F/3

Fire Shield 

Let's continue our exciting tour through the wonderful world of what TSR Wizards of the Coast Hasbro Industrial Fantasy Simulations Inc. thinks you can do with fire. This one basically shrouds you in a bonfire, which provides you with resistance to fire damage, after the 'sympathetic magic' approach that so much of Dungeons & Dragons relies on. (In fact, being consumed by flames makes you more vulnerabe to fire damage, not less.) It also gives you a counter-attack against anyone who tries to smite you, inflicting a small but not insignificant amount of damage.

What's particularly odd about this spell is that you can also make it a 'chill shield', whatever that is, that makes you equally resistant to cold. This makes no sense, and furthermore, doesn't it make more sense to have Chill Shield  as a separate spell?  If nothing else, it would break up the tedium between Charm Person and Chill Touch.

Real-World Rating: 5 (Effective But Limited)

Fire Storm

A Firestorm is a DC super-hero.  A fire storm is what we did to Dresden, Germany. Glad we got that cleared up. This is actually a great spell, creating a hundred-foot cube of infernos that rain down from the sky, inflicting a minimum of 35 HP damage and a maximum of a whopping 700. For some reason, you can also make all the plant life in the hell-storm you just created invulnerable to the spell's damage, which is great if you want to, say, kill a bunch of people at a botanical garden.

Real-World Rating:  8 (Very Effective)

Flame* Blade

Oh, so you thought we were done with all the fire spells, didn't you? But you forgot about flame, buddy. You forgot about flame. This low-level spell does the classic fantasy move of creating a tongue of fire in the shape of a scimitar (sword-shapes are not available as the spell is manufactured in Turkey), which is cool and does slightly more damage than it would do if you just shot somebody. It also provides low-level light if you forgot your cell phone. A good low-risk, low-reward offensive spell. 

Real-World Rating: 6 (Pretty Okay)

Flame Strike

Finally, the long-awaited Fire Storm vs. Flame Strike showdown! 7th level vs. 5th level; 150-foot range vs. 60-foot range; no material component vs. smelly material component; both instant, 10' in area of effect, and half damage on a save. This one is obviously just a low-rent version of the other one, but it's pretty good to have in your pocket in the event you need to burn someone to death in a pinch, as we so often do.

Real-World Rating: 7 (Effective)

Flaming Sphere

The fire spells (or, as I like to call them, A Walk Through H) come to a close with kind of a whimper. This is the favorite offensive spell of low-level druids and clerics and other people who shouldn't technically be in the business of being a homicidal drifter, but here we are. While this one can last for a bit, and you can make it do fun tricks like hopping a fence or getting in the back seat of an Uber, it's still essentially a big flaming cotton ball that you have to poke around the room. Meh.

Real-World Rating: 3 (Pretty Ineffectual)

Flesh to Stone

Turning people to stone has always been more impressive in theory than in practice; for one thing, where are you supposed to keep all these statues? Have you seen the price of real estate lately? They're all just going to end up on an episode of Storage Wars.

But in D&D, it's even worse. For one thing, there's a lot of outs -- your target gets as many as three saving throws, any of which could render the whole spell null and void. For another, it only lasts for as long as you can concentrate on keeping the opponent statue-fied, which takes you out of any other action and could easily be improved on by the use of any number of spells (like Hold Person) that does that job for you. 

Finally, the most fun thing about it is that you can inflict damage on the statue which persists after it turns back into a person, meaning that this is truly a temptation for the sadistic rather than a tool for the decent. There's a reason nobody wanted to go out with Medusa.

Real-World Rating: 4 (More Trouble Than It's Worth)

Fly

Flying is not only one of the great dreams of humankind, but an aspiration of so many wish-fulfillment fantasies. But there's a reason we so often resort to magic items or technological quick-fixes to achieve it. 

If nothing else, Fly is an exercise in time management. Players (and, often, DMs) often don't pay much attention to spell durations, but in this case, letting your concentration lapse, or failing to heed the hard, fast ten-minute deadline, will likely result in a terminal splat. The 5th edition of D&D also puts an end to the daring old wizard-duel fantasies of aerial combat by making it a Concentration spell, meaning there's really not much else you can do while racing through the sky -- a limitation not applicable to, say, dragons. 

One thing that's really odd about it -- unless I'm doing my math wrong, a distinct possibility in every area of my life -- is that the Fly spell gives you an air speed of "60 feet for the duration". While the bad copywriting does not clarify what period the 60 feet is for, it's probably safe to assume that it's per round; and, since a round in 5e is 6 seconds, this translates to exactly ten feet per second. That translates to just under seven miles an hour, and folks, that's not very fast. This means that the spell, while allowing you to fly through the air like God's most majestic creatures, means that you can be outrun by almost every form of modern transportation including a bus, or a bicycle, or a normal person running at a fairly leisurely clip. I can't deny the appeal of any spell that lets you fly, but the fact that when you do, you are liable to be paced by an orc dragging around a large wooden chest filled with dented helmets takes a little bit of the glory away from it in my opinion.

Real-World Rating: 5 (Effective But Limited) 

*: If you, like me, are prone to a very common typo, you can pretend that all the 'Flame' spells are actually 'Fame' spells and instead of giving you power over fire, they just make you a minor celebrity.