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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 2400267" data-attributes="member: 3146">The gate analogy has already been addressed. I'll say a little bit about it that hasn't already been said and then move on. There are several other classes of spells that have the same kind of "useful in this situation but not in that" balance point. Greater command, for instance is a powerful 5th level spell but only works on intelligent creatures vulnerable to mind-effecting effects who share a language with you. Those are very significant limitations and they are sufficient to make what might otherwise be a 6th or 7th level spell (somewhere between mass hold person and mass hold monster) a reasonable 5th level spell for PCs (though considerably more useful for NPCs since they can be assured that the PCs will be affected by it). The various charm and dominate spells have similar balance points as do the command undead/halt undead/control undead spells. There shouldn't be any question that restrictions on the targets and locations that a spell will be useful are balancing factors for the spell. The real questions are these:1. How predictable are the appropriate targets/circumstances? If my cleric is hunting a group of dire wolves, I'm not prepping greater command. OTOH, if my wizard is going into an undead haunted graveyard, I'm likely to prep command undead. However, most of the time, I'm not sure whether my characters will be facing undead or demons on a given day so my cleric prepares a mix of 5th level spells and my wizard leaves command undead on a scroll.Now, if you simply assume that outdoors=entangle is useful, entangle falls into the easy to predict category. Prepare it when you're travelling in the country or the forest. Don't prepare it when you're going into a dungeon. However, if outdoor travel takes you through a wide variety of lonely switchbacks on a largely bare hillside, trampled pasturelands, high cornrows, and redwood forest, and that each of those terrain types has a different effect on entangle, you can't be sure that entangle will be useful in whatever environment you' get ambushed in. It could be any one of those.2. How common are the appropriate targets/circumstancesAre they present in maybe 30% of the encounters? That's about the point that a circumstance limited spell becomes worth prepping fulltime. Less than that and it had better have a BIG effect on combat if you're going to prep it just in case a circumstance shows up.3. How serious are the appropriate targets/circumstances?This is a big one for curative spells. 95% of encounters don't give my cleric a chance for remove paralysis to come in handy, but in the 5% that do, it's very useful. Since a 2nd level slot carries a very low opportunity cost by the time you're 12th level, I usually carry it. But I don't carry a remove blindness. Blindness doens't come up any more often than paralysis and 3rd level slots are a higher opportunity cost. (And the lesser strand of prayer beads covers that anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />4. How useful is the spell in the appropriate circumstances?Dismissal is a relevant example here. It's essentially a ranged save or die (at least be taken out of combat) spell one or two levels earlier than such spells that target more than just outsiders. I've never considered it to be a particularly good choice, but banishment, as a multitarget effect with options to boost the DC and spell penetration roll is a lot more useful. Thus while my cleric has never prepped dismissal, my fighter/mage preps banishment as a matter of course. (He probably wouldn't if he didn't have arcane strike though).5. What else can you do with the spell if it's not useful?As I alluded to earlier with arcane strike, this is a serious consideration--especially for wizards. Nearly all other D&D spellcasters (though not rangers, paladins, and some prestige classes) can spontaneously do something with useless spell slots. For clerics, that's healing which is always useful--even when you're talking a 0-level spell and you're 20th level. For druids, OTOH, that's summon nature's ally. Summon Nature's Ally is a good ability, but SNA I stops being useful by sometime around level 6. So, after that point, I would expect to see druids being more picky with their spell list. Similarly, since rangers can't do anything else with a prepared entangle, I would expect rangers to be less likely to prep entangle "just in case."Finally, it's important to realize that giving forethought to the terrain is not necessarily screwing the druid. Giving forethought to terrain is important to good DMing in general. Archers like wide, unbroken fields of fire. Swashbucklers like tables to leap on, bannisters to slide down, etc. Wizards like terrain that can limit enemy movement and that bunches them up for fireballs and makes it hard to get around walls of force. If you plan out the low drystone wall on one side of the road keeping the sheep out of the cornrows on the other side, you can pick where the hobgoblin ambush comes from. If it makes sense for a hobgoblin ambush, it's not not screwing the druid, it's playing the hobgoblins smart.</blockquote>

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