Hey! You beat me to it (even at 5th level, our PCs cast two Aid spells at the start of every adventuring day).
D&D 5E Low Level Wizards Really Do Suck in 5E
Hey! You beat me to it (even at 5th level, our PCs cast two Aid spells at the start of every adventuring day).
FormerlyHemlock
Hero
Is this the thread where we were talking about how wrong the DMG is to say that adding a few wizard levels to a dragon doesn't change its difficulty? Shield and Blur are transformative for dragons, and the above is exactly why. It's pretty much guaranteed to survive for twice as long if it has Shield access, even with only 2 or 4 first-level slots.
keterys
First Post
Definitely seems to, yep.
keterys
First Post
The oddest thing is that it's generally to our party's advantage if they go for the wizard, warlock, or druid, instead of the fighter. Lots of flashy arcane and technically the source of our healing, I guess?
The fighter usually is more fragile, and does more damage than I am, or even the mage for the first like 5 rounds of combat of the day (but shield's not broken, nah). The druid's being a huge snake that grapples and restrains targets and has Sentinel lately, and I think everyone at the table - including the DM - is content when his monsters butcher through her buckets of shapeshifted hp instead of ours.
Weirdly, I suspect a dragon using shield would be worth us counterspelling. We usually save for fireballs, but that might be annoying enough to be worth it
The fighter usually is more fragile, and does more damage than I am, or even the mage for the first like 5 rounds of combat of the day (but shield's not broken, nah). The druid's being a huge snake that grapples and restrains targets and has Sentinel lately, and I think everyone at the table - including the DM - is content when his monsters butcher through her buckets of shapeshifted hp instead of ours.
Weirdly, I suspect a dragon using shield would be worth us counterspelling. We usually save for fireballs, but that might be annoying enough to be worth it
On this, I'm more sympathetic to [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION]. Or rather, whatever the details about typical GMs targetting this or that, I think he's right to think that his group is not entirely typical in its tactical/mechanical acumen.
I think the same is definitely true of [MENTION=43019]keterys[/MENTION], and [MENTION=6787650]emdw45[/MENTION], and from your posts I think it's true for you as well.
Based on my reading of posts online, plus my experiences playing with other groups, at cons, etc, I think it's true for my group as well. (Though my group is not as hardcore as keterys's - his 4e epic party had 1000-hp first rounds, whereas mine tends to be more in the single-digit hundreds.)
It doesn't have to stack. It replaces. When at zero hit points, the five from the maximum hit points is gone. If you're using it to get people back up from zero, it works fine. Sure, saving a 1st level slot isn't bad.
At lower level the cleric hides. As we get higher, the cleric has more hit points and can stay in melee range. Then again, all of this is dependent on the set up of the combat. In a recent combat the cleric helped carve a path through the hobgoblins. She cast spiritual weapon and started carving hobgoblins up with her rapier. Fairly impressive what she did.
Clerics obviously don't always heal. The reality is we don't always do things one way. I imagine your (and every other) group is the same. It's a matter of assessing what needs to be done at a certain point in time that is most important.
This really depends on level and resources. We were pinched in a battle today. Disciplined creatures will overrun your front line as the hobgoblins we fought did today. They wouldn't let us hold a choke point and they retreated to wait out magic. We had to assault and open our party up from both sides. I can understand your situation.
Your party must be quite large to hold multiple tactical points. We can manage two at the most with five unless we're using a wall spell, then maybe three if we seal one off with a wall or similar impediment.
Sounds like it. You would change the way you play in our games at higher level. At low level we get by with less combat healing. Tonight we didn't use any healing spells against a group of hobgoblins. We went all offense. Lower level encounters allow for less combat healing.
Unless you're using a higher level spell slot. Then the healing gap is quite a bit worse. You seem to be using healing word at 1st level all the time using weeble-wobble heals. Our DM killed that tactic. Unless you do use it with higher level slots.
This is definitely where our games differ. This is a style choice that definitely goes well beyond the rules.
I will speak mostly for my own games when I am DM as my other buddies that DM do things differently. I design dragons specifically to be epic fights meaning they will last as in not die by the third round. If you have a party capable of outputting 500 points a round, you will fight a dragon with 5000 hit points. Dragons and other epic monsters will be designed to make you feel like you are fighting an extremely powerful epic creature that requires absolutely zero help to make you feel pain. I make sure players fear dragons in my campaigns. I don't care what the rules give a dragon, I care more what a dragon is supposed to be in a story. That being a creature more than capable of inspiring fear in a party without a single ally. You won't know how tough it is, how many hit points it has, or how long it will take to kill. But I'll have calculated all of it out before hand and given it appropriate defenses for a long, epic fight that will make you feel the fear of the unknown as well as the glorious relief of victory. For dragons in particular I don't violate this rule. They've always felt too weak in every version of D&D. In 5E a powerful ranged party or a martial party with flight can rip through their hit points using resources like Action Surge and Smite far too easily. They still haven't made dragons tough enough for my tastes, but their damage output is now good enough I don't have to alter it too much.
I do the same thing with many encounters. Challenge is designed according to the party's capabilities, not the recommendations in the game books. This is probably the key difference that causes our play-styles and preferences to differ. We probably play very similarly in encounters that are run by the book because we go all offense when things are easy. The hard encounters are designed specifically to require smart and powerful healing or the party lowers their survival chances substantially.
Sounds like your DM is stepping out of the rules box a bit. Good on him. At the moment I'm following the books to ensure I don't make things too tough, but once I'm comfortable I'll take the off the gloves again. I don't mind quick fights for most encounters, but epic fights should feel epic and frightening. A party killing something in three or four rounds (18 to 24 seconds) like an Ancient Dragon will never sit well with me. I won't have it in my games.
I believe you're overestimating the value of healing word.
Many years of playing in other DM's campaigns. I haven't met a group that played like we do. Not a single one. I have met many groups that run very standard, by the book campaigns. I've quit a ton of online campaigns due to boredom because the DMs create so few challenging encounters that a mild power gamer can't crush. They aren't very challenging or interesting. I wouldn't mind trying your campaign just to see if it lives up to the hype that you would "smoke" me. I haven't been "smoked" in a long, long time, especially by DMs running encounters out of the book. That stopped being interesting years ago.
Do your NPCs target them? If an NPC group knows the PC's capability, they generally target the wizard or cleric first for assassination, usually the cleric. They are aware that the cleric surviving means resurrection and they want to knock that capability out. If you do this as well, great. I see your parties are excessively large. That changes a lot of things. Last time I ran a party as large as yours, the entire undertaking was a nightmare to prepare for.
Your party is larger than usual and four PCs capable of healing? Are we talking paladins and rangers or clerics, druids, and bards? And you're adding a 7th player? That throws CR off by an immense amount. We generally have one healer. Please don't discuss non-standard parties. We play with five, one more than recommended. Seven PCs is too much for these games. Even five can be a pain for encounter design. I no longer have the time or patience to deal with parties that reach six and seven members. Five is my limit at this point.
Please stop trying to sell me that there is any substantial difference between healing word and cure wounds. There isn't. You can use healing word and attack with your cantrip or use cure wounds and attack with your spiritual weapon or do damage moving with spiritual guardians. Neither will have a substantial effect on the game. Neither will be cast with any regularity.
I don't waste the spell slot on two spells that do the same thing. Cure wounds does give me more bang for the buck using a higher level slot which we have used quite often. Healing word has proven too weak in the fights we've been in to do the job. That is why we go with cure wounds. If you get more bang for the buck from healing word because you have a very large party with a lot of healers, good for you. It doesn't work that way for our party. We use it because experience has shown it is better than healing word because of its potency using higher level spell slots. When you have one healer, we have found you need a more potent healer.
They determine who the healer and wizard are because we usually only have one of each. They are obvious due to their capabilities.
Do the five PCs that can cast spells do so often? The NPCs you fight can't see a fire bolt or similar spell versus the occasional spell of an Eldritch Knight? Yet somehow they've survived attacks from humanoids for ages? We don't use metagame knowledge. We wait until the classes show what they do.
We even have NPCs that have mistaken the Eldritch Knight for the wizard because he cast the Thunderwave spell first. It's very organic how they come to choose their target.
At higher level against intelligent PCs, I had them assassinate the healer and wizard outside of combat. The BBEG didn't even bother engaging the martials. They knew exactly who the healer and wizard were and they were given orders to kill them. This happens all the time in campaigns against intelligent enemies that have intelligence on the party, meaning just about every campaign that isn't a general dungeon crawl.
Last edited:
Unless you're at zero hit points and it doesn't matter. Isn't that when you're using healing word at range?
This is what aid says.
Your spell bolsters your allies with toughness and
resolve. Choose up to three creatures within range.
Each target’s hit point maximum and current hit points
increase by 5 for the duration.
Nothing about stacking issues. You cast the spell and it replaces the hit points. If you're already at zero hit points and can't go negative (which you can't in this game), then aid restores five hit points. It will pop you back up and you're good to go for your attacks. A 1st level healing word does 1d4+5 for an average of 7 to 8 hit points (3 points more if a life cleric). The difference between 5 and 7 when you're using the spell to pop someone up from being down isn't substantial.
In this game you can't healing word someone and cast anything else other than a cantrip. So I'm not sure why Karinsdad is arguing this is such a substantial benefit. At best the cleric can cast his sacred flame cantrip or hit with a weapon attack in any round he casts healing word. How often are you going to cast healing word that the loss of damage would in anyway seriously affect the outcome of a battle. Anytime you use a Bonus Action spell, you can only cast a cantrip in that round or make a weapon attack.
Your spell bolsters your allies with toughness and
resolve. Choose up to three creatures within range.
Each target’s hit point maximum and current hit points
increase by 5 for the duration.
Nothing about stacking issues. You cast the spell and it replaces the hit points. If you're already at zero hit points and can't go negative (which you can't in this game), then aid restores five hit points. It will pop you back up and you're good to go for your attacks. A 1st level healing word does 1d4+5 for an average of 7 to 8 hit points (3 points more if a life cleric). The difference between 5 and 7 when you're using the spell to pop someone up from being down isn't substantial.
In this game you can't healing word someone and cast anything else other than a cantrip. So I'm not sure why Karinsdad is arguing this is such a substantial benefit. At best the cleric can cast his sacred flame cantrip or hit with a weapon attack in any round he casts healing word. How often are you going to cast healing word that the loss of damage would in anyway seriously affect the outcome of a battle. Anytime you use a Bonus Action spell, you can only cast a cantrip in that round or make a weapon attack.
There is no such thing as a "standard party". And having only one healer in a group of five PCs is the exception. Your group is unusual if only one PC in 5 can heal in 5E.
I also didn't know there was a recommendation of 4 PCs for 5E.
Yes, my party is larger than normal. But 5 players is the average that I have had over the decades. Last year, we started a 4E campaign with 6 players. Unusual for us, but it is what it is.
When we went to 5E, I got together with every single player individually and they took the race / class that they wanted to take. The did not know about the other PCs. So drop one PC from the list with a table of 5 instead of 6 from our group, you'll still have a lot of healers.
Fighter (damage mitigation)
Rogue (arcane, eventually)
Wizard (arcane)
Cleric (healer)
Bard (arcane, healer)
Ranger (healer)
After the Wizard died (and got replaced with a Paladin) and with the new PC coming in, we will now have:
Fighter (damage mitigation)
Rogue (arcane)
Cleric (healer)
Bard (arcane, healer)
Ranger/Wizard (arcane, healer)
Paladin (healer)
Druid (healer)
Yes, there are more than 4 or 5 PCs here, but this is not that atypical of a 5E party. Everyone plays a different class. We have 4 primarily melee types (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Paladin; the Cleric does so by choice), we have 3 semi-melee / semi-caster types (everyone else). Everyone can melee if necessary. Everyone has a ranged attack of some sort. And everyone but the Fighter can cast spells.
In 5E, this is not that atypical of a makeup of PCs with the exception of how many there are.
As for CR, that's simple. More PCs = higher CR that I can throw at them. I threw a Red Dragon halfway between Young and Adult; averaged stats and hit dice and AC and breath weapon between the two, something like 8 spells (I double Cha), traps, terrain; and they had one character (the 3rd level NPC Ranger, the character the 7th player is currently playing) go unconscious. That's CR 13 or 14 (Young is 10, Adult is 17). Yes, it scared the bejeezus out of them and it's Fireball spell and Breath Weapon and such did some serious damage, but they kept themselves really spread out and pulled it off (the Dragon did not even get to use its Web spell, but it did go invisible on them). Granted, if the Dragon would have encountered them in a smaller room, they would have had a tougher time spreading out (I only ever caught 3 PCs/NPCs in an area effect at a time), but it had traps and such to try to make up for that. I don't funnel all of my PCs into a breath weapon death trap (although if the dragon would have survived which it almost did, a future encounter would have been in a smaller room).
I tend to use CR merely as a rule of thumb anyway. I look at the total hit points of foes, special abilities, terrain, AC and such and figure out how much damage per round the PCs have to dish out to take it out. I compare this to how much damage PCs normally dish out and figure out how many rounds it will take. If the number gets too high, I know that the encounter is going to be too deadly. For your gnoll encounter, I would have done the same thing, but I would have known that the gnolls would originally face the choke point, but eventually bust through it. I would have then limited the gnolls to some more reasonable number because unlike your DM, my gnolls would almost definitely eventually bust through the line because I use shove and grapple in my games. I also do things like have one foe knock a PC prone and then have 4 or 5 foes go up and Advantage beat on the prone PC. The DM can do this if he has a lot of foes and he can bust through PC tactics (like choke points).
Similar Threads
