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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6550480" data-attributes="member: 6787650">1.) "Legendary Resistance and Laugh." Bit of a double standard there if you assume that Command always fails while Cutting Words always succeeds (in #3). No counter-strategy is helpful in all cases. 2.) To put it differently, you just "wasted" 25% of your party's action economy to negate (100%?) of the enemy's action economy. 3rd vs. 2nd level is a loss, yes, but not a serious one since everyone else is busy killing things with Eldritch Blasts. It's not like the party is helpless against the threat. I have no idea what my hanging "Congrats..." meant though.3.) Abjurors can't prevent the attack at all, they can only absorb damage from it. I had forgotten though that 5E brain-eating now takes an attack roll instead of being automatic, so yes, Light clerics can at least make the Mind Flayer attack without advantage, and Lore Bards can make the attack-with-advantage suffer up to a -6 penalty on average. Out of all these strategies though the best one is the one available to warlocks: break the grapple with Repelling Blast before it ever gets this far. It takes two turns to eat a brain after all, and there's no need for you to act off-turn unless you ignored the grapple on your previous turn. (Maybe two of your buddies got grappled and you couldn't break both, or you failed your attack-with-advantage on your buddy. Such things happen. But then, failure can happen with anything.)4.) I've had plenty of encounters that started a mile away. Always outdoors of course. (Recent example from my DM: "The perytons are flying toward you and you see black specks on their backs. You have two minutes until they arrive [on the combat grid]. What do you do in the meantime?") I've never had an encounter that involved a Meteor Swarm, but if I did run one it would probably involve starting at long range because that's what Meteor Swarm is fantastic at. (For most other purposes, against a party it's just a double-strength Fireball.)5.) Lore Bards/Light Clerics/Abjurors have to burn (re-)actions too. It's always a tradeoff. By "could have easily prevented" I think you mean "could have tried to prevent". Everyone's got limitations. Lore Bard is totally ineffective in this scenario because it's a crit--Cutting Words doesn't help. Abjuror, well, he can add some extra ablative HP which may or may not be able to at least keep the guy from dying (you said he'd be one-shotted so I'm imagining that the target has maybe 40 of 80 HP left so the 127 would inflict instant death; Arcane Ward would just barely prevent the instant death) but still leaves him down and making death saves. Light Cleric can't use Warding Flare because the crit has already happened--you have to declare it when the attack happens, not after it's resolved.Arcane Ward isn't really much better here than simply taking the Inspiring Leader feat on one of those warlock/clerics. Cutting Words is, well, sometimes useful, sometimes a waste (roll low), sometimes powerless (doesn't work against undead, etc.). It's nice to have as an option but it's also not an option I always feel compelled to exercise given scarcity constraints. I haven't played with Light Clerics, but the fact that you can only use it on 5 attacks per long rest (and unlike Cutting Words/Shield/etc. you don't even get to wait to use it on attacks that make a difference) is one of the reasons I haven't played with them: the ability is so meh that it doesn't interest me.The main thing I'm seeing is that you like to focus on reactive scenarios where everybody's in melee and something happens and you need to burn a reaction on preventing a disaster (or at least trying to); if it works for you, great. But from my perspective that is pretty late in the game; I wouldn't have any fun playing that way because it's not proactive enough. "Respond, don't react."</blockquote>

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