Analysing Magic Missile: How Effective Is It In D&D 5e

Running calculations on this automatically hitting 1st level spell.

Magic missile has been a staple of wizards and sorcerers throughout the editions of D&D. It’s a bunch of low powered, magical, homing missiles, kicking in at level 1.

But is it worth taking? With such low damage on each dart, it would be easy to dismiss this spell. However, with the power of mathematics, we can gauge its true power and usefulness.

How does magic missile work?

Wizard fighting spiders — Wizard casting a spell: Wizards of the Coast

Handily, magic missile works exactly the same in both the 2014 and 2024 iterations of D&D 5e. Here’s how it works below:

1st-level evocation

Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous

You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart strikes a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 Force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.

Using a Higher-Level Spell Slot. The spell creates one more dart for each spell slot level above 1.

PHB 2024, p295

The important thing to note is you’ve got 3 darts that deal 1d4+1 damage each that automatically hit their targets.

Calculating how good magic missile really is

There are 2 aspects of magic missile to consider when working out how good it is. The average damage and how much better it is at hitting than other spells.

Comparing the damage is a little easier so we’ll start there. For that, I’ve pulled out some similar types of spells that do damage only to one target or have multiple missiles that again, only do damage. I’ve looked at how these compare when upcast to different levels too which you can see in the table below:

Spell level	Magic missile	Inflict wounds	Scorching ray
1	10.5	11	N/A
2	14	16.5	21
3	17.5	22	28
4	21	27.5	35
5	24.5	33	42
6	28	38.5	49
7	31.5	44	56
8	35	49.5	63
9	38.5	55	70

As you can see in the above, magic missile scales poorly in damage compared to these other spells (not that I’d generally recommend using a 9th level spell slot on scorching ray).

However, each spell has a different approach to hitting. Magic missile hits automatically, inflict wounds requires a saving throw and deals half damage on a success and scorching ray requires spell attack rolls, but no damage on a miss.

As you might notice, damage seems to scale with the likeliness of dealing damage. This means if we want to truly understand the effectiveness of magic missile, we need to factor in the chances of hitting and how that affects average damage.

Unfortunately, this is very difficult to calculate as so much varies based on your ability scores, class features, the enemy and the circumstances of combat. As a rough rule of thumb though, at any given level, the odds of a success are generally about 65%. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to work with this number and factor in average damage if 65% of spells attacks are successes and saving throws are failures:

Spell level	Magic missile	Inflict wounds	Scorching ray
1	10.5	9.1	N/A
2	14	13.6	13.7
3	17.5	18.2	18.2
4	21	22.7	22.8
5	24.5	27.3	27.3
6	28	31.8	31.9
7	31.5	36.3	36.4
8	35	40.9	41
9	38.5	45.4	45.5

Remarkably, inflict wounds and scorching ray track incredibly close to one another when it comes to average damage (almost like they were designed to be of fairly similar damage levels).

With hitting factored in, magic missile does track much closer to these other spells and actually exceeds them slightly at levels 1 and 2 (which should almost always be the spell slots used for this spell).

One other factor to note is the superior damage type of magic missile (force) compared to other spells like inflict wounds (necrotic) and scorching ray (fire). Force is one of the least resisted damage types in the game.

So in terms of damage output, magic missile stacks up fairly well with other pure damage dealers, especially as we wouldn’t expect these spells to generally be upcast with mid to high level spell slots. Instead what we have is a very reliable source of decent damage, that can be directed at multiple targets if desired.

For me, this makes magic missile a solid, but not remarkable spell. Perfectly decent to have in your repertoire, and particularly nifty for high AC enemies, but not necessarily anything special. It is probably the best pure damage dealer of level 1 spells by a small amount other than chromatic orb.

However, if you think you can up the odds of hitting by gaining advantage, harming enemy saving throws or having enhancements like innate sorcery (from the sorcerer class), then you may find that something like scorching ray or chromatic orb will deal more damage on average.

What do you think of magic missile? Let me know in the comments below.