The best D&D 5e cantrips for every class

Cantrips are the spells you cast most, because they cost no slot and you have them forever. Picking the right ones shapes how your character feels every single turn. Here are the cantrips worth taking, grouped by what they do, with the class lists they come from.

The best attack cantrips

Fire Bolt. The gold standard for arcane casters. 1d10 fire at 120 feet, no save, scaling to 4d10. On the wizard and sorcerer lists, it’s the default ranged option and it even sets unattended flammables alight.

Eldritch Blast. The warlock signature and, with invocations like Agonizing Blast, the strongest damage cantrip in the game. It fires additional beams as you level, so you can spread or focus damage.

Sacred Flame (cleric) and Vicious Mockery (bard) round out the divine and support options — Sacred Flame ignores cover with its Dex save, and Vicious Mockery deals damage and imposes disadvantage, which is often worth more than the dice.

Other solid picks: Ray of Frost (damage plus a speed reduction), Shocking Grasp (advantage against metal armour, no reaction for the target — a melee caster’s escape button), Chill Touch and Poison Spray.

The best utility cantrips

Damage isn’t everything. The cantrips that solve problems out of combat often get more use over a campaign.

Mage Hand. A remote hand for pulling levers, retrieving items and setting off traps from a safe distance. Endlessly useful and on most arcane lists.

Minor Illusion. The creativity cantrip — a sound or an image that clever players turn into distractions, cover and misdirection. Few cantrips reward imagination like it.

Prestidigitation and Druidcraft are the flavour-and-function toolkits (clean, chill, flavour, spark), while Light and Mending quietly solve the practical problems every party hits. And Guidance (druid/cleric) plus Spare the Dying are the support cantrips that keep the party rolling well and standing up.

Pick by class

Which cantrips you can take depends on your class list. Browse them directly: wizard, sorcerer, cleric, druid, bard, warlock. A good rule of thumb: one reliable attack cantrip, one utility cantrip (Mage Hand or Minor Illusion), and then fill the rest to taste. See the complete cantrip list for every option with full text.

Keep them at the table

The friction with cantrips is the same as any spell: nobody wants to look them up mid-turn. Because you cast cantrips constantly, having them on a card in front of you speeds every round. The Spell Cards bundle (£33 £9.90) gives you every class spell as an illustrated, printable card, so your cantrips — the spells you use most — are always a glance away. Pair it with the free spell list tool to plan the rest of your spellbook.