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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7821467" data-attributes="member: 71699">You might have mistaken the intent of my post. I think it is helpful to discuss approaches to resolving these issues, as well as the issues themselves. My thinking has been influenced by others, for instance sirlin's discussion of multiplayer game balancing.I ran a game containing two warlocks for over two years. One survived the whole campaign, one was a reroll after a character death or two. So although the experience at any one table is narrow, I got to see it in live play in numerous encounters. It is worth noting that my players had high-system mastery and were interested in crunch: often mechanical concerns don't cause trouble at tables where that is not the case.Warping encounters? As a DM, in order to make encounters fun, I had to give thought to repelling blast. Encounters where I failed to consider repelling blast in advance, risked being trivial for the players... and a waste of the time to craft and play them. That becomes acute when the push back makes it impossible to close: it forces a DM onto ranged strategies for foes.Invalidating strategies? Both took repelling blast because, in play it was a dominant strategy. One gave it up at one point, and then swapped back to it the following level. The effectiveness of repelling blast meant that other - less effective - invocations were invalidated as strategies. One can easily see that this will matter most to power-gamers, and not very much at all to non-power-gamers.Still taken? Yes, when I changed it to once per target, players still took it.Enough experience? I firmly believe that playtesting time correlates well with the quality of analysis of game mechanics. So no, I don't think I have sufficient experience (even though relatively high perhaps, compared to other tables) to be definitive. However, I read into the Xanathar's hedging of similar invocations the results of a wider net. Speculation, certainly.Design takes it into consideration? If you play with repelling blast through all the tiers that it is available (I have, extensively, in live play) then you will see that the scaling of the warlock's attack and the things that interact with that, is sufficiently strong that repelling blast is good at every level. It's amazing at high-level! Legendary resistance, for instance, does not interact with repelling blast, even though it is a design gambit aimed directly at catching such problems. It is wrong to look at "two mechanics that move things 10'" and say they are the same, BTW. It depends very much what they interact with.So, back to my earlier post: I believe the quality of argument about issues to hand can be improved by discussing background approaches, concerns, motivations. You might have taken my post to have some other intent. I don't even believe that modifying repelling blast is justified at all tables: that really depends on the approach the group takes to play.</blockquote>

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