Roll a bag of hit points, blind the weakest thing in the room, and watch the internet argue about it for a decade.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level illusion spell called Color Spray. Available to Sorcerers and Wizards, this is the spell where you throw a fistful of glitter out of your hand and a bunch of low-health creatures suddenly can’t see. It’s one of the strangest first-level spells in the whole game, because the 2014 version doesn’t ask for a saving throw at all. Instead it hands you a pool of hit points and tells you to spend it, cheapest targets first. That one design choice is why people have been calling this spell broken, or a trap, or both, for ten straight years.
Sitting at a range of self with a 15-foot cone, a casting time of one action, and a duration of one round, Color Spray is a burst of close-up crowd control. You are not sniping a boss with this. You are standing near a clump of weak enemies and deleting their eyeballs for a turn. And the way it decides who gets blinded is unlike almost anything else at this level, so let’s get into it.
For now, let’s take a look at the rules as written. And remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different. That’s what makes this fun.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: Self (15-foot cone)
- Components: V, S, M (a pinch of powder or sand that is colored red, yellow, and blue)
- Duration: 1 round
Here’s the 2014 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 222:
“A dazzling array of flashing, colored light springs from your hand. Roll 6d10; the total is how many hit points of creatures this spell can effect. Creatures in a 15-foot cone originating from you are affected in ascending order of their current hit points (ignoring unconscious creatures and creatures that can’t see). Starting with the creature that has the lowest current hit points, each creature affected by this spell is blinded until the end of your next turn. Subtract each creature’s hit points from the total before moving on to the creature with the next lowest hit points. A creature’s hit points must be equal to or less than the remaining total for that creature to be affected.”
Yes, the book really does say “how many hit points of creatures this spell can effect,” with effect spelled the wrong way. That’s a real typo that shipped in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, and it has nothing to do with how the spell works. Now let’s walk through the part that actually matters, because almost everyone gets a piece of this wrong.
“Roll 6d10; the total is how many hit points of creatures this spell can effect.” So the first thing you do is roll six ten-sided dice. That’s your budget. It averages 33 and can swing anywhere from 6 to 60. This is a pool of enemy hit points you get to spend, and the important word is current. Not maximum hit points, current hit points. A big bruiser that’s been chewed down to 12 HP counts as a 12-point target, not whatever its full bar was.
“Creatures in a 15-foot cone originating from you are affected in ascending order of their current hit points.” Here’s the engine. The spell lines up everyone in the cone from lowest current HP to highest and starts blinding them from the bottom up. You do not get to pick who gets hit. The dice and their health totals decide, weakest first, and you keep going up the ladder until the pool runs dry.
“Ignoring unconscious creatures and creatures that can’t see.” Two freebies for the enemy. Something already knocked out does not soak up any of your pool, and neither does something that already can’t see, a creature that’s already blind or fighting in the dark without darkvision. The spell skips them entirely, which is good, because you don’t want your hit point budget wasted blinding a guy who was napping.
“Starting with the creature that has the lowest current hit points, each creature affected by this spell is blinded until the end of your next turn.” So the payoff is the blinded condition, and it lasts until the end of YOUR next turn rather than the target’s, which buys you a full round of value. A blinded creature has disadvantage on every attack roll, and every attack against it has advantage. You have turned a cluster of enemies into easy targets who also can’t hit back reliably, for a whole round, off a first-level slot.
“Subtract each creature’s hit points from the total before moving on to the creature with the next lowest hit points. A creature’s hit points must be equal to or less than the remaining total for that creature to be affected.” This is the accounting, and it’s the whole skill of the spell. Say you roll a 33. Three goblins are standing in the cone at 7, 9, and 11 current HP. The spell blinds the 7 (33 minus 7 leaves 26), then the 9 (26 minus 9 leaves 17), then the 11 (17 minus 11 leaves 6). All three blinded, six points to spare. But if a fourth creature behind them is sitting at 15 HP, it walks free, because 15 is more than the 6 you had left. The pool stops the instant the next creature in line costs more than your remaining total. One tough target near the front can wall off everything behind it.
At Higher Levels. “When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, roll an additional 2d10 for each slot level above 1st.” So every slot above first adds two more d10 to the pool. A 2nd level slot rolls 8d10, a 3rd rolls 10d10, and so on. You’re not blinding creatures for longer or widening the cone, you’re just buying a bigger hit point budget so the wave of blindness climbs higher up the health ladder and catches tougher enemies. Upcasting Color Spray is how you make it scale into a room full of mid-tier monsters instead of just the goblins.
Limits and Cheeses
A couple of things to know before you glitter-bomb the whole dungeon.
First, that hit point pool is a random number you’re spending against numbers you usually can’t see. You do not know the exact current HP of the enemies in the cone, so casting Color Spray is always a bit of a read. Against a pack of clearly wounded weaklings it’s close to a guaranteed multi-blind. Against fresh enemies, or one beefy target mixed into the group, a bad 6d10 roll can fizzle on the very first creature.
Second, the duration is short and the range is point-blank. One round of blinded is strong, but it’s one round, and to get the cone where it needs to go you’re standing within 15 feet of a group of enemies as a squishy first-level caster. That positioning tension is the price of the spell.
Third, it does nothing to anything that doesn’t rely on sight the normal way, and it’s a pure HP-gate with no save in 2014, which sounds amazing until you remember the flip side. There is no save, so a weak creature cannot resist it, but there is also no save, so the moment a creature’s current HP is above your remaining pool, it is flatly immune that turn no matter how bad its eyes are.
I’ll keep the limits short here, because the fun stuff, the real uses, the sorcerer metamagic tricks, the questionable table arguments, and a few deviant ideas people have floated, all live in the companion post. Go read the Color Spray uses post for that. This one is about what the spell is and where it came from.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
Okay, this is the big one, and it’s the most dramatic 2014-versus-2024 change I’ve covered so far. Color Spray WAS reprinted in the 2024 Player’s Handbook, on page 251, and Wizards did not tidy it up or trim a couple of words like they did with Bless. They gutted it and rebuilt it from scratch.
Here’s the entire 2024 spell, and I mean the entire thing: “You launch a dazzling array of flashing, colorful light. Each creature in a 15-foot Cone originating from you must succeed on a Constitution saving throw or have the Blinded condition until the end of your next turn.”
That’s it. Read what just happened. The 6d10 hit point pool is gone. The ascending-order-of-current-HP sorting is gone. The whole spend-your-budget-cheapest-first engine, the thing that made Color Spray weird and famous, deleted. In its place is the most ordinary save-or-suck template in the game. Every creature in the cone rolls a Constitution saving throw, and the ones that fail are blinded until the end of your next turn. The blinded duration is the only thing that survived unchanged.
And notice the trade. The 2014 version had no save, so it could never be resisted, but it was hard-capped by that random hit point pool, so it could whiff on tough targets entirely. The 2024 version rips off the HP cap, so now it can theoretically blind a dragon, but it hands every target a Constitution save to shrug it off, and Constitution is one of the best save stats big monsters have. So the spell went from “blinds the weakest, ignores the strong, no save” to “can hit anything, but everything gets a Con save.” Those are two completely different spells wearing the same name.
One more casualty worth flagging. The 2024 version has no At Higher Levels line at all. You cannot upcast it anymore. In 2014 a bigger slot bought you a bigger pool. In 2024, a first-level slot is all it will ever be, because a Constitution save doesn’t care how much of a slot you fed it. So if your table runs 2024 rules, throw out everything you knew about counting hit points. It’s a Con save now, full stop.
History
Now the part I love, because Color Spray is old, and its history is a genuinely great illustration of how D&D’s whole design philosophy kept swinging back and forth.
The spell traces all the way back to the illusionist in the early days, showing up in Dragon Magazine’s very first issue as a sheet of bright conflicting colors that affected one to six levels of creatures and rendered them unconscious through confusion. Even then the core idea was there, a fan of color that shuts down a handful of weak things at once.
Then Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the 1978 Player’s Handbook, gave it the version that tortured DMs for a decade. Color Spray was a 1st level illusionist spell with a range of one inch per level on the tabletop, a duration of one segment, and a wedge-shaped area. It affected one to six creatures, and here’s the mechanic, it sorted by how the target’s level or hit dice compared to yours. Creatures at or below your level got knocked unconscious for two to eight rounds. Creatures one or two levels above you got blinded for one to four rounds. Creatures three or more levels above you got stunned for a couple of segments. Weak things went to sleep, tougher things merely got blinded, and the toughest just got rattled. The wording was so tangled that Dragon Magazine had to print corrections and DMs argued for years about how it even functioned, but the design intent is crystal clear, this was a graded crowd-control spell that did more to the weak and less to the strong.
Second edition, in 1989, kept that skeleton and cleaned up the language a little. Still 1st level, still one to six creatures, now affected in order of increasing distance from you. Same three tiers, knocked unconscious for 2d4 rounds at or below your level, blinded for 1d4 rounds one or two above, stunned for a round three or more above. Creatures above your level or with six or more hit dice got a saving throw, and blind creatures were immune. Same soul as first edition, just readable.
Third edition and 3.5 modernized the framework and made the tiers depend purely on the target’s hit dice instead of comparing to your level. A sorcerer or wizard 1st level spell, an illusion, a 15-foot cone-shaped burst, Will save negates. Two hit dice or less and the creature was unconscious, blinded, and stunned on a whole timer that ran several rounds. Three or four hit dice and it was blinded and stunned for a shorter stretch. Five or more hit dice and all it got was stunned for a single round. Sightless creatures were immune. This is the version a lot of older players picture, the one where Color Spray could stone-cold end a fight against low-hit-dice mooks but barely tickled anything with real staying power.
Fourth edition did what fourth edition did to everything and turned it into a combat power. Color Spray became a 3rd level wizard encounter attack power over on page 161 of the 2008 Player’s Handbook, a blast that dealt 1d6 plus your Intelligence modifier in radiant damage and left every target it hit dazed until the end of your next turn. No hit dice tiers, no unconscious, just damage and the dazed condition, very much the 4e house style where every spell is a tidy little attack.
And then fifth edition in 2014 did something clever. It looked at forty years of “this spell does more to weaker creatures” and found a brand new way to express it, the 6d10 hit point pool, spend it cheapest-first, blind whoever it reaches. It threw out the hit-dice tiers and the unconscious and stunned effects, kept only blinded, and dropped the save entirely. It’s a genuinely original take on a very old idea. And then, as we just covered, 2024 walked away from all of it and made the spell a plain Constitution save.
So that’s the arc, and it’s a wild one. Color Spray started as a graded knockout spell that put the weak to sleep, spent thirty years sorting victims by hit dice, briefly became a radiant daze cannon in 4e, got reinvented in 2014 as a hit point budget you spend on blindness, and then in 2024 got flattened into the single most generic save-or-be-blinded spell imaginable. Five decades, and the one constant is that it has never once agreed with itself on how it should work.
Opinion
Color Spray is the most interesting first-level spell that most people never actually cast, and the reason is right there in the design history. The 2014 version is a puzzle. When the pieces line up, a clump of low-health enemies, a decent roll, you standing in the right spot, it is one of the best action-economy swings a first-level slot can buy, blinding three or four creatures so your whole party gets advantage and takes almost nothing back for a round. When the pieces don’t line up, it does nothing, and that inconsistency is why so many players quietly leave it on the shelf and take Sleep or Grease instead.
The 2024 rewrite is honestly a fair fix. It’s boring, but it’s reliable, and it can finally threaten something bigger than a goblin. Whether you think trading the weird beautiful hit point engine for a flat Con save was worth it probably says a lot about whether you like your spells clever or dependable. Me, I miss the math. Counting hit points and watching the blindness climb the ladder was a genuinely fun little ritual, and the 2024 version plays like every other save spell in the book.
So I want to hear it. Is Color Spray a hidden gem you actually run, or is it the trap option you skip every single time? And which version do you prefer, the 2014 hit point roulette or the clean 2024 Con save? Let me know in the comments below, go check out the companion post for all the ways to break this thing, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
