Iceberg
5th level evocation, 1 action, 60 feet, VS, Concentration up to 30 seconds
You batter a target you can see within range with a series of progressively larger hailstones. When you cast the spell, and as a bonus action on subsequent turns, you force the target to make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failure, it takes 3d6 cold damage, plus 2d6 cold damage for each round you have maintained your concentration. (3d6 initially, then 5d6, then 7d6, and so on.) On a success, the target takes half as much damage.
At higher levels, the maximum duration of the spell increases by one round for each slot level above 5th.
I've spent a lot of time crunching numbers on this and comparing it to several other spells. It's a weird one, and I'm still not sure I know if it's overpowered or underpowered, or if it's even useful at all. The core concept is that, like an iceberg, there's a lot more to it than you see at first. But that's a surprisingly hard concept to balance, in a system where most damage is instantaneous.
On the one hand, it's potentially the highest-damage spell in the game. At 5th level, over the full duration, it can deal 35d6 (~122.5) damage to a single target, compared to, say, 10d6 (~35) for a 5th-level fireball or 8d8 (~36) for a cone of cold. And it grows quadratically: at 6th level, it can deal 48d6 (~168) damage compared to 10d6+40 (~75) for disintegrate. At 9th level, it maxes out at a whopping 99d6 (~346.5) damage, dwarfing an upcast disintegrate at 19d6+40 (~106.5), or even meteor swarm at 40d6 (~140).
On the other hand, that requires a lot of things to go perfectly right. First of all, it's all against a single target; how many monsters even have 350 hit points? Some, but not a lot. And upcasting over duration means the fight needs to last 9 rounds, which is an absurd slog. And it assumes no one else kills it before then. And you need to maintain concentration the whole time, and not use a bonus action for anything else. And overkill is a big possibility, once you get into the 10-15d6 per round range; if that's the killing blow, then most of that damage is likely to be wasted. So there's several reasons why the big on-paper numbers aren't as game-breaking as they look.
On the gripping hand, the spell uses concentration, and you probably have better things to use that on than high-risk damage. I picture it better for sorcerers than wizards, since I prefer a division between wizards' control and utility spells and sorcerers' blasting and big damage, as opposed to the near-circular Venn diagram they have in 5e. In that case, sorcerers wouldn't have many damage spells to spend their concentration on, making iceberg a more attractive choice. But it hardly seems able to compete with a wall of force or dominate monster.
A more realistic way to analyze the spell is looking at the damage over the typical combat length of three rounds: 15d6 (~52.5), and consider anything more as pure fluff. That number is a lot more reasonable, surpassing cone of cold, which seems fair for its longer duration and use of concentration, but falling short of disintegrate. Overall, I think it's a decent choice if you want to stick to a cryomancer theme, and you want single-target damage. By the time you get to 5th-level spells, you'll probably have a sense of whether that's useful for the type of fights you have in your campaign.
But enough of this player-focused nonsense. How can our evil sorcerers use this against the players? As a single-target spell, it has obviously limited use against a whole party. I hate picking out one target for a spell like this, because it can sometimes feel like bullying a player, but it would be very effective against a fighter or paladin: high HP to chew through, no dexterity save, and in their hubris they think their heavy armor will protect them. It would also be a great way to get around a raging barbarian's resistances, but keep in mind their bonuses to dex saves.
The most important thing is ensuring your concentration stays up long enough to get your money's worth from the spell slot. That means keeping players away, and your options for doing that are limited without concentration for control spells. This is a good time to work in some complex terrain features: heavy snow drifts, slippery ice, jagged cliffs, perhaps aiming down from the top of a crevasse. And minions are imperative - only damaging one character at a time, the same one each round, while the rest can gang up on you? That's a recipe for disaster. On subsequent rounds, you can pair the bonus action activation with an AoE spell as an action, but for the first round especially you'll need some mecha-penguins or polar bears wearing top hats or whatever, to soak up the players' attacks and spread the damage around.
One excellent use for this spell, both for players and DMs, is targeting objects and structures. Objects always fail dexterity saves, and rarely fight back, so you can take 30 seconds to 1 minute to absolutely pulverize a wall, tower, house, whatever. Referring once again to the DMG object rules (pp. 246-7), ~125 damage is enough to destroy huge chunks of almost anything, and big waves of 7d6+ can chew through most damage thresholds. The rules for targeting objects, and what makes up a valid target in a compound object like a city wall, are pretty vague. Whether you could, say, take down a 10-foot section of the fortification, and then transfer to another 10-foot section with the same casting of the spell, is left to the mercy of the DM. But I would encourage DMs to interpret it liberally in favor of the players; there aren't many spells that can target objects, or that are so effective at destroying massive structures, and destroying buildings is a rare and satisfying thing to do in a game, so if the players find a will and a way to do it, don't try to stop them.
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