While not super relevant to the thread, I think it is worth noting that most meta magic options were bad before Barbs existed. It is one of the things that I hope is addressed in 2024 if not sooner.
The only real downside I can see to silvery barbs is the use of your reaction for offense making you more vulnerable. Especially if you're the one messing with all the enemies your DM will probably have them come after you.
To me if an ability is so powerful that it instantly draws all aggro on you for using it...then I am not too sure why you would want to use it anyway.
It is bad design IMO to attempt to balance an ability by punishing the player every time they use it or to make it annoying to use.
Its my same beef with Twilight Cleric as the major counter seems to be "Kill/Incapacitate the Cleric" which as the player in that scenario doesn't really seem to be too fun....
While not super relevant to the thread, I think it is worth noting that most meta magic options were bad before Barbs existed. It is one of the things that I hope is addressed in 2024 if not sooner.
The simple fact that Barbs consumes a reaction where Heightened Spell does not makes Heightened better in some circumstances. Barbs is a more resource-efficient way to accomplish the goal "make this guy blow his save", but it is less efficient in terms of action economy. Most of the time, the one will be preferable to the other, but not always. As has been stated multiple times, sometimes you desperately need to keep a reaction open for Counterspell and can't afford to Barbs your best spell...but you can afford to Heighten it. You can Heighten-and-Counterspell, you cannot Barbs-and-Counterspell. That use case may be narrow, but it's valid and proves that Barbs is not universally superior to heightened, let alone universally superior to all other spells ever conceived no matter what those spells are/do, the way many are claiming.
I think the fact that it gets as close to "strictly better" as it does, not just to Heightened Spell but to Shield and even Counterspell and Cutting Words, is the root of my concerns with it. Like, you could make the argument that a Fireball that does an additional d6 but it's all cold damage is not strictly better than Fireball, because sometimes monsters are immune to cold but not fire... But it would still be pretty sketchy.
The simple fact that Barbs consumes a reaction where Heightened Spell does not makes Heightened better in some circumstances. Barbs is a more resource-efficient way to accomplish the goal "make this guy blow his save", but it is less efficient in terms of action economy. Most of the time, the one will be preferable to the other, but not always. As has been stated multiple times, sometimes you desperately need to keep a reaction open for Counterspell and can't afford to Barbs your best spell...but you can afford to Heighten it. You can Heighten-and-Counterspell, you cannot Barbs-and-Counterspell. That use case may be narrow, but it's valid and proves that Barbs is not universally superior to heightened, let alone universally superior to all other spells ever conceived no matter what those spells are/do, the way many are claiming.
Well. It is universally better if you're wizard. Or a bard. Or any other non-sorc spellcaster in existence.
Your "use-case" is shrinking yet again to only if you're a sorcerer, and only if you wanted to burn one of your couple metamagics on heightened metamagic instead of anything better and also only if you're level 5+ and you wanna take counterspell as your known spell and also only if you're in a fight with enemy spellcasters and only if you still have 3 spell points available and only if you didn't wanna use a different metamagic on the spell you're trying to force them to fail...
If any of these things are not true Silvery Barbs is superior in every way. Your "use-case" for claiming Heightened is better is dismissible as a rounding error.
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I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Also, silvery barbs works on any spell save, not just the first, and works on saves against spells cast by your allies.
Suppose silvery barbs were changed from 'when a creature you see succeeds at' to 'when a creature you can see attempts' and the effect were changed from 'reroll' to 'disadvantage'. Would it still be worth taking?
If y'all are so absolutely, utterly, and invincibly convinced this spell will break your game? Don't let it in. Nix it. Drop it. Cull it. Kill it. Make it go away.
Freaking a hundred and fifteen percent out and trying to blow up other people's tables doesn't help anybody. Trust me, after thirteen pages of watching this 'discussion' degenerate, I am well aware that spellcasters are not allowed to have reactions and first-level spells are not allowed to be good/useful/fun to use or cast. All first-level spells need to be hot steaming moose piss or The Game Explodes Forever, and if spellcasters get to do ANYTHING but cast their one spell with their one action, The Game Explodes Forever a Second Time.
Keep your game from exploding. Kill the spell. Kill Find Familiar while you're at it. Or Detect Magic. Or Magic Missile. Kill Shield and Absorb Elements, for damn sure, and let's make sure Hellish Rebuke dies next to 'em. Absolutely kill Bless and Bane. Kill Disguise Self, too - that spell's super strong for a first-level cast, people get use out of Disguise Self throughout whole campaigns. Way too good for a spell you're supposed to regret knowing after third level.
Let's go through the spell list and make sure that every single first-level spell that isn't Baby's First Evocation AoE is cut from the list, because we just absolutely can't be having any first-level spells that a player actually still wants to keep on their spell list after third level. Any other suggestions? ...oh, just remembered! Command's absolutely got to go, too. Make sure of that.
If y'all are so absolutely, utterly, and invincibly convinced this spell will break your game? Don't let it in. Nix it. Drop it. Cull it. Kill it. Make it go away.
Freaking a hundred and fifteen percent out and trying to blow up other people's tables doesn't help anybody.
This thread is unlikely to have an impact on most people's tables. That seems like a concern you can safely put to bed, and not worry about anymore. Ironically, you're pushing to have people drop it from their tables... So, that's a step farther than anyone who is simply discussing how powerful it is is going with it.
Trust me, after thirteen pages of watching this 'discussion' degenerate, I am well aware that spellcasters are not allowed to have reactions and first-level spells are not allowed to be good/useful/fun to use or cast. All first-level spells need to be hot steaming moose piss or The Game Explodes Forever, and if spellcasters get to do ANYTHING but cast their one spell with their one action, The Game Explodes Forever a Second Time.
I must have missed this.
Keep your game from exploding. Kill the spell. Kill Find Familiar while you're at it. Or Detect Magic. Or Magic Missile. Kill Shield and Absorb Elements, for damn sure, and let's make sure Hellish Rebuke dies next to 'em. Absolutely kill Bless and Bane. Kill Disguise Self, too - that spell's super strong for a first-level cast, people get use out of Disguise Self throughout whole campaigns. Way too good for a spell you're supposed to regret knowing after third level.
Odd take. Seems radical if you ask me. You are free to remove spells from your game though. Totally.
Let's go through the spell list and make sure that every single first-level spell that isn't Baby's First Evocation AoE is cut from the list, because we just absolutely can't be having any first-level spells that a player actually still wants to keep on their spell list after third level. Any other suggestions? ...oh, just remembered! Command's absolutely got to go, too. Make sure of that.
Anything else?
Sure. If you're eliminating useful spells you may as well strip out:
Then after we ban all these we could do another balance pass and ban even more! Eventually the spell list will just be animal friendship, ceremony and detect poison and disease and we'll finally be good! ~Fraternal Brotherhood of Fighter and Barbarian Union 456
Obviously unnecessary, right?
Look, the recent addition of an objectively more powerful spell to the game is going to cause people to react. And they're going to talk about it. There is no reason to try to stifle that conversation. There is no reason to get upset if people have that conversation. And discussing it doesn't mean they must also ban it from their games. You can both acknowledge how powerful it is and still use it.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
If y'all are so absolutely, utterly, and invincibly convinced this spell will break your game? Don't let it in. Nix it. Drop it. Cull it. Kill it. Make it go away.
Freaking a hundred and fifteen percent out and trying to blow up other people's tables doesn't help anybody. Trust me, after thirteen pages of watching this 'discussion' degenerate, I am well aware that spellcasters are not allowed to have reactions and first-level spells are not allowed to be good/useful/fun to use or cast. All first-level spells need to be hot steaming moose piss or The Game Explodes Forever, and if spellcasters get to do ANYTHING but cast their one spell with their one action, The Game Explodes Forever a Second Time.
Keep your game from exploding. Kill the spell. Kill Find Familiar while you're at it. Or Detect Magic. Or Magic Missile. Kill Shield and Absorb Elements, for damn sure, and let's make sure Hellish Rebuke dies next to 'em. Absolutely kill Bless and Bane. Kill Disguise Self, too - that spell's super strong for a first-level cast, people get use out of Disguise Self throughout whole campaigns. Way too good for a spell you're supposed to regret knowing after third level.
Let's go through the spell list and make sure that every single first-level spell that isn't Baby's First Evocation AoE is cut from the list, because we just absolutely can't be having any first-level spells that a player actually still wants to keep on their spell list after third level. Any other suggestions? ...oh, just remembered! Command's absolutely got to go, too. Make sure of that.
Anything else?
This type of reaction is totally uncalled for.
People dont share your opinion on the strength of this spell. Thats it.
That is not grounds to tell them that they have to toss out half-a-dozen other spells.
More than half this thread has been people calling for Silvery barbs to be errata'd, or even removed from the game, on the grounds of it being unacceptably powerful. The primary causes of concern are its ease of accessibility - first-level spells are on the table for a number of feats, and feats are not supposed to add powerful capabilities to characters - and its ability to 'double' a powerful Greater Arcana spell such as Disintegrate or True Polymorph. I've seen arguments that first-level spells are never supposed to be good, arguments that spellcasters should never be allowed to use their reaction to cast spells because spells are too powerful to be used as reactions, and more. There's arguments that this spell, by itself, makes the entire D&D 5e spellcasting system unfair.
It's ridiculous. I happen to think that reaction spells are a really cool and underutilized idea - reactions in general in 5e are severely underutilized, you should always be having to consider which of your 2+ reaction options you want to use in a turn rather than "Martials get attacks of opportunity id the DM is dumb, spellcasters get to sit on their thumbs and eat it, and that's it". Given that the spell has existed in the wild for precisely one week, the amount of sky-is-falling outrage surrounding it is unreal. Nobody has played with this spell yet for more than one session, if that. Nobody has any real experience with it. Everybody's screaming "OHH EM GEE, THIS STUPID SPELL LETS YOU AUTOMATICALLY SUCCEED ON EVERY SAVE-OR-SUCK SPELL EVER, BAN IT NAO" without, in many cases, so much as looking at the spell text.
Just look at all the insanity surrounding the Legendary Resistance thing. People were convinced Silvery Barbs nullified Legendary Resistance entirely because their favorite YouTube sensationalist said so, when a basic read of the spell's text and working through what legendary resistance actually does for ninety seconds makes it clear that no, Barbs can't ever defeat legoresistance. It fundamentally cannot; Barbs mucks with the dice and legoresist says "the dice stops mattering, you just win". But people were so convinced by their favorite YouTube sensationalist that they banned the spell from their tables without even reading it.
It's insanity. Complete insanity. I've always hated the knee-jerk sky-is-falling reaction of literally every game fanbase ever to literally every set of patch notes ever. Everybody snap kicks, nobody ever sits down and says "Hey, let's logic our way through this, or even try it out some and see how it goes."
Well I suppose that's what happens when my temper snaps. Sorry. I shall work to refrain from telling people they can do whatever the hell they like with their game, including banning literally the whole of Strixhaven, in the future.
Hey, Yurei, I was one of the people panicking over the Legendary Resistance thing, and I'll have you know that I came up with it all by myself. No YouTuber controls my thoughts, buster. *And* I'll reiterate that without the direct commentary by the designers (outside of the text of the actual book, I might emphasize), the issue would still be up for annoying, frustrating debate.
Anyway.
You started this thread to discuss the spell. If it's not permissible that people discuss the spell while it's this new, then why'd you start the thread while the spell was this new? And why didn't you add an option to the poll that said "it's too early to say anything with any degree of certainty"? No, I think you're falling back on "it's too early" because it means nobody can prove you wrong. You already had an opinion -- that the spell is fine -- but since you can't seem to convince more than 44.6% of readers (at time of posting this) to agree with you, you're changing your tactics rather than your opinion. >:)
I recognize that your rhetorical style is tied up with your authorial style in having a distinct preference for exaggeration for comic effect, but I want to make it clear that the way you write about this stuff makes it really difficult to have a meaningful conversation. If you'll allow me a disgusting nesting doll of a sentence: When I have to say, "Actually, nobody said 'spellcasters aren't allowed to have reactions,' what they said was 'the reaction is a comparatively available segment of the action economy, which means that any spell that uses a reaction should be considered to be more powerful than a similar spell that uses a different type of action,' buster," every time I respond to you, before I can get to the Actual Point which is that you don't think the power discrepancy between reaction spells and action spells is all that significant (or something), then I'm just going to stop arguing from exhaustion. Is that how you want to win debates? By your opponents growing tired from having to carry more weight than you do? That seems kinda disappointing to me. I would want to win by the comparative merit of my reasoning. Or at the very least because I used such confusing grammar that my opponent simply got lost in the maze of my words and starved to death.
Look, there's been a lot of conjecture about this spell being "busted", "game-breaking", "universally/objectively better", so on, etc. There's also a lot of us that don't agree with those assessments, including people who have been playtesting it in their own games. It's a little frustrating when those of us who don't agree with those assessments are being being told that our thoughts on the matter are dismissable, especially when it's in favor of arguments that are themselves subjective and sometimes erroneous, as is the case with the argument that Silvery Barbs bypasses Legendary Resistance (which, by now it's official, it doesn't).
I know the official ruling on legendary resistance isn't bypassed by LB. But, if you think about it, they had to make that ruling no matter what. Even if the wording logically doesn't support their ruling, they still had to do it. So it still feels ham fisted. But instead of errata on the spell itself, they made a ruling on the interaction between the spell and another specific ability. It feels kind of lazy to me. To me, the wording on LB says that it is executed after a success has been declared. It feels like they made an exception to the order of how things are executed by extending LR's order to infinite.
I don't have to think about it at all, actually. Legendary Resistance automatically succeeds, regardless of what the roll is. No amount of rerolling changes that.
You started this thread to discuss the spell. If it's not permissible that people discuss the spell while it's this new, then why'd you start the thread while the spell was this new? And why didn't you add an option to the poll that said "it's too early to say anything with any degree of certainty"? No, I think you're falling back on "it's too early" because it means nobody can prove you wrong. You already had an opinion -- that the spell is fine -- but since you can't seem to convince more than 44.6% of readers (at time of posting this) to agree with you, you're changing your tactics rather than your opinion. >:)
Yurei literally added "Other" to the poll, which absolutely covers "It's too early to say with any degree of certainty". And a minor, petty quibble, but 44.6% is nothing to sneeze at, especially there is no actual majority opinion, only a plurality.
Given that the spell has existed in the wild for precisely one week, the amount of sky-is-falling outrage surrounding it is unreal. Nobody has played with this spell yet for more than one session, if that. Nobody has any real experience with it.
The spell is in the wild and you're not speaking from a place of knowledge when you say no one has tried it out. Speaking for just myself, I've playtest it. It is extremely potent, but burns through your spell slots exceptionally fast. It turns failure into success. It turns hits into misses. It steals the good fortune of your enemies. The effect is obvious and profound. The cost? You will burn through all your low level slots on this spell in a heartbeat.
Some classes can deal with this better than others. Wizards can get 1/2 level (rounded up) slots back on a short rest once a day, this helps for a Barbs user. Clerics with the optional Harness Divine Power option will find this use contends strongly with their other channel divinity options. And the Sorcerer can create 1st level spell slots with their sorcery points, and that can help keep the Barbs flowing.
The specific build that takes Barbs to the next level and can muster the staying power to keep casting it as often as you're going to want to be casting it is the Aberrant Mind sorcerer. By level 6 you'll have four 1st level slots to burn, and because Barbs is Enchantment you'll have been able to learn it through your Psionic Spells option, which means you can now cast it from sorcery points directly at only 1 point per cast, and doing so makes it component-free, so you'll be able to pull off this move even in social situations. So pushing your sorc points into it you'll have combined ten uses a day easy. And since it is so efficient for you, you could even consider burning 2nd level slots for sorc points to keep casting it, at two barbs per 2nd level slot. If you did that, you'd have up to sixteen barbs in a day at only L6. More than you're likely to need for anything.
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I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
For what it is worth, which I know isn't likely to be much, I let a wizard have the spell in my current campaign. They were extremely excited to use the spell and in last night's game they cast it three different times. It only changed the outcome once. It is still a bit too early to tell if that will be the pattern going forward, but it certainly doesn't have me worried about how powerful the spell is.
Hey, Yurei, I was one of the people panicking over the Legendary Resistance thing, and I'll have you know that I came up with it all by myself. No YouTuber controls my thoughts, buster. *And* I'll reiterate that without the direct commentary by the designers (outside of the text of the actual book, I might emphasize), the issue would still be up for annoying, frustrating debate.
Anyway.
You started this thread to discuss the spell. If it's not permissible that people discuss the spell while it's this new, then why'd you start the thread while the spell was this new? And why didn't you add an option to the poll that said "it's too early to say anything with any degree of certainty"? No, I think you're falling back on "it's too early" because it means nobody can prove you wrong. You already had an opinion -- that the spell is fine -- but since you can't seem to convince more than 44.6% of readers (at time of posting this) to agree with you, you're changing your tactics rather than your opinion. >:)
I recognize that your rhetorical style is tied up with your authorial style in having a distinct preference for exaggeration for comic effect, but I want to make it clear that the way you write about this stuff makes it really difficult to have a meaningful conversation. If you'll allow me a disgusting nesting doll of a sentence: When I have to say, "Actually, nobody said 'spellcasters aren't allowed to have reactions,' what they said was 'the reaction is a comparatively available segment of the action economy, which means that any spell that uses a reaction should be considered to be more powerful than a similar spell that uses a different type of action,' buster," every time I respond to you, before I can get to the Actual Point which is that you don't think the power discrepancy between reaction spells and action spells is all that significant (or something), then I'm just going to stop arguing from exhaustion. Is that how you want to win debates? By your opponents growing tired from having to carry more weight than you do? That seems kinda disappointing to me. I would want to win by the comparative merit of my reasoning. Or at the very least because I used such confusing grammar that my opponent simply got lost in the maze of my words and starved to death.
Addressing as best I can:
1.) I was made aware of Barbs not through Strixhaven releasing (I did not buy the book, though I can access its text via campaign sharing), but via one of my regular tablemates watching a Treantmonk video that can be boiled down to "This spell is bad for your game and you should ban it immediately". If in more colorful vernacular. I had to put out that housefire before I even properly knew what the spell did. An increasingly large number of people let social media influencers, YouTubers, and other Popular People do their thinking for them, without ever pausing to wonder if they should use their own reasoning and logic. The legoresist thing is a perfect example. I remain firm in that even without the clarification Wizards offered, there is no ambiguity about the interaction between Barbs and Legoresist. Barbs mucks with dice; Legoresist ignores the dice entirely. yes, you can use a legoresisted 'successful roll' to trigger Barbs, and it will reroll the die and grant an ally advantage. Legendary Resistance will still state "the creatre succeeds on this roll even if it fails". There is only ambiguity if one does not have a complete grasp on what Legendary Resistance does. Note that LR does not state "you can treat the die roll as a 20" or any such thing. It says "if you fail, you can succeed instead". The die becomes irrelevant.
2.) That is indeed a mistake on my part. One I will remember for future threads. Time may well prove me incorrect. It may also bear out my assertion that the spell is not, in fact, the most overpowered thing ever printed. I am not changing my tactics so much as I am out of patience, especially with absurd claims like "this spell is objectively better than every other first-level spell in D&D and also half the class features in D&D". When someone spends three pages of the thread ceaselessly shouting that Silvery Barbs, by itself, replaces the entire Metamagic class feature of the sorcerer while straight-up ignoring all the ways it does not, it ends up cranking my frustration level dangerously high. For that I apologize, but I have not yet heard an argument that shifts my opinion that the spell is fine. I believe it would also be fine at second level, and in fact I created a second-level version of it four pages or so ago, but I maintain it's still fine at first, too. As I've already argued, I have a 12th-level character being built for exactly the sort of situation everybody is saying barbs is the absolute worst in, and I can't find room to take the spell. At first or second, and it's not worth blowing a third or higher on.
3.) I recall stating, early in the thread, that martial builds that cannot readily/reliably use their reaction are often considered bad martial builds. A fighter or barbarian that doesn't find/manufacture a way to get a reaction attack it can use eight out of ten combat rounds is considered a low-damage, poorly optimized build, and rogues are often made or broken by whether they can bullshit themselves a way to use a second sneak attack in their turn using their reaction. Non-spellcasters are expected to use their reaction, every turn, if they want to be efficient. Why should spellcasters be any different? Furthermore, casting spells is fun. It's what people play spellcasters to do. Spells already have a much higher failure rate than attacks as it is, outside save-for-half AoE blasts. Those big control spells everyone is so mortally terrified of bounce well over fifty percent of the time; by the time you're high enough level to start casting them, enemy saves have already gone into the double digits and many enemies will have Magic Resistance, Legendary Resistance, or other features that render them immune to controlling/debilitating magic. Spellcasters are supposed to spend their turn casting one spell once, watching it fail completely roughly two times in three, and then let the team's fighter, barbarian, rogue, or paladin waltz in and deal more damage in a single round of attacks than they could deal with anything other than Disintegrate - a notably off-curve and overtuned Greater Arcana spell.
Maybe I vibe on the idea of spellcasters being able to cast spells more often, and getting spells that don't always bounce off the +53 to all saves Wizards gives to literally everything in the book with a challenge rating higher than four. Have you seen a dragon's saving throws? Don't even bring your spellcasters to a dragon fight - their modifiers are higher than the caster's whole-ass save DC. The damn things don't even need legendary resistances, it's factually impossible for them to fail any save they roll save maybe Intelligence, no matter how many times you cast Silvery Barbs.
Are spells that use a reaction rather than an action powerful? Yes. If their trigger happens. Notice nobody's ever said squat about Hellish Rebuke being a powerful, valuable inclusion on somebody's spell list. It's a reaction spell that deals quite good damage for its slot level and upcasts acceptably...and its trigger is something every spellcaster seeks to avoid as much as possible. Any spellcaster is going to want to use their reaction to not get hit instead of using it to cast Rebuke, which is why you see Shield all the time and Rebuke never. Barbs has an extremely common, every-round trigger, yes. Its effect is also relatively minor and a neat little twist. I would like to see more reaction spells, but due to the community's vicious, raging vitriolic hatred for Barbs, I doubt we'll see any more of them. Possibly ever.
And that ticks me off a twitch.
Is that any better?
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While not super relevant to the thread, I think it is worth noting that most meta magic options were bad before Barbs existed. It is one of the things that I hope is addressed in 2024 if not sooner.
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To me if an ability is so powerful that it instantly draws all aggro on you for using it...then I am not too sure why you would want to use it anyway.
It is bad design IMO to attempt to balance an ability by punishing the player every time they use it or to make it annoying to use.
Its my same beef with Twilight Cleric as the major counter seems to be "Kill/Incapacitate the Cleric" which as the player in that scenario doesn't really seem to be too fun....
Oh for sure agree on that!
I think the fact that it gets as close to "strictly better" as it does, not just to Heightened Spell but to Shield and even Counterspell and Cutting Words, is the root of my concerns with it. Like, you could make the argument that a Fireball that does an additional d6 but it's all cold damage is not strictly better than Fireball, because sometimes monsters are immune to cold but not fire... But it would still be pretty sketchy.
Well. It is universally better if you're wizard. Or a bard. Or any other non-sorc spellcaster in existence.
Your "use-case" is shrinking yet again to only if you're a sorcerer, and only if you wanted to burn one of your couple metamagics on heightened metamagic instead of anything better and also only if you're level 5+ and you wanna take counterspell as your known spell and also only if you're in a fight with enemy spellcasters and only if you still have 3 spell points available and only if you didn't wanna use a different metamagic on the spell you're trying to force them to fail...
If any of these things are not true Silvery Barbs is superior in every way. Your "use-case" for claiming Heightened is better is dismissible as a rounding error.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Also, silvery barbs works on any spell save, not just the first, and works on saves against spells cast by your allies.
Suppose silvery barbs were changed from 'when a creature you see succeeds at' to 'when a creature you can see attempts' and the effect were changed from 'reroll' to 'disadvantage'. Would it still be worth taking?
Then toss the spell from your table.
Just toss it.
If y'all are so absolutely, utterly, and invincibly convinced this spell will break your game? Don't let it in. Nix it. Drop it. Cull it. Kill it. Make it go away.
Freaking a hundred and fifteen percent out and trying to blow up other people's tables doesn't help anybody. Trust me, after thirteen pages of watching this 'discussion' degenerate, I am well aware that spellcasters are not allowed to have reactions and first-level spells are not allowed to be good/useful/fun to use or cast. All first-level spells need to be hot steaming moose piss or The Game Explodes Forever, and if spellcasters get to do ANYTHING but cast their one spell with their one action, The Game Explodes Forever a Second Time.
Keep your game from exploding. Kill the spell. Kill Find Familiar while you're at it. Or Detect Magic. Or Magic Missile. Kill Shield and Absorb Elements, for damn sure, and let's make sure Hellish Rebuke dies next to 'em. Absolutely kill Bless and Bane. Kill Disguise Self, too - that spell's super strong for a first-level cast, people get use out of Disguise Self throughout whole campaigns. Way too good for a spell you're supposed to regret knowing after third level.
Let's go through the spell list and make sure that every single first-level spell that isn't Baby's First Evocation AoE is cut from the list, because we just absolutely can't be having any first-level spells that a player actually still wants to keep on their spell list after third level. Any other suggestions? ...oh, just remembered! Command's absolutely got to go, too. Make sure of that.
Anything else?
Please do not contact or message me.
This thread is unlikely to have an impact on most people's tables. That seems like a concern you can safely put to bed, and not worry about anymore. Ironically, you're pushing to have people drop it from their tables... So, that's a step farther than anyone who is simply discussing how powerful it is is going with it.
I must have missed this.
Odd take. Seems radical if you ask me. You are free to remove spells from your game though. Totally.
Sure. If you're eliminating useful spells you may as well strip out:
Then after we ban all these we could do another balance pass and ban even more! Eventually the spell list will just be animal friendship, ceremony and detect poison and disease and we'll finally be good! ~Fraternal Brotherhood of Fighter and Barbarian Union 456
Obviously unnecessary, right?
Look, the recent addition of an objectively more powerful spell to the game is going to cause people to react. And they're going to talk about it. There is no reason to try to stifle that conversation. There is no reason to get upset if people have that conversation. And discussing it doesn't mean they must also ban it from their games. You can both acknowledge how powerful it is and still use it.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
This type of reaction is totally uncalled for.
People dont share your opinion on the strength of this spell. Thats it.
That is not grounds to tell them that they have to toss out half-a-dozen other spells.
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Isn't it?
More than half this thread has been people calling for Silvery barbs to be errata'd, or even removed from the game, on the grounds of it being unacceptably powerful. The primary causes of concern are its ease of accessibility - first-level spells are on the table for a number of feats, and feats are not supposed to add powerful capabilities to characters - and its ability to 'double' a powerful Greater Arcana spell such as Disintegrate or True Polymorph. I've seen arguments that first-level spells are never supposed to be good, arguments that spellcasters should never be allowed to use their reaction to cast spells because spells are too powerful to be used as reactions, and more. There's arguments that this spell, by itself, makes the entire D&D 5e spellcasting system unfair.
It's ridiculous. I happen to think that reaction spells are a really cool and underutilized idea - reactions in general in 5e are severely underutilized, you should always be having to consider which of your 2+ reaction options you want to use in a turn rather than "Martials get attacks of opportunity id the DM is dumb, spellcasters get to sit on their thumbs and eat it, and that's it". Given that the spell has existed in the wild for precisely one week, the amount of sky-is-falling outrage surrounding it is unreal. Nobody has played with this spell yet for more than one session, if that. Nobody has any real experience with it. Everybody's screaming "OHH EM GEE, THIS STUPID SPELL LETS YOU AUTOMATICALLY SUCCEED ON EVERY SAVE-OR-SUCK SPELL EVER, BAN IT NAO" without, in many cases, so much as looking at the spell text.
Just look at all the insanity surrounding the Legendary Resistance thing. People were convinced Silvery Barbs nullified Legendary Resistance entirely because their favorite YouTube sensationalist said so, when a basic read of the spell's text and working through what legendary resistance actually does for ninety seconds makes it clear that no, Barbs can't ever defeat legoresistance. It fundamentally cannot; Barbs mucks with the dice and legoresist says "the dice stops mattering, you just win". But people were so convinced by their favorite YouTube sensationalist that they banned the spell from their tables without even reading it.
It's insanity. Complete insanity. I've always hated the knee-jerk sky-is-falling reaction of literally every game fanbase ever to literally every set of patch notes ever. Everybody snap kicks, nobody ever sits down and says "Hey, let's logic our way through this, or even try it out some and see how it goes."
Why?
For the love of whichever god you like best, why?
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It is.
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Well I suppose that's what happens when my temper snaps. Sorry. I shall work to refrain from telling people they can do whatever the hell they like with their game, including banning literally the whole of Strixhaven, in the future.
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Hey, Yurei, I was one of the people panicking over the Legendary Resistance thing, and I'll have you know that I came up with it all by myself. No YouTuber controls my thoughts, buster. *And* I'll reiterate that without the direct commentary by the designers (outside of the text of the actual book, I might emphasize), the issue would still be up for annoying, frustrating debate.
Anyway.
You started this thread to discuss the spell. If it's not permissible that people discuss the spell while it's this new, then why'd you start the thread while the spell was this new? And why didn't you add an option to the poll that said "it's too early to say anything with any degree of certainty"? No, I think you're falling back on "it's too early" because it means nobody can prove you wrong. You already had an opinion -- that the spell is fine -- but since you can't seem to convince more than 44.6% of readers (at time of posting this) to agree with you, you're changing your tactics rather than your opinion. >:)
I recognize that your rhetorical style is tied up with your authorial style in having a distinct preference for exaggeration for comic effect, but I want to make it clear that the way you write about this stuff makes it really difficult to have a meaningful conversation. If you'll allow me a disgusting nesting doll of a sentence: When I have to say, "Actually, nobody said 'spellcasters aren't allowed to have reactions,' what they said was 'the reaction is a comparatively available segment of the action economy, which means that any spell that uses a reaction should be considered to be more powerful than a similar spell that uses a different type of action,' buster," every time I respond to you, before I can get to the Actual Point which is that you don't think the power discrepancy between reaction spells and action spells is all that significant (or something), then I'm just going to stop arguing from exhaustion. Is that how you want to win debates? By your opponents growing tired from having to carry more weight than you do? That seems kinda disappointing to me. I would want to win by the comparative merit of my reasoning. Or at the very least because I used such confusing grammar that my opponent simply got lost in the maze of my words and starved to death.
Look, there's been a lot of conjecture about this spell being "busted", "game-breaking", "universally/objectively better", so on, etc. There's also a lot of us that don't agree with those assessments, including people who have been playtesting it in their own games. It's a little frustrating when those of us who don't agree with those assessments are being being told that our thoughts on the matter are dismissable, especially when it's in favor of arguments that are themselves subjective and sometimes erroneous, as is the case with the argument that Silvery Barbs bypasses Legendary Resistance (which, by now it's official, it doesn't).
I know the official ruling on legendary resistance isn't bypassed by LB. But, if you think about it, they had to make that ruling no matter what. Even if the wording logically doesn't support their ruling, they still had to do it. So it still feels ham fisted. But instead of errata on the spell itself, they made a ruling on the interaction between the spell and another specific ability. It feels kind of lazy to me. To me, the wording on LB says that it is executed after a success has been declared. It feels like they made an exception to the order of how things are executed by extending LR's order to infinite.
I don't have to think about it at all, actually. Legendary Resistance automatically succeeds, regardless of what the roll is. No amount of rerolling changes that.
Yurei literally added "Other" to the poll, which absolutely covers "It's too early to say with any degree of certainty". And a minor, petty quibble, but 44.6% is nothing to sneeze at, especially there is no actual majority opinion, only a plurality.
The spell is in the wild and you're not speaking from a place of knowledge when you say no one has tried it out. Speaking for just myself, I've playtest it. It is extremely potent, but burns through your spell slots exceptionally fast. It turns failure into success. It turns hits into misses. It steals the good fortune of your enemies. The effect is obvious and profound. The cost? You will burn through all your low level slots on this spell in a heartbeat.
Some classes can deal with this better than others. Wizards can get 1/2 level (rounded up) slots back on a short rest once a day, this helps for a Barbs user. Clerics with the optional Harness Divine Power option will find this use contends strongly with their other channel divinity options. And the Sorcerer can create 1st level spell slots with their sorcery points, and that can help keep the Barbs flowing.
The specific build that takes Barbs to the next level and can muster the staying power to keep casting it as often as you're going to want to be casting it is the Aberrant Mind sorcerer. By level 6 you'll have four 1st level slots to burn, and because Barbs is Enchantment you'll have been able to learn it through your Psionic Spells option, which means you can now cast it from sorcery points directly at only 1 point per cast, and doing so makes it component-free, so you'll be able to pull off this move even in social situations. So pushing your sorc points into it you'll have combined ten uses a day easy. And since it is so efficient for you, you could even consider burning 2nd level slots for sorc points to keep casting it, at two barbs per 2nd level slot. If you did that, you'd have up to sixteen barbs in a day at only L6. More than you're likely to need for anything.
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
For what it is worth, which I know isn't likely to be much, I let a wizard have the spell in my current campaign. They were extremely excited to use the spell and in last night's game they cast it three different times. It only changed the outcome once. It is still a bit too early to tell if that will be the pattern going forward, but it certainly doesn't have me worried about how powerful the spell is.
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Addressing as best I can:
1.) I was made aware of Barbs not through Strixhaven releasing (I did not buy the book, though I can access its text via campaign sharing), but via one of my regular tablemates watching a Treantmonk video that can be boiled down to "This spell is bad for your game and you should ban it immediately". If in more colorful vernacular. I had to put out that housefire before I even properly knew what the spell did. An increasingly large number of people let social media influencers, YouTubers, and other Popular People do their thinking for them, without ever pausing to wonder if they should use their own reasoning and logic. The legoresist thing is a perfect example. I remain firm in that even without the clarification Wizards offered, there is no ambiguity about the interaction between Barbs and Legoresist. Barbs mucks with dice; Legoresist ignores the dice entirely. yes, you can use a legoresisted 'successful roll' to trigger Barbs, and it will reroll the die and grant an ally advantage. Legendary Resistance will still state "the creatre succeeds on this roll even if it fails". There is only ambiguity if one does not have a complete grasp on what Legendary Resistance does. Note that LR does not state "you can treat the die roll as a 20" or any such thing. It says "if you fail, you can succeed instead". The die becomes irrelevant.
2.) That is indeed a mistake on my part. One I will remember for future threads. Time may well prove me incorrect. It may also bear out my assertion that the spell is not, in fact, the most overpowered thing ever printed. I am not changing my tactics so much as I am out of patience, especially with absurd claims like "this spell is objectively better than every other first-level spell in D&D and also half the class features in D&D". When someone spends three pages of the thread ceaselessly shouting that Silvery Barbs, by itself, replaces the entire Metamagic class feature of the sorcerer while straight-up ignoring all the ways it does not, it ends up cranking my frustration level dangerously high. For that I apologize, but I have not yet heard an argument that shifts my opinion that the spell is fine. I believe it would also be fine at second level, and in fact I created a second-level version of it four pages or so ago, but I maintain it's still fine at first, too. As I've already argued, I have a 12th-level character being built for exactly the sort of situation everybody is saying barbs is the absolute worst in, and I can't find room to take the spell. At first or second, and it's not worth blowing a third or higher on.
3.) I recall stating, early in the thread, that martial builds that cannot readily/reliably use their reaction are often considered bad martial builds. A fighter or barbarian that doesn't find/manufacture a way to get a reaction attack it can use eight out of ten combat rounds is considered a low-damage, poorly optimized build, and rogues are often made or broken by whether they can bullshit themselves a way to use a second sneak attack in their turn using their reaction. Non-spellcasters are expected to use their reaction, every turn, if they want to be efficient. Why should spellcasters be any different? Furthermore, casting spells is fun. It's what people play spellcasters to do. Spells already have a much higher failure rate than attacks as it is, outside save-for-half AoE blasts. Those big control spells everyone is so mortally terrified of bounce well over fifty percent of the time; by the time you're high enough level to start casting them, enemy saves have already gone into the double digits and many enemies will have Magic Resistance, Legendary Resistance, or other features that render them immune to controlling/debilitating magic. Spellcasters are supposed to spend their turn casting one spell once, watching it fail completely roughly two times in three, and then let the team's fighter, barbarian, rogue, or paladin waltz in and deal more damage in a single round of attacks than they could deal with anything other than Disintegrate - a notably off-curve and overtuned Greater Arcana spell.
Maybe I vibe on the idea of spellcasters being able to cast spells more often, and getting spells that don't always bounce off the +53 to all saves Wizards gives to literally everything in the book with a challenge rating higher than four. Have you seen a dragon's saving throws? Don't even bring your spellcasters to a dragon fight - their modifiers are higher than the caster's whole-ass save DC. The damn things don't even need legendary resistances, it's factually impossible for them to fail any save they roll save maybe Intelligence, no matter how many times you cast Silvery Barbs.
Are spells that use a reaction rather than an action powerful? Yes. If their trigger happens. Notice nobody's ever said squat about Hellish Rebuke being a powerful, valuable inclusion on somebody's spell list. It's a reaction spell that deals quite good damage for its slot level and upcasts acceptably...and its trigger is something every spellcaster seeks to avoid as much as possible. Any spellcaster is going to want to use their reaction to not get hit instead of using it to cast Rebuke, which is why you see Shield all the time and Rebuke never. Barbs has an extremely common, every-round trigger, yes. Its effect is also relatively minor and a neat little twist. I would like to see more reaction spells, but due to the community's vicious, raging vitriolic hatred for Barbs, I doubt we'll see any more of them. Possibly ever.
And that ticks me off a twitch.
Is that any better?
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