What exactly is being misapplied? The rules treat darkness as an area of heavy obscurement.
Sorry, I may have been unclear. I am not saying
you are misapplying the rules, but that the rules themselves, in trying to be simplified, treat darkness like a solid wall or heavy brush, which hide
everything beyond it. Darkness only directly obscures what is within it. Light outside an area of normal darkness (
i.e., behind it relative to the viewer) can indirectly reveal what is within the darkness. This is like the bag of flour tossed in the air or footprints in mud indirectly revealing the location of an invisible creature.
When the darkness that is blocking line of site is so limited on radius that it can be moved through or around in 1 turn - is it actually effective at blocking line of sight?
On a flat open field, true. What if your opponents are behind hard cover, say inside a building? Do they leave that cover?
That's not true. In 5e RAW combat, unless you are hidden (unseen and unheard) then the enemy knows your position.
I was speaking in the general sense that they still have disadvantage to hit you, which does not affect area of effect spells you cast on them in the
darkness. True, they might have AoE spells, too. Like most spell usage, it's very contextual. But if you're going up against a bunch of brigands who are armed only with bows and javelins, it could be a good tactic.
Sure. though that also means you can't counterspell them.
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Sure. But it also shuts down the ability to hit them with spells that require seeing the target.
True enough. Again, context matters for good spell usage. If both sides have strong casters,
darkness might not be useful to either side.
That's a use yes, but it's a pretty niche use. My argument isn't that there is no circumstances darkness is useful when treating it as inkblot, it's that there's so few benefits and the benefits it does have come up very rarely.
I have seen these uses and more for
darkness in many editions of D&D. Many spells have niche uses, but it is still useful.
It will only do that to casters that need to target someone they can see. Every other combatant just stands in it and fights anyways, because it doesn't have any effect on what they are doing...
It will impose disadvantage on their attacks if nothing else; that's nothing to sneeze at.
Darkness provides obscurement not cover. It also doesn't make you automatically succeed on stealth or keep the enemies from reacting to the ball of darkness coming at them.
Again, "cover" in the idea of advancing forward with opponents having disadvantage on attacking you as you approach, possibly to a better location (with actual cover) where you can use hide for your turn. Forgive my use of "cover" in the non-technical sense here.
This goes back again to the argument of it being next to useless and not useless entirely. You seem to be arguing that there's some small bit of use that can be found for it. And my response is: So what? Before we even started discussing I already conceded there were some small bits of 'use' for it, so arguing that there are some small bits of 'use' for it isn't actually a counterpoint to my position...
I will forgive your "There's no offensive or defensive use of the spell" as a broad statement. So what do you see as examples for its use with your interpretation? This goes back to my question about the wizard (or whoever) who first created the
darkness spell; what did they set out to accomplish with the spell? Which version is more useful? Which version is more appropriate for its spell level?
It doesn't keep them from attacking you normally like they already are...
Again imposing disadvantage is helpful, IMO. They will not be attacking normally, unless they were attacking you with advantage. In which case, attacking normally is a step up.
