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I've never seen a Lore bard be even remotely competent in melee. It sounds like the players you saw are just trying to play as Fighters. The baseline I'm going by is Valor Bard, which IME is appropriately balanced for a full caster with a bit of weapon skill. My experience with both Swords and...

True, but Wizards don't get spiritual weapon.

The parties I DM for love Blight more than I love Taco Tuesdays. It's fine for what it is. I mean, it' s not amazing, but if you just want to hurt a single target, I don't think there's really a better 4th-level spell. Phantasmal Killer is plain garbage. No. Bigby's Hand upcast to 7th level...

TBH the ability to halve enemy melee damage for a round on a hit from a 2nd-level spell is underrated. It even works against ancient dragons.

Yeah, multiclassing is allowed in AL. While a lot of "ultimate" builds rely on a dodgy reading of the rules or 5-minute workdays, both of which are easily countered by a DM without invoking house rules, 2-dipping warlock is straightforward cheese. Aside from goofball builds, there's also been...

A lot of them revolve around 2-dipping warlock, particularly the Hexblade, to break a class out of its niche for a fairly low cost, since a) Eldritch Blast+Agonizing Blast+Hex is martial-tier damage, not cantrip-tier damage b) EB scales with player level, so delaying Extra Attack isn't as big...

I've seen people get good use out of 5e's Flaming Sphere many times. Searing Smite is bad, but at least it uh...at least could potentially impose more Concentration checks? I mean it's crap, but at least I can see it occasionally having utility. True Strike exists solely so you don't waste...

I think the main difference is between people who make straightforward choices and people looking for mistakes to exploit, whether they are mistakes in design, SA rulings, or DM rulings. Someone who chooses a feat & subclass to be very good at damage isn't really different than someone who...

It's not just you. It's that every new thing follows a trend more or less like this: Initial improvements make a world of difference, because the ideas and technologies are so new and unrefined. As the low-hanging fruit gets cleared, additional improvements do not make as big an impact on...

I think this thread is using "optimization" two different ways. The OP sounds like he's really talking about "munchkinism," where you make weird choices to try and exploit rules to produce unexpected results (Coffeelock, Palalock, Nuclear Wizard, etc). Other people are talking about...

STOP BEING YOUNG

My druid pretty consistently used it for DUDE WEED LMAO bonding with NPCs. I've never even touched the stuff, myself.

All I'm saying is that getting your Sneak Attack is easy, and a player who regularly fails to do this is simply not grasping fundamentals. Just goes to show how non-representative any one experience is. Most of the casters I've had looooooove damage and practically have to be tortured to drop...

Coffeelock was exactly that sort of bad-faith gaming. It relied on having a weak DM who lets you get away with never resting, not on actual rules. It was not quite true that "elves never need to long rest;" rather, the effects of not resting were left to the DM's discretion. The rules section on...

I feel like "attack whomever your clanky pal is attacking" is so basic to playing a rogue effectively that if you're still failing to do this at high level, only God can help you. I'm going mainly off observation. Outside of the aforementioned rogue, most martial players have One Cool Thing...

IME there are two kinds of problematic munchkinism, and here's how I deal with them: Multiclass dips that exploit gaps in designer testing & thinking. I simply restrict multiclassing to 2 classes, and you can't MC Warlock. The end. There are still some things you can that are cool, but they're...

I think this goes a long way toward making full casters not feel like much compared to martials. You can be pretty brain-dead and play a martial well, and even then, I regularly see high-level rogues doing things like forgetting to hide, or Ready for when an ally gets in melee range, and doing a...

The context of this discussion was fighting a Marilith, a CR 16 enemy, and what is good to use, so the implicit assumption here is that a party is high enough level to fight it, which is ~14th level, and is actually trying to choose good spells, i.e. isn't just farting out Lightning Bolt at...

Most broken caster combo: a caster who prepares/knows only elemental damage spells and pretty much the entire campaign is against demons. Wait, did you mean broken in a good way?