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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Giant Octopodes" data-source="post: 8746128" data-attributes="member: 7037488">Reducing the chance of a negative outcome from 20% to 4% may only be a "16% chance it actually made a difference", but it's also an 80% reduction in the rate of undesirable outcomes, and of the total 84% of situations in which it "didn't make a difference", you were not using it, and expended no resources, in 80% of those.So if your party forces 5 saves on enemies over the course of a battle, and each of those have an 80% chance the enemy fails, 32% of the time, they fail all of them.  Great!  You won!  The other 68% of the time, one or more of those saves are succeeded, and you're in a situation where Silvery Barbs can come into play, and in the situations where it comes into play, 80% of the time it results in the save being failed instead.  Thus, the chance it makes a difference in the outcome = 54%, for a cost of 1 spell slot.  The potential impact may be higher, some of those situations involve multiple successful saves and you could potentially use it on more than one instance if spread across multiple turns, but if we cap the expenditure at 1 we can keep 'the math' simpler.  Far more importantly, the pool of 'negative outcomes' shrunk from 68% of situations to 14% of situations.Your 'math' seems to focus primarily on how unlikely it is to come up in isolated incidents.  In a party of 6, for a given single target attack, one could say that Shield only 'makes any difference to the outcome' if they are targeted, hit, and hit by an amount where +5 AC would change the result.  So you could 'calculate' the potential impact as 4%. But such 'calculations' would ignore how impactful it is in the situations where it Does come up, and I feel strongly that you're making the same mistake here.</blockquote>

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