Sleep is the most worthless spell

[Mircoles]

By altering the spell the way that you have, you've made it overpowered.

4e is far more tactical than older editions and auto slowing a large swath of the enemy with a chance for them to fall unconcious gives you a substantial tactical advantage.

With your house-rule, it looks like all you want to do is "instant win" the encounter.

And what you use against an enemy can be used against you. I don't think that you'll be so happy with your house-rule when your Dm uses it against you. Which, he likely will asap.

 

[the Jester]

I have to give sleep a "damn potent" rating from what I've seen.

The ability to stop your foes from engaging your party for a round (automatically slowing them) is huge.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

HugE dissapointment with this one - such a classic spell that I've loved ever since Wizardry I.
Now you take it as your valuable daily, and then even if you hit, they're not asleep. All they have to do is roll 10+ and its over (with a slow). Pbbbthhh....

We house-ruled this one and put the monsters to sleep.

What are your thoughs?

Will the DM ensure that monsters have access to similar Save-or-Die effects to use on the PCs (and will, in fact, use them from time to time)? If so, then at least the playing field will be equal and it should all balance out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

RIght.. in theory this spell should be great. In play, it has always been a disappointment, to the point where I dont even use it. All they need to do is roll > 9. Having used it several times, ive probably put to sleep 2 montsers. Not worth a daily, imo.

At 1st level it is a somewhat so-so spell, but can still EASILY win you an encounter and is worth a daily slot for an orb wizard. Consider, if you can slow 2-3 of the 5 standard monsters that might be coming at you then you can focus fire for a round on one of the others and you've just deprived the enemy of actions.

Figure it this way, roughly: Each round you can just about kill a monster with focused fire at low level. So the monsters get approximately 15 standard actions in a combat, 5 on round 1, 4 on round 2, etc. Sleep will, when used in a good situation for it, knock 3 of those actions out right off, assuming you slow 3 targets. It will also on average cause the monsters to lose another 3 actions from sleeping. That's 6 of the monsters 15 actions down the tubes, the equivalent of outright killing 1 monster on round 1.

This is all BEFORE the huge optimizations of sleep you can get. The orb wizard can easily drop a -3 on one monster's save, and with a modicum of optimization can jack that up to around -7 by 8th level, though most of it now only applies to the first save. At 8th level the Orb of Inevitable Consequences can start to show up, which makes the spell auto-hit. At that point it starts to take on the dimensions of being the best spell in the game. With all the nerfs to save penalty granting effects its true heyday is over but even so a good solid orb wizard build in low paragon can pretty much win 1 encounter a day just with that power alone.

Making it work like the old AD&D version? Way broken. More way broken than the orb wizard was before it was nerfed way back, and that was pretty broken. 4e just is not designed along the lines of "I cast my spell, we won" like AD&D was. 4e wizards have a lot more chances to cast spells and each spell has less impact on its own. Wizards are still one of the best classes around but they aren't either insta-gibbing the encounter or else standing around tossing a dagger with nothing in between anymore.

You'll get used to it.

 

[Aulirophile]

I dunno, "I cast my daily, we won" is pretty close to how it works out when I see intelligent players playing Wizards. Wizard dailies are terrifying.

 

[LightPhoenix]

Stalker0, I think you killed my post. I'm (roughly) reposting it with your reply below in quotes.

My issue with Sleep is three-fold:

1) You're penalized twice to get the full effect of the spell; once on the attack roll, and once on the save. At best, you have a 50% chance of having the full effect on a creature.

2) As mentioned, the spell is only really worth it if you're an Orb Wizard. Without lowering the chance to save, there's no point to it. It doesn't work often enough (at absolute best, 50%) to make it worthwhile otherwise. That's poor design.

3) Like many early Wizard spells, it hits all creatures. Except in very limited circumstances, it ends up being an opening gambit to avoid hitting your allies in melee. It does little against ranged combatants, since slow is pretty a trivial condition to them.

For good or bad, this is a core tenent in 4e power design, especially with encounter powers. Most encounter powers add a benefit when you are a certain build, and imo the majority of them aren't worth taking without that little something extra.

 

[gjnave]

Ok.. these have been awesome replies. You have show me the errors of my way.

I guess the problem is that I dont how to make a Wizard - and was instead mixing the wizards styles. I tried to create a summoning wizard (no + to WIS),with a Staff of Defense (I wanted the extra AC point for my summoned creatures) and wanted to mix "Sleep" in with that. I was assuming that the penalties to saves would have to come from fighting alongside another specific class (ie. a bard), and not from being an "Orb" wizard and the benefits coming from such.

If anyone has any tips on creating the differnt types of wizards, or links to sites that do, I would be very interested.

On another note, how does Essentials adding of mastery's of different types of magics, effect character builds?

 

[gjnave]

My issue with Sleep is three-fold:

2) As mentioned, the spell is only really worth it if you're an Orb Wizard.

Which is the conclusion I've come to reading all the replies

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Which is the conclusion I've come to reading all the replies

Well, the thing is it is still a pretty decent spell. In a reasonable setup you can deprive the enemy of a good number of actions. It does work. Being a burst 5 you can expect to hit 3 targets, maybe 4. All of them will be slowed. Slowed isn't ultra-good but it IS quite likely to deprive the enemy of a couple attacks, and probably deprive one of a couple turns. Used as an opening gambit, it works reasonably well. Not the best spell for say a 1st level wizard to use, but it gets better as you level up if you push save penalties.

As for the best way to build a wizard... Well, you really need to just decide what sort of build to concentrate on. I haven't really gone over the Essentials Mage stuff well, but with PHB1 type wizards the best thing to do is 1st realize your character is not about doing damage. Pick spells that mostly give good control. Orb wizards are good for imposing save penalties, which is fairly nice. The Staff wizard works well as an in-your-face sort of build. Summoners really want to be using a Tome of Binding. Wisdom is a pretty good secondary for most wizards, but obviously CON works well for the summoner and some staff builds.

One thing is for sure, 4e didn't particularly favor 'classic' D&D wizard spells. Fireball for instance is a fairly crappy spell. Stinking Cloud is a lot better, or Web. Color Spray isn't bad though.

Don't neglect rituals. They are pretty handy, even if they do cost a bit of gold.

 

[DracoSuave]

Will the DM ensure that monsters have access to similar Save-or-Die effects to use on the PCs (and will, in fact, use them from time to time)? If so, then at least the playing field will be equal and it should all balance out.

The playing field is not and has never been expected to be equal. The PCs are supposed to defeat the monsters. If the playing field is equal, the PCs shouyldl be defeated in half of all combats, leading to a situation where your campaign has a 75% chance of ending in your second battle.

D&D ain't designed around that.

As for sleep: Sleep is a fine spell, but you have to play the odds. You can't target a single monster and go 'Alright, he's down for the count' and expect that to work. You target multiple monsters; the one that falls asleep? That's the guy you coup-de-grace like a villain.

Unless you're an orbizard...