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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8325979" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Except that--and this is critical--grease isn't "make one single enemy potentially fall prone, one time." It creates a persistent hazard, no concentration required, that provides one automatic effect in the area (difficult terrain) and one repeating effect on all creatures in the area (Dex save or fall prone).If used with even moderate skill, and I think it's reasonable to assume moderate skill on the part of every player, you're getting at minimum a couple of targets that potentially fall prone and some solid area denial. If you're lucky, you've just proned multiple targets and made your squishy self (and squishy friends) unreachable for a round or two.If grease were a single-target, once-and-done effect like a cantrip is, then yes, your main comparison here would be more apt. As for the other point, you're not paying any special cost by choosing to cast your low-level spells now vs later; if you're playing with even moderate skill, you're trying pretty hard to expend every slot you've got, so the fact that you chose to use grease now and not fireball simply means you expected to get more utility out of that 3rd-level slot later than you would right now. That's not a cost, that's an analysis.Is...that actually accurate? Are so many enemies truly not actually at all moving along the ground?Because if so, you've just admitted a FAR worse problem for non-caster characters than the power of spells. The game prices melee characters out of play. That's not a good thing.They can potentially prone one thing. Maybe. If they're lucky.Maybe make some apples-to-apples comparisons instead of being so blithe and sarcastic?Put your math where your mouth is. Write up these spells. Let's see what people think about them.No, see, you've missed a key point here. As a spell, compared to the vast universe of other spells, grease is pretty weak.As a single action, compared to the single actions non-casters can perform, it's pretty dang powerful.THAT is the fundamental problem here.Except that that's not what action surge does. Action surge lets you take another standard action--and you can only use it once a day (twice at very high level). That's 5th-level spell or above. And yes, I'd say action surge could be argued to match a 5th-level spell, since it is one of the more powerful combat abilities in the game, and some spellcasters do actually dip Fighter just so they can get it (actually, you'd usually start Fighter for the Con save proficiency and heavy armor, then flip to whatever caster class you actually want to play--Bard is a strong choice here since it gets very minimal benefits from its max-level features).But let's turn that same comparison around, shall we? Does getting to cast a single fifth-level spell very early on equal the powers available to a Wizard or Bard as they gain levels? Given that a 10th-level Wizard can cast two such spells a day, on top of their other features, that's a pretty difficult claim to make.Wizards don't cast healing spells though, so that's kind of a specious example--remember that the school of Theurgy didn't make it into actual play. Let's consider Bard instead, since that's a full caster who explicitly gets healing stuff. So, we have this...let's call it burst of vitality spell: a first-level, self-only, reaction spell (so it doesn't run afoul of the "used a bonus action spell = can't cast anything but cantrips" rule) that heals for 1d10+class level would be...decent. Definitely worth considering if you're a melee Bard. But is it much better than shield? Both spells are reactions. The burst of vitality spell is a bit trickier to get best usage out of, and is at least in part dependent on a die roll (average level+5.5 HP), but it definitely does do something no matter what as long as you've actually taken damage, while shield is much more reliable in terms of direct effect (+5 AC), it's just not guaranteed to be worth casting (though Mearls has explicitly said that shield isn't supposed to be "wasted"--the player is supposed to know whether casting it would make a difference, which heavily mitigates the no-guaranteed-protection angle).I'd call it powerful for a first-level spell, but not overweeningly so; a Life Cleric can get 1d8+5 out of a first-level spell slot, which (on average) is only 1 less than what a 5th-level Bard could do with this hypothetical burst of vitality. It's got better innate scaling than most first-level spells and a bigger die (1d10 instead of 1d8 or even 1d4 for healing word), and uses a much more favorable casting time (reaction, as opposed to a regular or bonus action). However, it's self-only, which is a fairly big limit...and much, much worse than that, you can only cast it once per short rest. With those limits in place, it doesn't strike me as an especially powerful first-level spell. Maybe the scaling is a bit much, most spells don't have their static values scale beyond the range of their rolled values, but I wouldn't call it radically out of line to include such a spell on the Bard, Cleric, Ranger, and Paladin spell lists.Given it is a game, "they're fun" is not a defense, it is an absolute bare-minimum requirement. If a class weren't fun, there would not need to be any discussion about the mechanics or balance--the class would be flatly unacceptable.I have played a diverse sample of 5e classes. (Fighter, Sorcerer, Bard, Cleric, Monk.)My concerns remain.Where is this 4d6+10 coming from? I'm not familiar with any weapon that does that much damage, but I don't claim to be an absolute expert on 5e rules. Keep in mind, though, that I don't think it's at all fair to count things like feats. Feats are both optional, and not actually part of the Fighter class. Extra ASIs are, but the feats themselves are not "what the Fighter can do at-will," they're "what the Fighter can do at-will after investment," which makes the comparison no longer apples-to-apples. The Wizard didn't need to spend a feat to be able to cast fireball.</blockquote>

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