Helping you choose the best metamagic options for your sorcerer.
Sorcerers have the power to enhance their spells beyond what other spellcasters can using their metamagic feature. Metamagic consumes the sorcerer’s sorcery points making metamagic somewhat limited in use. But sorcery points are plentiful enough that sorcerer’s can be using metamagic on a fairly regular basis to enhance their spells.
You are also limited by the number of metamagic options you can take. This makes your choice of which metamagic option to take very important.
D&D 2024 brings with it a bunch of changes to the sorcerer’s metamagic. While the fundamentals remain the same, a lot of the details of how each option works has been changed and rebalanced.
Below I’ll take you through each metamagic option, how it works, what’s changed, tactics and some advice on which options to take.
What is metamagic and how does it work?
Metamagic has a variety of options you can choose which enhance a spell that’s been cast. This includes effects like making spells more accurate, making them affect more creatures or protecting allies from the effects of your spells.
There are 10 metamagic options to choose from and you can take 2 of these at level 2. Once you hit level 10, you can take 2 more options with another 2 coming at level 17.
Most metamagic options cost 1 sorcery points (though some of them cost 2). You have a number of sorcery points equal to your sorcerer level. These all get replenished on a long rest and half of them can be replenished on a short rest once per long rest (from level 5). This means that you can’t just use metamagic on every spell you cast as you will run out, but you do have a fairly substantial number of sorcery points by the time you’re at mid levels.
At first, you can only use one metamagic option on each spell, but at level 7, you can use 2. There are 2 exceptions here. Empowered spell and seeking spell can both be used on a spell in response to the roll to hit or the damage roll. These can be used whether you’ve used a metamagic option already or not.
Evaluating the metamagic options
Careful spell – 4/5
Good for: Casting AoE spells without harming your allies.
Ability: Prevent some chosen creatures from being affected by the spell you cast.
Changes from 2014: Creatures no longer take half damage where succeeding the saving throw would have caused this.
Tactics: Cast AoE spells at the crowd around your martials without fear of harming them. Some AoE spells will let you choose who’s affected, but most will affect anyone in the area. This includes powerful spells like fireball and hypnotic pattern. It should make you less reliant on dealing big damage in the first turn of combat before martials get in close and make them difficult to miss.
Distant spell – 2/5
Good for: Casting spells from a longer distance.
Ability: Double the range of a spell or make a touch spell have a range of 30ft.
Changes from 2014: None
Tactics: There is some niche usefulness in this option, allowing you to lengthen the distance of a spell. But there are so many spells with a 30ft+ range that distance is rarely too much of a problem.
Spells like message might benefit from the extra range or mass suggestion will let you capture targets from further away. You might also want to cast lesser restoration (for clockwork sorcerers) on someone that isn’t right next to you. Allowing chill touch to be cast at 30ft is nice, but there are similar ranged cantrips without the same kind of distance restrictions.
I suspect the best use of this is probably for healing and buff spells that are touch only, but I don’t think that’s often enough of an issue to make this worth taking.
Empowered spell – 3/5
Good for: Dealing more damage when you make a poor damage roll. Especially for AoE spells.
Ability: Reroll some of your damage die from a spell. You can decide this once you’ve seen the roll and can be used even if you already used another metamagic option.
Changes from 2014: None
Tactics: The best use of this is on AoE spells that deal damage and roll a lot of dice like fireball. This is because the extra damage you roll will multiply by the number of targets. It’s not bad on a single target spell either if you really need to deal big damage to an enemy. You don’t want to be using this on spells with less damage dice than your charisma modifier (or that requires rerolls less than this). That just becomes a waste of your sorcery points.
The bigger the damage dice, the better with this spell. If you roll a 1 on a D4, the reroll will average 2.5 damage which is an increase of 1.5 damage per die. Compare this to a d8 where the average roll will be 4.5 making the extra damage 3.5, so the bigger the damage die, the better.
This means vitriolic sphere is a poorer option for this (with d4s for damage dice), fireball is better (with d6s) but circle of death is best (with d8s).
Extended spell – 2/5
Good for: Maintaining concentration and making a spell last longer.
Ability: Double the duration of a spell and have advantage on concentration saving throws for the spell.
Changes from 2014: You now also gain advantage on saving throws to maintain concentration.
Tactics: It’s quite rare that there’s a benefit to a spell lasting longer than it’s normal duration. Most combats don’t last longer than a minute and out of combat spells rarely benefit much from a double duration time. Maybe something like creation could be useful where creating gems for 20mins instead of 10 will be beneficial for your get away, but that’s a highly situational circumstance.
Advantage on concentration saving throws is much more useful, but if that’s something you really want, I’d be more tempted to take war caster and have that advantage permanently.
Heightened spell – 4/5
Good for: Really nasty save or suck spells.
Ability: Cause one target of a saving throw spell to have disadvantage against saving throws from that spell.
Changes from 2014: Requires 1 less sorcery point and grants disadvantage on all saving throws associated with the spell for the target, not just the initial one.
Tactics: This works best on spells with really nasty effects when saves are failed. This could be damage, like from finger of death, or it could be against conditions like restrained from the web spell.
It’s worth being aware that this works for all saving throws associated with that spell. This means spells with saving throws to end a condition on subsequent turns will be enhanced further. It’s also worth noting that some spells, like web, initially require a saving throw and then to escape the restraint, require an ability check which won’t be taken with disadvantage. So check the effects of these spells carefully.
It works nicely alongside something like flesh to stone for example, with subsequent saving throws required.
Quickened spell – 4/5
Good for: When you want to cast a cantrip and a spell with a spell slot with your action.
Ability: Cast a spell that requires an action with your bonus action.
Changes from 2014: Effectively doesn’t change but the wording has changed to accommodate changes to how casting multiple spells in a turn works.
Tactics: There are limits on what else you can cast with your action. Essentially, this means no level 1+ spell. This is a bit limiting, but if you want to knock off cantrips alongside action spells, this will let you do that.
I like the idea of using mind sliver with my action to deal damage and make an enemy less likely to pass a saving throw from your next spell cast with your bonus action. You could also go with maximum damage dealing by using something like true strike.
Seeking spell – 4/5
Good for: When you miss with a spell attack roll.
Ability: If you miss with a spell attack roll, you can reroll the d20.
Changes from 2014: Requires one less sorcery point.
Tactics: This can be used even if you already used a metamagic option for this spell. Great if you miss with an important spell attack and a good insurance policy for your spell attacks.
Subtle spell – 4/5
Good for: Casting spells sneakily.
Ability: Remove the need to use verbal, material or somatic components of a spell.
Changes from 2014: Now removes the need to use material components as well.
Tactics: This is really good for when you need to cast spells sneakily and not give away your position. This is handy for things like charm person with their short range, especially if you want to stay hidden when this is done.
The only challenge really is that this is a bit of a situational need, if not an overly unusual one if you engineer it that way. As such, I wouldn’t take it as one of your first metamagic options unless you’re really committed to being a sneaky sorcerer.
Transmuted spell – 2/5
Good for: Draconic sorcerers and bypassing resistances.
Ability: Change the damage type of your spells.
Changes from 2014: None
Tactics: Draconic sorcerers deal extra damage with spells of a certain damage type through elemental affinity. But if you’ve chosen lightning damage, but desperately want to take fireball, you can have the best of both worlds by using transmute spell.
The other use case for this is if you come across monsters resistant to your best spells, you can change their damage type and still deal loads of damage.
My issue with this is if you aren’t a draconic sorcerer, it’s not overly hard to pick a variety of damage type spells to ensure you don’t become stuck against demons because you only took fire spells for instance.
Twinned spell 5/5
Good for: Targeting more enemies with a spell.
Ability: Effectively upcast certain spells to hit an additional target.
Changes from 2014: More limited as to which spells can be twinned as upcasting the spell must target additional targets. This wasn’t the case before.
Tactics: This means you can effectively increase the level of a spell cast, and even if you aren’t of a level that can cast that spell level. For example, if you’re a level 7 sorcerer with banishment, you can upcast it with this metamagic option to hit an additional target.
As these spells are often concentration spells too, it means you can effectively double the effects of your concentration without expending precious, higher level spell slots.
If you are level 7 or higher, you can use 2 metamagic options at a time. This could pair really nicely with something like heightened spell to give one of the targets disadvantage on their saving throw.
What do you think of the changes to metamagic? And what are your favourite options? Let me know in the comments below.
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