D&D General Mike Mearls says control spells are ruining 5th Edition

[Zardnaar]

The DMG and XGTE give pretty good guidance on exactly how many and what kind of magic items to give the party in 5e.

There is no "rule" in 5e saying you should not give out magic items. You absolutely need to give out magic items unless you are constantly making specific considerations in the monsters and challenges you select.

What is true is that the CR on monsters do not assume that the party will have Specific Magic Items at Specific Levels. AC is not tuned assuming all 8th level characters will have +2 weapons, for example.

This.

Being able to easily aquire what you want chucked in 3E and 4E.

 

[Minigiant]

The DMG and XGTE give pretty good guidance on exactly how many and what kind of magic items to give the party in 5e.

There is no "rule" in 5e saying you should not give out magic items. You absolutely need to give out magic items unless you are constantly making specific considerations in the monsters and challenges you select.

What is true is that the CR on monsters do not assume that the party will have Specific Magic Items at Specific Levels. AC is not tuned assuming all 8th level characters will have +2 weapons, for example.

You "needed" to give out "magic weapons" and "magic armor", have a replacement, or avoid a lot of traditional D&D monsters

You needed to give out "magic trinkets" and "magic wonderous items", have a replacement, or avoid a lot of traditional D&D challenges.

You didn't need to give out "+X magic weapons" and "+X magic armor"

HOWEVER

a lot of humaniods and some monsters in simple ROG design relied on a magical +X to saves either via magic items (PCs) or innately (monsters).

5e goofed on this.

 

[Lanefan]

Interesting proposal

Let us run through 3 examples

FIREBALL
1e-2e method
5th level wizard casts 3rd level spell Fireball - 8d6
6th level - 9d6
8th level - 11d6
10th level - 13d6
15th level - 18d6

You misread what I originally said.

It's d6 damage per level. Period. Thus, 5th-level wizard gets 5d6, 8th-level gets 8d6, 15th level gets 15d6, etc.

variant 5e, increase potency on upcast
wizard casts 3rd level spell Fireball - 8d6
4th level spell - 10d6
5th level spell - 12d6
6th level spell - 14d6
7th level spell - 16d6
9th level spell - 18d6

This and your other examples also fail to note two things about upcasting (one benefit, one flaw): the flaw is you're using a higher-level slot that you could use for other things, while the great big benefit is that you can use all your upper-level slots to cast Fireball plus use your 3rd-level slots; meaning in effect you can do far more Fireballs in a day than just your 3rd-level slots would indicate.

My proposal would be to ditch upcasting completely, meaning that while your Fireballs might get a bit more bang for the buck at higher levels you wouldn't be able to cast nearly as many of them: you'd be hard-limited by the number of 3rd-level slots you have.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

You misread what I originally said.

It's d6 damage per level. Period. Thus, 5th-level wizard gets 5d6, 8th-level gets 8d6, 15th level gets 15d6, etc.

This and your other examples also fail to note two things about upcasting (one benefit, one flaw): the flaw is you're using a higher-level slot that you could use for other things, while the great big benefit is that you can use all your upper-level slots to cast Fireball plus use your 3rd-level slots; meaning in effect you can do far more Fireballs in a day than just your 3rd-level slots would indicate.

My proposal would be to ditch upcasting completely, meaning that while your Fireballs might get a bit more bang for the buck at higher levels you wouldn't be able to cast nearly as many of them: you'd be hard-limited by the number of 3rd-level slots you have.

But if there are 4th, 5th and 6th level spells that serve a similar purpose to Fireball (AoE/Damage), you end up with literally "more bang" per day if these spells all auto-scale. And that's a bigger issue than being able to cast 3rd level spells at 5th level and having more spells per day, at least the lower level spells are weaker than the higher level ones.

Spells definitely shouldn't scale just with caster level if caster level also gets you more spell slots overall. Ideally, a 10th level Wizard or Sorceror might have no more 1st and 2nd level spell slots as they all upgraded to higher level spell slots, but he might have the same number of spells per day as a 5th level Wizard - but they're all higher level now.

The quadratic wizard is a result of both spell slots and spell effect scaling with level. Fixed damage per spell rank but the option to upcast them at higher levels seem like an attempt to counter this effect.

 

[Zardnaar]

But if there are 4th, 5th and 6th level spells that serve a similar purpose to Fireball (AoE/Damage), you end up with literally "more bang" per day if these spells all auto-scale. And that's a bigger issue than being able to cast 3rd level spells at 5th level and having more spells per day, at least the lower level spells are weaker than the higher level ones.

Spells definitely shouldn't scale just with caster level if caster level also gets you more spell slots overall. Ideally, a 10th level Wizard or Sorceror might have no more 1st and 2nd level spell slots as they all upgraded to higher level spell slots, but he might have the same number of spells per day as a 5th level Wizard - but they're all higher level now.

The quadratic wizard is a result of both spell slots and spell effect scaling with level. Fixed damage per spell rank but the option to upcast them at higher levels seem like an attempt to counter this effect.

Quadratic wizard us more the non damaging spells.

Fireball didn't break 3E. With 5E hit points a 3E fireballs weaker until lvl 9 and 10.

And fireballs fairly mediocre most of the time.