we're up to 160 points oh and haste gives us additional action now we can only do a few things with that action so let's see we got one attack with an attack action that's not so great and then we could either Dash disengage hide or use an object so we'll take the dash action add another 32 D4 and we're up to 240 damage no saving throw now let's say our dexi has two levels in fighter well now they have action surge so B action surge to dash that's another 32 D4 now we're up to 320 point of damage and let's say we have two levels in Rogue well that's cutting action which gives us a bonus action Dash option that's another 32 D4 we're up to 400 damage that's 160 D4 by the way grass has 346 hit points total he's dead no saving throw no legendary resistance his damage immunity doesn't come into play because the damage is magical and if our DM uses circles and instead of squares on the battle map this is not a problem Dash here then here then here and so on dead demon Prince now let's say this character here is a creation B and we happen to have our dancing item say right here now that dei's base move speed is increased by 10 ft that makes 400 damage 500 damage instead now you might very reasonably be thinking at this moment that sure 500 damage is an absolutely huge amount damage to be inflicting in around but there are a ton of wha ifs here and this is typical white board optimizing where in an actual game you should never expect this kind of result here's where I tell you that we tested this strategy in an actual game here's what happened when we faced the big bad of the adventure bye-bye Chris this is this this is the perfect storm here because I'm right next to the uh to the spike growth I'm next to the dancing object which gives me 10 more movement y I'm hasted I have my feline agility and I'm action dashing I'm bonus action dashing and I'm haste action dashing that gives me um 960 feet of movement and so with grappling that's 480 ft of movement and in terms of D4 that is 192 D4 so I'm going to roll that I I you don't even need to roll that's enough one one second no we're rolling it we're rolling it4 babo 49 D damage I think you got him I think he's dead now you'll be able to see the whole game where we tested this grapple technique on the cmcc builds YouTube channel so I'll link that in the video description if you want to check it out but notice how close to the average damage we did and I say we because it is a strategy that is a team effort requiring three characters the reason the damage is close to the average isn't a fluke the more dice you add the closer the average you're going to get that's how the law of averages works and as you saw we are rolling a lot of dice it's so many dice that if you actually play with physical dice you might actually want to talk to your DM about some method to simplify it by either using the average roll or roll a tenth as many dice and multiply or something like that because rolling this many dice and adding them all up is going to take a long time okay so 500 damage on average but what if I told you that at a lot of tables this damage could be doubled really easily because it can and because that's what I promised on the thumbnail well I've brought up this issue many times on this channel so I'm going to sound like a broken record to regular viewers but if you are a DM I generally don't recommend letting players choose their own magic items in fact if I'm your player I'm going to recommend to you not to allow us to do that and this includes item crafting rules or magic item shops or magic item wish lists because if you optimize there are often broken combinations that you can exploit case in point boots of speed these can be activated up to 10 minutes before the devastating interaction and they straight out double our speed which was already doubled once with feline agility and a second time with a Hast spell and now we double it yet again and 200 dice of damage becomes 400 dice of damage and our average damage jumps to 1,000 now that's not 1,000 damage if we roll well or 1,000 maximum damage that's 1,000 damage on average and because of the law of averages we will get very close to that number might be 950 might be 1,50 no published monsters have that kind of hit points this automatically kills any creature even challenge rating 30 there's no saving throw there's nothing they can do unless they're immune to the grappled condition and that's a fairly rare ability even at high challenge ratings I should also add that even if the creature is benefiting from a freedom of movement spell freedom of movement does not make you immune to Grapple it just allows you to escape a grapple easily but if we do this then we can drag them and then they're too dead to escape now all of this might ring some kind of bell for regular viewers because I have a video called grapple death squad that utilizes a similar strategy and these two friends and I deliberately made characters to test the grapple death squad but you might also notice the damage here is higher than I promised in that video also our Grappler could pretty much guarantee successful grapples through multiple methods and there was flight available if they needed to Grapple a flying enemy and drag them down to the spike growth and a lot of other contingencies that we plan for and the character that cast haste had superior protection against losing that spell because there's one rule to Casting haste don't lose the spell so although I think grapple death squad is a good combination of three builds that use teamwork this new team has significant mechanical improvements so they're not really grapple death squad anymore I think I'm going to call them Squad abling ultimate catastrophic ends so if your players say they're bringing the sauce with their builds then they probably watched the next video that I'm going to release where I'm going to show you how to make the sauce by the way those other two players who are ramen Goblin and math guy Dave became friends of mine because we play D and D together all the time because they are members of my patreon and since I'm calling them out here's some other friends of mine who play D and D with me on a regular basis as members of my patreon check out the link to my patreon in the description if you would like to join and be a member we have AirHead and Alex R and vo bloody n aizone CJ Chris C Coral dank train Dewey cheetahman how Douglas Reynolds Eden the DM Eric waserman Evan getting FB ko5 Gad artsy Gish life Lightfoot heisenberger Jay gel James MAA James sprag joha bati Blanchett shiru John Mata Jonathan zooker Joseph Van Horn Justin times Lars V Mark D Mr Brett pcz Quicksilver hg80 Scott Parson Sig speed Shadow Thunder loock and William whittles and until next time I am going to sit back relax and have some fun D and D is for everyone thanks everybody and I will talk to you soon

Channel: Treantmonk's Temple

Views: 49,839

Keywords: dnd, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Optimization, Guide, Wizard, Wizards, charop, ultimate, best, most powerful

Id: uupO2p7gDF4

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024