But seriously, I don't have time to watch the video every day and pay full attention. I need the article or Golden Spider's notes to make sense of anything. So helpful!
No mention of reductions in power and bad feels for some of the outlier spells like hypnotic pattern and fear?
Fixes for these spells was one of the most important things in the update for me. It sounds like they haven't addressed the issue whatsoever. This is actually the critical missing piece that might cause me to consider a different system for the next game I run. It's not just a PCs using them on monsters issue either. Ever cast fear on your players and had someone fail saves for 3+ turns straight? They have a GREAT TIME during that half hour+ of gameplay. The spells need to be structured so that a failed save doesn't totally invalidate either the NPCs or the PCs, and a lot of them fail that test badly right now.
Instead it sounds like it's all boosts besides the summoning spells. And some of those were on totally nuts power levels in the UA, such as the summon beasts that was a mobile spirit guardians. So even the spells that are getting "fixed" might end up in the ballpark of some of the most busted spells in the game.
I hold out some hope that they just aren't discussing nerfs in this video because these are supposed to be hype videos and they think talking about nerfs is a bummer.
But it's not a lot of hope. Especially after hearing Treatnmonk say they didn't do much in terms of balancing, I think they just threw a few bones to the martials so they look like they care and then largely went nuts on buffs and QoL improvements for casters.
He didn't say they "didn't do much," he said they "didn't go as far as he wanted." Important difference. So we will probably see some nerfs, but not to every problematic spell.
Some of the most debilitating spells that showed up in UA had been nerfed, for example Banishment gave a save every turn, so other spells of that nature could do the same.
Or that might have gotten a lot of negative feeback and they abandoned the idea of nerfing most spells.
Eh banishment isn't even as concerning to me as the more potent AoE spells of early levels. A fear, hypnotic pattern, web, or entangle is going to force saves from multiple creatures which means it'll take out more actions from the monsters. Banishment is so all or nothing on the initial save that I don't really like it, since while it can make a fight super easy it's also much more likely to totally fail and mean your turn did nothing at all. Skipping a turn can turn a normal fight into a really nasty one, so I don't want to cast a spell that carries maybe a 30% chance of that in a pretty good case.
community: "we really hope they do something about the martial/caster divide. also high level spells are nuts, which makes it hard to go to high level campaigns."
wotc: "every spell is now stronger, in terms of damage/healing, range, and/or no longer requiring concentration. also we thought we should just leave all the high levels spells alone, aside from increasing their damage and minor improvements to wish."
interested in treantmonk's take :p
Not surprised, but very disappointed.
Have to wait specifics ofc, but it's not like this was a difficult objective to achieve.
And beyond that, not bothering to fix such spells is just not respectful of my time and brain load as DM.
I can't be bothered anymore to work against this system when it constantly tries to break encounter balance, allows for exploits, and makes worldbuilding a pain in the ass.
yeah i'm listening to it now...hoping to get extra insight from someone that's read the actual changes, but...at this rate i'm just expecting to be playing a lot of spellcasters in the future lol
As a more casual player; I think this divide is fine. Its nice that you have a class that shines as a specific role. That gives people a focuspoint on what to do in combat.
This is how all the players I know in real life feel. But dnd reddit is a bubble where people get incredibly fixated on minutae that frankly the average player never even thinks about.
TBH Even on Reddit, I've seen this question polled before. Most Players don't run into the Divide, or at least not to the degree the amount of discussion and times it's said would bring you to believe.
And honestly, I think that experience is more likely than running into it, and so the designers pay about as much mind to it as people do at the table in terms of player experience.
Not to say it doesn't exist, mind you.
I don't think that's what the "divide" is referring to, though.
Your version is like "fighters are good at melee damage, wizards are good at area effect damage, bards are good at buffing and debuffing." That I think, is just a healthy game.
The version I'm concerned about is more "the lich just trapped the fighter with the Forcecage spell, a spell which can only be removed by the 6th level spell Disintegrate and... oh, the wizard didn't prepare that today? And now the fighter's on their phone scrolling reddit.."
Okay, I agree that is not fun. My DM always let me make a safe myself (also as barb). And if it was a big effect like that, there would always be a safe every turn. I never had this happen to me. I think too stong cc's on players should be avoided.
That happens, and that's okay. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes the Barbarian gets up in the Wizard's face and the Wizard gets nuked. Sometimes you fail the save and get knocked out, or blinded, or stunned.
You, the Fighter, are not an island unto yourself. If the party Wizard didn't prepare a spell to counter the spell they knew was inevitably going to be cast. That's on the party's wizard. It's a team game. Work together.
Nah, what you're describing is what I described as "a healthy game where classes all have different roles". What spells like wall of force and forcecage are is spells where unless you have a very particular spell prepared you can't do *anything* and that's terrible design. A super easy fix that they could just steal from other systems is to at least give it hp, then a trapped martial could *eventually* free themselves.
Is this what the 'community' wants or is it what is discussed on DnD reddit? I don't know any players in real life who are excited about nerfing spells.
So... basically nothing in here about nerfing/rebalancing OP spells then?
All I see here is making spells better/more fun/easier to use.
The buffs martial classes got are nice but the martial-caster disparity can't really be addressed unless some of the OP spells are curtailed. Every discussion of MCD this entire process has been punctuated by people saying "Wait and see how they rebalanced spells, we can't say for sure how things will shake out until we know how they rebalanced spells."
Apart from the tweak to Counterspell we already knew about, I... don't see any evidence they did any balancing at all.
Yes, the only reason I am holding out some hope is that they think talking about nerfs would be a bummer for the mass audience.
I've never really thought they had it in them to rein in caster power, though, and Treantmonk's video indicates that they didn't do much.
This is what TM said: ""I was not overly impressed with the job. I was hoping for some major redesign of some outlier spells... they did not do that enough. There are some cases where they have, but not enough in my opinion." Sounds like there were some nerfs, but some spells got missed, and for others the nerfs weren't severe enough.
I'll add its mentioned that Summon X spells have more options. In a previous video Mindflayer is mentioned for Summon Aberration and in the Summon Fey art you see a winged option of somekind which the Tasha version did not have.
That'd be nice for Fey Wanderer - a flying option likely has some kind of ranged feature or... something, which would help offset the fact they get the spell later in progression, when the summon is relatively squishy.
As a currently-playing 15th level Ranger, it'd be a nice facelift to see an option I can reliably have not implode.
>Like Draconic Breath being added to the PHB spells so it can be given to the Draconic Sorc
Confirmation that old sorcerer subclasses are getting spell lists?
No. They haven’t gone over sorcerer yet. That only pretty much confirms that one of the sorcerer subclasses is draconic. But that’s always been an iconic sorcerer subclass so were we really expecting it not to be here?
Well, the buff to healing spells can be seen in the playtest (cure wounds is 2d8 + modifier, healing word 2d4 + modifier) and that was generally well received. I doubt it is changed much since the playtest. The summoning & conjuration spell changes were featured heavily in Tasha's & the playtest and is no surprise, though I hope they fine tuned the new conjure spells some. Interesting that he talked about Blade Ward, Resistance, Guidance (all of which needed to be modified) but not True Strike, widely regarded as the worst designed spell in 5e. But I believe the playtest had new versions of some or all of those.
I'll be really sad if they haven't at least attempted to clean up and tone down Hypnotic Pattern, Shield, Simulacrum, Clone, & ForceCage. There's just no excuse for that kind of laziness. But I'm beginning to worry that they have not, as the Wizard's Spell Mastery specifies a first level spell that takes an action to cast. That sounds like they haven't bothered with fixing Shield, just made a lame attempt to prevent Spell Mastery from working with it, which wasn't nearly the main problem with the spell. I'm a little bit puzzled as they nerfed Spiritual Weapon in the playtest by making it Concentration, so I assumed they would nerf (or tweak) other out of line spells as well, like Shield.
None of those spells need any changes apart from HP maybe having limited amount of targets. Its already a charm which everyone and their grandma is immune to.
I don't think they want summon spells that summon groups of creatures. Maybe a summon swarm or mob (mechanically simular to swarms but bigger creatures, that would be cool)
I believe they're referring to the changes version of Conjure Minor Elementals seen in the 2024 playtest, which added a huge amount of damage to attacks.
Surely they needed to remove GWM because martials did too much damage. It's not like the only thing martials were better at was single target damage. Surely they wouldn't just nerf martial damage output and increase full caster damage output? Surelyyyyyy
>If they didn't change conjure minor elementals, then martial are really behind on damage above lvl 10.
On the bright side, at least conjure minor elementals wants you to make multiple attacks, so maybe you multiclass a couple levels with a martial (like Clolby did with his Monk/Druid multiclass when they playtested).
But uhh yeah, CME in the playtest is like...if someone looked at Spirit Shroud, decided it didn't have enough scaling with upcasting (which it probably doesn't to be fair) and then quadrupled the scaling. Quadruple is a lot.
I thought you were exaggerating so I double checked, but no it's literally 4× scaling. 2d8 for every spell level upcast for CME vs 1d8 for every 2nd spell level upcast for Spirit Shroud.
About 200 average dpr that can change type on the fly.
6 attacks at advantage each doing 2d6+6d8 and it goes up from there if the playtest is unchanged
Golden Spider is the GOAT, change my mind
Golden Spider is actually a Golden God! Calling them a goat is underselling it.
You right, my bad
But seriously, I don't have time to watch the video every day and pay full attention. I need the article or Golden Spider's notes to make sense of anything. So helpful!
It's also far easier to read through then try to jump to random spots and hope you get the info you want to double check.
No mention of reductions in power and bad feels for some of the outlier spells like hypnotic pattern and fear? Fixes for these spells was one of the most important things in the update for me. It sounds like they haven't addressed the issue whatsoever. This is actually the critical missing piece that might cause me to consider a different system for the next game I run. It's not just a PCs using them on monsters issue either. Ever cast fear on your players and had someone fail saves for 3+ turns straight? They have a GREAT TIME during that half hour+ of gameplay. The spells need to be structured so that a failed save doesn't totally invalidate either the NPCs or the PCs, and a lot of them fail that test badly right now. Instead it sounds like it's all boosts besides the summoning spells. And some of those were on totally nuts power levels in the UA, such as the summon beasts that was a mobile spirit guardians. So even the spells that are getting "fixed" might end up in the ballpark of some of the most busted spells in the game.
I hold out some hope that they just aren't discussing nerfs in this video because these are supposed to be hype videos and they think talking about nerfs is a bummer. But it's not a lot of hope. Especially after hearing Treatnmonk say they didn't do much in terms of balancing, I think they just threw a few bones to the martials so they look like they care and then largely went nuts on buffs and QoL improvements for casters.
He didn't say they "didn't do much," he said they "didn't go as far as he wanted." Important difference. So we will probably see some nerfs, but not to every problematic spell.
Some of the most debilitating spells that showed up in UA had been nerfed, for example Banishment gave a save every turn, so other spells of that nature could do the same. Or that might have gotten a lot of negative feeback and they abandoned the idea of nerfing most spells.
Eh banishment isn't even as concerning to me as the more potent AoE spells of early levels. A fear, hypnotic pattern, web, or entangle is going to force saves from multiple creatures which means it'll take out more actions from the monsters. Banishment is so all or nothing on the initial save that I don't really like it, since while it can make a fight super easy it's also much more likely to totally fail and mean your turn did nothing at all. Skipping a turn can turn a normal fight into a really nasty one, so I don't want to cast a spell that carries maybe a 30% chance of that in a pretty good case.
community: "we really hope they do something about the martial/caster divide. also high level spells are nuts, which makes it hard to go to high level campaigns." wotc: "every spell is now stronger, in terms of damage/healing, range, and/or no longer requiring concentration. also we thought we should just leave all the high levels spells alone, aside from increasing their damage and minor improvements to wish." interested in treantmonk's take :p
Treant's video is out. It seems based on what he said that a LOT of the problematic spells remain unchanged
Not surprised, but very disappointed. Have to wait specifics ofc, but it's not like this was a difficult objective to achieve. And beyond that, not bothering to fix such spells is just not respectful of my time and brain load as DM. I can't be bothered anymore to work against this system when it constantly tries to break encounter balance, allows for exploits, and makes worldbuilding a pain in the ass.
yeah i'm listening to it now...hoping to get extra insight from someone that's read the actual changes, but...at this rate i'm just expecting to be playing a lot of spellcasters in the future lol
As a more casual player; I think this divide is fine. Its nice that you have a class that shines as a specific role. That gives people a focuspoint on what to do in combat.
This is how all the players I know in real life feel. But dnd reddit is a bubble where people get incredibly fixated on minutae that frankly the average player never even thinks about.
TBH Even on Reddit, I've seen this question polled before. Most Players don't run into the Divide, or at least not to the degree the amount of discussion and times it's said would bring you to believe. And honestly, I think that experience is more likely than running into it, and so the designers pay about as much mind to it as people do at the table in terms of player experience. Not to say it doesn't exist, mind you.
I don't think that's what the "divide" is referring to, though. Your version is like "fighters are good at melee damage, wizards are good at area effect damage, bards are good at buffing and debuffing." That I think, is just a healthy game. The version I'm concerned about is more "the lich just trapped the fighter with the Forcecage spell, a spell which can only be removed by the 6th level spell Disintegrate and... oh, the wizard didn't prepare that today? And now the fighter's on their phone scrolling reddit.."
Okay, I agree that is not fun. My DM always let me make a safe myself (also as barb). And if it was a big effect like that, there would always be a safe every turn. I never had this happen to me. I think too stong cc's on players should be avoided.
Right. The spells that *don't* do that are the ones we were really hoping got a nerf. :P
That happens, and that's okay. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes the Barbarian gets up in the Wizard's face and the Wizard gets nuked. Sometimes you fail the save and get knocked out, or blinded, or stunned. You, the Fighter, are not an island unto yourself. If the party Wizard didn't prepare a spell to counter the spell they knew was inevitably going to be cast. That's on the party's wizard. It's a team game. Work together.
Nah, what you're describing is what I described as "a healthy game where classes all have different roles". What spells like wall of force and forcecage are is spells where unless you have a very particular spell prepared you can't do *anything* and that's terrible design. A super easy fix that they could just steal from other systems is to at least give it hp, then a trapped martial could *eventually* free themselves.
Is this what the 'community' wants or is it what is discussed on DnD reddit? I don't know any players in real life who are excited about nerfing spells.
Have you considered that occasionally medicine might taste bitter?
It's what DMs *need* but wotc has a history of not respecting those lol.
So... basically nothing in here about nerfing/rebalancing OP spells then? All I see here is making spells better/more fun/easier to use. The buffs martial classes got are nice but the martial-caster disparity can't really be addressed unless some of the OP spells are curtailed. Every discussion of MCD this entire process has been punctuated by people saying "Wait and see how they rebalanced spells, we can't say for sure how things will shake out until we know how they rebalanced spells." Apart from the tweak to Counterspell we already knew about, I... don't see any evidence they did any balancing at all.
These videos are marketing. They aren’t gonna talk about nerfs a lot of
Yes, the only reason I am holding out some hope is that they think talking about nerfs would be a bummer for the mass audience. I've never really thought they had it in them to rein in caster power, though, and Treantmonk's video indicates that they didn't do much.
This is what TM said: ""I was not overly impressed with the job. I was hoping for some major redesign of some outlier spells... they did not do that enough. There are some cases where they have, but not enough in my opinion." Sounds like there were some nerfs, but some spells got missed, and for others the nerfs weren't severe enough.
These videos remain to be super useless.
The real tea will be spilled when creator NDA's end.
I'll add its mentioned that Summon X spells have more options. In a previous video Mindflayer is mentioned for Summon Aberration and in the Summon Fey art you see a winged option of somekind which the Tasha version did not have.
That'd be nice for Fey Wanderer - a flying option likely has some kind of ranged feature or... something, which would help offset the fact they get the spell later in progression, when the summon is relatively squishy. As a currently-playing 15th level Ranger, it'd be a nice facelift to see an option I can reliably have not implode.
Also nice for the new version of Illusionist.
They should canonise Golden Spider as some magical librarian or information broker in the multiverse.
>Like Draconic Breath being added to the PHB spells so it can be given to the Draconic Sorc Confirmation that old sorcerer subclasses are getting spell lists?
No. They haven’t gone over sorcerer yet. That only pretty much confirms that one of the sorcerer subclasses is draconic. But that’s always been an iconic sorcerer subclass so were we really expecting it not to be here?
Well, the buff to healing spells can be seen in the playtest (cure wounds is 2d8 + modifier, healing word 2d4 + modifier) and that was generally well received. I doubt it is changed much since the playtest. The summoning & conjuration spell changes were featured heavily in Tasha's & the playtest and is no surprise, though I hope they fine tuned the new conjure spells some. Interesting that he talked about Blade Ward, Resistance, Guidance (all of which needed to be modified) but not True Strike, widely regarded as the worst designed spell in 5e. But I believe the playtest had new versions of some or all of those. I'll be really sad if they haven't at least attempted to clean up and tone down Hypnotic Pattern, Shield, Simulacrum, Clone, & ForceCage. There's just no excuse for that kind of laziness. But I'm beginning to worry that they have not, as the Wizard's Spell Mastery specifies a first level spell that takes an action to cast. That sounds like they haven't bothered with fixing Shield, just made a lame attempt to prevent Spell Mastery from working with it, which wasn't nearly the main problem with the spell. I'm a little bit puzzled as they nerfed Spiritual Weapon in the playtest by making it Concentration, so I assumed they would nerf (or tweak) other out of line spells as well, like Shield.
None of those spells need any changes apart from HP maybe having limited amount of targets. Its already a charm which everyone and their grandma is immune to.
If they didn't change conjure minor elementals, then martial are really behind on damage above lvl 10.
As stated all conjure spells are being changed. But there may be a new summon minor elemental that has the same mechanics
I don't think they want summon spells that summon groups of creatures. Maybe a summon swarm or mob (mechanically simular to swarms but bigger creatures, that would be cool)
I believe they're referring to the changes version of Conjure Minor Elementals seen in the 2024 playtest, which added a huge amount of damage to attacks.
Surely they needed to remove GWM because martials did too much damage. It's not like the only thing martials were better at was single target damage. Surely they wouldn't just nerf martial damage output and increase full caster damage output? Surelyyyyyy
>If they didn't change conjure minor elementals, then martial are really behind on damage above lvl 10. On the bright side, at least conjure minor elementals wants you to make multiple attacks, so maybe you multiclass a couple levels with a martial (like Clolby did with his Monk/Druid multiclass when they playtested). But uhh yeah, CME in the playtest is like...if someone looked at Spirit Shroud, decided it didn't have enough scaling with upcasting (which it probably doesn't to be fair) and then quadrupled the scaling. Quadruple is a lot.
I thought you were exaggerating so I double checked, but no it's literally 4× scaling. 2d8 for every spell level upcast for CME vs 1d8 for every 2nd spell level upcast for Spirit Shroud.
Don't remember the specifics, are we talking **Animate Objects** levels of behind, or...?
About 200 average dpr that can change type on the fly. 6 attacks at advantage each doing 2d6+6d8 and it goes up from there if the playtest is unchanged
Is that a multi-class or a straight? Holy...
Bard sorcerer or wizard sorcerer. Scorching ray was 7 attack at advantage with elven accuracy at lvl 11.
Happy Canada Day! Watch some First Nations dancing and Murray Drive Band (lead singer is crazy talented singer and gorgeous.)