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This is pretty interesting. I played/DMed 3rd edition on a regular basis since the day it was released to the day 4th edition was released. No-one in all those years made a single attempt at counterspelling. Counterspelling rarely seems to be worthwhile.
If you found useful ways of using it, then I'm impressed. However, the truth of the matter is that nearly everyone else didn't, so there's little point in it appearing in 4e. For me, it was kind of a good idea, and I remember being excited about it at first, but I think it was just totally broken in implementation.
A question: were you playing it as written, or did you houserule it in any way?
No, I didn't house rule it. I play in a campaign with an average of six players. I write up my own encounters and create villainous groups with particular spell combinations and cooperative tactics in mind.
For example, I often design encounters to take into account of terrain. So you have a party with a limited amount of resources trying to make it to the big bad wizard. They have perhaps a wizard trying to outthink your party wizard and priest.
Enemy wizard A plans to cast a hold spell on Alliance Fighter B as enemy fighter C closes on Alliance Fighter B. The ready action casts a hold spell. If the fighter misses, he is getting coup de grased and ended right there.
So the party wizard or priest had best be on their toes for such tactics. Because whatever the players use for tactics, I use for the monsters.
This is just one example of a common tactic alot of players have used. The thing is when it is used against the party they die. The only way to counter this activity is to hope you win initiative, close the distance on the wizard, kill the fighter before hand, or have a
Remove Paralysis or counterspell action ready.
I've done this with parties trying to close the distance while be nuked to high heaven by an enemy caster. Without the counterspelling, they would have been nuked to bits. Usually a few dispels and fireballs can counter the other parties fireballs long enough to close the distance.
I spent time planning encounter distance and tactics to use against the party as well as tactics they can use to counter.
I was a good caster in 2nd edition. I could use spells with a great deal of acumen. But 3rd edition really took the spell variety to a new level that I liked.
Our party fought a demonic army with a twelve suped up mortal hunter, arrow demons. I came up with the strat to defeat them using
Wind Walls, teleport strike attacks, key
Dimensional Anchors,
Anticipate Teleport to hold off the rest of the demons for a few rounds, and
Walls of force to seal off the battlefield from other melee being able to provide support for the regular arrow demons.
We set up a return base that prevented scrying so they couldn't find us.
My DM felt real comfortable creating very formidable encounters because he knew he had to provide more than "monsters straight ahead" to beat us.
He even formed a combat unit of Dethbringers whose sole function was to us the Greater Dispel to counter our healers and mages. That was a tight fight.
So both the players and the DM used the counterspell action to great effect.
One thing we did do to make such tactics effective was limit the influx of magic items. We found the game became unwield and difficult to run as characters gained more and more outlandish magic items that made them immune to everything from grappling to death spells.
Magic item inflation was the single biggest flaw of 3rd edition. I hope they did something to correct this in 4th edition. From what I've seen they did. Players having access to magic items that make them immune or effectively immune to attacks damage a DMs ability to create challenging encounters.
Magic item inflation killed more of our campaigns than just about anything else. So we started reigning in magic items and trying to not to release too many immunity or resistance based items into the game.
