Well, somewhat. With the way healing works in 5E it’s pretty easy to get people back up, and you can often have one PC be downed and still have the rest of the party doing pretty well. If I’m running an enemy that wants to kill the entire party, and the party is trying to kill the enemy, having one at least person go unconscious is pretty common to make it actually feel challenging. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the party is actually in danger of losing the fight.
Even with playing just the monsters in the book, high-level encounters in D&D will be incredibly swingy because there are a lot of abilities for both PCs and monsters where one character rolling well or poorly can completely change whether the fight is a near-TPK or a cakewalk. The party succeeded on the save against the cool boss ability, well they’re probably gonna be fine. Or they all failed, well now they’re fucked. The boss failed the save and now it’s paralyzed, guess you’ve pretty much won. Or it succeeded, now you’ve wasted your turn. That kinda thing.
That’s why making encounters with a bunch of swingy abilities can actually tip things back into being controllable. If your boss is getting whomped harder than expected, he gets desperate and breaks out the super-kill abilities. Or if the party is the ones getting clobbered, maybe the boss gets overcompetent and doesn’t use their super-kill ability until it’s too late.
I’ve found that at the end of the day, the PCs are generally expected to win, and they have a major advantage: when they hit zero, they get to roll death saves and can be healed, whereas the enemies usually just die. This is actually a huge factor in their favor, and explains partially why PCs can beat enemies that might seem way above their level. So honestly I don’t worry too much about making strong enemies, my parties can usually handle them. And if they handle it too easily, it’s not the end of the world.
This is a good answer. DMs have a lot of dials to turn to adjust the difficulty of an encounter even just with how they play the enemies. Really I think there are few DMs who play enemies as deadly as possible all the time.
I know I’ll sometimes play enemies more aggressively if the PCs are doing better in the fight, like attacking downed PCs or counterspelling healing. Whereas if they’re struggling, I might find other things for the enemies to do that’ll be a little less mean.
I’m probably gonna end up nerfing the blast at least a little so it feels a bit more fair overall, since a number of responses thought it was overturned. Probably take a damage die off and drop the range a little.
The dual damage types is mostly flavor, I think thunder is a little better than lightning technically? but they’re pretty close, and I don’t think you’d cast this if you’re fighting something resistant to lightning anyway.
With the main mode it seems like it’s in a fair spot, then? Better than haste, seems fair compared to guardian of nature? Part of the balancing is also that it’s self-buff only, so unlike haste and holy weapon you can’t have the 7th level Wizard give it to the Fighter.
I don’t want the AoE to take away too much from the rest of the spell, it’s like 50% there for the flavor/coolness effect anyway. My experience with taking holy weapon on my Cleric is that you’ll often end up dropping the spell from taking damage or you’ll hold off using the blast because you wanna keep swinging, so you end up not using the blast anyway. So I don’t want the blast to drag down the power of the rest of the spell. Seems like there’s a fine line between making it overpowered and making it unusable here.
You have a good point comparing it to ice storm, which only does a little more damage than the blast. Though on the other hand ice storm kinda sucks, doesn’t it?
I guess speed buff + op-attack immunity does make you pretty untouchable to melee from most humanoids, that is pretty good. I do want it to be better than haste since it’s a level higher. If I nerf the AoE a bit do you think the rest is balanced overall?
I’m not sure I’m seeing how it amounts to action surge-y? The thing about the blast is that it costs your action on that turn, so if I make it too weak then it won’t be worthwhile ever using it vs just keeping the spell up and continuing to attack with it or dropping the spell normally and doing something else with your action.
Holy weapon’s blast, which was the inspiration, is substantially more impactful: more damage (slightly), bigger area, and it can even inflict blinded, plus it’s triggered as a bonus action rather than an action. Of course my spell can’t be as good since it’s a level lower, but I do think the comparison is more than fair even given that, between the blast effects at least.
I guess, do you think I’m underrating how good the movement effect is? I’m trying to make it comparable to guardian of nature which is also 4th level and can add 1d6 damage per hit, plus it gives advantage on your attacks. Since advantage is really strong I don’t wanna just add that to my spell instead but I do want the other effects to end up being comparable. I did originally consider just giving disadvantage on opportunity attacks rather than ignoring them completely, but I figured if zephyr strike and Ashardalon’s stride could ignore them with lower level slots it should be ok.
Thanks for your feedback, I do appreciate it!
Aha, thank you! I missed guardian of nature when I was looking for spells to compare it to. That’s a good comparison because it’s the same level.
Guardian does also have the very nice benefit of adding advantage to what would probably be all of your attacks. Do you think the other benefits of my spell are good enough to be comparable? Definitely not thinking of just slapping advantage onto my spell too as I think that would be too much, but I’m wondering if this justifies a bit more oomph in there somewhere.
The other reply thought the blast was overturned too. I don’t want the blast to be too much of the focus; it’s like 50% there for flavor. Maybe dropping it down a damage die and shrinking the range as you suggested? I just don’t want it to feel like a waste of your action compared to dropping the spell normally and casting something else.
I actually bumped the blast damage up a bit right before posting, it started out at 2d6 of each. I can tone it back down if it seems unfair.
My thinking was that if you’re spending your whole action on an AoE blast it should be at least decent, and there are much better AoEs for a 4th-level slot. Flavorfully it’s sort of a letdown if the blast does less damage to an enemy that turn than just keeping the spell up and hitting them a couple more times. Holy weapon has a higher damage blast that you can trigger as a bonus action, plus it even blinds, but since that’s a level higher I couldn’t have it be that good.
There isn’t a similar enough 4th-level spell to compare it to, but on the lower-bound end there’s haste and spirit shroud which both add damage per turn with concentration plus some other benefits. This spell adds less damage per turn than spirit shroud and possibly less than haste depending on how strong your individual attacks are, which is why I felt it might be undertuned even with the movement buffs. Immunity to opportunity attacks is pretty good especially if you’re taking it on a squishy caster, but I need it to be worthwhile somehow.
Hmm, and I was worried it might be undertuned. What do you think should be changed?
There are other spells I could ask for, but I wanted to make some of my own, makes 'em feel more personalized and it makes sense for the character.
This reminds me of the Animorphs TV episode where they were putting Yeerks in cell phones.
Thing is, how long are the little dudes supposed to survive in there?
This reminds me, I do something kinda similar. At ASI levels I give out a +1 and a feat, instead of the usual +2 or a feat. I agree that it’s more fun to let people take feats instead of feeling obligated to pick the ASI!
Hmm, not particularly; most of them are fairly small changes in play even if they take up a decent amount of text in the doc. I’m mostly just trying to put the weaker options more on par with stronger options. If something comes up in a game where I realize “Whoops I made that too strong” I’ll reassess.
So far my players have liked them as it’s mostly buffs: I’ve definitely seen the weaker Sorcerer subclasses get more play because of the changes. You could argue that Sorcerers are casters and don’t need the help, but I feel it just puts them on par with Wizards at worst.
Oh I do so much actually. Well, I have a ton of house rules in a doc that are 99% pretty little things, minor QoL stuff, mostly to buff martials and character options that need the help. For example:
I’m not really sure what you mean you disagree with. I think we’re talking at cross purposes here, because I’m not quite getting where you’re going with what you’re saying.
The thing about movies and other pieces of narrative fiction is that the writers can and very often do arrange the narrative so that the main characters are more able to evenly contribute, despite having wildly different capabilities. Like how Vision got stabbed at the beginning of Infinity War and was weakened for the whole movie, or how Dr. Strange got stuck holding back water during the final fight in Endgame, or how characters like Superman and the Flash constantly job and forget powers they have or that they’re also geniuses, or half the enemies inexplicably have a supply of Kryptonite, so that Batman has something to do. And even then, there are clear differences in what they achieve: Thor’s arrival in Infinity War was a “the day is saved!” moment, no one reacts to Hawkeye like that. Superman gets movies about him saving the world by himself, while Batman on his own usually just saves Gotham.
When you put these characters together in the same game for players to pick from, you have to make them more balanced, that’s why games like Injustice have plot points where some characters get powers or Superman is weakened by Kryptonite or they just hand-wave things and put characters on roughly the same level. And D&D tries to do that too, they just do something of a half-baked job at it, as the OP is showing. Because if you try to address it narratively like a movie does, the caster players will rightfully feel unfairly targeted: “Wow, this enemy also knows countermagic/has an antimagic item/has magic resistance?”
So do you think that the utility of spells should be nerfed, so that the party has to rely on finding someone else to do the things for them?
I read a quote a while back that I really liked: “The game is inherently a series of problems wrapped up in a narrative. The easier it is for you to solve those problems, the better you are at the game.” And I feel like the answer to “Which classes have an easier time solving problems in the game?” is pretty obvious and hard to argue. Even if you do think it’s possible for a martial to find a creative solution to accomplish the same thing as a caster, it’s clearly far more difficult and less straightforward for them to do so compared to just casting the “fix the problem spell” that usually exists, right?
I think you’re misrepresenting the position a bit. No amount of creativity can make up the gap in utility power between high-level — or even mid-level — spells and the abilities that martials get. It’s not a video game mindset to ask for more things to do that are clearly defined, like casters already have.
I’m not sure I concur here.
Perfect balance is impossible, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to make classes feel at least roughly equal with no obvious winners and losers. What’s the benefit of having a class that people agree on is bad? For a long time that was Ranger, and it was clear that they didn’t want Rangers to be bad because they tried to fix the Ranger in UA like four times before Tasha’s finally did a solid job with it. And most of the Ranger fixes aren’t straight combat buffs either, so they definitely do care about out of combat ability to some extent.
It’s not “anime” to give martials more power or more things to do. You say it’s wrong that a caster can do stuff without asking the DM that a martial has to rely on DM fiat for… but how so? That sounds completely accurate to me.
Well, I don’t entirely disagree, but if you’re making classes equal in combat (roughly), you’ll need to make them equal out of combat as well (roughly), or else the classes with the best out of combat utility will just be the best overall too, right? And that’s pretty difficult, and really not something they seem to be trying to do.
I do agree all classes should be able to contribute to all the general pillars of the game at least somewhat, but also some specialization is inevitable and necessary or else classes would feel too samey. There is always going to end up being one class that’s the best at social encounters or exploration, so they need to trade off in other areas for it to be fair.
Which is an insane way to balance the game, right? And I could understand in 2014, but it seems like they’re sticking with it in 2023. They nerfed stuff like GWM/SS but I don’t think any utility spells really got touched.
Yup, always go higher than the book says, especially with a high-level party. Tier 4 PCs have so much stuff they can do it’s really hard to challenge them, so you gotta get nuts.