D&D 5E Familiars, what for?

[abirdcall]

Really, I would never ask my familiar to help in combat anyways, I didn't even think that was the primary complaint about Familiars being able to take the Help action- if you make the right choices, getting advantage when you want it is pretty easy to do.

It was more having the Familiar help with ability checks that I thought was the thing people were more concerned about. Hitting enemies in combat is what players are supposed to do!

Getting advantage on ability checks constantly would be more annoying than Guidance spam.

I have the complete opposite experience.

Ability checks are very easy to get advantage on.

And yes PCs are supposed to hit things that is why AC is low and bonuses are high to begin with.

 

[James Gasik]

See when I first started, I thought advantage in combat was hard, but then I started seeing lots of options to get it (even in the PHB, you could play a Wolf Totem Barbarian and hand it out to your party members, while you get it yourself just by being a Barbarian).

(Granted, the potential loss of Pack Tactics removes another way to get easy advantage, alas).

But when faced with difficult things like opening doors or bypassing traps, spotting hidden things, and the like, things that come up a lot and you don't want to fail, getting a Help action is a big deal, so like I said, I thought that's what the issue was.