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

[eclair~]

5e had a missed opportunity by not scrapping the + magic weapons and armour which broke Bounded Accuracy and instead focusing on

The whole point of bounded accuracy is that +x items could be a nice boon to the player while not being vital for characters to remain viable.

 

[Distracted DM]

The whole point of bounded accuracy is that +x items could be a nice boon to the player while not being vital for characters to remain viable.

Yeah, but with all the bonuses 5e PCs can stack having non-attunement +1/2/3 items seem very unnecessary.

 

[Lanefan]

Okay, but that is then strictly a change for Fireball, Cone of Cold and Ice Storm are correctly represented.

Yeah, that was not the point of the exercise.

Okay but to be thorough besides damage done on upcasting there are spells such as Hold Person that when upcasted allows you to add additional persons being potentially affected. If you were to remove upcasting you would have to stipulate for these spells that at every x levels you could add an additional person affected by the spell.

Yes, exactly. The other things that can (but for any given spell don't have to) scale by level are range and duration.

For Hold Person it could probably be locked in at two targets and left there.

 

[Lanefan]

5e had a missed opportunity by not scrapping the + magic weapons and armour which broke Bounded Accuracy and instead focusing on ...

If 5e had scrapped basic + magic weapons, every DM and their little dog would have immediately added them back in. Net result: the same as current.

I suspect the bigger flaws might have been a combination of over-reliance on bounded accuracy (5e-specific) and trying to tighten down the math too much (all WotC editions).

In TSR-era D&D with its much looser math, going from a +0 sword to a +1 to a +2 doesn't really make all that much difference, other than becoming able to hit some specific creatures that require magic to hit, but it makes the player happy.