D&D 5E Chill touch vs Troll regeneration

[CapnZapp]

Absolutely.



If regeneration is the only thing that makes a threat epic, I'd personally question exactly how 'epic' of a threat said thing is.



If regeneration is the only thing making a solo threat a threat, then I'd personally question whether the solo 'threat' ever was.



I'd imagine the Troll Elder is competent enough to easily deal with the puny caster whose best/only course of action in what I presume to be a battle to the death is cast a measly cantrip.



If your one very obvious target to shoot at only has regeneration going for it, it done goofed and deserves what's coming to it.

I don't understand why you're making these arguments.

Its as if there were a series of easily acquired low-level spells and effects that completely shut down Tiamat, that would be okay in your book.

No, one feature is not the only thing that makes a threat epic.

But why even give a feature to a Demon Prince or similar if any old level 0 spell can shut it down? If the feature is at all important, it WILL get shut down. It will play its intended role in perhaps one out of ten fights, assuming good tactics from the players.

You seem carelessly unawares of the tricks optimizing minmaxers have up their sleeve. If what you really want to say is "I don't care, my players aren't going for optimal builds" then say so, so I can dismiss your argument as irrelevant for the topic at hand.

Which is: there should not be a feature that is trivial to shut down, not when the feature belongs to something supposedly scary.

When you create a monster, the DMG guidelines tell you to shave three rounds worth of regeneration off the monster's max hit points. Because 5th ed fights are calibrated to last three rounds.

Say you have a monster with regeneration 40.
By your line of reasoning, a mere cantrip will - all by itself - be responsible for 120 points of damage. That sound reasonable to you?

But all of this ignores the main question:

It would be so easy for WOtC to have avoided the problem, not making the job of running a high-level NPC perceptably more difficult, and we wouldn't need to have yet another interminable "don't change anything the game is perfect as is" discussion... *sigh*

 

[Staffan]

The thing is that while chill touch is useful against regenerators or other monsters with in-combat healing, it's not much of a problem. That's because while cantrips don't cost any spell slots to cast, they do have two other costs: the opportunity cost of choosing them over other cantrips, and the action cost to cast them.

Let's say you're a 5th level wizard. You know four cantrips. One of them is going to be prestidigitation, because you do have a modicum of self-respect. That leaves three. Are you really going to spend one of those three on chill touch, which is primarily useful against a very rare class of monsters (regenerators - oni, revenants, slaadi, trolls, vampires), when you could instead take fire bolt which deals more damage? Or shocking grasp which can get you out of melee? Or utility spells like mage hand, light, or message?

And once you do know chill touch, do you want to cast that to deal 2d8 damage + prevention of healing? Or would you perhaps rather spend an actual 2nd level spell slot and deal 3x2d6 damage with scorching ray - incidentally, also blocking troll and revenant regeneration? Or perhaps a mere 1st level slot and deal 3d4+3 damage with no chance of failure?

Certainly, if you do find yourself facing a creature that regenerates, chill touch might sound like a good idea. But there really aren't that many creatures that do in the MM: oni, revenants, shield guardians, slaad, trolls, and vampires and their spawn. Do you really want to pick chill touch as one of the few cantrips you know just in case you run into one of these?

 

[FarBeyondC]

I don't understand why you're making these arguments.

Because I feel they need to be made- no more, no less.

Its as if there were a series of easily acquired low-level spells and effects that completely shut down Tiamat, that would be okay in your book.

I would not have a problem if a series of easily acquired abilities or items happened to completely shut down one aspect of a threat (even Tiamat). If, however, said abilities/items were able to completely shut down a threat entirely, I'd wonder exactly how the threat in question was considered a threat at all.

I consider stopping regeneration to be the former, and not a problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that you believe stopping regeneration equates to the latter, and is therefore a problem.

But why even give a feature to a Demon Prince or similar if any old level 0 spell can shut it down?

Because, if the feature is worrying enough to those facing the Demon Prince or other creature in question, it forces the members of that party to devote resources (time not spent dealing with enemy's other threatening features, if nothing else) towards stopping it. Even if the resource of time seems trivial, the things said party member could have been doing with in that time instead should not be.

If the feature is at all important, it WILL get shut down. It will play its intended role in perhaps one out of ten fights, assuming good tactics from the players.

If any feature is at all tricky for a group of characters to deal with- and they know about it- I expect them to shut it down. Assuming good tactics from the DM, the cost (in opportunity and time, if nothing else) of shutting it down should be sufficient to not change the encounter's difficult to a nontrivial degree.

You seem carelessly unawares of the tricks optimizing minmaxers have up their sleeve. If what you really want to say is "I don't care, my players aren't going for optimal builds" then say so, so I can dismiss your argument as irrelevant for the topic at hand.

As a proud (if errant) optimizing minmaxer, I'm well aware of the tricks and tools. As a simultaneous challenge and moment gamer, I tend to not often personally use them (as what's best from a pure effectiveness standpoint tends to be at odds with what I personally want to accomplish).

Doesn't mean I won't dip into the playbook every so often to put a player or DM in their place - wherever I want them.

Say you have a monster with regeneration 40.
By your line of reasoning, a mere cantrip will - all by itself - be responsible for 120 points of damage. That sound reasonable to you?

Yes. Assuming we're dealing with a optimized, minmaxed party here, 40 damage per round isn't all that unreasonable.

Which is: there should not be a feature that is trivial to shut down, not when the feature belongs to something supposedly scary.

I disagree, in that I feel there should always be at least one feature on something that is trivial to shutdown, no matter how scary the something is, unless the thing is intended to be unbeatable.

But all of this ignores the main question:

It would be so easy for WOtC to have avoided the problem, not making the job of running a high-level NPC perceptably more difficult, and we wouldn't need to have yet another interminable "don't change anything the game is perfect as is" discussion... *sigh*

Not to say they are right or wrong, but I don't think WotC sees a problem to avoid. Neither do I.

After all, if I really wanted to scare a party that relied on chill touch to deal with regeneration and other healing, I'd include features that got around it.

 

[Celtavian]

The thing is that while chill touch is useful against regenerators or other monsters with in-combat healing, it's not much of a problem. That's because while cantrips don't cost any spell slots to cast, they do have two other costs: the opportunity cost of choosing them over other cantrips, and the action cost to cast them.

Let's say you're a 5th level wizard. You know four cantrips. One of them is going to be prestidigitation, because you do have a modicum of self-respect. That leaves three. Are you really going to spend one of those three on chill touch, which is primarily useful against a very rare class of monsters (regenerators - oni, revenants, slaadi, trolls, vampires), when you could instead take fire bolt which deals more damage? Or shocking grasp which can get you out of melee? Or utility spells like mage hand, light, or message?

And once you do know chill touch, do you want to cast that to deal 2d8 damage + prevention of healing? Or would you perhaps rather spend an actual 2nd level spell slot and deal 3x2d6 damage with scorching ray - incidentally, also blocking troll and revenant regeneration? Or perhaps a mere 1st level slot and deal 3d4+3 damage with no chance of failure?

Certainly, if you do find yourself facing a creature that regenerates, chill touch might sound like a good idea. But there really aren't that many creatures that do in the MM: oni, revenants, shield guardians, slaad, trolls, and vampires and their spawn. Do you really want to pick chill touch as one of the few cantrips you know just in case you run into one of these?

Yes. I always take chill touch if I'm able. It has more than the advantage you speak of. It has good range. It does d8 damage. It shut down all healing, so good against not only regenerators, but anyone with a healing effect. That means if a creature has a healing effect, you can shut it down which acts as a sort of reverse form of damage dealing that far exceeds say using a 4th level damaging spell where the damage will be regenerated. It does necrotic damage which not as many creatures are resistant to. It can give disadvantage to the attack rolls of undead.

I don't waste a spell slot on an easy creature. I shut down an important part of its defenses allowing other damage dealers to hammer. There's not a good reason to avoid taking chill touch save style. Chill touch and shocking grasp are power cantrips with highly useful riders. Chill touch against any type of healer. Fighting a cleric with heal[? Shut it down with chill touch. Fighting a creature that can use a Legendary Action to heal itself? Shut it down with chill touch. Just like shocking grasp can be used to shut down counterspell, shield, parry effects, and anything with a reaction.

Spellcasters with a wider toolbox are more effective. Shocking grasp and chill touch are very effective tools to have in your box.

 

[Celtavian]

Then change it in your game, if that's how you feel.

Except for 4E, I've played every version of D&D since white box and there has always been something that counters regeneration. I happen to like that because it rewards players for being smart. I remember one battle where fire was not stopping the creature's regeneration (I think it was a half-red dragon ogre mage). Instead we grappled it and pushed its head underwater - 3E regeneration didn't work against drowning. It was a creative solution to a creature with ramped up regeneration. But I would personally find it rather tedious to have to do something similar to every creature with regeneration. YMMV

In the current edition, I've run a number of battles with regenerating creatures. Sometimes the characters take them out quickly, sometimes not. Even with firebolt and acid splash, such battles were sometimes extremely dangerous for the party. In my experience, allowing chill touch and other spells to block regeneration for a single turn hardly makes the ability useless.

In my experience, it does. Then again my players use the tactic I stated. They focus fire on the creature with the mage using chill touch to keep it from regaining points. They do this against enemy priests that try to heal themselves. They did against two Legendary Creatures that had healing attacking abilities. Once they noted the creature was regaining hit points in some fashion, tactical switch to chill touch and focused damage. The cantrip became a better damage dealer than a much, much higher level spell.

If you played every edition, then you remember having to track down all pieces of the troll and burn it real good. It took more work than casting a cantrip and more resources.

 

[Celtavian]

Yes, it is, and you've just demonstrated that very thing by pointing out exactly how small the benefit you are reacting to is, as I will illustrate shortly.
It's probably because it only makes sense to you. That could mean you are having a thought that other people just haven't arrive at yet, but it could also mean that everyone else has had the thought and moved past it to understand some other thought.

The only idea you've illustrated is that you don't have much experience with chill touch against creatures that have hit point regain effects as a key part of their defenses.

The sequence is forgetting a certain detail: creatures with regeneration either don't get to regenerate if they don't start their turn with at least 1 hp, so any attack that deals at least as much damage as chill touch is just as effective at killing the creature, or the creature only dies if they start their turn at 0 hit points and don't regenerate and have their regeneration shut off should anyone shove a torch in their face.

First, that's not how it works for all creatures. Second, preparing a torch is a lot more difficult than using a cantrip and you have to get up close and personal to use a torch. Why are you focusing solely on the troll? Chill touch is effective against anything not immune to spells of cantrip level or necrotic damage. I'm not sure if the rider effect doesn't still work if the target is immune to necrotic damage.

With other means of healing, the kinds that don't happen automatically and instead require a spent action of some kind, all that is happening is chill touch changing the though process from "Maybe I should heal? Nah, this action is better spent doing X (where X is likely trying to prevent further hit point loss, rather than recover those already lost)" to "I can't heal, which I probably wasn't going to do anyway so I will do X (where X is the very same thing decided upon doing in the prior case too).

If a creature has a powerful healing effect as part of their action sequence that accounts for their higher CR, then they are going to die quicker and easier. They may not even have an alternative that is very useful like a troll whose primary defense is regeneration. There are other creatures like enemy priests whose primary usefulness might be casting a big heal. All shut down by a cantrip. A 6th level heal spell countered by a cantrip. Powerful vampiric regeneration countered by a cantrip. Demonic lord's regeneration shut down by a cantrip.

To you no big deal, to me a big deal. So yes, I don't consider an over-reaction and nothing you say will change that. If in your mind's eye a cantrip shutting all that down looks fine, so be it. It doesn't in my mind's eye.

And, most important of all, if you aren't doing like I said earlier and using chill touch to shut down the regeneration every round (that you hit), the practical effect is that the fight ends about 1 round sooner than it otherwise would because if the creature has so few hit points that it will die if it's regeneration isn't allowed to work this round, then another 10 or 20 hit points probably isn't going to keep it alive much longer.

A CR 5 roll is the type of enemy you send against a 2nd or 3rd level party. They can't output that kind of damage at that level. When you design a healing effect for an appropriate level party, it will return sufficient hit points to make that regeneration effect worthwhile. When I first glanced at regeneration, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of hit points regenerated. Given the way 5E was built, it was an effective level of regeneration rather than the ridiculously small amounts in Pathfinder/3E. But once I read how easy it was to shutdown, it went back to a useless ability easily bypassed. Then once players learned the mechanics of chill touch, they learned they could shut down the regeneration of anything from a troll to a hydra to a vampire to Juiblex as well as the healing of an evil priest or the corpse absorption abilities of a legendary creature.

I guess to you that is no big deal, but to me that's a big deal for one cantrip. A little too wide an ability in my opinion. If you don't mind, I'll ignore snarky remarks as I've seen chill touch have an outsized effect in a lot of encounters where a key ability that allows a creature to regain hit points was shutdown trivializing the encounter to the point I check off regeneration or healing as mostly useless in a creature's repertoire of abilities. Smart parties will focus on shutting it down with a unlimited use cantrip. Not like arcane casters do so much damage they can't spare a cantrip with a powerful rider effect every round.

And that is about all we have to discuss.

 

[Celtavian]

Maybe or maybe not.

However, it was pretty scary in the original troll context: Three Hearts and Three Lions, by Poul Anderson. That troll just wouldn't die until they burned its whole body. If D&D never managed to bring trolls up to that level of scariness (debatable) it's a failure to adapt the source material.

I believe in 1st edition trolls were like this. It's been a long time. I remember having to find and burn every piece of a troll. If you left even a finger or lump of flesh laying about, a new troll was going to grow.

 

[Celtavian]

So one of your party members is basically spending his turn shutting down one ability of one of your opponents. Is that so bad? Is it broken that a wizard could ready an action every turn to cast counterspell? Or that a grappler can keep an opponent prone?

Put it this way: even when your tactic is 100% successful, it doesn't mean regeneration is useless. It forces the wizard to cast chill touch every turn instead of disintegrate or something.

I'll give you this... if the PCs hired a cohort of level 1 wizards to follow along and cast chill touch on everything, that would be kind of messed up. But there are plenty of other solutions to that problem

Spell slots are precious. When you can cast a cantrip to do a few d8 plus x (where x equals the regeneration number) when you take into account shutting down regeneration, you do that every round because it is effective as casting a 2nd or higher level spell for free.

I wouldn't cast disintegrate unless I was escaping a wall of force or forcecage at that level you can cast that spell once per day. In 5E wizards are support casters that do less damage than a well built martial hammer. An optimal action may well be casting chill touch every round.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

The only idea you've illustrated is that you don't have much experience with chill touch against creatures that have hit point regain effects as a key part of their defenses.

There are no such creatures in D&D.

First, that's not how it works for all creatures.

Point me in the direction of a creature that has regeneration that isn't A) only effective if they start their turn with 1 or more hit points, or B) specifically including the clause that the creature only dies if it starts its turn at 0 hit points and does not regenerate. I checked the Monster Manual before making my claim of that being how regeneration works, so if you are correct and I missed one - prove it.

Second, preparing a torch is a lot more difficult than using a cantrip and you have to get up close and personal to use a torch.

The difference in how "difficult" it is is marginal at best.

Why are you focusing solely on the troll?

I'm not, I have no idea why you think I am.

If a creature has a powerful healing effect as part of their action sequence that accounts for their higher CR, then they are going to die quicker and easier.

Yeah, that's the game working as intended: if your party has the ability to exploit a creature's built-in weaknesses, your party kills it quicker and easier.

They may not even have an alternative that is very useful like a troll whose primary defense is regeneration.

Regeneration is not a troll's "primary defense." Neither in design intent, nor in practice.

There are other creatures like enemy priests whose primary usefulness might be casting a big heal.

It is strange that you would say this when one of the few things commonly agreed upon among those who discuss optimal strategy is that in-combat healing is not worth doing - a defensive spell to reduce how many hp you lose in the first place, or an offensive spell to reduce how long your enemies are alive to give you opportunities to lose hp will always be a more efficient use of actions and spell slots.

To you no big deal, to me a big deal. So yes, I don't consider an over-reaction and nothing you say will change that. If in your mind's eye a cantrip shutting all that down looks fine, so be it. It doesn't in my mind's eye.

...so, are you saying that you've never seen a party that didn't include at least one of the following: a sorcerer, a warlock, a wizard, a death domain cleric, or a character taking the magic initiate feat. That also made the choice to take chill touch instead of one of the other available cantrip options? Because if you aren't saying that, then I really don't see how you can believe you are not over-reacting at least a little bit to an element that might never come up in your campaign (since a group could be made up of players simply not interested in those particular character options).

A CR 5 roll is the type of enemy you send against a 2nd or 3rd level party. They can't output that kind of damage at that level. When you design a healing effect for an appropriate level party, it will return sufficient hit points to make that regeneration effect worthwhile.

I don't know what it looks like at your table, but at my table a single troll against a 3rd level party barely needs regeneration at all, because at that level the troll's "best defense" is that a single round of it's attacks can put just about any character in the party on their back dying.

And if not being shut down constantly, the regeneration will likely happen 2 or 3 times, adding 1 round to the expected length of combat - which isn't much of a change at all.

You are acting like that change is massive, and it just isn't. Unless, of course, you can show me some play-by-play of a combat where chill touch has actually trivialized the encounter compared to whoever cast it casting any other attack cantrip available to their class - facts to back up your apparent emotion-cause knee-jerk of a reaction might show your argument to have some weight.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I believe in 1st edition trolls were like this. It's been a long time. I remember having to find and burn every piece of a troll. If you left even a finger or lump of flesh laying about, a new troll was going to grow.

In 1st edition, trolls in fact did have rules stating that any severed pieces would rejoin and arise ready for combat, or grow into a new troll if left behind while the troll is burned... but they had no rules mentioned as to how/when anything was severed from the troll (leaving to only apply at DM whim, or if a magic item with severing rules built into it is use). So without stepping into the realm of "because that's how the DM ran it", which can do the same in any edition, 1e trolls were no different from the 2nd edition trolls I mentioned early but that they couldn't actually fall to pieces in the first place.

They still had the extreme limitation that their regeneration didn't start working at all until "3 melee rounds after being damaged," and being at the extremely slow rate of 3 hp per round.

So, really, 5th edition regeneration is the best trolls have ever had - even with it being shut down by chill touch, rather than just the even more common fire or acid.