Played some Tier 3 & 4 CCC over the weekend. I think content as a whole is improving as experience with writing for 5e AL is accrued. I've seen a couple of things that appear to be habitual in these of late, though.
1) Penalties for use of teleportation magic. Make a DC or suffer damage and/or teleportation failure/mishap with no real way to know this could be an issue without just trying a spell and risk getting zapped. Yeah, you don't want a teleportation easy button but what happens is the player spends a spell slot (limited resource) to find out it doesn't work and they are damaged for doing it.
2) Counterspell mania. Had at least two mods where we had 3+ long chains of counterspells going off. In one case it was significantly baked into the encounter (ie items that counterspelled at high level were scattered about). I like a fun wizard duel but when every spell you're trying to get off is being counterspelled only to be counter-counterspelled which in turn is counter spelled, over and over again. Well, not as much fun. On top of that one of the DMs was of the opinion that you have no idea what spell is being cast when you use counterspell (even when the PC in question has a passive perception of 20 and a +15 bonus to Arcana). So people were burning high level counterspells on low-level spells. [DM]Chuckle, chuckle...[/DM] :-/
