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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 9253844" data-attributes="member: 2525">All fair examples and not too long.Increased damage: Spellcasters were already doing increased damage at mid levels and up, and now more melee classes are doing the same kinds of damage. So an existing element already accounted for in the old monster design is now being expanded to be more easily available to more classes. Which is the theme here.Pushing: was always there, just more widely available now. The pushing 15 feet is about the addition of more fields of damage spells. It used to be mostly Spirit Guardians and Spiked Growth and Wall of Thorns and Firewall and things like that, but they're adding in a lot more like the new Conjure animals. And it used to be mostly Warlocks with repelling blast and shield pushes, but they had already added more with things like the Telekinetic feat and now they're adding a lot more with the Elementalist Monk and Brutal Strike for barbarians and more. So it's really not changing monster design - it was always there, there will just be more of it now. Slow: was always there for most spellcasters, just more widely available now to more melee combatants. It's also likely somewhat related to those fields of damage. Shove them into them, knock them prone, slow them, they now have a hard time leaving the damaging field.These are all elements of the game which already  existed, so all the prior monsters were already designed with these in mind. The only thing they're likely to change with the new monsters is to increase the number of opportunities to resist or avoid these things. So while a burrowing creature was pretty good at avoiding the harms of pushing and slow, now more monsters will have abilities that better enable them to avoid or reduce the harms of these kinds of abilities. And sure, it would be nice to playtest those. But you didn't need to settle on the PHB classes to begin designing monsters with those things in mind. All of them were already established trends with the more recent player-facing books like Tasha's. They knew both increased damage for melee combatants to catch up to spellcaster damage was a design goal of the 2024 edition, and they knew a list of add-on abilities like push/pull, slow, knock-down, damage on a miss, etc.. were design goals going into this.</blockquote>

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