With NDAs lifted, I've seen some previews of the spells and some other features coming in Arcana Unleashed. I want to be clear here that the spells previewed (via Insight Check on YouTube) vary, with some looking like they could be some real new classics. Others, though, are underwhelming, and in the case of the one I'm going to talk about here, disappointing.
Let's talk Detonate.
I had some very high hopes for this spell, but unfortunately, I just don't think anyone will use it because the power level is just inferior to a comparable spell.
Detonate forces a creature to make a Con save, and on a failure, they take 10d10 damage, or half as much on a success, and then each creature within 60 feet of them has to make a Dex save, making that save at disadvantage if the target was reduced to 0 HP by the initial damage, taking 10d10 damage on a failure.
The spell is 9th level, and that's the problem.
Generally, as you get to higher-level spells, and especially 9th level spells, you need something truly transformative. Raw damage usually isn't really justified at this level, which is why Meteor Swarm, the ultimate evocation damage spell, does an ungodly 40d6 damage in total over an enormous area (4 different 40-foot-radius spheres within a mile).
The problem I see with Detonate is that I can't really imagine why you'd cast this rather than Meteor Swarm. A 60-foot radius circle (yes, it's a sphere, but we'll imagine this in a typical battle map scenario) has an area of 11,309 square feet, while 4 40-foot-radius circles have 20,106 square feet of area. In other words, you're going to be able to hit far more foes with Meteor Swarm, and the damage is going to be 140 on a failure or 70 on a success, versus 55 on a failure versus 27.5 on a success. Even with the disadvantage on the save if your target gets blown up, creatures are going to take less damage from this on a failed save than they would against Meteor Swarm on a successful save.
And I kind of feel like this has been something of a hallmark of 5.5 D&D. There seems to be a real fear of power creep, and so a lot of options in supplemental books have been undertuned.
Now, again, this is one example, and it's just a particular spell that I was excited about, but now feel like I'll never see anyone pick it.
It is tough, of course: power creep is extremely hard to prevent when you have a game system that you're continuing to add to over ten years since you first released it. Because of the gradual roll out of 5.5 updates, I've had to have a kind of weird piecemeal approach to updating my long-running Ravnica campaign: the Artificer in the group happily updated when the core books came out in 2024, which was a pretty simply process, but when the new Artificer came out in Forge of the Artificer, she decided she didn't want to sacrifice the old version of Soul of Artifice (which she hasn't actually gotten yet as the campaign is now at level 19, but my hope is to get them to 20 by the end of the year and hopefully wrap the campaign in 2027). I had initially said that if you wanted to use the new version of spells, you'd have to update to the new version of your class, but I had allowed her to do this before there was a new Artificer, and rather than force her to go back to giving their Artificer the old spells, I instead just caved and let anyone with an old class use the new spells if they wanted (the Cleric doesn't want to give up the old Divine Intervention, and so stuck with the 5.0 Cleric - also, I can't blame them for not wanting to update to the new Grave Domain, which wasn't yet out, of course - but I've now allowed them to use the updated healing spells). I wish that one of the Sorcerers who has Counterspell would use the new version.
The point is, without a clean break, power creep often comes, I think, in the form of cherry picking, creating something that takes all of the good and none of the bad.
The RPG, really, that I'm most familiar with is World of Warcraft, and it's far easier to regulate that because when Blizzard pushes an update to the game, it's mandatory. Sometimes we'll get changes I don't love - it's still fine, but I think they messed with the Frost Mage in this expansion when it had been a spec that I felt was basically perfect from about 2010 to 2026, but you just sort of roll with it.
Anyway, the point is that I understand WotC's real reluctance to put out anything that's going to break the game. We saw in 5.0 as certain options like the Hexblade Warlock really kind of re-shaped the balance of the game.
Now, I did see a really great argument once, talking about Hearthstone, actually: if an option is more powerful than an older option, it's only power creep if that original option was worth taking. It was comparing two creatures (minions, what are they called in that?) who cost the same, but one had strictly better stats, like 5 attack and 4 health as opposed to like 5 attack and 3 health. The thing was that no one was playing the old card with 3 health, so it was really introducing something that had a chance to affect the meta of the game, rather than throwing said meta into whack.
I think, for example, the Hollow Warden Ranger is an example of that sort of thing. The Ranger is infamously underpowered as a D&D class, and didn't even really get much better in 5.5, with subclasses that were improved over their 5.5 versions (other than the Gloom Stalker) but not really to the point where they were truly good. The Hollow Warden seems like power creep if you look at 5.5 Ranger subclasses in a vacuum, but the effect was more likely to just get a Ranger to the point where it could compete with other classes.
It's interesting that we get a sort of microcosm of this in Arcana Unleashed:
Sad to report, but Summon Plant is probably not very good. It works like all the other summon spells, but every Plant choice you can pick has a damage vulnerability, either Fire or Slashing (the latter of which feels like a huge liability). If you can avoid those types of damage, great - it should be fine.
But in contrast, Summon Dinosaur actually looks pretty good: the creature it summons is Huge no matter what. I think its default option will be the Tyrannosaurus version, which has an attack that hits for 2d10+5+the spell's level (base level is 6th, so we're looking at an average of 22 damage on each of its three attacks,) and the T-Rex will grapple and restrain a target if it hits.
In other words, the damage is really kept comparable to existing spells, but a bit higher, and with a powerful but not insurmountable condition imposed. It's also piercing damage, and while the removal of "nonmagical kinetic resistance" in 5.5 has made bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage less of a problem than in 5.0, resistance to these do sometimes come up, so there's a little asterisk by that damage that distinguishes this summon from some of the other options.
It's funny: when I started playing D&D with 5.0 in 2015, about a year after its initial release, new books like Volo's Guide to Monsters and Xanathar's Guide to Everything got me really eager to try out all the new content. As a DM, I was always rushing to use new monsters, and as a player, I was typically drawn more to newer subclasses.
The 5.5 core rulebooks were far more balanced than the 5.0 ones, and I really appreciated the effort put into broadening the options for players (there are still some areas where I disagree with the design philosophy - I find it interesting that Daggerheart has just released an Assassin class that is separate from their Rogue, and I sometimes think that my idea of what a Rogue should be, as in, basically a class capable of very high damage that must rely on stealth and evasiveness to survive rather than toughness and armor, is not what WotC thinks a Rogue should be) but I've been weirdly mixed on the post-2024 (well, the Monster Manual was 2025) releases.
To be fair, though, if you look back at the early stuff out of 5.0, there are some real whiffs. We remember Xanathar's Guide to Everything for the Hexblade Warlock, the Grave Cleric, Swords Bard and Gloomstalker Ranger, but it also had duds like the War Magic Wizard or the Samurai Fighter.
And while Tasha's Cauldron of Everything brought us probably a higher "awesome to crap" ratio, it also arguably (maybe not even arguably) saw some real power creep with things like the Twilight Cleric (I've heard people claim the Peace Cleric is even more powerful, though I think I'd need to see that in action to understand why).
This sort of design is hard - and as Shawn Merwin, veteran game designer and Eldritch Lorecast member, says, no one would want to play a perfectly balanced game. I think the ideal state of game balance for a big exception-based, modular game like D&D is for each option to be useful in particular situations, but no one can control how common those situations actually are. The asymmetry is what gives us the ability to create a character that is our own.
But I also think the importance of at least some semblance of balance is to let us make those decisions that are true to our character and have that rewarded by making the character good at what they're meant to do.
In the case of Detonate, I think there's an easy solution: it just shouldn't be a 9th level spell. Make this spell, like, 6th or 7th level, and now it feels reasonable. It's a wider area and higher damage than a 7th level Fireball, but that's fine - upcasting typically doesn't have as good scaling as natively higher-level spells, with Meteor Swarm being perhaps the ultimate example. I think the design mandate was to make more 9th level spells, but then they got cold feet on letting it actually do 9th level spell kinds of damage.
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