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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 8495474" data-attributes="member: 5889">To be fair, if your playing a 1st level wizard.... sleep is one of the strongest spells in the game. The reason it doesn't get more attention is sleep scales very poorly, and 1st to 2nd levels tend to fly by pretty quickly, and so the spell's period of dominance is pretty minor. Frankly if I was running a campaign that going to be 1st level the whole time....I would consider an adjustment to sleep. Meanwhile spells like shield and silvery barbs scale exceptionally well, and are relevant all the way up to 20th level. Now for those comparing silvery barbs to shield.... clearly shield is the better damage mitigation effect. That is very easy to show in math, the second you put in 2+ attacks in a round, shield tends to reduce more damage. That's really not debatable. What is debatable however, is the assumption on getting attacked. Shield proponents are assuming the wizard will get attacked, and then shows shield's superiority in soaking those attacks. What is missing from that analysis is increased % of the time that the monster will NOT ATTACK AT ALL due to Silvery Barbs. If I cast banishment and it fails, then my wizard takes a full attack, and it sucks. But if my silvery barbs succeeds and activates the banishment, now my wizard takes no attacks. And no defense bonus is equivalent to never getting attacked in the first place.The point of the controller (or "god") wizard is to prevent damage from happening in the first place, to control the monster's ability to even do damage at all. To a silvery barbs player, if your letting your wizard even take a lot of attacks...your doing it wrong.Now that does not mean shield has no place, far from it. Sometimes you just have to take the pain, and in those cases shield is the better spell. I would absolutely want both spells prepared on my wizard. But I still say that overall Silvery Barbs makes the wizard superior at its job of control vs shield compensating for a wizard being a bad tank. Dnd generally rewards specialization, and a wizard that specializes in control through silvery barbs is going to perform better overall than a wizard that focused on shield to be some "ok" tank.</blockquote>

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