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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ECMO3" data-source="post: 8622427" data-attributes="member: 7030563">You  were looking for a spell to "clear the room"  Fear does that, no way around it and it does it better than just about any spell short of 5th level.There are all kinds of caveats when you may or may not want to use it.If your goal is to "clear the room" it is the best thing that can happen.Moreover the enemies can bolt out of the room without you casting the Fear spell as well and if it is "really, really bad" then it probably should happen.You have built a strawman here where the room in question is something you want to clear but then not really clear.Assuming there is more troops.  Assuming they lose sight of you. You are bringing lots of conditionals into this, beyond the original discussion of the spell.Maybe the 3 who failed come running back in 4 rounds, meanwhile you killed the 2 that didn't without them in the room and they lost a ton of actions.I suppose they could all just abandon the keep/cave/dungeon/wizards tower or whatever they are in as well.Maybe they are a bunch of Drow that get advantage on the save against HP.  Or maybe they are a bunch of Halflings that get advantage against frightened saves. Maybe they are wild animals (a momma bear and her cubs), if you scare them off they ain't coming back and that is far better than incapacitating them all and then waking her by stabbing her.Maybe you just want them to drop their weapons, wands, staves and as soon as they move away from those things you drop concentration and now they are unarmed and severely nerfed.  An wizard without his focus or an unarmed Orc (if he already threw his javelin) is a lot less of a threat.  There are endless possibilities, and depending on those it might or might not be a great spell for that situation, but those are really not the focus of the discussion.  As a combat spell free from such conditions and disclaimers; Fear is top tier, the best control spell and arguably the best spell period at 3rd level.I have used this spell a lot in combat with 5 different DMs and this is what I can say from experience:  Most of  the time we never see the enemies that ran off ever again.  Whatever they are Tyranasaurus, dragons, drow, Beholder ... most of the time that is the last we saw of them.  Not always but most of the time.We have also had another character vortex warp me to a group of Drow casters at the end of a long hall that we did not want to escape (we believed they had great magic items and we were mostly right).  I moved to get behind them and cast Fear on them from behind and they fled towards the PCs.  Then I dashed after them hitting them with AOOs.  When they got past the PCs (taking AOOs) I misty stepped in front of them to make them run back the other way (through the PCs again).    In actual play IME in terms of effectiveness blasting spells are not as effective as control spells in general.As an example you mentioned saving your 3rd level slots for a dragon with legendaries in the last post.  This was presumably to use fireball on the dragon?  Each fireball would have averaged a whopping 14 damage on him!</blockquote>

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