Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 8321783" data-attributes="member: 6795602">There are rarely only 2 options.  So let me walk you through the 3rd option.At level 1 you can prepare 4 spells and there are significantly stronger spells for low level characters to take.  Sleep or Magic Missile or Burning Hands or even Silent Image all come to mind as strong general purpose level 1 spells.  Grease is only very strong in very particular situations and offers very mild benefits otherwise.  For example, one often can go whole campaigns and never have a setup where grease was as useful as it was in the Fire Giant encounter described.  A level 1 Wizard also only gets 3 slots in the day (counting arcane recovery).  He had better make those slots count and it's very unlikely using grease at low level is going to do so.At higher level, (1) Level 3+ Concentration spells are the real powerhouses and you can only have 1 of those up at a time.  (2) You end up with more than enough slots to cast 1 high impact level 3+ concentration spell every encounter (with plenty of slots left over).  (3) Damage spells become relatively weaker (even at level damage spells start to fall off compared to the % of hp they take away from enemies).  (4) A higher level wizard has enough spells to know/prepare that he can use some on situationally strong+efficient spells.  (5) Grease and other non-concentration spells like blindness/deafness (blind grants advantage/disadvantage and many spells require sight) have additional strong use cases at higher level as they can be paired with strong concentration spells and (6) you have enough slots to do so without fear of too quickly running out.TLDR: option 3 is that grease and other non-concentration non-damage spells tend to be very mediocre on low level wizards, while becoming relatively stronger on higher level wizards primarily through spell and slot proliferation, high scaling hp of enemies, and non concentration status.  Even then, such non-concentration spells most often serve as helper spells to the more generally strong concentration spells and very rarely are situationally strong enough to use by themselves in any encounter of note.*Of note: I agree that higher level Wizards are more powerful than fighters, just not because of grease. Which ends up being a big part of why your analysis fails IMO.  And resource cost isn't effectively zero.  Your low level slots remain the most efficient slots to use for defensive spells and such spells will still be in competition with spells like grease.IMO, There's a reason the game went away from such abilities.</blockquote>

Verification