Fans have crafted a DnD homebrew to revamp the worst 5e spells in the game. Dungeons and Dragons has a whole lot of spells – around 500, in fact, across various official books and sources. But not every DnD spell is worth casting.
Some, like True Strike, have so little impact that you’d be better off just attacking your target, while others, like Skywrite, have incredibly niche use cases. Then there are spells like Mordenkainen’s Sword that seem cool at first, until you notice they are simply outclassed by many other options.
With so many magicks not mapping onto expectations, Reddit users SoManyRobots and OmegaAnkh have teamed up to create a solution. The result is their ‘Spells That Don’t Suck’ homebrew, a weighty tome that revamps 112 DnD spells in total.
This involves boosting a large number of spell effects, replacing many spells entirely, or splitting one spell into two, all while trying to preserve their overall feel or function. Sometimes that means changing the spell’s level.
For instance, True Strike was bumped up to a 1st level spell “there was no way to make True Strike useful without making it too strong to be a cantrip,” explains SoManyRobots. Now named ‘Fated Strike’ it can be used on a teammate instead of just yourself, and means their next attack will be an automatic hit.
While most of the spells in Spells That Don’t Suck have been improved, there are a couple of particularly strong, overtuned spells that were dialed back, the logic being that: “overpowered spells suck too, just in a different way.” For instance Silvery Barbs, which the homebrew calls “probably the most-banned spell in the game” was split into two separate spells, and also bumped up a level.
The homebrew comes complete with design notes, which provide an explanation about what was changed and why. Spells That Don’t Suck is currently on version 6, with ten new spells added in the latest version.
If you’re a fan of all things mystical, you’ll probably need a DnD character build for a 5e Wizard or 5e Sorcerer. And you might be a fan of some of the best DnD magic items too.