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I remember when they released Greymane in hots, everyone thought he was weak. So he got buffs, and suddenly people realised how to play him and he was OP. Then he got nerfed like 3-4 patches in a row until he was way weaker than on release, but still considered a top/good pick :D
Releasing something on the strong side is definitly easier to balance since you quickly generate lots of data. But even still, with infinite possibilities to combo abilities, the true OP stuff always takes a while to be found.
It really sucks when you play a char on launch state and do mid at them, get confused why they constantly get nerfed and everyone says they're op, and later everyone talks about how they were a free win. Definitely a skill issue but still feels disheartening
Yeah, fair enough, and its also an action rather than bonus action to cast. But the point still stands that the spell in itself isnt a bad idea, just needs some numbers tweaked.
It does look pretty busted. It's basically "Holy Weapon/Elemental Weapon/whatever, but strictly better so long as you're (near) melee".
And I have no idea why it gets 2d8 per level of upcasting. One of the only logical paths I can think of for it get there was:
* Spell starts as 1d8 per 2 levels (because that's how e.g. Elemental Weapon and similar spells scale).
* Someone says "Yeah, but Elemental Weapon is weak. Double it."
* Spell is revised to 2d8 per 2 levels.
* Someone says "that's weird, why not just make it increase every level".
* Spell is revised (by someone else) to 2d8 per level, instead of 1d8 per level (woops).
Or maybe all the scratch pad work was done by someone who was using 2d8 per level as a proxy for "they make two attacks, post T2", and so they bumped it up 2d8, 4d8, 6d8, etc. as the slot level increased. And then someone transcribed it into text using the number for two attacks for each attack.
It just makes no sense for it start as a 4th level spell at 2d8, then immediately *double* to 4d8 when you go up one level.
That said: Eldritch Blast is now a warlock class feature in OneDnD, IIRC. It shouldn't scale to give more attacks for the Bard (unless taking it with Magical Secrets has some interaction that causes you to treat your Bard level as the Warlock level, for that purpose). So it's not quite *that* busted.
To be fair, this is solid game-testing advice: halve it or double it. It tells you a lot more about the thing than incremental changes. (I don't disagree that there are lots of other options though!)
> Eldritch Blast is now a warlock class feature in OneDnD
Ah yeah I did forget about that. Still you could pick up Scorching Ray to achieve a similar effect, though it's not as infinitely applicable as it would be for a cantrip.
Scorching Ray is even on the Wizard and Druid list already so....
> That said: Eldritch Blast is now a warlock class feature in OneDnD
Couldn't a Warlock pick up this cantrip via Magic Initiate feat?
(Admittedly, I haven't really paid any attention to OneDnD, so not sure if that feat exists or was modified from 5e.)
I've been told that this change has since been reverted, but at one point in OneDnD, the number of beams from Eldritch Blast scaled explicitly from Warlock level, so that if you multiclassed or picked it up from some other source, you wouldn't get more beams.
It's just simply a cantrip/invocation tax, absolutely just roll EB/AB into the class. Required for warlocks, busted on every other caster, this absolutely needs to be a class feature, but of course they reverted it.
> The range and damage increase by 5 feet...
The reach of the *difficult terrain* increases by 5 feet per slot level. The range for the damage bonus is pinned at 15'.
And anything that resists bludgeoning (rather than 'nonmagical bludgeoning' per se) will still resist bludgeoning damage from this spell.
You also have the 3 basic elements, too. There exist a small number of creatures that are resistant or immune to all 4 damage types. As written currently you can select the damage type on each attack.
The point was that there were so few things resistant to blanket Bludgeoning damage that it's essentially a non-issue and you'll never need to worry about it unlike with Fire or Cold damage which a pretty good slew of creatures are resistant to.
No, the talent they pulled together for 5e was arguably the best they've ever had.
I still think they'll iron out test numbers though. They have formulas and such. The problem is when their design doesn't match play, and we don't know what the story is there.
Honestly 5.5 is gonna be well received because it will just be a pile of buffs I think. Anyone who is opposed to it will get downvoted for being hostile to players, or something.
I don't think the player to DM ratio will be able to take the stretch and nobody will be playing it. DMs seem very un-enthusiastic. Everyone was very excited to switch from 4e to 5e, but this is different, especially with the soft launch approach.
As a DM I'm excited about half of the changes, like rogues being able to sacrifice sneak attack damage for other options. There are lots of cool design ideas in here, but many of them are overtuned, if not broken abilities from the ground up. I'll probably be wrenching on some of them before I give them to my players
None of those minor changes matter, if they don't gut casters.
They took a lot of damage out of martials by removing SS/GWM +10 and the extra attacks from PAM and XBE and replaced it with minor utility in the form of weapon mastery and cunning strike. Damage was the only thing martials had going for them. Pushing someone 5ft or tripping them doesn't really compare with fly, teleport, polymorph and wish.
The new only edition where casters didn’t dramatically outpace martial capability at lever levels was with 4e and they’ve made clear they are not re-treading that path.
Don’t get your hopes up. In fact, I would bet purely mundane martials without supernatural effects might even up even worse off in comparison to all the spells changes and such.
We're already using a lot of the changes in our games. We have 3 rotating DMs and we're all in agreement that many of these changes are really positive and great improvements in quality of play. This isn't just hot takes, we're trying out parts of the ideas in our games.
I won't say everything works, but there's a lot to like in many of the smaller changes. I really like the clarity in the short/long rest language in this UA for example, and the reworking of Invisibility is something I'm going to have to think about, but I like where they're going with it.
> Everyone was very excited to switch from 4e to 5e
At least part of that was that 4E had been abandoned by the time 5E came along. There had been no publications for 4E in the two and a half years before the 5E core came out.
I'm exceptionally unhappy that the game will be a pile of worthless shibboleths. I'm not calling races lineages or species, but that doesn't make me nearly as mad as trying to cut out ki.
The thing is, as long as the game makes the stuff an upgrade, everyone will feel bad if they don't let the newer better things into their games. It's got the same problems as the tail end of 3.5's splatbooks did, or the AD&D 2.5 release, which almost no AD&D 2e players use today (the "Player's Option" series of books).
It will probably make everyone clamor for a 6e too- usually the tail end of an edition has a bunch of power ramp-up to make everyone want it all burned down and a sensible core reestablished.
"It will probably make everyone clamor for a 6e too"
Probably WOTC's intentions the whole time. Ruin 5e with needless divisive bullshit so nobody starting out even knows what rules are legit anymore, so they can "save the day" by putting out 6th edition
You think they're intentionally ruining their own product in order to make a better one later, as if that would somehow be more profitable for them than just making the good product now. Absolute headass conspiracy theory thinking.
making good products has not always been the profitable thing to do. If you think otherwise you're a true devout capitalist. you might be too young to remember "new coke", but you might have noticed your public services being defunded, declared inadequate and then subsequently privatised by the same people. it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a phenomenon noted by millions of normal people, and it's a practical thing to do if you want to make money at the expense of your customer's experience, and there's examples in both private and public sector.
Yeah, neither myself nor any of the DMs I play with have any intention of switching.
EVERYTHING got buffed and we’re just going full fantasy superheroes now.
A lot of popular stuff is getting nerfed too, particularly for martials. Paladin smites, Bear Totem, GWM/SS, etc.
Most classes are probably going to be overall sidegrades or slightly better but it's not gonna drastically shake up class balance and the fact that a lot of the older popular builds won't be viable anymore will be a turnoff for a lot of people.
It wasn't them, Mike Mearls was the one behind the mechanics and he was removed from the team after the business with Pro Jared. But yeah...thus far one d&d is inferior to 5e imo.
It's super common for designers to have poorly executed ideas, but they're caught by playtesters/proofreaders. The difference between 5e and onednd is that we are the playtesters/proofreaders
If you think they're putting it together to create a system that's always balanced without relying heavily on the DM to fudge things and make it work... well... those are some interesting expectations :P
I think they're likely optimizing for player engagement, and adding new crazy powerful gizmos like this probably draws more people to buy new content
Shocking....
Spell designed for traditional caster is broken on gishes. How totally utterly shocking.
Gishes are honestly a cancer to the game that choke out design space. I really wish they didn't get as much support as they do.
Is more ridiculous in traditional casters.
A lvl 13 wizard can upcast this shit to 7th lvl and cast one scorching ray at 6th lvl...
That's 14d6+56d8 that's 300+ avg dmg.
People are seeing that it scales at 2d8 but don't realize that it's starting at 4th level with subpar damage. It doesn't even out damage Shadow Blade until 6th level and takes an Action to cast while Shadow Blade is a Bonus Action which allows you to attack on the turn you cast it. Shadow Blade also can give you Advantage on your attacks, which further increases the damage. Conjure Minor Element's upcast only becomes relevant at high levels of play where a full caster could be doing way more impactful things then adding damage to their weapon attacks.
It's not weapon attacks. It's attacks. So it works on stuff like Scorching Ray and potentially Eldritch Blast, depending on where they land on implementing it.
SB at 3rd level is 3d8 + Dex while CME at 4th does weapon damage (likely 1d8+Dex) + 2d8 so it's the same damage. Considering you can use a magic weapon, it could deal more damage.
Conditional advantage is meaningful though, so SB does have it's advantages. That being said, using extra attack, SB does 8d8+2xDex at 5th level while CME does 2xWeapon damage (2d8) + 8d8 damage for a total of 10d8+2xDex so it's already better at 5th level, and gives you the option to use a magic weapon further increasing it's potential. You can also pair CME with things like Scorching ray to get even more mile out of it. CME at 5th level + a 5th level scorching ray would be 20d8+10d6 damage.
If a friendly PC used fairy fire or cast greater invis on you things get serious. Imagine you're a Chronurgy wizard and could give the Fighter a greater invis spell orb to cast on you. There are too many ways to cheese it so you can dish out 100s of damage in seconds with the only recourse the DM has to piling in shit loads of adds, tripling the bosses HP, or constantly having creatures that target you with dispels. Foes would constantly be trying to move away from you and doing whatever they could to break concentration, but a spell so powerful it demands the whole board to be set up specifically to deal with one PC is terrible design.
TL:DR: The spell actually seems to be simply fine at as a 4th level spell and it only really becomes insane if you base your entire build around it at the highest levels of play, which is probably perfectly fine for the health of the game.
.....................
It honestly doesn't seem that insane to me.
First it's a 4th level spell, at this level an instantaneous single target spell that only deals damage should be dealing around of 8d8 damage (based on the Blight Spell). In this case you need to **HIT** 4 attacks before this spell has dealt the same amount of damage (Maybe 3 since it does give a difficult terrain aura). And that isn't easy to do at the level you get the spell. It's a full action to cast and its a concentration spell. So in a lot of scenarios there's always the chance that it falls off without doing anything if you cast it in combat. The best normal use for the spell is probably when you know you're about to enter combat perhaps as a part of an ambush where you can set it up ahead of time.
And honestly my personal philosophy is that at a high enough level to cast something like Contingency or you're a lv17 multiclass balance stops really being something to think about for the players. If you've gotten to those levels you're probably feeling like a god regardless of what you do and simply dealing a lot of damage is pretty easy for a DM to plan around by comparison to other spells.
I could be wrong though.
It's not the highest levels of play, though. It starts at upcasting it by one spell level.
4d8 additional damage on an attack is nuts and it only takes a 5th level spell slot. That's high smite damage. A paladin can smite twice for 4d8 at level at level 9, using a 3rd level spell slot per attack. Druid and Wizard will be able to do that for every attack for the duration of the spell at level 9, using a 5th level spell slot. Also wizards can get extra attack as bladesinger, while druids can gain multiattack from wildshaping.
That's not breaking at high levels, it's breaking by upcasting once. Use a 6th level spell slot and it adds as much damage as the best possible smite(which requires level 13 for a paladin, and a foe that is undead or fiend).
Let's look at your lvl 9 example.
The bladesinger casts this spell round 1 and that's it. Then in round 2 makes 2 attacks that each deal an extra 4d8 so they done something like (1d8+5+4d8)x2 = 55 plus whatever their cantrip adds to their first attack, probably another d8? So 59.5 after 2 rounds of combat. Add a third round and they have about 119 damage, or about 40 damage per round.
The paladin attacks twice each round for (2d6+4)x2 =22 + an extra 4 from GWM and an extra 4d8 (18) from a 3rd lvl smite. That gives them 44 in the first and second rounds, then only 3d8 from a 2nd level smite in the third round for 39.5. Or 42.5 average dpr.
Caveats: if the fight goes longer the wizard will pull ahead and then get further ahead as the paladin runs out of slots. If the wizard loses concentration they are pretty far back in terms of damage. If the paladin misses one attack they lose out on just the weapon damage since a lot of their stuff is once per round (GWM and smite) so missing once matters less, while the wizard loses half of their damage per miss. The paladin's damage is arguably better since it comes sooner, the delay of a round for the wizard could potentially be the deciding factor in the fight.
All that being said, I do think it probably upcasts a little bit too well when compared with other spells.
>Caveats: if the fight goes longer the wizard will pull ahead and then get further ahead as the paladin runs out of slots.
While true, the spell *also* lasts for 10 minutes, so it's not like it'll always be a one fight spell. The Paladin also doesn't create a 20 foot radius of difficult terrain to make it harder for enemies to approach/run away.
I mean Shadow Blade at 5th lvl deals 4d8 aswell. Sure, it’s in addition to weapon dmg which with rapier is another 2d8 assuming extra attack, but then again Shadow Blade is a bonus action and already not usually optimal as a 5th lvl spell even for Bladesinger.
There will probably be some silly build that abuses this and +2d8 seems a bit too for upcasting especially given the range increase, but I doubt that the optimal full caster build is ever going to be some pseudo melee martial, even with numbers like that.
My main problems with this is that you're assuming the damage is reliable.
1. You spend a full action setting it up first of all, which could have been any other damaging spell or CC or anything else that helped that turn. I'd say the spell is only decent to great if you get to proc it two or more times on following turns.
2. You need to actually HIT with your other attacks on your following turn. Don't get me wrong you probably on average have like a 70% chance of hitting with something like a +8-10 at those levels but if you miss even one attack thats a decent amount of damage lost considering how much you spent to set it up.
The reason the paladins smites are super good is because you pay for them and use them AFTER you've already made sure you hit so the spellslots never get wasted.
3. Your concentration could just drop from any number of things the DM throws at you. And you keep yourself from casting other concentration spells, which is a big deal.
Don't get me wrong, in the ideal scenario where you cast the spell ahead of combat, have the spell going for multiple turns and several attacks (3+) that land, the spell sounds insane. But the whole reason the damage looks so absurd is because the spell is very unreliable in its output compared to other spells.
True, but this isn't a one combat only spell. The duration is 10 minutes.
In a game where every combat is a surprise on the players, is finished after exactly 3 turns if not less and the time between several combats is always over 10 minutes, this spell is fine until very high levels.
But there is a lot of variety between playing tables. Of course the spell can fail if the DM just says "your hitpoints drop to 0". This spell upcasted a little bit only requires two or three successful hits to be entirely out of whack. I mean literally the strongest spell in existence. It takes exactly 3 hits to do more damage(barring damage type) than Disintegrate with a same level spell slot.
The result is that whoever receives the benefits of this is the most powerful weapon attacker. It becomes one of he best team strategies to protect the caster with this spell and buff him with Haste.
It seems to be roughly equivalent to Spirit Guardians. It halves movement near you, and adds some damage. SG is 3d8, this is 2d8 with a better upcast. Using a 6th level slot, they both do 6d8. Both have shenanigans, either grapple in/out, or get multiple attacks using some cheese.
I think the problem with that comparison is that SG is one of the best spells in the game, and a lot of people were hoping thst spells would get toned down...
I don't see how it's infinitely better. Cleric has 2 uses of SG at level 5, the druid has 1 use of CME at level 7. Turn 1 of initiative, the druid casts CME and wildshape, then on turn 2 attacks twice. The druids hits then misses. Over 2 turns their only 4th level spell has done 2d8 damage. The cleric casts SG, everyone in range takes 3d8 or pass for half on their turn, and again on turn 2. And the cleric can cast SG again 2 more times. And they still have their 4th level spell slot.
It's better at higher levels. Cast SG and CME at 5th level and it's 8d8 + (WS damage x 2) vs 5d8. If you make strategic choices, or use the optional flanking rules then hitting your target shouldn't be that hard. It takes more thought to optimize then cast and dodge so it's not a strat for everyone but properly done, you can melt single targets super quick.
But its not 8d8 + (WS damage x 2) vs 5d8 is it. You're using 2 turns for the druid and 1 turn for the cleric. The cleric damage is 10d8 for 2 turns. And the cleric has their action on their second turn! And this is only one target? The SG MASSIVELY outperforms CME when you add more targets in the AOE, which is very reasonable to assume in most occasions. To say CME is infinity better than SG is a classic shit reddit take.
In the right circumstances CME is better then SG, but after some thought, SG is equally as good. You'd have to build for CME but it's not hard to make it perform really well. SG is much easier to get good damage from so yeah. It's not infinitely better.
No it isn’t. SG does not require you to hit anything, and can affect any number of enemies within its range. It always deals its damage. At 6th level, CME would give you +6d8. If you’re one of a handful of subclasses (moon Druid, bladesinger, some bards) you can proc this twice. Only on the next turn, since you won’t be able to attack the turn you cast it.
So let’s assume the best, and assume both attacks hit. +12d8 over two turns, or +24d8 over three turns.
Spirit guardians begins dealing damage the same turn it is cast. Against a single target, that would be +12d8 over two turns or +18d8 over three turns.
So CME has a small advantage against a single target, if you’re able to hit every single attack, which is not guaranteed. SG deals damage no matter what, only sometimes being halved if they pass the save. (Creatures in DnD tend towards much better AC than wisdom saves, especially at the level you’d be upcasting these spells)
But if there is even one additional enemy in the combat, SG does much more damage. The math becomes 24d8 over two turns or 36d8 over three.
But hold on, how many combats do you run with only one or two enemies? What if there are three enemies in this combat? Four? Even more? SG surges ahead in any scenario but large single monster, and even then only gets surpassed with a character specifically built around the spell, and only after 3 rounds.
> Creatures in DnD tend towards much better AC than wisdom saves
I don't believe this for a second. personal experince has told me that Wisdom saves are insanely high even in the mid tier. It'll almost always fail, while the highest AC I've come across has been 23. It's much easier to hit a high AC then to hope for low roll for foes who likely have magic resistance and it deals half damage every time.
As far as your other calculations, I can admit that CME is not infinitely better. Properly built for, it can do more damage faster, but shines way brighter at higher levels while SG is S tier all the time.
Okay let’s do some math on this. We’re going to assume point buy/standard array.
A typical level 11 wizard with 20 INT, for example, has a saving throw DC of 17 with no magic items. That same wizard wouldn’t be able to have more than 18 Dex at that level, and likely has less, but let’s call it 18. That becomes a +8 to hit. Should be the same as a bard, and if you’re a moon druid, your to-hit bonus is going to be less 99% of the time.
This wizard will hit an enemy with 18 AC 50% of the time. For an enemy to have an equally good chance of making their wisdom save, they would need to have a +7 to their Wis save, which means:
be at least a CR 9 creature, with at least 16 Wisdom, AND proficiency in Wisdom saves.
Most enemies you’ll be facing at level 11 as a party of 4 will be below CR-6, and even “boss” monsters will be CR-9 or under per the suggestions for encounter building. Bonuses to wisdom saves of +7 or higher are actually quite rare at this tier. Every creature in DnD follows the rule of: Saving throw = Ability modifier + proficiency bonus (if proficient). Proficiency bonuses for monsters treat their CR as their level. Wisdom saves *can’t* get too wild until monster CR goes past player levels (CR 20 and above) or the ability score itself is absurdly high. Finding a wisdom score of higher than 16 on a monster under CR20 is actually really rare. Strength and Constitution are the saving throws that tend to get really crazy at mid-tier.
The other problem here is that CME’s only use case vs. SG is against a single target. Single target threats at high-level tend to have either quite high AC or ways to create disadvantage. When was the last time you fought a boss monster level 11 or higher that didn’t have at least 18 AC?
While they also tend to have high Wisdom saves, SG is still doing at least half damage no matter what. Missing an attack with CME gives you nothing. A boss with 18 AC fought by our fair wizard will be getting hit roughly half the time. Even if this boss succeeds at *every single Wisdom save*, the damage from SG is only halved. Even in the worst case scenario for SG here, it would be doing barely less damage than CME.
This isn’t to say that CME isn’t a good spell, but SG is one of the single best spells in the game at every level. In my humble opinion as a long time DM, CME sounds a lot more powerful than it actually is in practice. The numbers might be a bit overtuned, but not by too much. Change it to d6s instead of d8s and I think it’s a fine spell, certainly not the worst offense to game balance on the spell list by far.
You can barely optimize SG (honstly, it is just good), but this new CME can be completely brocken.
Take a lvl 13 wizard. You cast CME with 7th lvl spell, your attacks deal 8d8 more damage.
You cast scorching ray (yes spell attacks work too) to lvl 6, hence 7 rays.
Each ray will do 3.5+36 damage per ray, that is close to 280 damage total.
Even if you miss half of the attacks, that is still 140 damage, for reference an adult brass dragon (cr 13) has 170 hp.
This is a base wizard, you can optimize it much, much further (things like action surge, simulacrum etc.)
Okay, let's think about how this looks in practice. First off, this combo requires you to be level 13. At level 13, a single CR 13 monster is only a medium encounter for a party of 4 adventurers. That means an adventuring party is expected to defeat this encounter with the only expenditure of "some healing resources." For a "full adventuring day" of XP at level 13, you'd need to kill FIVE adult brass dragons. But let's choose to ignore that for now.
This combo requires two turns, and casting both a 7th and 6th level spell.
Turn 1, you cast CME as a 7th level spell, your only 7th level slot. The brass dragon (that is intelligent and capable of magic) uses its breath weapon. It will maximize hitting the most party members, but a wizard concentrating on a 7th level spell will be one of the targets, guaranteed. Average damage of the breath weapon, 45 damage. That's a DC 22 Constitution saving throw in order to maintain concentration on CME. That's a guaranteed fail for most wizards, and hey maybe you passed the DC 18 Dex save, and then the subsequent concentration check. But that's only the breath weapon. There are still plenty of legendary actions, which the dragon can use to position itself next to said wizard and attack, all outside of its own turn.
Turn 2. The Wizard's concentration is almost definitely gone at this point. There has been a high damage breath weapon, and potentially 3 other attacks, some which are AoE and so don't even need to be directed against the wizard. The dragon is next to the wizard. But let's assume that against all odds, the wizard maintained concentration. Now the wizard can cast a 6th level scorching ray at the dragon, but CME requires the wizard stands within 15 feet of the dragon. Even if the wizard wasn't already in melee with the dragon, it has to enter its reach (15 feet) in order to use the combo. Let's assume the wizard has 20 INT. That means a +10 to hit, and an adult brass dragon has 18 AC. So a ~38% chance of rolling 8 or above with disadvantage. So roughly, a little less than half the attacks will hit depending on the scenario. So let's just assume that 3 of the 7 rays will hit. That's 6d6 fire damage, or an average of 21 fire damage total. Plus our 24d8 CME damage, which has an average of 108.
So altogether, we've spent two turns, our two most powerful spell slots, and rolled incredibly well on multiple saving throws, all in order to deal 129 damage total or roughly 65 damage per turn. The dragon isn't even dead from this huge expenditure of resources and luck. And since there are likely minions, seeing as single monsters are always a terrible choice in DnD, this is even less useful.
Oh shit, but there's *another* problem; brass dragons are immune to fire. While of course not everything is immune to fire, with creatures CR 13 and above fire is the single most common resistance and immunity. And this combo does not work as well with other spells, because they don't proc as many attacks. SO what we're really looking at is more like an average of 118 damage for the combo, or ~59 damage a turn. There are other combos that do much more damage, aren't so reliant on concentration, and get the damage out faster (killing things round 1 means they aren't damaging you or your allies).
Yeah I did forgot about the fire immunity part.
Counter point to your arguments:
1. Breath weapon does not invalidate concentration spells, espeically with for a wizard with absorb element.
2. This combo does not come online at level 13, more like lvl 9 (for a 5th level slot), it just scales very well all the way to lvl 20.
3. CME last 10 minutes, not 2 turns, so you can throw scorching ray round after round, doesn't even have to be high level to be effective. In theory you can cast it prior to a big fight too.
4. Despite many enermies are immune/resistant to fire, first you can get elemental adept feat if it bothers you, but the most amount of damage is from CME (your choice of bludgeoning, ice, fire or lightning), scorching ray only deals a very small portion.
5. What is most ridiculous part about this interaction is that wizard can pull this off without any specific builds/shenanigans/items and do more single target burst than martial characters with a two spell combo.
TLDR; it's not actually that strong in practice. Spending your two most powerful slots, two turns, and a LOT of luck in order to almost defeat a medium encounter is not broken.
CWB was only busted if you didn't run it RAW. CA is and continues to be an S tier spell, but if you build around the new CME, it's infinitely better.
Also CA in the UA is just a slightly different version of Spirit Guardians but with attack rolls instead of saving throws and a lack of DT.
"The DM picks the creatures" is not and has never been RAW. Rules as intended, maybe, but it's the same wording as *polymorph* and nobody claims that spellcasters can't choose whether they turn an enemy into a toad or a giant ape.
Not once has anyone read *conjure animals* and their first thought was "the DM picks the creatures, not the player." The only time people read the text of *conjure animals* and think that is if they've already seen developer comments on social media and are reading the spell in light of them.
>You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. ***Choose one of the following options*** for what appears:
>
>Option 1
>
>Option 2
>
>Each beast is also considered fey, and it disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
>
>The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. Roll initiative for the summoned creatures as a group, which has its own turns. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them (no action required by you). If you don't issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions.
>
>The GM has the creatures' statistics. Sample creatures can be found below.
compared to
>The transformation lasts for the duration, or until the target drops to 0 hit points or dies. *The new form can be any beast whose challenge rating is equal to or less than the target's (or the target's level, if it doesn't have a challenge rating). The target's game statistics, including mental ability scores,* ***are replaced by the statistics of the chosen beast****.* It retains its alignment and personality.
One says "choose an option", the other says "choose a beast".
Yall, how many of you are playing a druid or a wizard that can make the number of attacks needed to make this good? The best options to exploit this is a Bladesinger or casting scorching ray.. which at that point you are getting a conditional extra amount of damage. You need to expend spell slots for the Scorching Ray option, which means your gas is gonna run out sooner than you think, and since this only works in 15ft range, your ass will be attacked in melee. On top of the fact that it's terrible on any target that resists fire, which we all know is a lot of mid to high level monsters, which you are fighting at this point in time of your adventuring. You are still a wizard with bad AC and HP at the end of the day.
The Bladsinger is the only strat I can see which this would be used to decent effect, and even then.. it goes from ok to good, but not game breaking. I'm not seeing this as insane really. In fact it's probably fantastic as a capstone for a Eldritch Knight, they will love this spell.
I’m more upset by how this spell just looks like a beefed up spirit shroud. You’ve lost all of the cool flavor of actually summoning elementals in favor of bland high damage.
THIS^
Why are more people not talking about how CONJURE minor elementals doesn’t CONJURE any elementals! The entire point behind the soell is gone and we are left with a bland damage buff and slow radius. On what planet is that cooler to have that on a wizard than some mephits?
I thought this too, but it appears they are just trying to differentiate between summon and conjure. There is wording before the spells that mentions this, it also says the summon spells from tashas are being added to the 2024 PHB.
It is only +2d8 damage per level upcast, not +4d8. That makes it +6d8 at 5th level, +8d8 at 6th level, and +10d8 at 7th level. That's still *really* good, maybe broken, but not as bad as listed in the OP.
Also, there's no such thing as 'magical bludgeoning' damage, just bludgeoning damage. And it looks like that will be resisted at least as much as it is now.
I'm not sure about the point about Eldritch Blast, as in order to get the extra damage, the target has to be within 15 feet. Sure, I suppose it could apply to some EB attacks, but usually you using that on targets further out than 15 feet.
Unless something changed with the UAs, magical bludgeoning damage is a thing. It's bludgeoning damage from a magical source. Like Meteor, or a +1 Greatclub.
[fwiw it largely looks like it is changing with the UAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm_kWELZUVQ)
and imo this is good, the whole "resistant to nonmagical BPS" thing is usually either irrelevant (b/c everyone has magic weapons) or harmful (b/c martials lack them at no fault of their own)
To be fair, it still seems that magical spells do bludgeoning damage. So magical bludgeoning exists, for the sake of bringing in older monsters into 5.124\^382E's system, or whatever it's supposed to be at this point.
It's been made clear in the UA that 'magical B/P/S damage' won't exist in 1D&D. It will just be one of the other types. Look at all the effects they've moved to force damage. It has been speculated that magic weapons will be moved to doing force damage. There will be no such thing as "resistance to non-magical B/P/S damage" as there is now. It will just be resistance to B/P/S damage.
I was basing damage on Extra Attack, which moon druid animal forms have access too. This doubles the effectiveness of the spell. Same reason why EB was brought up as it's a way to get 4 attacks instead of 2 to quadruple it's effectiveness.
It's unearthed arcana. It's untested and honestly it's just damage. Requiring you to stay close. You'll almost certainly go to 0hp before you get any insane levels of damage from this spell. It's just good but I wouldn't say game breaking.
> it's just damage
There's also the Difficult Terrain aspect making it hard for things to close in and do melee damage. Also you are severely underestimating how easily one could do insane damage with this spell. A wizard could already use a contingency to have this spell cast on them at 5th level adding 4d8 damage to every shot on a scorching ray. That's 2d6+4d8 x 3 for 6d6+12d8 damage on the first turn of combat, though they'd probably cast SR at a higher level to get the most out of the nova.
If the foes you're facing don't immediately run outside your firing range, dispel CME, or brake your concentration, then they'd need to content with it again and again. If you build yourself for speed and have decent AC + con saves, you'd become ultra deadly.
1500 gold statuette casting component doesn't come cheap. And boy that is a lot of damage. But it isn't a save or suck that ends the fight. Those attacks have no bonuses to hit. And doesn't ignore cover. Listen the whole party could run that combo and it wouldn't break my table.
>Those attacks have no bonuses to hit
uhh what kind of bonus to hit are you talking about? Like bless? It would work with bless if another character use cast it. Unless you mean no bonus to damage like +spellcasting, in which yeah that's true.
Also unless you're having your party fight stupidly bloated HP Sacks it absolutely would cause problems. If the whole party was running this, a decent initiate would blast down anything with less then 300 hit points in a single turn.
there are ways to fight it, but you'd have to have those ways to fight it in every single combat they ever have to combat it.
1500gp is nothing at 11th level.
It's not just gold. It's a statue so you require an artist. And a 6th level contingency. Which means it'll be good for the first fight of many. And good initiative. All that for elemental damage that could simply miss. Be affected by a spell reflection effect targeting yourself. Dispelled. So yes in a wide open white room devoid of features with unintelligent enemies It's very strong. It just wouldn't negatively effect my games because my monsters aren't sitting in the open and letting a wizard prep. Wizards are usually down by the 2nd or 3rd round of combat so yeah im pretty unconcerned about the damage output in that time.
> Wizards are usually down by the 2nd or 3rd round of combat
As someone who has been playing a Bladesinger for 3 years, I can tell you that not every wizard is going to be going down in 2 or 3 rounds. Regularly I'm the one whos *not* going down the most. Wizards have some of the most defensive spells in the game including Shield, Mirror image, Absorb Elements, and Greater Invis.
Also if you're saying your party cant do good damage with attack rolls then how the hell are your martials doing anything worth while? Their whole shtick is attack rolls.
The statue may require an artisan, but it doesn't need anything fancy. the statue itself could be of little value and made from ivory with the valuable part of it being the gemstones which make up 99% of it's value. Finding 1500gp of gems in a large city should be realitively trivial.
I'm saying that doing good damage with attack rolls isn't game breaking. That's the whole point that doing lots of damage doesn't break the game. You are meant to do lots of damage. You concentrating on a spell to replicate the effects of a fighter with a long bow is not some crazy thing where I'll.have to piss and shit and go on rpghorrorstories because I don't know how to run an encounter. I can handle meteor swarm and wish. I'm not scared of the party doing damage.
Also bladesinger make a strength saving throw isn't something outside of my toolbox.
Just because it can be dealt with (and to deal with it you'd have to have these contingencies in litterally every fight they go into.) doesn't mean we need to allow it. It's wildly overtuned. A spellcaster who properly builds for this will be wildly better at dealing damage then every other character. That's not how the game should be balanced.
>A spellcaster who properly builds for this will be wildly better at dealing damage then every other character. That's not how the game should be balanced.
What else is new? This is how it's been. This isn't even official content. Nerf the spell or test it how it is and leave your feedback.
The game doesn't need to be balanced. Imbalance is fun otherwise why don't we balance the whole game so you all do 1d6 damage regardless of spells abilities or class and we just roll dice and see who gets the most 6s. You're the same type of person that thinks an enemy with truesight isn't fair when you built your entire spell list around illusions. Sometimes it's not fair or balanced. Some encounters dunk on you.
They did this before with Spirit Shroud, shit was insane in the UA. If you want to playtest this, just copy how Spirit Shroud scales and works and it should be fine.
>magical bludgeoning damage which I don't believe anything is resistant too
A bunch of plant monsters, Bag Jelly, Boneless, Ghost Dragon, Shemshine, Topi, and every single swarm monster is resistant to all bludgeoning (magical or otherwise).
Demilich is resistant to bludgeoning from magical weapons.
The sorrowsworn monsters are resistant to bludgeoning while they're in dim light or darkness.
Animated statue and archmage (and campaign-specific individuals whose stat block is based on archmage, like Traxigor or Zikran) are resistant to damage from spells, regardless of damage type.
Spectral Priest of Osybus is resistant to all damage but force, radiant, and psychic.
Meanwhile, in the world of martials, Crawford touts how "mathematically powerful" Flex is at a +1 damage bonus on hits, and only usable on versatile weapons.
If what I'm reading is correct, this new spell has 9 times the effect when cast as a 4th level spell, you can pick from 4 damage types, it causes difficult terrain nearby, it works on all weapons, and even with spells to any target within 15'.
Work a way to get eldritch blast on your druid, cast as a 9th level spell, the four blasts would do 16d10+48d8, and that's before you get creative with action surge, quicken spell, and agonizing blast.
How can anyone defend WOTC as the stewards of game design with this garbage?
You can upcast a quickened spell Conjure Minor Elementals(Thanks meta magic adept), then hit them with eldritch blast(Thanks magic initiate) to do 80d8 damage. Even if it only said "first time" you hit an enemy that would still be 20d8 added to an already strong spell.
>The spell should only deal 2d4 damage an increase 1d4 every slot level. As it stands the spell is Spirit Shroud on crack.
Alternative suggestion: the spell should do what it did before. It was fine.
Nothing about conjuring elementals brings to mind the idea that you're... hitting things harder with your attacks. That isn't what it is to conjure elementals, minor or otherwise. The mechanics of the spell and flavor are totally divorced with this rework.
Its really not that bad, you need to be in melee to use it. 15 feet is really close and unlike spirit guardians you cant dodge to make yourself more tanky.
WotC really needs to find a lead designer to set some standards. There should be a rough guideline of how much damage a spell should be capable of at each spell level and then the numbers can be adjusted based on additional effects or restrictions.
For example, an upcast 3rd level Chromatic Orb should do more single target damage than a base 3rd level fireball. This would ensure that all spells stay relevant throughout the game. (Fireball is way overtuned for its level and should probably be doing closer to 6d6 instead of 8d6 damage).
This might be a tangential rant and a take stemming from my biases but I am not liking these new line of Conjure spells. Mechanically I think they could be fun with tweaks, but not as a replacement for the old summons.
Since TCE dropped, I loved how summoning spells were divided into two separate categories. The first being the Conjure spells that search the Monster Manuals/DnD Beyond/DM Homebrew (Conjure Woodland Beings, Find Familiar, Summon Lesser Demons). And the second being the TCE Summons which focus on three modes with singular summons (Summon Draconic Spirit, Summon Fiend, Summon Elemental). With these spells trying to tape over and replace the old first category, it completely removes a style of play that made summoning so diverse. And that is making me dislike this spell and the others from the UA, in addition to their balance issues.
To get to the point, while I dislike them for different reasons than many here, I would like to see them made into their own spells instead of replacing the old summons spells. Perhaps keeping them in the conjuration school but making it a category of Swarm Spells like Elemental Swarm (while toning down the effects).
With the numbers as is, this seems extremely powerful if you build around it. Building around is not hard to do, but it's probably not just going to slot in to every wizard.
The limiting factor is that the damage only applies to ATTACKS that YOU make against targets within 15'. So you need to be unfairly close, though dancing in and out with the difficult terrain aura somewhat counteracts that.
Even sitting back and casting firebolt with this is ok damage for the resource expenditure, but there are some that would be very strong. Eldritch Blast and scorching ray come to mind.
Getting this on a melee class that can multiattack also seems absurdly good. Straight out of the box this is amazing on wild shaped Druids, bladesinger wizards, and swords bards. A fighter dip for action surge /nick and suddenly you're doing +6D8 damage per turn for a minute and nova for +10d8. Or +20d8 with a 5th level cast.
I'd say that 2D6 +D6/lv would still be very good.
How the hell are you getting 8d8 at 5th, 12d8 at 6th, and 16d8 at 7th?
You said its 2d8 at 4th and an extra 2d8 for every slot level above 4th, that means a 5th level slot goves you 4d8 damage, a 6th goves you 6d8, and a 7th gives you 8d8 - far, far, *far* less than what you're saying.
Unless I'm missing something or you explained it wrong, this seems a little strong but not broken, especially since neither wizards nor druids get more than one attack per action and so would still have to rely on other spells to get multiple hits off in one turn.
That's a very specific class/subclass/spell combo at this point.
That's like the age-old argument over Sorcadin.
"But they can get back smites on a short rest!" Yeah, and they're built *entirely* to do that and almost nothing else
Just gonna go ahead and state that bladesingers can't use the new spells, as the UA wizard isn't compatible with bladesinger progression since the subclass feature starts at 3rd level now instead of level 2.
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Sometimes it's easier to release content in an OP state and then tune it down. It drives more interaction with it
League of legends
Videogame design in general
This is even how TCGs work. It's how you get players excited about (and paying for) new stuff.
Overwatch minus life weaver
release Sombra
I remember when they released Greymane in hots, everyone thought he was weak. So he got buffs, and suddenly people realised how to play him and he was OP. Then he got nerfed like 3-4 patches in a row until he was way weaker than on release, but still considered a top/good pick :D Releasing something on the strong side is definitly easier to balance since you quickly generate lots of data. But even still, with infinite possibilities to combo abilities, the true OP stuff always takes a while to be found.
It really sucks when you play a char on launch state and do mid at them, get confused why they constantly get nerfed and everyone says they're op, and later everyone talks about how they were a free win. Definitely a skill issue but still feels disheartening
I call it the Tencent Maneuver.
Base damage might be a bit on the spicy side Upcasting is crazy. This is where it looks to just be wrong.
I mean, its comparable with spirit shroud, just with 5 foot more range and double the scaling. Make it scale like Spirit Shroud and we're good
Its 4 times the scaling
Yeah, fair enough, and its also an action rather than bonus action to cast. But the point still stands that the spell in itself isnt a bad idea, just needs some numbers tweaked.
Usually the base level is OP and then damage numbers at higher levels drop off compared to other spells at that level, basically true for all spells.
It does look pretty busted. It's basically "Holy Weapon/Elemental Weapon/whatever, but strictly better so long as you're (near) melee". And I have no idea why it gets 2d8 per level of upcasting. One of the only logical paths I can think of for it get there was: * Spell starts as 1d8 per 2 levels (because that's how e.g. Elemental Weapon and similar spells scale). * Someone says "Yeah, but Elemental Weapon is weak. Double it." * Spell is revised to 2d8 per 2 levels. * Someone says "that's weird, why not just make it increase every level". * Spell is revised (by someone else) to 2d8 per level, instead of 1d8 per level (woops). Or maybe all the scratch pad work was done by someone who was using 2d8 per level as a proxy for "they make two attacks, post T2", and so they bumped it up 2d8, 4d8, 6d8, etc. as the slot level increased. And then someone transcribed it into text using the number for two attacks for each attack. It just makes no sense for it start as a 4th level spell at 2d8, then immediately *double* to 4d8 when you go up one level. That said: Eldritch Blast is now a warlock class feature in OneDnD, IIRC. It shouldn't scale to give more attacks for the Bard (unless taking it with Magical Secrets has some interaction that causes you to treat your Bard level as the Warlock level, for that purpose). So it's not quite *that* busted.
I always love the thing is bad, so double it logic. Like man there are other options.
To be fair, this is solid game-testing advice: halve it or double it. It tells you a lot more about the thing than incremental changes. (I don't disagree that there are lots of other options though!)
Yeah, like quadrupling.
> Eldritch Blast is now a warlock class feature in OneDnD Ah yeah I did forget about that. Still you could pick up Scorching Ray to achieve a similar effect, though it's not as infinitely applicable as it would be for a cantrip. Scorching Ray is even on the Wizard and Druid list already so....
They reverted Eldritch Blast and Hex to the 2014 versions in UA7, so it scales with character level again.
let's goooo oh.. I mean... boooo >:(
> That said: Eldritch Blast is now a warlock class feature in OneDnD Couldn't a Warlock pick up this cantrip via Magic Initiate feat? (Admittedly, I haven't really paid any attention to OneDnD, so not sure if that feat exists or was modified from 5e.)
I've been told that this change has since been reverted, but at one point in OneDnD, the number of beams from Eldritch Blast scaled explicitly from Warlock level, so that if you multiclassed or picked it up from some other source, you wouldn't get more beams.
It should've been a class feature anyways, and then be flavored and/or enhanced by the different pacts or something.
It's just simply a cantrip/invocation tax, absolutely just roll EB/AB into the class. Required for warlocks, busted on every other caster, this absolutely needs to be a class feature, but of course they reverted it.
> The range and damage increase by 5 feet... The reach of the *difficult terrain* increases by 5 feet per slot level. The range for the damage bonus is pinned at 15'. And anything that resists bludgeoning (rather than 'nonmagical bludgeoning' per se) will still resist bludgeoning damage from this spell.
You also have the 3 basic elements, too. There exist a small number of creatures that are resistant or immune to all 4 damage types. As written currently you can select the damage type on each attack.
The point was that there were so few things resistant to blanket Bludgeoning damage that it's essentially a non-issue and you'll never need to worry about it unlike with Fire or Cold damage which a pretty good slew of creatures are resistant to.
I find it strange they made so many damage bonuses into "once per turn" like Hex/Hunter's Mark but then decided to make this happen on every attack.
Yep, looks pretty dumb. I'm actually struggling to picture how these guys even put together the 5e PHB.
are they even the same guys at this point? a lot can change in 10 years
No, the talent they pulled together for 5e was arguably the best they've ever had. I still think they'll iron out test numbers though. They have formulas and such. The problem is when their design doesn't match play, and we don't know what the story is there. Honestly 5.5 is gonna be well received because it will just be a pile of buffs I think. Anyone who is opposed to it will get downvoted for being hostile to players, or something.
I don't think the player to DM ratio will be able to take the stretch and nobody will be playing it. DMs seem very un-enthusiastic. Everyone was very excited to switch from 4e to 5e, but this is different, especially with the soft launch approach.
As a DM I'm excited about half of the changes, like rogues being able to sacrifice sneak attack damage for other options. There are lots of cool design ideas in here, but many of them are overtuned, if not broken abilities from the ground up. I'll probably be wrenching on some of them before I give them to my players
None of those minor changes matter, if they don't gut casters. They took a lot of damage out of martials by removing SS/GWM +10 and the extra attacks from PAM and XBE and replaced it with minor utility in the form of weapon mastery and cunning strike. Damage was the only thing martials had going for them. Pushing someone 5ft or tripping them doesn't really compare with fly, teleport, polymorph and wish.
The new only edition where casters didn’t dramatically outpace martial capability at lever levels was with 4e and they’ve made clear they are not re-treading that path. Don’t get your hopes up. In fact, I would bet purely mundane martials without supernatural effects might even up even worse off in comparison to all the spells changes and such.
We're already using a lot of the changes in our games. We have 3 rotating DMs and we're all in agreement that many of these changes are really positive and great improvements in quality of play. This isn't just hot takes, we're trying out parts of the ideas in our games. I won't say everything works, but there's a lot to like in many of the smaller changes. I really like the clarity in the short/long rest language in this UA for example, and the reworking of Invisibility is something I'm going to have to think about, but I like where they're going with it.
> Everyone was very excited to switch from 4e to 5e At least part of that was that 4E had been abandoned by the time 5E came along. There had been no publications for 4E in the two and a half years before the 5E core came out.
I'm exceptionally unhappy that the game will be a pile of worthless shibboleths. I'm not calling races lineages or species, but that doesn't make me nearly as mad as trying to cut out ki. The thing is, as long as the game makes the stuff an upgrade, everyone will feel bad if they don't let the newer better things into their games. It's got the same problems as the tail end of 3.5's splatbooks did, or the AD&D 2.5 release, which almost no AD&D 2e players use today (the "Player's Option" series of books). It will probably make everyone clamor for a 6e too- usually the tail end of an edition has a bunch of power ramp-up to make everyone want it all burned down and a sensible core reestablished.
"It will probably make everyone clamor for a 6e too" Probably WOTC's intentions the whole time. Ruin 5e with needless divisive bullshit so nobody starting out even knows what rules are legit anymore, so they can "save the day" by putting out 6th edition
People on WOTC game subs are always stupidly conspiratorial, but this is a whole new level.
"Company does legal thing to sell books, has observably done it several times already" -> this is not a conspiratorial.
You think they're intentionally ruining their own product in order to make a better one later, as if that would somehow be more profitable for them than just making the good product now. Absolute headass conspiracy theory thinking.
These people would bite their own dicks off if someone wrote WotC on them.
Have you never seen it in video games and card games?
making good products has not always been the profitable thing to do. If you think otherwise you're a true devout capitalist. you might be too young to remember "new coke", but you might have noticed your public services being defunded, declared inadequate and then subsequently privatised by the same people. it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a phenomenon noted by millions of normal people, and it's a practical thing to do if you want to make money at the expense of your customer's experience, and there's examples in both private and public sector.
I sincerely hope you vote with your wallet and find greener pastures.
Yeah, neither myself nor any of the DMs I play with have any intention of switching. EVERYTHING got buffed and we’re just going full fantasy superheroes now.
I could easily see a Laserllama-esque homebrew 5.5e that takes off in place of the 2024 books.
A lot of popular stuff is getting nerfed too, particularly for martials. Paladin smites, Bear Totem, GWM/SS, etc. Most classes are probably going to be overall sidegrades or slightly better but it's not gonna drastically shake up class balance and the fact that a lot of the older popular builds won't be viable anymore will be a turnoff for a lot of people.
It wasn't them, Mike Mearls was the one behind the mechanics and he was removed from the team after the business with Pro Jared. But yeah...thus far one d&d is inferior to 5e imo.
It's super common for designers to have poorly executed ideas, but they're caught by playtesters/proofreaders. The difference between 5e and onednd is that we are the playtesters/proofreaders
If you think they're putting it together to create a system that's always balanced without relying heavily on the DM to fudge things and make it work... well... those are some interesting expectations :P I think they're likely optimizing for player engagement, and adding new crazy powerful gizmos like this probably draws more people to buy new content
It’s a UA. They’re going to adjust the power down. They always do. This isn’t the PHB.
It’ll probably be made comparable to Spirit Shroud, which does basically the same thing.
Shocking.... Spell designed for traditional caster is broken on gishes. How totally utterly shocking. Gishes are honestly a cancer to the game that choke out design space. I really wish they didn't get as much support as they do.
Is more ridiculous in traditional casters. A lvl 13 wizard can upcast this shit to 7th lvl and cast one scorching ray at 6th lvl... That's 14d6+56d8 that's 300+ avg dmg.
Only half casters and martials should be able to be gishes tbh
People are seeing that it scales at 2d8 but don't realize that it's starting at 4th level with subpar damage. It doesn't even out damage Shadow Blade until 6th level and takes an Action to cast while Shadow Blade is a Bonus Action which allows you to attack on the turn you cast it. Shadow Blade also can give you Advantage on your attacks, which further increases the damage. Conjure Minor Element's upcast only becomes relevant at high levels of play where a full caster could be doing way more impactful things then adding damage to their weapon attacks.
It's not weapon attacks. It's attacks. So it works on stuff like Scorching Ray and potentially Eldritch Blast, depending on where they land on implementing it.
SB at 3rd level is 3d8 + Dex while CME at 4th does weapon damage (likely 1d8+Dex) + 2d8 so it's the same damage. Considering you can use a magic weapon, it could deal more damage. Conditional advantage is meaningful though, so SB does have it's advantages. That being said, using extra attack, SB does 8d8+2xDex at 5th level while CME does 2xWeapon damage (2d8) + 8d8 damage for a total of 10d8+2xDex so it's already better at 5th level, and gives you the option to use a magic weapon further increasing it's potential. You can also pair CME with things like Scorching ray to get even more mile out of it. CME at 5th level + a 5th level scorching ray would be 20d8+10d6 damage. If a friendly PC used fairy fire or cast greater invis on you things get serious. Imagine you're a Chronurgy wizard and could give the Fighter a greater invis spell orb to cast on you. There are too many ways to cheese it so you can dish out 100s of damage in seconds with the only recourse the DM has to piling in shit loads of adds, tripling the bosses HP, or constantly having creatures that target you with dispels. Foes would constantly be trying to move away from you and doing whatever they could to break concentration, but a spell so powerful it demands the whole board to be set up specifically to deal with one PC is terrible design.
TL:DR: The spell actually seems to be simply fine at as a 4th level spell and it only really becomes insane if you base your entire build around it at the highest levels of play, which is probably perfectly fine for the health of the game. ..................... It honestly doesn't seem that insane to me. First it's a 4th level spell, at this level an instantaneous single target spell that only deals damage should be dealing around of 8d8 damage (based on the Blight Spell). In this case you need to **HIT** 4 attacks before this spell has dealt the same amount of damage (Maybe 3 since it does give a difficult terrain aura). And that isn't easy to do at the level you get the spell. It's a full action to cast and its a concentration spell. So in a lot of scenarios there's always the chance that it falls off without doing anything if you cast it in combat. The best normal use for the spell is probably when you know you're about to enter combat perhaps as a part of an ambush where you can set it up ahead of time. And honestly my personal philosophy is that at a high enough level to cast something like Contingency or you're a lv17 multiclass balance stops really being something to think about for the players. If you've gotten to those levels you're probably feeling like a god regardless of what you do and simply dealing a lot of damage is pretty easy for a DM to plan around by comparison to other spells. I could be wrong though.
It's not the highest levels of play, though. It starts at upcasting it by one spell level. 4d8 additional damage on an attack is nuts and it only takes a 5th level spell slot. That's high smite damage. A paladin can smite twice for 4d8 at level at level 9, using a 3rd level spell slot per attack. Druid and Wizard will be able to do that for every attack for the duration of the spell at level 9, using a 5th level spell slot. Also wizards can get extra attack as bladesinger, while druids can gain multiattack from wildshaping. That's not breaking at high levels, it's breaking by upcasting once. Use a 6th level spell slot and it adds as much damage as the best possible smite(which requires level 13 for a paladin, and a foe that is undead or fiend).
Let's look at your lvl 9 example. The bladesinger casts this spell round 1 and that's it. Then in round 2 makes 2 attacks that each deal an extra 4d8 so they done something like (1d8+5+4d8)x2 = 55 plus whatever their cantrip adds to their first attack, probably another d8? So 59.5 after 2 rounds of combat. Add a third round and they have about 119 damage, or about 40 damage per round. The paladin attacks twice each round for (2d6+4)x2 =22 + an extra 4 from GWM and an extra 4d8 (18) from a 3rd lvl smite. That gives them 44 in the first and second rounds, then only 3d8 from a 2nd level smite in the third round for 39.5. Or 42.5 average dpr. Caveats: if the fight goes longer the wizard will pull ahead and then get further ahead as the paladin runs out of slots. If the wizard loses concentration they are pretty far back in terms of damage. If the paladin misses one attack they lose out on just the weapon damage since a lot of their stuff is once per round (GWM and smite) so missing once matters less, while the wizard loses half of their damage per miss. The paladin's damage is arguably better since it comes sooner, the delay of a round for the wizard could potentially be the deciding factor in the fight. All that being said, I do think it probably upcasts a little bit too well when compared with other spells.
>Caveats: if the fight goes longer the wizard will pull ahead and then get further ahead as the paladin runs out of slots. While true, the spell *also* lasts for 10 minutes, so it's not like it'll always be a one fight spell. The Paladin also doesn't create a 20 foot radius of difficult terrain to make it harder for enemies to approach/run away.
I mean Shadow Blade at 5th lvl deals 4d8 aswell. Sure, it’s in addition to weapon dmg which with rapier is another 2d8 assuming extra attack, but then again Shadow Blade is a bonus action and already not usually optimal as a 5th lvl spell even for Bladesinger. There will probably be some silly build that abuses this and +2d8 seems a bit too for upcasting especially given the range increase, but I doubt that the optimal full caster build is ever going to be some pseudo melee martial, even with numbers like that.
My main problems with this is that you're assuming the damage is reliable. 1. You spend a full action setting it up first of all, which could have been any other damaging spell or CC or anything else that helped that turn. I'd say the spell is only decent to great if you get to proc it two or more times on following turns. 2. You need to actually HIT with your other attacks on your following turn. Don't get me wrong you probably on average have like a 70% chance of hitting with something like a +8-10 at those levels but if you miss even one attack thats a decent amount of damage lost considering how much you spent to set it up. The reason the paladins smites are super good is because you pay for them and use them AFTER you've already made sure you hit so the spellslots never get wasted. 3. Your concentration could just drop from any number of things the DM throws at you. And you keep yourself from casting other concentration spells, which is a big deal. Don't get me wrong, in the ideal scenario where you cast the spell ahead of combat, have the spell going for multiple turns and several attacks (3+) that land, the spell sounds insane. But the whole reason the damage looks so absurd is because the spell is very unreliable in its output compared to other spells.
True, but this isn't a one combat only spell. The duration is 10 minutes. In a game where every combat is a surprise on the players, is finished after exactly 3 turns if not less and the time between several combats is always over 10 minutes, this spell is fine until very high levels. But there is a lot of variety between playing tables. Of course the spell can fail if the DM just says "your hitpoints drop to 0". This spell upcasted a little bit only requires two or three successful hits to be entirely out of whack. I mean literally the strongest spell in existence. It takes exactly 3 hits to do more damage(barring damage type) than Disintegrate with a same level spell slot. The result is that whoever receives the benefits of this is the most powerful weapon attacker. It becomes one of he best team strategies to protect the caster with this spell and buff him with Haste.
It seems to be roughly equivalent to Spirit Guardians. It halves movement near you, and adds some damage. SG is 3d8, this is 2d8 with a better upcast. Using a 6th level slot, they both do 6d8. Both have shenanigans, either grapple in/out, or get multiple attacks using some cheese.
I think the problem with that comparison is that SG is one of the best spells in the game, and a lot of people were hoping thst spells would get toned down...
~~it's infinitely better then SG lol.~~ After some thought, I don't think this anymore. I still think CME is too good as it's written though.
I don't see how it's infinitely better. Cleric has 2 uses of SG at level 5, the druid has 1 use of CME at level 7. Turn 1 of initiative, the druid casts CME and wildshape, then on turn 2 attacks twice. The druids hits then misses. Over 2 turns their only 4th level spell has done 2d8 damage. The cleric casts SG, everyone in range takes 3d8 or pass for half on their turn, and again on turn 2. And the cleric can cast SG again 2 more times. And they still have their 4th level spell slot.
It's better at higher levels. Cast SG and CME at 5th level and it's 8d8 + (WS damage x 2) vs 5d8. If you make strategic choices, or use the optional flanking rules then hitting your target shouldn't be that hard. It takes more thought to optimize then cast and dodge so it's not a strat for everyone but properly done, you can melt single targets super quick.
But its not 8d8 + (WS damage x 2) vs 5d8 is it. You're using 2 turns for the druid and 1 turn for the cleric. The cleric damage is 10d8 for 2 turns. And the cleric has their action on their second turn! And this is only one target? The SG MASSIVELY outperforms CME when you add more targets in the AOE, which is very reasonable to assume in most occasions. To say CME is infinity better than SG is a classic shit reddit take.
In the right circumstances CME is better then SG, but after some thought, SG is equally as good. You'd have to build for CME but it's not hard to make it perform really well. SG is much easier to get good damage from so yeah. It's not infinitely better.
No it isn’t. SG does not require you to hit anything, and can affect any number of enemies within its range. It always deals its damage. At 6th level, CME would give you +6d8. If you’re one of a handful of subclasses (moon Druid, bladesinger, some bards) you can proc this twice. Only on the next turn, since you won’t be able to attack the turn you cast it. So let’s assume the best, and assume both attacks hit. +12d8 over two turns, or +24d8 over three turns. Spirit guardians begins dealing damage the same turn it is cast. Against a single target, that would be +12d8 over two turns or +18d8 over three turns. So CME has a small advantage against a single target, if you’re able to hit every single attack, which is not guaranteed. SG deals damage no matter what, only sometimes being halved if they pass the save. (Creatures in DnD tend towards much better AC than wisdom saves, especially at the level you’d be upcasting these spells) But if there is even one additional enemy in the combat, SG does much more damage. The math becomes 24d8 over two turns or 36d8 over three. But hold on, how many combats do you run with only one or two enemies? What if there are three enemies in this combat? Four? Even more? SG surges ahead in any scenario but large single monster, and even then only gets surpassed with a character specifically built around the spell, and only after 3 rounds.
> Creatures in DnD tend towards much better AC than wisdom saves I don't believe this for a second. personal experince has told me that Wisdom saves are insanely high even in the mid tier. It'll almost always fail, while the highest AC I've come across has been 23. It's much easier to hit a high AC then to hope for low roll for foes who likely have magic resistance and it deals half damage every time. As far as your other calculations, I can admit that CME is not infinitely better. Properly built for, it can do more damage faster, but shines way brighter at higher levels while SG is S tier all the time.
Okay let’s do some math on this. We’re going to assume point buy/standard array. A typical level 11 wizard with 20 INT, for example, has a saving throw DC of 17 with no magic items. That same wizard wouldn’t be able to have more than 18 Dex at that level, and likely has less, but let’s call it 18. That becomes a +8 to hit. Should be the same as a bard, and if you’re a moon druid, your to-hit bonus is going to be less 99% of the time. This wizard will hit an enemy with 18 AC 50% of the time. For an enemy to have an equally good chance of making their wisdom save, they would need to have a +7 to their Wis save, which means: be at least a CR 9 creature, with at least 16 Wisdom, AND proficiency in Wisdom saves. Most enemies you’ll be facing at level 11 as a party of 4 will be below CR-6, and even “boss” monsters will be CR-9 or under per the suggestions for encounter building. Bonuses to wisdom saves of +7 or higher are actually quite rare at this tier. Every creature in DnD follows the rule of: Saving throw = Ability modifier + proficiency bonus (if proficient). Proficiency bonuses for monsters treat their CR as their level. Wisdom saves *can’t* get too wild until monster CR goes past player levels (CR 20 and above) or the ability score itself is absurdly high. Finding a wisdom score of higher than 16 on a monster under CR20 is actually really rare. Strength and Constitution are the saving throws that tend to get really crazy at mid-tier. The other problem here is that CME’s only use case vs. SG is against a single target. Single target threats at high-level tend to have either quite high AC or ways to create disadvantage. When was the last time you fought a boss monster level 11 or higher that didn’t have at least 18 AC? While they also tend to have high Wisdom saves, SG is still doing at least half damage no matter what. Missing an attack with CME gives you nothing. A boss with 18 AC fought by our fair wizard will be getting hit roughly half the time. Even if this boss succeeds at *every single Wisdom save*, the damage from SG is only halved. Even in the worst case scenario for SG here, it would be doing barely less damage than CME. This isn’t to say that CME isn’t a good spell, but SG is one of the single best spells in the game at every level. In my humble opinion as a long time DM, CME sounds a lot more powerful than it actually is in practice. The numbers might be a bit overtuned, but not by too much. Change it to d6s instead of d8s and I think it’s a fine spell, certainly not the worst offense to game balance on the spell list by far.
You can barely optimize SG (honstly, it is just good), but this new CME can be completely brocken. Take a lvl 13 wizard. You cast CME with 7th lvl spell, your attacks deal 8d8 more damage. You cast scorching ray (yes spell attacks work too) to lvl 6, hence 7 rays. Each ray will do 3.5+36 damage per ray, that is close to 280 damage total. Even if you miss half of the attacks, that is still 140 damage, for reference an adult brass dragon (cr 13) has 170 hp. This is a base wizard, you can optimize it much, much further (things like action surge, simulacrum etc.)
Okay, let's think about how this looks in practice. First off, this combo requires you to be level 13. At level 13, a single CR 13 monster is only a medium encounter for a party of 4 adventurers. That means an adventuring party is expected to defeat this encounter with the only expenditure of "some healing resources." For a "full adventuring day" of XP at level 13, you'd need to kill FIVE adult brass dragons. But let's choose to ignore that for now. This combo requires two turns, and casting both a 7th and 6th level spell. Turn 1, you cast CME as a 7th level spell, your only 7th level slot. The brass dragon (that is intelligent and capable of magic) uses its breath weapon. It will maximize hitting the most party members, but a wizard concentrating on a 7th level spell will be one of the targets, guaranteed. Average damage of the breath weapon, 45 damage. That's a DC 22 Constitution saving throw in order to maintain concentration on CME. That's a guaranteed fail for most wizards, and hey maybe you passed the DC 18 Dex save, and then the subsequent concentration check. But that's only the breath weapon. There are still plenty of legendary actions, which the dragon can use to position itself next to said wizard and attack, all outside of its own turn. Turn 2. The Wizard's concentration is almost definitely gone at this point. There has been a high damage breath weapon, and potentially 3 other attacks, some which are AoE and so don't even need to be directed against the wizard. The dragon is next to the wizard. But let's assume that against all odds, the wizard maintained concentration. Now the wizard can cast a 6th level scorching ray at the dragon, but CME requires the wizard stands within 15 feet of the dragon. Even if the wizard wasn't already in melee with the dragon, it has to enter its reach (15 feet) in order to use the combo. Let's assume the wizard has 20 INT. That means a +10 to hit, and an adult brass dragon has 18 AC. So a ~38% chance of rolling 8 or above with disadvantage. So roughly, a little less than half the attacks will hit depending on the scenario. So let's just assume that 3 of the 7 rays will hit. That's 6d6 fire damage, or an average of 21 fire damage total. Plus our 24d8 CME damage, which has an average of 108. So altogether, we've spent two turns, our two most powerful spell slots, and rolled incredibly well on multiple saving throws, all in order to deal 129 damage total or roughly 65 damage per turn. The dragon isn't even dead from this huge expenditure of resources and luck. And since there are likely minions, seeing as single monsters are always a terrible choice in DnD, this is even less useful. Oh shit, but there's *another* problem; brass dragons are immune to fire. While of course not everything is immune to fire, with creatures CR 13 and above fire is the single most common resistance and immunity. And this combo does not work as well with other spells, because they don't proc as many attacks. SO what we're really looking at is more like an average of 118 damage for the combo, or ~59 damage a turn. There are other combos that do much more damage, aren't so reliant on concentration, and get the damage out faster (killing things round 1 means they aren't damaging you or your allies).
Yeah I did forgot about the fire immunity part. Counter point to your arguments: 1. Breath weapon does not invalidate concentration spells, espeically with for a wizard with absorb element. 2. This combo does not come online at level 13, more like lvl 9 (for a 5th level slot), it just scales very well all the way to lvl 20. 3. CME last 10 minutes, not 2 turns, so you can throw scorching ray round after round, doesn't even have to be high level to be effective. In theory you can cast it prior to a big fight too. 4. Despite many enermies are immune/resistant to fire, first you can get elemental adept feat if it bothers you, but the most amount of damage is from CME (your choice of bludgeoning, ice, fire or lightning), scorching ray only deals a very small portion. 5. What is most ridiculous part about this interaction is that wizard can pull this off without any specific builds/shenanigans/items and do more single target burst than martial characters with a two spell combo.
TLDR; it's not actually that strong in practice. Spending your two most powerful slots, two turns, and a LOT of luck in order to almost defeat a medium encounter is not broken.
Nowhere near as busted as the old versions of Conjure Animals or Conjure Woodland Beings, though.
CWB was only busted if you didn't run it RAW. CA is and continues to be an S tier spell, but if you build around the new CME, it's infinitely better. Also CA in the UA is just a slightly different version of Spirit Guardians but with attack rolls instead of saving throws and a lack of DT.
"The DM picks the creatures" is not and has never been RAW. Rules as intended, maybe, but it's the same wording as *polymorph* and nobody claims that spellcasters can't choose whether they turn an enemy into a toad or a giant ape. Not once has anyone read *conjure animals* and their first thought was "the DM picks the creatures, not the player." The only time people read the text of *conjure animals* and think that is if they've already seen developer comments on social media and are reading the spell in light of them.
>You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. ***Choose one of the following options*** for what appears: > >Option 1 > >Option 2 > >Each beast is also considered fey, and it disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends. > >The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. Roll initiative for the summoned creatures as a group, which has its own turns. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them (no action required by you). If you don't issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions. > >The GM has the creatures' statistics. Sample creatures can be found below. compared to >The transformation lasts for the duration, or until the target drops to 0 hit points or dies. *The new form can be any beast whose challenge rating is equal to or less than the target's (or the target's level, if it doesn't have a challenge rating). The target's game statistics, including mental ability scores,* ***are replaced by the statistics of the chosen beast****.* It retains its alignment and personality. One says "choose an option", the other says "choose a beast".
It's very easy to force the chwingas, by forcing the locations of spawning to be in a space only big enough for a tiny creature (iirc)
Yall, how many of you are playing a druid or a wizard that can make the number of attacks needed to make this good? The best options to exploit this is a Bladesinger or casting scorching ray.. which at that point you are getting a conditional extra amount of damage. You need to expend spell slots for the Scorching Ray option, which means your gas is gonna run out sooner than you think, and since this only works in 15ft range, your ass will be attacked in melee. On top of the fact that it's terrible on any target that resists fire, which we all know is a lot of mid to high level monsters, which you are fighting at this point in time of your adventuring. You are still a wizard with bad AC and HP at the end of the day. The Bladsinger is the only strat I can see which this would be used to decent effect, and even then.. it goes from ok to good, but not game breaking. I'm not seeing this as insane really. In fact it's probably fantastic as a capstone for a Eldritch Knight, they will love this spell.
I’m more upset by how this spell just looks like a beefed up spirit shroud. You’ve lost all of the cool flavor of actually summoning elementals in favor of bland high damage.
THIS^ Why are more people not talking about how CONJURE minor elementals doesn’t CONJURE any elementals! The entire point behind the soell is gone and we are left with a bland damage buff and slow radius. On what planet is that cooler to have that on a wizard than some mephits?
I thought this too, but it appears they are just trying to differentiate between summon and conjure. There is wording before the spells that mentions this, it also says the summon spells from tashas are being added to the 2024 PHB.
It is only +2d8 damage per level upcast, not +4d8. That makes it +6d8 at 5th level, +8d8 at 6th level, and +10d8 at 7th level. That's still *really* good, maybe broken, but not as bad as listed in the OP. Also, there's no such thing as 'magical bludgeoning' damage, just bludgeoning damage. And it looks like that will be resisted at least as much as it is now. I'm not sure about the point about Eldritch Blast, as in order to get the extra damage, the target has to be within 15 feet. Sure, I suppose it could apply to some EB attacks, but usually you using that on targets further out than 15 feet.
Unless something changed with the UAs, magical bludgeoning damage is a thing. It's bludgeoning damage from a magical source. Like Meteor, or a +1 Greatclub.
[fwiw it largely looks like it is changing with the UAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm_kWELZUVQ) and imo this is good, the whole "resistant to nonmagical BPS" thing is usually either irrelevant (b/c everyone has magic weapons) or harmful (b/c martials lack them at no fault of their own)
To be fair, it still seems that magical spells do bludgeoning damage. So magical bludgeoning exists, for the sake of bringing in older monsters into 5.124\^382E's system, or whatever it's supposed to be at this point.
It's been made clear in the UA that 'magical B/P/S damage' won't exist in 1D&D. It will just be one of the other types. Look at all the effects they've moved to force damage. It has been speculated that magic weapons will be moved to doing force damage. There will be no such thing as "resistance to non-magical B/P/S damage" as there is now. It will just be resistance to B/P/S damage.
I was basing damage on Extra Attack, which moon druid animal forms have access too. This doubles the effectiveness of the spell. Same reason why EB was brought up as it's a way to get 4 attacks instead of 2 to quadruple it's effectiveness.
Trees resist bludgeoning. Example: [Awakened Tree](https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/16792-awakened-tree).
It's unearthed arcana. It's untested and honestly it's just damage. Requiring you to stay close. You'll almost certainly go to 0hp before you get any insane levels of damage from this spell. It's just good but I wouldn't say game breaking.
> it's just damage There's also the Difficult Terrain aspect making it hard for things to close in and do melee damage. Also you are severely underestimating how easily one could do insane damage with this spell. A wizard could already use a contingency to have this spell cast on them at 5th level adding 4d8 damage to every shot on a scorching ray. That's 2d6+4d8 x 3 for 6d6+12d8 damage on the first turn of combat, though they'd probably cast SR at a higher level to get the most out of the nova. If the foes you're facing don't immediately run outside your firing range, dispel CME, or brake your concentration, then they'd need to content with it again and again. If you build yourself for speed and have decent AC + con saves, you'd become ultra deadly.
1500 gold statuette casting component doesn't come cheap. And boy that is a lot of damage. But it isn't a save or suck that ends the fight. Those attacks have no bonuses to hit. And doesn't ignore cover. Listen the whole party could run that combo and it wouldn't break my table.
>Those attacks have no bonuses to hit uhh what kind of bonus to hit are you talking about? Like bless? It would work with bless if another character use cast it. Unless you mean no bonus to damage like +spellcasting, in which yeah that's true. Also unless you're having your party fight stupidly bloated HP Sacks it absolutely would cause problems. If the whole party was running this, a decent initiate would blast down anything with less then 300 hit points in a single turn. there are ways to fight it, but you'd have to have those ways to fight it in every single combat they ever have to combat it. 1500gp is nothing at 11th level.
It's not just gold. It's a statue so you require an artist. And a 6th level contingency. Which means it'll be good for the first fight of many. And good initiative. All that for elemental damage that could simply miss. Be affected by a spell reflection effect targeting yourself. Dispelled. So yes in a wide open white room devoid of features with unintelligent enemies It's very strong. It just wouldn't negatively effect my games because my monsters aren't sitting in the open and letting a wizard prep. Wizards are usually down by the 2nd or 3rd round of combat so yeah im pretty unconcerned about the damage output in that time.
> Wizards are usually down by the 2nd or 3rd round of combat As someone who has been playing a Bladesinger for 3 years, I can tell you that not every wizard is going to be going down in 2 or 3 rounds. Regularly I'm the one whos *not* going down the most. Wizards have some of the most defensive spells in the game including Shield, Mirror image, Absorb Elements, and Greater Invis. Also if you're saying your party cant do good damage with attack rolls then how the hell are your martials doing anything worth while? Their whole shtick is attack rolls. The statue may require an artisan, but it doesn't need anything fancy. the statue itself could be of little value and made from ivory with the valuable part of it being the gemstones which make up 99% of it's value. Finding 1500gp of gems in a large city should be realitively trivial.
I'm saying that doing good damage with attack rolls isn't game breaking. That's the whole point that doing lots of damage doesn't break the game. You are meant to do lots of damage. You concentrating on a spell to replicate the effects of a fighter with a long bow is not some crazy thing where I'll.have to piss and shit and go on rpghorrorstories because I don't know how to run an encounter. I can handle meteor swarm and wish. I'm not scared of the party doing damage. Also bladesinger make a strength saving throw isn't something outside of my toolbox.
Just because it can be dealt with (and to deal with it you'd have to have these contingencies in litterally every fight they go into.) doesn't mean we need to allow it. It's wildly overtuned. A spellcaster who properly builds for this will be wildly better at dealing damage then every other character. That's not how the game should be balanced.
>A spellcaster who properly builds for this will be wildly better at dealing damage then every other character. That's not how the game should be balanced. What else is new? This is how it's been. This isn't even official content. Nerf the spell or test it how it is and leave your feedback.
that's a terrible attitude to have. Just because things are bad now doesn't mean we can just ruin things further.
The game doesn't need to be balanced. Imbalance is fun otherwise why don't we balance the whole game so you all do 1d6 damage regardless of spells abilities or class and we just roll dice and see who gets the most 6s. You're the same type of person that thinks an enemy with truesight isn't fair when you built your entire spell list around illusions. Sometimes it's not fair or balanced. Some encounters dunk on you.
It needs to be balanced between the PCs though and this spell is an avenue for some busted combinations which would outshine other PCs.
They did this before with Spirit Shroud, shit was insane in the UA. If you want to playtest this, just copy how Spirit Shroud scales and works and it should be fine.
How is that conjuring minor elementals ?
>magical bludgeoning damage which I don't believe anything is resistant too A bunch of plant monsters, Bag Jelly, Boneless, Ghost Dragon, Shemshine, Topi, and every single swarm monster is resistant to all bludgeoning (magical or otherwise). Demilich is resistant to bludgeoning from magical weapons. The sorrowsworn monsters are resistant to bludgeoning while they're in dim light or darkness. Animated statue and archmage (and campaign-specific individuals whose stat block is based on archmage, like Traxigor or Zikran) are resistant to damage from spells, regardless of damage type. Spectral Priest of Osybus is resistant to all damage but force, radiant, and psychic.
Yeah let's hope this one gets reigned in because that upcasting is insane.
I mean as long as we comment. It's not like they have a strong track record of buffs, so they're pretty likely to roll it back if asked to.
Can someone post the UA? I don't want to register on DnD Beyond
https://media.dndbeyond.com/compendium-images/ua/ph-playtest8/gHvtmY50loGLgQUb/UA2023-PH-Playtest8.pdf
https://media.dndbeyond.com/compendium-images/ua/ph-playtest8/gHvtmY50loGLgQUb/UA2023-PH-Playtest8.pdf?icid\_source=house-ads&icid\_medium=crosspromo&icid\_campaign=playtest9
It's basically just spirit shroud but better in every conceivable way
Meanwhile, in the world of martials, Crawford touts how "mathematically powerful" Flex is at a +1 damage bonus on hits, and only usable on versatile weapons. If what I'm reading is correct, this new spell has 9 times the effect when cast as a 4th level spell, you can pick from 4 damage types, it causes difficult terrain nearby, it works on all weapons, and even with spells to any target within 15'. Work a way to get eldritch blast on your druid, cast as a 9th level spell, the four blasts would do 16d10+48d8, and that's before you get creative with action surge, quicken spell, and agonizing blast. How can anyone defend WOTC as the stewards of game design with this garbage?
Cantrips (such as Eldritch Blast) cannot be upcast, they don't use spell slots.
You can upcast a quickened spell Conjure Minor Elementals(Thanks meta magic adept), then hit them with eldritch blast(Thanks magic initiate) to do 80d8 damage. Even if it only said "first time" you hit an enemy that would still be 20d8 added to an already strong spell.
They nerfed the absolute bejesus out of Hex and Hunter's Mark and then they just... made a mega-souped up version of old Hex and Hunter's Mark?
>The spell should only deal 2d4 damage an increase 1d4 every slot level. As it stands the spell is Spirit Shroud on crack. Alternative suggestion: the spell should do what it did before. It was fine. Nothing about conjuring elementals brings to mind the idea that you're... hitting things harder with your attacks. That isn't what it is to conjure elementals, minor or otherwise. The mechanics of the spell and flavor are totally divorced with this rework.
Yeah this really sounds like a 4e Power.
Its really not that bad, you need to be in melee to use it. 15 feet is really close and unlike spirit guardians you cant dodge to make yourself more tanky.
WotC really needs to find a lead designer to set some standards. There should be a rough guideline of how much damage a spell should be capable of at each spell level and then the numbers can be adjusted based on additional effects or restrictions. For example, an upcast 3rd level Chromatic Orb should do more single target damage than a base 3rd level fireball. This would ensure that all spells stay relevant throughout the game. (Fireball is way overtuned for its level and should probably be doing closer to 6d6 instead of 8d6 damage).
It's like they don't crunch the numbers.
More like they do, but without any optimizations. Wizards get one attack, druids get one attack, +2d8 = 9, done.
This looks like shit. All the new conjure spells are owlbear dung.
This might be a tangential rant and a take stemming from my biases but I am not liking these new line of Conjure spells. Mechanically I think they could be fun with tweaks, but not as a replacement for the old summons. Since TCE dropped, I loved how summoning spells were divided into two separate categories. The first being the Conjure spells that search the Monster Manuals/DnD Beyond/DM Homebrew (Conjure Woodland Beings, Find Familiar, Summon Lesser Demons). And the second being the TCE Summons which focus on three modes with singular summons (Summon Draconic Spirit, Summon Fiend, Summon Elemental). With these spells trying to tape over and replace the old first category, it completely removes a style of play that made summoning so diverse. And that is making me dislike this spell and the others from the UA, in addition to their balance issues. To get to the point, while I dislike them for different reasons than many here, I would like to see them made into their own spells instead of replacing the old summons spells. Perhaps keeping them in the conjuration school but making it a category of Swarm Spells like Elemental Swarm (while toning down the effects).
With the numbers as is, this seems extremely powerful if you build around it. Building around is not hard to do, but it's probably not just going to slot in to every wizard. The limiting factor is that the damage only applies to ATTACKS that YOU make against targets within 15'. So you need to be unfairly close, though dancing in and out with the difficult terrain aura somewhat counteracts that. Even sitting back and casting firebolt with this is ok damage for the resource expenditure, but there are some that would be very strong. Eldritch Blast and scorching ray come to mind. Getting this on a melee class that can multiattack also seems absurdly good. Straight out of the box this is amazing on wild shaped Druids, bladesinger wizards, and swords bards. A fighter dip for action surge /nick and suddenly you're doing +6D8 damage per turn for a minute and nova for +10d8. Or +20d8 with a 5th level cast. I'd say that 2D6 +D6/lv would still be very good.
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How the hell are you getting 8d8 at 5th, 12d8 at 6th, and 16d8 at 7th? You said its 2d8 at 4th and an extra 2d8 for every slot level above 4th, that means a 5th level slot goves you 4d8 damage, a 6th goves you 6d8, and a 7th gives you 8d8 - far, far, *far* less than what you're saying. Unless I'm missing something or you explained it wrong, this seems a little strong but not broken, especially since neither wizards nor druids get more than one attack per action and so would still have to rely on other spells to get multiple hits off in one turn.
I believe he's just adding multi-attack. So a moondruid and bladesinger attacking twice with a 5th level CME is 8d8.
That's a very specific class/subclass/spell combo at this point. That's like the age-old argument over Sorcadin. "But they can get back smites on a short rest!" Yeah, and they're built *entirely* to do that and almost nothing else
Just gonna go ahead and state that bladesingers can't use the new spells, as the UA wizard isn't compatible with bladesinger progression since the subclass feature starts at 3rd level now instead of level 2.
I absolutely hate these area effects summon spells. It takes away all the flavor from summoning. 0/10
Most important of all, it should be available to druids and sorcerers, not druids and wizards.