NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ibrandul" data-source="post: 8416727" data-attributes="member: 6871736">Take a look at the revised War Priest that WotC revealed as an example of the new approach. That’s not a Yuan-ti or even a lich. It’s basically an NPC version of a common (vanilla, even) PC—right down to the newly added "Cleric" type.It’s one thing to redesign this NPC’s spellcasting to be different from its PC version by replacing spell slots with 4e-style “per day” powers. That’s not likely to be visible to players anyway; the new version will behave the same as the old version in most encounters, so far as players can see. Even the more player-visible action-economy effects of this change (bypassing the two-spells-in-a-turn limitation) are NPC/DM-facing.But it’s quite another thing to redefine spells—thematically spells, no two ways about it, spells such as fireball, not innate abilities or inexplicable wacky ancient magic—such that PC abilities/options that target spells can’t target these spells anymore. That's not a matter of "Under the hood, monster abilities don't work like my PC abilities do"; it's a matter of "Why can't my PC abilities that are supposed to interact with this monster's spells actually do what they say they're supposed to do?" (Note that this isn't just limited to counterspell—the Mage Slayer feat just got downgraded from "usually very good, though campaign-dependent" to "DO NOT BUY" and no longer makes any sense thematically.)And sure, there are players and play groups that don’t choose to take counterspell even if it’s available to them. But there are also other PC options, including a whole subclass, that are designed to rely heavily on that spell, and anyway the spell is a powerful enough option that I’ve never encountered any “best build” advice that doesn’t strongly recommend selecting counterspell if you have access to it, unless other party members have counterspell covered.My point here is just that counterspell is a very common player selection, even if that’s not the case in your group. My broader take is that while I think nerfing counterspell is a fine idea in the abstract, this particular change doesn’t just reduce the spell’s potency, it also makes the spell even more of a hassle at the table by foisting untenable “No, this isn’t actually a spell, it just looks and behaves exactly like one—and used to actually be one until Jeremy Crawford had an idea” conversations upon tables that do use the spell and the new statblocks.</blockquote>

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