Bard Faerie Fire in Tier 1

FrogReaver said:

Strawman much? I didn't say play testing doesn't matter. I said you can't determine if FF or DW is better simply by playing the game a few dozen times. You need analysis to answer that question which is what you object to me doing for some weird reason.

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Not a Strawman. It's an argumentative question. There's a difference. You said better. How can play experience determine what is better. I am trying to get you to question your assumptions about what the word better means in the context of playing a game.

EDIT: But I think I'm just kidding myself to assume that's ever going to happen. I understand where you're coming from, but I fundamentally disagree with the roots of your premise.

Dausuul said:

2 veterans. 3 bugbears. 4 giant spiders. 8 skeletons.

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Interesting examples. I'm curious why you felt the need to pick numbers of enemies that would make for significantly harder fights than the orc example. For example are you designing fights around the 6-8 encounter adventuring day or are your fights designed for more of a 2-3 encounter adventuring day?

All of these are encounters that I would not hesitate to throw at tier 1 PCs. Most are significantly harder than 4 orcs, but tough fights are part of the game--indeed, tough fights are where good spell selections matter the most.

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Most of those fights would outright kill any level 1 or 2 party thrown at them. Most of those fights can't be easily won without significant resources used by the other PC's. How do you want me to account for those resources? I was attempting to stay in the less hard encounters for the simple reason that other PC abilities don't have to become a factor. If you insist on fights like the ones you cited above then we need some way to factor in the effects of other PC abilities.

I'd rather have the best spell for the boss fight and a sub-optimal spell for a minor skirmish than vice versa.

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If you are at enough of a level for most of those encounters then you'll have level 2 spells and should be using one of them there instead of FF or DW.

...Are you seriously asking this? You don't see the point of looking at how the spell holds up when used by actual players in an actual game?

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Huh? Isn't that what I'm doing with analysis? What I don't see the benefit of doing is saying well I played the game once with a bard and used faerie fire and it was awesome and then I played once as a bard and used DW and it wasn't as awesome. There's too many variables and randomness involved for a handful of play experiences to give any indication about which spell is better. All play experience does is help us calibrate representative encounters for us to base our analysis on. If someone had played hundereds of games with FF and hundreds of games with DW I would start putting some stock in their experiences as being representative but none of us here have done that.

So yes, when someone asks me about play experience, I have plenty of play experience in 5e which gives me plenty of ability to look at an encounter and determine it's representativeness. What none of us have is enough play experience to say that based on my play experience FF is better than DW without some kind of analysis going on.

Autumn Bask said:

Not a Strawman. It's an argumentative question. There's a difference. You said better. How can play experience determine what is better. I am trying to get you to question your assumptions about what the word better means in the context of playing a game.

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LOL. So you want to talk about what better means. Go ahead talk about it.

Autumn Bask said:

EDIT: But I think I'm just kidding myself to assume that's ever going to happen. I understand where you're coming from, but I fundamentally disagree with the roots of your premise.

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You mean that we can objectively rate one ability as better than another even though both abilities have some situations they are better for?

FrogReaver said:

There's too many variables and randomness involved for a handful of play experiences to give any indication about which spell is better. All play experience does is help us calibrate representative encounters for us to base our analysis on.

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I want to focus on this statement. You claim that the variables and randomness of play mean that it is useless to determine which is better. Which I partially agree with. The usefulness of these spells can vary depending on the game that a person is playing in and the makeup of the party.
But those variables and randomness also mean that white room analysis is meaningless because too many variables can come up during play that cannot be accounted for in the that type of analysis. Just take your 4 orc example. The effectiveness of each of those spells can change based on the initiative order, the location of the orcs (how far and how clustered they are), the battlefield, the numbers, levels, and classes of your party members, what optional/homebrew rules people are using (ie flanking for adv, which I will argue makes FF basically pointless for non-invisible enemies), how tactical the DM and players like to play, how min-maxed the characters are, whether one group is surprised, what the goal of the fight is (maybe you don't want the orcs to run into the next room to alert more orcs or you don't want to light them up to alert more orcs), your bard's spell DC, etc.
There isn't a representative fight that can properly allow you to make a black/white conclusive determination about which is better.

FrogReaver said:

But that doesn't tell you which option is better... So how does gameplay experience actually reveal which is the better option?

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One of the advantages from actual gameplay is seeing benefits that get throw aside and dismissed in white room DPR jaunts.

Early on the lighting impacts of FF and its reveal of invis and its AoE around corner cases were all pretty much dismissed and since then its been the more easily matched DPR and rate of drop cherry foes in a vacuum stuff we see all the time.

Actual play through a larger variety of events shows those add to the value of the FF vs DW.

All the gains of DW can be assessed into this methodology... but quite a bit of FF is thrown out before we see the so-called analysis.

I mean, how well would DW fare if we dismissed out of hand its AO possibility cuz of the possibility that the Retreat is not possible, the reactions have already been used, etc?

Those are the kind of things you see in actual play. Their lack are part of the reason this seems more a methodology determined yo produce a given result than analysis.

I think the other thing you have to weigh is that DW has limited upside. At most you get 3-18 damage and a round of fear. That's absolute best case.

The upside on FF is huge. When factors do converge it's not even comparable. E.g. multiple allies attacking with Advantage on a high AC boss for multiple rounds.

FrogReaver said:

I was attempting to stay in the less hard encounters...

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Then spell optimization isn't an issue. In fact, the low level bard probably shouldn't waste spell slots on a not-hard encounter.

If you want to compare which of two things are better, especially when there's a resource cost, you want to look at situations where it actually matters.

Elfcrusher said:

Then spell optimization isn't an issue. In fact, the low level bard probably shouldn't waste spell slots on a not-hard encounter.

If you want to compare which of two things are better, especially when there's a resource cost, you want to look at situations where it actually matters.

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Actually you want to look at situations where you will actually use it. In a hard battle you will use a level 2 spell. Surely your not having more than 2-3 hard battles per day?

FrogReaver said:

Actually you want to look at situations where you will actually use it. In a hard battle you will use a level 2 spell. Surely your not having more than 2-3 hard battles per day?

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Yes, in a hard fight, I may just use a 2nd level spell. Maybe I will use DW as 2nd level agsinst one of the creatures who saved on the FF while the team hits them. Or maybe I used blindness an the one that saved. But leading with a significant debuff AoE, seeing which ones thrn need more, etc those are more the kinds of things you see in actual play rather than white room assumptions and DPR hunts.