Cantrip (Backup) Tier#
This tier is for your backup options. While relying on cantrips is bread-and-butter for very early level casters, they quickly fall to disuse later on in the game.
We’ll use Spout as one of our primary cantrips here. This is in part because most cantrips have similar scaling to Spout, starting with 2d4 and heightening by 1d4 per rank. We’ll assume it only hits one creature, as most cantrips do. Since we’re focusing exclusively on single-target damage, and this scales the same as the very popular Electric Arc.
We’ll also use Telekinetic Projectile. It’s good to have an AC targeting cantrip as a comparison. This one starts with 2d6 and heightens by 1d6 per rank. Since we aren’t considering weaknesses or resistances, Needle Darts is skipped in order to keep the analysis lighter, but is a valuable alternative choice.
For our first martial comparison, we’re going to use the case of a Swashbuckler forced to rely on a shortbow. A Swashbuckler can’t benefit from most of their class options for ranged attacks, but will have very high dexterity, and so can competently use a bow in a pinch. We will explore some ways of representing this.
Emoji key#
We’ll represent the classes with emojis to keep the chart a bit more readable.
🤺 Swashbuckler
🩸 Sorcerer
Understanding our baseline#
Let’s consider these turns as our baseline.
A swashbuckler firing a shortbow twice.
A sorcerer aiming with Telekinetic Projectile once.
A sorcerer casting Spout once.
Each of these are ranged abilities that cost 2 actions.
Shortbow advantages
Maximum distance
Strike-related action economy (the ability to choose to fire once)
Bonus damage on critical hits
Two chances to hit or crit
Spell advantages
Zero gold cost
Hand-related action economy
e.g. no drawing, dropping, swapping, or needing a freehand
Spout: Half damage when an enemy succeeds on a save
Telekinetic Projectile: Higher damage scaling and alternate physical damage types
All of these activities might be supplemented by another shortbow attack, if the sorcerer happened to have one as well (with weapon proficiency, available to any human at level 1). But we aren’t considering DPR optimizations. Strides, Interacts, Sustains, Steps, etc. are all extremely common activities a character might do instead of fish for a third Strike or supplement a cantrip.
#r "nuget: Plotly.NET.Interactive"
#r "nuget: FSharp.Json"
#load "../Helpers.fs"
#load "../Bestiary.fs"
#load "../Compare.fs"
#load "../DamageDistribution.fs"
#load "../Library.fs"
#load "../Transform.fs"
#load "../ChartTools.fs"
#load "../publish-backend/average-level.fs"
open Plotly.NET
open PublishBackend.AverageLevel
- FSharp.Json, 0.4.1
- Plotly.NET.Interactive, 5.0.0
What martial backup weapon do we compare with?#
It’s difficult to predict the myriad of ways that a backup ranged weapon could fall behind the curve, so we’re going to need to make a value judgment here. There are many worse-case scenarios to consider as well, like barbarians or champions that often invest very few points into dexterity. Even if they had optimized weapons to borrow, they would likely fall far behind because of their lack of dexterity.
Backup 1: Weapon runes that fall behind#
It’s common for backup weapons to be poorly maintained. Sometimes they’re many levels behind, sometimes they’re just a few levels behind, but they’re almost never on par with your main choice. Additionally, it’s often common for them to be missing runes they could’ve taken at various points.
We’ll first represent this by testing two weapons. The first will be 4 levels behind its expected weapon runes for the character’s level. That means its first potency comes at level 6, striking comes at level 8, and damaging property rune comes at level 12. The second will be 2 levels behind.
We’ll also leave Spout out of it for now, to keep the chart from getting too busy.
cantripBackupLevelPenaltyCharts [4; 2] 0
This chart can almost be split in half. If you’re on PC, you may be able to click and drag to zoom in on the plot in order to look at the lower levels first and the higher levels next in more detail. And, as a reminder, you can click on the names on the right to hide a line to make the chart a little less busy.
Here we see the expected damage spikes for the caster’s cantrips: odd levels come with a damage increase and sometimes come with proficiency bumps. Similarly, we see the lagging bumps after the swashbuckler starts to get their first weapon runes, and then rapid escalation as property runes and earlier proficiency bumps kick in for the later levels. There are also quite a few levels where the swashbuckler backup weapons are extremely comparable.
From this perspective, cantrips really seem to keep up in the early half of the game where they’re the most likely to be used. That is, in the later half of the game, when these backup weapons are much more powerful, casters usually are much more reliable at using their abundant spell slots and often have enough good focus spells to last them 2 or 3 rounds.
Telekinetic Projectile beats the level-4 backup weapon until level 13. And it stays close to the level-2 backup weapon until level 12, where a potency rune and a relatively cheap for that level weapon damage rune is applied.
Backup 2: Automatic bonus/rune progression#
Perhaps this is a game with Automatic Bonus Progression or Automatic Rune Progression, where backup weapons keep up much more easily. Perhaps this is a player who does keep their backup weapon full of runes, but the property runes are all conditional, or their backup weapon happens to be an exciting specific magic weapon that can’t add property runes and doesn’t have a property rune as a base.
Let’s compare again with a backup weapon that is, for whatever reason, maximized on fundamental runes but has no damaging property runes.
cantripBackupCompareCharts 0
Here we see that the ABP (fundamental rune only) shortbow is often closer to the Telekinetic Projectile than the weapon level -4 option with property runes involved. It does bump ahead at level 4 with the Striking rune followed by the earlier accuracy bump, but does not spike so much later on when property runes are providing a significant percentage of the shortbow’s damage.
For this reason, we will opt to use the ABP version for comparing moving forward. While the behind level property rune shortbow does heavily illustrate the weakness of many backup weapons early on and their relative strength later on, its greater deviation from cantrips makes it a harder point of comparison. I also think we’ve sufficiently demonstrated the insights between these two ways of considering backup damage.
Level difference single-target damage#
Now that we’re choosing the ABP backup weapon, we’re ready to start analyzing how the gap between our level and the enemy’s level impacts average damage for that level. And we’re ready to bring Spout back into the comparison.
On-level creatures#
Let’s first consider a few attacks against enemies of the same level. It’s worth keeping in mind that, while we are focusing on single-target damage here, on-level enemies are likely to appear in groups where multi-target is more likely to excel and may be available through backup options like Electric Arc.
cantripBackupCreatureLevelCharts 0
Against on-level enemies, we see that accuracy makes a big deal here. The relative accuracy the swashbuckler has over the sorcerer at levels 5 and 6 as well as levels 13-18 make a significant difference here. These accuracy differences come from getting their proficiency bumps 2 levels earlier and from their potency runes on their Strikes, which sorcerers cannot get for their spells. This also makes sense, because accuracy helps the swashbuckler twice, as they Strike twice.
Even though Spout does half damage when an enemy successfully saves, the superior scaling (40% more damage on a hit vs. a failed save) of Telekinetic Projectile tends to win out on average.
For the cantrips, we have these massive spikes at levels 15 and 19, where there’s both a regular damage boost and a significant accuracy boost (+2).
It seems fairly clear that, at the cantrip level at least, levels 13 and 14 are very far behind the ranged backup martial bow.
Creatures at player level+1 and level+2#
We will sometimes find ourselves in situations where we have to use our backup options against stronger enemies that we’re somewhat less likely to hit or harm. These also are more likely to be enemies that we will actually be using our single-target attacks on. Let’s start turning up the dial a bit on the enemy levels.
cantripBackupCreatureLevelCharts 1
cantripBackupCreatureLevelCharts 2
We can note a few things here.
Spout starts to catch up with Telekinetic Projectile as the level gap increases, because the half damage when an enemy saves starts to contribute a lot more. In cases where doing any damage (an enemy with low health) is more important, Spout becomes preferable.
The gap between backup ranged weapons and cantrips narrows as the level gap increases, even for Telekinetic Projectile. This makes some sense as the second Strike of the shortbow, already at a -5 penalty, is now likely aiming at an enemy that is also up to 3 AC higher than an on-level threat. Additionally, since two Strikes are being made, the AC bump is applying twice.
Creatures at player level+3 and level+4#
It’s a terrifying thing to be resorting to backup options in these encounters. You’re almost certainly facing a single creature at this point, so a multi-target scenario is extremely unlikely.
Hopefully your GM let you prepare and gave you warnings about this encounter, to prevent you from being stuck here. That’s what the book suggests a GM should do, at least.
Hopefully you didn’t squander the opportunity to prepare and charge ahead recklessly. A party would never. (I totally have too many times honestly).
Hopefully, you can run. Or surrender.
But, for whatever reason, you’re here. Fighting.
Let’s take a look at the charts.
cantripBackupCreatureLevelCharts 3
cantripBackupCreatureLevelCharts 4
Spout becomes the winner here. The half damage range starts pulling ahead in the middle levels and almost always stays ahead. In the level+4 chart, we see it actually keep up with the shortbow for the notorious levels 13 and 14.
Telekinetic Projectile does surprisingly well in the middle levels of 7 through 12, often beating the martial backup options or staying very close.
The second Strike of the shortbow is contributing so little at this point, often at a -9 through -11 compared to a first Strike against an on-level enemy. It’s nat 20 fishing territory. Which doesn’t bode well for non-backup weapons either, since this is a max accuracy comparison!
Creatures 2 levels below#
Let’s take a quick look at lower level creatures, but we already know what to expect. The higher scaling of Telekinetic Projectile and the double benefit of being able to target AC twice is going to win out even more over saves when it’s easier to hit.
cantripBackupCreatureLevelCharts -2
Yup. Not much to more to say about these!
Conclusions#
Unsurprisingly, a martial’s backup ranged weapon is usually a little better than a caster’s cantrips, especially in the later levels when property runes are cheap or when their proficiency bumps up.
The higher creature’s level compared to yours, the more valuable save targeting becomes.
Against on-level and below enemies, targeting enemies’ AC with a higher damage scaling cantrip is often better on average than going for a saving throw defense with a lower damage scaling. (Many attack spells are balanced this way, as we’ll see.)
That’s basically it for the main cantrip tier analysis. On the next article, we’ll talk about some other interesting things at this tier that are a bit more of a side quest.