At high levels, Dungeons & Dragons players want to feel powerful, but if a spellcaster is never in the right situation to use their best spells, it's hard for them to gain such a feeling. Unfortunately for those higher-level casters, some fifth level spells practically waste the slot they take up.
Spells as powerful as those at the fifth level may not be entirely useless, but many of them apply only to situations so specific that they will rarely ever crop up. These spells might be the right tool for a specific job, but players who don't know what they're doing might be packing the wrong tool kit.
What many players look for in the magic they cast is a handy way to solve problems that are otherwise unsolvable instantly. Therein, the balance to the system of Fifth Edition can be tough. Cheat codes can be fun for a few moments, but they can also rob the game of a lot of its fun. The trick then comes in balancing those cheat codes, so they instill a feeling of reward rather than entitlement to the consequences they create. Toward that end, some of the most tempting spells at the fifth level feel imbalanced.
Legend Lore is the perfect example. The spell essentially grants players instant access to valuable information in the setting they inhabit, all at the cost of a few consumed materials. If this spell were restricted to an isolated moment, it might be a cool way for a party to learn about the mythology behind the world they inhabit. Still, with repeated use, the spell essentially breaks the vital "show, don't tell" rule of storytelling because all of the exposition a party really needs gets handed to them on a silver platter. Dungeon Masters can balance against this by simply withholding information the party needs or classifying it as occupying the space of the spell's loopholes. As soon as that happens, the spell becomes nothing more than a high-level flavor option.
Another extremely situational spell is Planar Binding. Though its effect of binding a creature to the caster's service and its duration of a full 24 hours may seem tempting, the balances against it are so severe that it proves far less useful than one might imagine. The spell requires an hour of casting time utilizing somatic, verbal and material components that consume a 1,000 gold piece jewel. If a creature needs to be bound to your service, it is presumably against cooperating for the full hour of casting time, meaning the costly spell is only even useful when the fiend or fey is already bound by a Magic Circle that itself requires a full minute to cast. Throw in that not all classes can even learn Magic Circle, and Planar Binding becomes so extremely specific it's never used.
Certain combat options at the fifth level are just straightforwardly inferior to Fireball, which is readily available at fourth level and capable of upcasting. Immolation and Cone of Cold both have a far more restricted area of effect, limiting the total amount of damage the spells can do. While they may be more useful in tight spaces, casters are still advised to upcast different options for superior damage outputs, and it's hard to imagine situations where either spell is the ideal option.
There are plenty of fantastic options with fifth level spells, but these aren't the right choices. If a character knows they will be in the exact situation in which they are useful, they should choose them, but chances are that those situations will rarely, if ever, arise.
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