Spike Growth: Thorns to be Wild

Usable By: Druid, Ranger

Spell Level: 2

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: 150 feet

Duration: Concentration, up to 10 minutes

Components: V S M (Seven sharp thorns or seven small twigs, each sharpened to a point)

The ground in a 20-foot radius centered on a point within range twists and sprouts hard spikes and thorns. The area becomes difficult terrain for the duration. When a creature moves into or within the area, it takes 2d4 piercing damage for every 5 feet it travels.

The transformation of the ground is camouflaged to look natural. Any creature that can’t see the area at the time the spell is cast must make a Wisdom (Perception) check against your spell save DC to recognize the terrain as hazardous before entering it.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Druids and rangers are defined partially by difficult terrain. They make it, avoid it, and interact with it in a lot of different ways during the early tiers. Spike Growth is the lynchpin example, the defining difficult terrain enabler that works with bonus damage to make a high potential spell that can be worth your 2nd level slot, but will vary in usefulness from environment to environment.

Out the gate, if a creature ever spends its turn crossing the entire thing from the center, it's passing through eight 5 ft. spaces, needing 80 ft. of movement to do it, and taking 2d4 damage per space moved for a grand total of 16d4 damage. Brainless creatures, like constructs and undead, will get shredded. This is a zombie killing MACHINE. If you’re fighting a zombie hoard and have a choke point, they’ll start crawling over each other's corpses before they can get anywhere near you.

For the mindful creatures with intelligence of any level, though, Spike Growth likely looks like something they completely ignore with climbing or fly speeds, or something they take 0-2d4 damage in before moving around it. That’s a lot less powerful. Ranged creatures might approach not noticing the Spike Growth, take the 2d4 damage, stop, and shoot the druid to try to knock concentration off. Sometimes this will close off a 40 ft. radius area from creatures with low HP, and in that way I rate this around as good as some of the wall spells like Wall of Fire, but it does still have a bit more going for it.

Gust of Wind and Thorn Whip both play well with Spike Growth. You don’t really need more than 6d4 damage out of this when paired with the difficult terrain and blockage to justify the cast. Thorn Whip can pull a creature that stepped in and stopped through two more spaces, and bam, now you’ve gotten all the damage you need out of it. It does have only a 30 ft. range, so you’re positioning is going to have to be precise to avoid damage yourself, but this is an easy example of how you can weaponize it further. There are a lot of tools to get creatures moving short distances; shoves paired with movement can force dashes, which can result in eating actions using the difficult terrain while dealing bonus damage, and that’s great. Well coordinated groups can juice cleverly placed Spike Growths in some interesting ways, making it a complex spell to work with at its highest level.

I don’t think this spell is revolutionary, but it's very interesting and fun to play with. It has VERY high highs against brainless creatures that just kill themselves moving through it, but also can be near uncastable in wide open spaces or against creatures that easily move over it. That lands it in a sweet spot for spells for me; excellent sometimes, pretty usable most of the time, and something you don’t want for some specific fights. Give it a try if the meat grinder aspect sounds fun to you!

5e Spells

Spike Growth: Thorns to be Wild