Having cantrips over expecting casters to be flailing about with their sling light crossbow or whatever was a good thing since it allowed casters to do something magical in the fight on rounds they were not casting a spell. The implementation causes a lot to be desired though because it pretty much removes an important piece of loot (weapons) from being a thing many characters have any reason to care about. Anything that improves cantrips also improves all of that caster's spells unless it's specifically made so it only applies to bob's specific cantrip. Yes those characters can get wands that cast other cantrips or leveled spells, but then you have bob frustrated that he wasted a cantrip slot on firebolt/sacredflame/etc rather than some niche or utility cantrip. On top of all that cantrips scale by level so instead of replacing old outdated gear with cool new stuff as the player levels you have a both a level wizard/sorcerer/cleric saying "I cast firebolt/sacred flame/toll the dead" nearly every round from level 1 to level 20 & the only difference is the number of damage dice.. no extra bolts like extra attack on fighter barbarian bard pally ranger bladelock etc, no interesting twists like tany of the things martials can add to their attack as they level instead of "I swing my sword" every level. There is a whole chapter in the dmg filled with magic weapons that have cool effects like keen disruption smiting terror life stealing wounding adamantine & so much more once you start including weapons with actual spells.
A while back there was a discussion about removing cantrips that got into a lot of the hassles involved in shifting cantrips to be linked to equipment like specific wands & such along with things like keeping the fluff/constructive/utility cantrips as class based things so I wanted to make a poll on this.
Obviously the cantrips for each choice should be balanced for that choice
A while back there was a discussion about removing cantrips that got into a lot of the hassles involved in shifting cantrips to be linked to equipment like specific wands & such along with things like keeping the fluff/constructive/utility cantrips as class based things so I wanted to make a poll on this.
Obviously the cantrips for each choice should be balanced for that choice