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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9739500" data-attributes="member: 6795602">A level 3 fireball does on average 28 damage and 14 on a miss.  I don’t know the actual hp of cr appropriate enemies for a level 10 party, but I think 140 is probably a fine estimate. Do you do between 10% and 20% of hp damage for every enemy hit.  Essentially you end the encounter about 15% faster assuming you can target most enemies. Do the same with a hypnotic pattern (assuming 50% chance to ‘hit’) and you’ve taken out half the enemies for nearly the whole encounter.  However if the others wake them up then you’ve actually just reduced the encounter by somewhere between 1 and 0.5 turns. Assuming a 5 round encounter that’s essentially 10% to 20% of enemy actions taken away. Very similar to fireball. It’s just there’s a ton of upside if the dm doesn’t have enemies shake each other out of it.  There’s also upside for control if the encounter would end faster than 5 rounds.  There’s also the concern that if you are already killing enemies in few rounds then adding more damage from fireball is unlikely to lower the number of rounds enemies get actions.  Which basically means that if your party otherwise does really good damage then fireball is less effective. Of particular note is fireball is not concentration. Concentration isn’t usually factored into control spell impact and the ability to cast a 2nd fireball in an encounter or in addition to a control spell can drastically weight toward fireballs effectiveness.</blockquote>

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