Thumbs together, fingers spread, and forty-five years of setting the tavern on fire.
Today we’re looking at a 1st-level evocation spell called Burning Hands. Available to Wizards and Sorcerers, plus a pile of subclasses and the odd feat, this is the one where you press your thumbs together, spread your fingers, and hose down everything in front of you with fire. It is the original wizard fire spell, the one every new player reaches for the second they roll up a caster, and it has been in the game almost since the beginning.
Sitting at a range of self with a 15-foot cone, a casting time of one action, and a duration of instantaneous, Burning Hands does exactly one thing and does it honestly. It throws 3d6 fire damage at everyone caught in the cone; they make a Dexterity saving throw, and the ones who fail take the full damage, while the ones who make it take half. No attack roll to whiff, no concentration to hold, no lingering effect to track. You point, they burn, you move on.
The catch, and it’s the whole personality of the spell, is that cone. Fifteen feet is not a lot, and it starts at your own hands, which means to catch more than one enemy you have to be close enough to those enemies to be just a tad nervous about it. Burning Hands is a spell that asks a squishy first-level wizard to walk up and stick both hands into the fight. That tension, big damage versus bad positioning, is the entire conversation around this spell, and I’ll dig into how people actually solve it in the companion uses video. This one is about what it is and where it came from.
Burning Hands Rules As Written
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: Self (15-foot cone)
- Components: V, S
- Duration: Instantaneous
Here’s the 2014 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 220:
“As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried.”
Let’s break that down. First, “each creature in a 15-foot cone.” Every creature, not every enemy. Burning Hands does not discriminate. If your barbarian is toe to toe with the goblins and you fan the flames over the whole mess, the barbarian is making that Dexterity save right alongside the goblins. This is a friendly-fire spell, and forgetting that is a rite of passage. A barbarian with no eyebrows is probably an upgrade anyway, right?
Second, “must make a Dexterity saving throw.” This is the good part. There is no attack roll here, so you never miss. Against a pack of low-Dexterity enemies, that’s damage in the bank no matter how badly you roll. It’s a save-for-half spell, which is the gentlest kind of area damage, because even your best outcome only doubles your worst. Nobody in the cone walks away clean, but nobody gets deleted either.
Third, the damage: “3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much on a success.” That’s an average of about 10 or 11 on a full hit, 5 on a save. For a first-level slot hitting multiple targets, that is a strong number, and it’s the most damage Burning Hands has ever reliably dealt at first level, which we’ll get to.
And fourth, the part everybody forgets, “the fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried.” Loose scrolls, a rope bridge, a puddle of lamp oil, the long hair of the rapunzel knockoff NPC. Burning Hands is a fire hazard with a spell slot attached, and a clever wizard gets more mileage out of that clause than out of the damage.
At Higher Levels. “When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the damage increases by 1d6 for each slot level above 1st.” So a 2nd level slot is 4d6, a 3rd level slot is 5d6, and so on. It never gets a bigger cone and it never gets fancier, it just hits harder. Because the area stays the same, upcasting Burning Hands is really only worth it when you can already catch two or three bodies in the cone. One target and a fat slot is a waste. A doorway full of enemies and a 3rd level slot is a party.
Limits and Cheeses of Burning Hands
The cone is the limiter, full stop. Its origin is you, so every target you want to hit is a target that can hit you back next turn. Burning Hands rewards good positioning and punishes standing in the open, and the whole game around it is finding the moment when two or three enemies bunch up close and you’re not already dead.
Friendly fire is real, so watch your front line. And because it’s a Dexterity save rather than an attack, it’s at its best against slow, clustered, low-Dex enemies, think zombies, kobolds packed in a hallway, a swarm, and at its worst against a single nimble target who was always going to make the save anyway.
I’m keeping this short, because the real uses, the metamagic tricks, the sorcerer damage cheese, the “set the whole room on fire” plays, and a few unhinged ideas people have posted, all live in the companion piece. Go watch the Burning Hands uses video for that. Here, let’s talk history, because this spell has one of the wildest damage arcs in the game.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version on Burning Hands
Short answer, they’re the same spell. If you know the 2014 version, you already know the 2024 one. Same 1st-level evocation, same one action, same 15-foot cone, same Dexterity save, same 3d6 fire for half, same plus 1d6 per higher slot. Nobody buffed it, nobody nerfed it.
There are two small changes, and neither one touches the math. The first is flavor. The 2014 spell opens with that iconic bit of stage direction, “as you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread.” The 2024 version, page 248, cuts it down to a flat “a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from you.” A little sad, honestly, because those thumbs have been in the spell since 1978, but it changes nothing at the table.
The second change actually gives you something. In 2014, the spell said it “ignites any flammable objects in the area” and then never told you what that meant, which sparked (pun intended) roughly 10,000 internet arguments. The 2024 version says those objects “start burning,” and burning is now a defined hazard in the 2024 rules, over on page 362. A burning object or creature takes 1d4 fire at the start of each of its turns until someone puts it out. So the object-ignition clause finally has teeth. It’s minor, but it’s the rare case where the cleanup edition made the fun clause slightly more real instead of cutting it.
That’s the whole diff. If somebody at your table swears Burning Hands changed in 2024, they’re either thinking of the flavor text or they’re thinking of a different spell.
Burning Hands History
Now the fun part, because Burning Hands has been rewritten more times than almost any spell I’ve covered, and every edition had a completely different idea of what it should do.
First thing to know, Burning Hands is not one of the original 1974 spells. Unlike a lot of the classics, it wasn’t in the little brown books. It shows up in 1978, in the first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook, page 64, and that first version is almost unrecognizable.
In AD&D 1st edition, Burning Hands was a magic-user spell that did one hit point of damage per level of the caster, and get this, there was no saving throw at all. So a level one wizard did exactly one point of damage. One. The flames only reached about three feet in a fan in front of you, the duration was a full round of little blowtorch fingers, and the real payoff wasn’t the damage, it was setting things on fire. This is the version where you throw a flask of oil on a guy and then torch him with your hands. It was a terrible combat spell and a great arson spell, and honestly that DNA never fully left it.
In 2nd edition, 1989, it got a real damage upgrade and, for the first time, a saving throw. Now it did 1d3 plus 2 per caster level, up to a cap of 1d3 plus 20, and a successful save vs spell cut that in half. The fan of flame grew from three feet to five. So it went from “one point, no save” to a spell that a mid-level wizard could actually kill something with, at the cost of finally letting targets duck for half.
3rd edition, 2000, is where it starts to look like the spell we know. It became an Evocation with a fire descriptor, opened up to sorcerers and the fire domain, and switched to 1d4 per caster level, capped at 5d4. The save moved to a Reflex save for half, which is the direct ancestor of 5e’s Dexterity save. And it finally became a proper cone, ten feet in 3.0, then stretched to a 15-foot cone in 3.5, the exact size it still is today. That cap at 5d4 is the interesting bit. A first-level 3rd edition wizard matched the old 1st edition damage, but the spell stopped scaling after level five, so high-level wizards quietly retired it.
4th edition, 2008, did what 4th edition did to everything and turned it into an encounter power. This is the black sheep of the family. Instead of a saving throw, you made an actual attack, Intelligence against the target’s Reflex, and on a hit you dealt 2d6 plus your Intelligence modifier in fire to everyone in a close blast 5, which is a big 25-foot square. Two huge departures here. One, smarter wizards literally did more damage, because your Intelligence got added to the roll. Two, because it was an attack, you could crit with it, and you could also completely whiff and deal nothing, which no other version of the spell lets you do. It also went back to once per encounter, very 4th edition.
And then 5th edition, 2014, landed on the cleanest, strongest version yet. Flat 3d6 fire, no more counting caster levels, a Dexterity save for half, and plus 1d6 for every slot above first so it scales as long as you’re willing to spend. It kept the 15-foot cone from 3.5, brought back the save-for-half from 3rd edition, ditched the whiff-or-crit experiment from 4th, and gave a level one caster the biggest opening number the spell has ever had, and unlike 4th edition it can’t whiff to zero. The 2024 version, as we covered, left all of that alone.
So look at the whole arc. Burning Hands went from one automatic point of damage with no save, to a save-for-half blowtorch, to a caster-level cone, to a to-hit encounter power you could crit with, and finally to a clean flat 3d6 you can pump with a bigger slot. Same two hands, same spread fingers, five completely different spells wearing the same name.
My Opinion on Burning Hands
Burning Hands is the spell every wizard loves at level one and quietly stops preparing by level five. That’s just the spell’s life cycle, and there’s no shame in it. Early on, when enemies come in clumps and everybody has single-digit hit points, a no-miss 3d6 cone is one of the best first-level slots in the game. It falls off later because the cone never grew up and you eventually have better places to put your fire.
But I’ll defend it, because Burning Hands is more than its damage. It’s the arson clause. It’s the flask of oil and the “roll me a Dexterity save” and the whole room going up. It’s the spell that turns a boring corridor fight into a story. It’s the fiery reliability that says “dammit, I’m fire, and I burn real good!” The wizards who keep getting value out of it past low levels are the ones who stopped thinking of it as a damage spell and started thinking of it as a fire, with all the terrain and chaos that a real fire brings.
So I want to hear it. Is Burning Hands a level one favorite you retire without a second thought, or is it a permanent slot on your list because you’re the kind of caster who sees a hay barn and a group of bandits and just knows? And which version would you actually want to cast, the no-save 1st edition blowtorch or the modern 3d6 cone? Let me know in the comments below, go check out the companion video for all the ways to get mileage out of this thing, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous, thanks for reading!
Featured image from https://www.reddit.com/user/TarikHavoc/
