Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8805254" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I'm an outlier, I know, but I've never prepared or cast shield.  In all the time I played 5e, I found that, as a spellcaster, there are other, better ways to deter enemies from attacking you, like careful positioning, not moving to the front line of combat, use of terrain and cover, and of course, control spells.  Also, barring a critical hit, which the spell does nothing against, a single attack is rarely the end of the world.The best use of shield, then, is to defend against a multiattack or multiple foes swarming you; and guess what, you're still going to be in that situation next turn, so shield isn't really all that useful to me by itself.Most players who take shield seem to take great delight in being able to go "haha, no, you missed me!" to the DM (and most DM's who hate the spell are ones who are easily vexed by such antics, rather than taking the long view and realizing they have many more attacks to make against the PC's to come).I would rather use a proactive defense spell with a duration than a one-shot spell that is only very likely to protect me from harm for a single turn.  Heck, I think imposing disadvantage to an enemy attacker is better than a +5, since it makes it far less likely that you're suffer a critical hit (some monsters throw a truly insane amount of dice at you with their critical attacks!).Another issue is that AC isn't exactly hard to get in 5e.  Just about anyone can figure out how to get a 17+ AC, and most monsters don't have great chances to hit, as a consequence of bounded accuracy.  So the actual benefit of shield could very well be superfluous; sure, you can negate that freak outlier high roll, but you could easily build your character in such a way that the rest of the attacks you take that turn would probably miss anyways, especially once you get access to better defense spells like blur.  Heck, I'd argue that silvery barbs is better than shield for that purpose, and the spell is much more versatile, since the only other thing shield can do is protect you from magic missile- and how often does that come up?</blockquote>

Verification