Incendiary Cloud: Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
Spell Level: 8
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 150 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
A swirling cloud of smoke shot through with white-hot embers appears in a 20-foot-radius sphere centered on a point within range. The cloud spreads around corners and is heavily obscured. It lasts for the duration or until a wind of moderate or greater speed (at least 10 miles per hour) disperses it.
When the cloud appears, each creature in it must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 10d8 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. A creature must also make this saving throw when it enters the spell’s area for the first time on a turn or ends its turn there.
The cloud moves 10 feet directly away from you in a direction that you choose at the start of each of your turns.
Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
The classic carpet bombing spell; D&D doesn’t shy away from truly horrible means of mass murder, huh? Incendiary Cloud is an efficient tool for decimating large groups of people, but so is Wall of Fire, Fire Storm, Meteor Swarm, and the classic Fireball. Is it worth it over these other “fire go boom” effects? The short answer is it can be, but the difference between them all is minimal.
I’m normally all for spells that stay in an area and allow for repetitive uses of said area for damage. Spirit Guardians and Blade Barrier both come to mind; using shoves and other abilities that force positions can repeatedly push things in and out to get more out of the spell with a little cooperation. Incendiary Cloud only falters here because a stiff breeze can dismiss it, making effects like Gust of Wind, normally a staple of the pushing people around builds, impossible to use. The continued movement of the cloud makes a lot of the tools you’d use to keep things in it worse; characters have to reposition constantly as the cloud steadily drifts away. Yes, you get to pick how it goes away, but it isn’t much to the spell's benefit. That style of play is already challenging to pull off. Incendiary Cloud is going to be far less reliable than the wall spells or other stationary effects.
In tight corridors where waves of monsters are coming, Incendiary Cloud is a beating. It drags out its damage to hit any new entities coming into the fray, making it amazing specifically in this one instance. That specific encounter isn’t all that common; most of the time, Incendiary Cloud will be a 10d8 Fireball that hits one or two extra creatures, sometimes not even that. Notably, Fireball at 8th level is dealing 13d6 damage, which is slightly more on average than Incendiary Cloud. You have to REALLY want the rolling gas cloud to make it worth taking.
Incendiary Cloud heavily obscuring the area is fine in closed environments where the cloud can act as a near opaque barrier to deny enemies vision. Unfortunately, that again is a niche situation. Ranged creatures you’d look to deny vision from can simply leave the cloud, and even if they don’t the cloud is scooting past them the following turn, making it so the obfuscation it is providing is limited. The creatures can still hear, smell, and otherwise sense who they’re dealing with. The vast majority of the time, creatures will simply move to a location where they aren’t dealing with the obscuring cloud; if you’re fighting in a space more than 40 ft. wide, they can leave the area and see around it. This might force some monsters that’d like to be far away to approach or retreat which has some tactical advantage, but this is rare. It's definitely nice to have, and makes the spell a little more interesting, but the spell's own movement and its ability to easily be dispersed makes the obscuring element a lot worse.
If you’re in the market for a Fireball upgrade that doubles as a smoke bomb, Incendiary Cloud does it. It doesn’t do it well, but it functions as a limited Darkness meets Fireball meets Cloudkill. I don’t think I’d ever put it on a character sheet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t find a home somewhere out there.
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