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Message: <blockquote data-quote="W'rkncacnter" data-source="post: 9210320" data-attributes="member: 7033455">or maybe - and this is just a thought - it does the lowest damage in the game both because of the rider and because it's a bard-specific cantrip, and bards aren't really meant to be blasting? i mean, frostbite has the exact same rider as vicious mockery (i mean, restricted to weapon attacks, but still), and it's a d6, not a d4....wait, frostbite has (almost) the same rider as vicious mockery? i thought it slowed you...oh, that's ray of frost, which is a d8. more on ray of frost later.nobody uses true strike because it is literally better to just use your action to attack twice. it is, functionally speaking, completely useless. vicious mockery is decent, and it also has really good flavour (which, in fact, is the biggest reason i've ever seen it be used - it's funny).why would they do that? charisma's their best stat, and the damage of vicious mockery actually scales, unlike bard attacks (unless you're running a subclass that gets extra attack, in which case you're probably not using vicious mockery much anyway).i mean, sure, it would be a fair bit better, but if your party is that mad that you casted one cantrip instead of another one, then they need to relax. unless the cantrip you casted was true strike. then it's totally deserved.that said, comparing a cantrip to another cantrip to try to demonstrate one isn't a minor effect is an...interesting choice. if you really wanted to be convincing, i'd recommend comparing cantrips to 1st or 2nd level spells instead. can vicious mockery (or frostbite) compete with burning hands? or dissonant whispers? grease? ray of sickness? cause fear? in terms of damage i suppose they can at higher levels, but that's from damage scaling, not the actual rider. aside from damage, i'd say no, they can't. disadvantage on your first attack roll in a turn isn't a lot compared to disadvantage on all ability checks and attack rolls for one (ray of sickness) or more (cause fear) turns, or being able to hit an entire group of creatures at once (burning hands), or knocking creatures prone and slowing them down at the same time (grease), or just straight up forcing the target to run away (dissonant whispers).that's what i mean when i say vicious mockery is a "minor effect" - it's the sort of thing you'd never bother spending an actual resource on.i wasn't saying they should, i was just pointing out that his statement was inaccurate. i also later elaborated on why how cantrips scale is fundamentally different from how masteries scale.yeah. it's a buff. but at the end of the day, it's pretty much just ripping an effect from a cantrip and then slapping it on a weapon. it's a minor effect with extra damage.in fact, looking at ray of frost (hey!), i think that's actually how they went looking at how to balance masteries, since its rider is just slow. that'd also explain why slow doesn't let you stack it on the same creature - because ray of frost is a single attack.i'm not saying that masteries are a bad thing. i'm not even saying masteries can't stack up with other changes to change how the game plays. what i'm saying here is very simple: vicious mockery's rider is a minor effect. well, that and i think masteries could've been done in a more interesting way that feels like they're more integrated with extra attack, but that ship has sailed at this point.</blockquote>

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