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<blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9479910" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Fireball is fine*. Sleep and Hypnotic Pattern and Hold Person are fine. They all have uses. Call Lightning and 2014 Witch Bolt and Chromatic orb and so on -- those, not as much. The actual value of area affect direct damage vs crowd control and shutdown spells varies wildy. The direct damage's damage compared to expected HP totals, the save DCs for the shutdown effects, how many tanks you have/how much damage you are preventing with shutdown, how many less-tanky frontliners you have to mop up the shut-down opponents (people always say direct damage is the least effective strategy, but man someone has to do the actual damage) -- these all come into play. 5e is at least balanced such that which strategy is best is going to require some team/situation analysis (compared to, say, 3e where it really was a foregone conclusion). *and dedicated evokers wrapping their fireballs around their own team on the frontline are helping and providing a gameplay style a lot of people enjoy.It's always going to be subjective. What's worse, an actual game-breaking become-all-powerful or destroy-the-world rules glitch that will immediately get shut down (but is there in the text), an open ended abuse that can come up in real play but not repeatedly, or a confluence of rules creating a play strategy that is just too good too often?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Willie the Duck, post: 9479910, member: 6799660"] [I]Fireball [/I]is fine*. [I]Sleep [/I]and [I]Hypnotic Pattern[/I] and [I]Hold Person[/I] are fine. They all have uses. [I]Call Lightning[/I] and 2014 [I]Witch Bolt[/I] and [I]Chromatic orb[/I] and so on -- those, not as much. The actual value of area affect direct damage vs crowd control and shutdown spells varies wildy. The direct damage's damage compared to expected HP totals, the save DCs for the shutdown effects, how many tanks you have/how much damage you are preventing with shutdown, how many less-tanky frontliners you have to mop up the shut-down opponents (people always say direct damage is the least effective strategy, but man [U]someone[/U] has to do the actual damage) -- these all come into play. 5e is at least balanced such that which strategy is best is going to require some team/situation analysis (compared to, say, 3e where it really was a foregone conclusion). [SIZE=2][I]*and dedicated evokers wrapping their fireballs around their own team on the frontline are helping and providing a gameplay style a lot of people enjoy.[/I][/SIZE] It's always going to be subjective. What's worse, an actual game-breaking become-all-powerful or destroy-the-world rules glitch that will immediately get shut down (but is there in the text), an open ended abuse that can come up in real play but not repeatedly, or a confluence of rules creating a play strategy that is just too good too often? [/QUOTE]

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