Chill Touch - the Confusingly Named, but Actually Very Powerful Cantrip

 When we talk about powerful cantrips, Eldritch Blast often gets a mention. Like Firebolt, its main damage die is a d10, but its real power comes in the fact that rather than scaling up with additional d10s to a single burst of damage, it's spread out over several attacks, which allows for things like Hex and the Agonizing Blast invocation to trigger on every hit, making the whole thing a lot more powerful.

But Eldritch Blast is a Warlock-only cantrip, and is really kind of central to the class (while a bladelock might forgo the spell, I'd have probably written it into the rules that Warlocks just get Eldritch Blast as one of their level 1 cantrips.

For Wizards, Sorcerers, and Artificers, if you're looking to maximize damage output, Firebolt is the go-to cantrip of choice, as it does 1d10 (then scales to 2d10, 3d10, and finally 4d10 at level 17) damage, has a nice long range, and can even light things on fire.

However, let me draw your attention to Chill Touch.

First off, Chill Touch is, I'll flat out say it, badly named. From its name, you'd assume it's got a range of touch and does cold damage. Neither is true. Instead, you get the following:

Like Fire Bolt (turns out there is a space there) Chill Touch has a range of 120 feet, cast time of an action, components are verbal and somatic. You send a ghostly or skeletal hand, which reaches out and grabs the target, doing 1d8 (2d8 at level 5, 3d8 at level 11, 4d8 at level 17) necrotic damage.

However, on top of this slightly lower damage than a Fire Bolt, there are two other things: I'll start with the more flavorful (though not useless) one - if the target is undead, it has disadvantage on attacks against you until the end of your next turn.

The other, true game-changer, is that the target cannot regain hit points until the start of your next turn (the hand continues to cling to the target.)

Now, sure, this might be irrelevant in most situations. Most monsters you fight don't have healing spells. But there are some monsters against which this is remarkably powerful:

Some monsters automatically regenerate health unless they take a particular kind of damage. Vampires, for example, will always heal up unless they take radiant damage as long as they have at least 1 hit point (after which spawn die and full vampires get their whole misty escape thing). Trolls are even more resilient, as they literally cannot die unless their regeneration is thwarted with fire or acid damage.

But Chill Touch, a mere cantrip, cuts through all of this.

Even crazier are the mythic creatures of Mythic Odysseys of Theros. While Tromokratis has new objects for you to destroy when he enters his Mythic phase, both Arasta and Hythonia go into their second phase by regenerating all their health - something that, rules-as-written, Chill Touch, again a mere cantrip, prevents - essentially cutting off the second, more difficult part of those fights. (As a DM I'd probably make them immune to this effect, but that'd just be my call.)

The disadvantage on attacks is also nothing to sneeze at - in fact, this spell is fantastic against vampires.