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).
Well...
To that point I still say that SB helps burn through LR far faster than before. When the monk hits the legendary dragon monster with a stunning strike, and then the dragon makes its save? Previously this would have just been a waste of the monk's stunning strike. Enter: Silvery Barbs. Now the dragon needs to reroll that save, possibly failing and needing to now burn his Legendary Resistance. Your 1st level reaction spell is essentially an extra stunning strike!
And if he makes his save again after your party's wizard burned his reaction cast, well, now your cleric can give his silvery barbs a whirl too! Because this spell can be chained if you got more than one caster who knows it. That's like the cleric throwing out a stunning strike now. Because that's the effective output of +1 stunning strikes for every spellcaster who can barbs. This dragon is going to have to burn his LR and he's going to have to burn it every round now, with a bit of luck, maybe even all of them in the first round. Because even if the cleric's barb doesn't do the trick... now the bard's barb might, or paladin's. If you got spell slots, and plan to fight legendary creatures, you should probably be packing this spell.
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.
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.
I'll be taking this with my AM sorc, I'll also be taking metamagic adept for 2 more sorc points and a 2 level warlock dip for two more pact slots. I plan on reporting my experience with it sometime in a few months.
To that point I still say that SB helps burn through LR far faster than before. When the monk hits the legendary dragon monster with a stunning strike, and then the dragon makes its save? Previously this would have just been a waste of the monk's stunning strike. Enter: Silvery Barbs. Now the dragon needs to reroll that save, possibly failing and needing to now burn his Legendary Resistance. Your 1st level reaction spell is essentially an extra stunning strike!
And if he makes his save again after your party's wizard burned his reaction cast, well, now your cleric can give his silvery barbs a whirl too! Because this spell can be chained if you got more than one caster who knows it. That's like the cleric throwing out a stunning strike now. That's the effective output of 3 stunning strikes for the price of one. This dragon is going to have to burn his LR and he's going to have to burn it every round now. Because even if the cleric's barb doesn't do the trick... now the bard's barb might, or paladin's. If you got spell slots, and plan to fight legendary creatures, you should probably be packing this spell.
Right, this is essentially my only gripe.
As a day-to-day spell, it's cool, but not too exciting. However, against BBEGs, which are supposed to be exciting encounters, the entire party can over-synergize to hack through their defenses. One of the major issues of previous editions was the ability for the party, or a single character, to stack on a bunch of random features/spells/bonuses and nova bosses. This ends up turning the adventuring party into one giant glass cannon, and the GM ends up giving them monsters well outside of their weight class. Eventually those monsters start getting abilities that the party can't overcome, or they become so powerful that if they do manage to land a hit, the encounter quickly turns into "TPK or Flee".
Silvery Barbs is a special kind of synergy spell that fundamentally changes the meta, even if it isn't overpowered in isolation.
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."
100% this.
People this version have been hopping onto bandwagons and rallying for errata purely because the crowd says so, but the actual math on this particular spell? It's good, it's a fine spell. But broken? It's not even as good as the direct competition from the PHB, let alone broken. Anyone saying it's broken and "replaces shield" (as some youtubers are saying) should be looked at very, very skeptically regarding the D&D advice they give. Silvery Barbs is versatile, but it pays for that by lacking the same OOMPH that Shield has. If you use Silvery Barbs defensively on yourself instead of Shield, you might make one attack miss. Might. With Shield you can turn a flurry of painful hits into a pile of misses. That isn't an edge case, I see that happen all the time. That's what Shield does.
I think people are really underestimating the opportunity cost here from every angle. Those who can take Silvery Barbs already have really, really solid uses for their reaction. Also, at lower levels the spell slots are much more valuable and by the time you get higher level and can cast these reactions for cheap, the competition becomes even more fierce! Then it's competing with Counterspell! Sorcerers especially don't have the luxury of just taking every reaction, they kind of need to pick the best one... and that's gonna be Shield, if you're in a campaign where the DM isn't going to politely have the monsters all target the people in front.
Silvery Barbs does have advantages over Shield, and it should! But overall, as was stated beautifully in the first page, Shield is just better most of the time. The Silvery Barbs versatility is great! ...but also most of the time, enemies are going to come in groups, and will be using attack rolls. That's not always the case, but c'mon, it usually is. Being able to just say no to a big mudslide of damage coming your way? It's handy. And as for the advantage? I don't see that as a particularly notable portion of the spell, because there are just so many ways to give your teammates advantage on attack rolls. I view that as similar to the extra d6 of damage Absorb Elements gives. Nice to have, sometimes, but not the point of the spell.
All told, it's a bit early to start advocating bans. The spell just came out. At least play with it a bit with an open mind before you start bringing the hammer down.
It's ability basically gives you a chance to re-cast a high level spell which just doesn't need to be a 1st level spell that anyone can pick up with little investment.
Making it a 2nd level spell is pretty good solution imo
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?
So I watched that Treantmonk video, and he doesn't say it needs to be banned. He goes in depth why it's not the game breaking spell people seem to think it is. He says it's a good spell, but it will never be the only spell someone casts at 1st level, nor that it will always be better than shield, and so on. It's an enjoyable video to watch, even. For the longest of times I got an almost allergic reaction when someone mentioned his name, and then whilst bored I stumbled upon one of his vids, didn't see it was by him. I went back to one of the posts someone made that made me break out in hives. Did some double-checking, and it seems a lot of the time people are just misquoting or just pulling stuff out of context from his videos. He even corrects himself in later videos when he makes a mistake. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr7N1om5-7UemjK_stlAuTw It was the second video at time of posting.
So I've read through this whole thread and it hasn't quite gotten me on one side of the fence or the other. There's not a whole lot that I can add that hasn't been said already except maybe for one very specific way of thinking about it. Let's consider it from the game design perspective.
Silvery Barbs is a very flexible spell that can be useful in a variety of situations, but can we agree that using it to affect saving throws is probably it's most impactful use since there are not many other ways to do so? Yes we can use it to affect attack rolls, but there are plenty of other ways to do that and yes we can use it to affect ability checks, but the ones you'd most want to tank probably come in situations where openly using magic to cause them to fail is taboo.
So affecting saving throws is quite powerful because we have so few ways of doing so and in that regard Silvery Barbs is decidedly offensive since it's trigger is something succeeding a roll and the spell attempts to make them fail instead, and does not have the option to go the other way. It's placement in the action economy as a reaction is also pretty unique and new to 5E because we haven't had a spell equivalent to an offensive block breaker before. Counterspell is the arcane equivalent to a martial artist striking their opponent's wrist to disrupt their attack, while Shield is the equivalent to parrying an attack. Silvery Barbs used as a reaction on the same turn your target saves against your save-or-suck effect is the equivalent to a strike meant to tear away a shield to open up your opponent before going in for the kill.
I rather like the existence of this kind of tactical depth to combat, honestly I wish it were present in martial combat, so I do like that we have Silvery Barbs, but ... it also seems like kind of a more advanced level of wizardly combat. It also, if used for it's most optimal application, skews very offensively in a subsystem (saving throws) that so far has slightly favored defense and I'm still mulling over whether I think this is a good direction or not.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
After I said that we haven't had the magical equivalent to a block breaker before, I thought about it and yes we do have Bane and Mind Sliver, but neither of those can as easily be applied to a spell that one is casting on the same turn, requiring either a Fighter dip for Action Surge or metamagic.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
The fundamental problem with silvery barbs is that its best use is for augmenting single target save or suck spells, and save or suck spells are already low quality game play, in that they're useless much of the time, and overwhelming when not useless.
The fundamental problem with silvery barbs is that its best use is for augmenting single target save or suck spells, and save or suck spells are already low quality game play, in that they're useless much of the time, and overwhelming when not useless.
That's a lot for which to blame an entire category of spells. I would argue that a lot of them are pretty high quality gameplay -- something like Hideous Laughter will only make the target "suck" until the target's friends are dealt with, it won't let you murder the target with impunity because he'll probably break out of the spell if you try. There's so many of these spells that each work a little differently, I don't know how to even tackle this opinion. (I'm assuming you refer to spells where, if I fail the first saving throw, I'm basically out of the fight -- not simply any spell that requires a saving throw, as I've heard some people say. Like, yes, it does suck to fail my save against Toll the Dead, but that's not a save or suck spell.)
--
When you have something like Bane in the game you're encouraging teamwork, because the action and concentration economies don't make it cost effective for one character to use both Bane and another spell requiring a saving throw. Now I may be wrong here, but I feel like teamwork -- intra-party synergy -- combo turns -- is just about the coolest shit you can do in this game. One player setting the stage for another player to go off, I mean, it's what it's all about, right? Thor shooting lightning into Iron Man's arc reactor so he can shoot a huge laser? Love it. With Barbs in the game, though, that changes. No longer do you need two characters' turns to force through a failure. Now you can do it with just one. AND, if you don't end up needing it, you can save the spell slot. So realistically, you'd kinda be a fool to go back to boring ol' Bane or whatever else you were using. That's where my concerns come from. The spell is doing something that's way more efficient and (by my rough estimation, granted) less fun.
"But Choir," I hear you saying, "why don't you just do both? They stack!" And yes, they do, but how low do you really need to go? We're talking about the famous Bounded Accuracy here. You get diminishing returns, surely.
I'll freely admit this is all speculation on my part. Nobody's actually taken this spell in my groups. I think it feels off to people since it's a Magic setting guide thing.
Have watched about half this Treantmonk video so far. Two things, mostly:
1.) I still absolutely hate this guy. Watching this video is physically painful.
2.) I'm confused by why folks are citing his video as a reason Barbs is egregiously overpowered, because most of what he says seems to agree with everything I wrote at the very beginning of this thread. There's been ways to impose disadvantage on saves since 5e was printed, and literally nobody uses/likes them. The Arcane Trickster is considered one of the worst rogue subclasses outside Booming Blade nonsense despite Magical Ambush being very nearly on-demand disadvantage on saves, and the sorcerer's Heightened Spell has been doing this forever and is still considered one of the worst metamagic options. Even Treantmonk - the poster child for "your stuff sucks and you should feel bad for playing it" - is telling people to chill the hell out and stop fretting, because Barbs isn't really all that bad. Good, yes, absolutely, not not a game-shattering nightmare monster like people keep saying it is.
Have watched about half this Treantmonk video so far. Two things, mostly:
1.) I still absolutely hate this guy. Watching this video is physically painful.
2.) I'm confused by why folks are citing his video as a reason Barbs is egregiously overpowered, because most of what he says seems to agree with everything I wrote at the very beginning of this thread. There's been ways to impose disadvantage on saves since 5e was printed, and literally nobody uses/likes them. The Arcane Trickster is considered one of the worst rogue subclasses outside Booming Blade nonsense despite Magical Ambush being very nearly on-demand disadvantage on saves, and the sorcerer's Heightened Spell has been doing this forever and is still considered one of the worst metamagic options. Even Treantmonk - the poster child for "your stuff sucks and you should feel bad for playing it" - is telling people to chill the hell out and stop fretting, because Barbs isn't really all that bad. Good, yes, absolutely, not not a game-shattering nightmare monster like people keep saying it is.
Indeed. But I have now a more nuanced position on him, that his followers are worse than the man himself.
It’s the flexibility I have an issue with. Are there times other first level spells will be better? Sure. Shield is better if you are taking a bunch of attacks. BUT shield can only deal with attacks. Nothing else.
my problem with silvery barbs is this. It is never a bad option. It might not be the single most optimal spell, but it wraps similar effects to other spells, metamagic and class features in one and lets you pick each time. That’s where my problem lies. Heightened spell is expensive, hence its lack of use. It costs level 2 spells worth of points of one half of the spells effects on a reaction, and no other flexibility.
it is also perhaps the most offensive reaction spell I have ever seen. You can get some nasty failed saves out of this and you can turn advantage into what looks like elven accuracy style turbo disadvantage. And you have to know if they succeeded before you even try the spell. And it buffs counterspell
but that isn’t all it does. It then gives advantage to someone else? Why? Wasn’t this good enough?
so sure other spells may be situationally better. But there are no spells in the first or second levels that offers this wide range of use and the sheer breadth of application. This is not a first level spell. Bump it to second or even third. Then it’s fine.
one good litmus test (but not perfect) for a spell is this. If you gave the spell to NPC casters, would the players be ok with that? I would put money that this spell makes them a whole lot more nervous than shield does.
one good litmus test (but not perfect) for a spell is this. If you gave the spell to NPC casters, would the players be ok with that? I would put money that this spell makes them a whole lot more nervous than shield does.
I think that's fair as a general gauge, though as you said... not perfect. I don't think it works especially well as a litmus test in this case. Enemies in encounters have advantages PCs never have.
1. There are often more NPCs, so the effect of a bunch of reactions being used to compel rerolls will have a larger impact on the other side of the field.
2. Regarding Shield specifically; Shield is best for when you already have a solid AC. AC gives accelerating returns, up to a certain point at least. NPCs tend to have pretty terrible AC, so shield is less useful for them. If you gave an enemy caster an optimized AC tower build and shield, the players would probably hate that a lot more than Silvery Barbs.
3. Enemies are disposable. They don't have to worry about resource management at all. I once had a DM use wish against my party as an opening. Not replicating a spell, the kind of wish that risks losing wish. He didn't have any real motivation to do this, hadn't tried talking us down, hadn't tried anything else in the fight yet. No PC caster would EVER, EVER do this. Risking the loss of wish is an absolute last resort once you get it. But if it's an NPC and you can just throw him away after? He can do it and it doesn't matter*. Tossing fresh spellcasters at the party with similar spell loadouts is going to tend to favor enemy casters because they are disposable.
Silvery Barbs is a fine spell, but its versatility is also the only reason it competes with more specialized reactions. Without that, it'd just be a bad spell.
*I acknowledge this particular case was an instance of poor DMing as much as anything, but it does help illustrate my point.
I'd argue that [Silvery Barbs] does comparable things to the other 1st level reaction spells.
Like which, though?
Silvery Barbs imposes pseudo disadvantage on the enemy (meaning that you don't ever waste it on an event that was always going to go un your favour anyway (by my calculations that's a little less than double bang for your buck for other disadvantage spells), and it's also stackable with real disadvantage as well as not being cancelled by advantage, meaning that even if they'd normally have advantage, you can cancel that with disadvantage and then use SB to impose what is effectively a disadvantage, if needs be) and gives advantage to an ally. Additionally
Yeah OK, it's not the "I Win" button, but, outside of specific situations, that's doing a lot more than the other L1 Reaction spells that I can think of.
Feather Fall saves you from falling. So far, I've never had a use for it, but it doesn't seem to be comparable to SB.
Shield gives you +5AC each is roughly the equivalent to what SB would do (according to others on the board, I havent done the maths, but it can only apply to you and doesn't give advantage to an ally on top. Im also unclear as to when Shield can be used, can you know if +5AC would make a difference before casting?
Have I missed any? One is not anywhere near as useful. One is offensive spell that isn't comparable. The last has advantages, mostly that it lasts a round rather than just the one off. On the other hand, SB is far more flexible, which makes it more useful in my opinion. I do think SB is above the other L1 spells.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Quote from UltimoPanda>>Have I missed any? One is not anywhere near as useful. One is offensive spell that isn't comparable. The last has advantages, mostly that it lasts a round rather than just the one off. On the other hand, SB is far more flexible, which makes it more useful in my opinion. I do think SB is above the other L1 spells.
You missed Absorb Elements and, at a higher level, Counterspell (note that spell slot difference aside, you still only get one reaction so you'll have to pick). The reason SB is balanced that people seem to be missing is you only have one reaction and, again, stiff competition.
Anyone who said Silvery Barbs is roughly equivalent to Shield in the domain of avoiding physical attacks is just mistaken. They're about the same value against one attack (with SB being better against a single crit, because Shield can't stop a crit), but typically Shield is going to be used against a pile of attacks coming your way. Attack rolls are much more common than saving throws, and against piles of attacks? Shield just wins, full stop, not even close. The value of +5 AC for a round is being compared to the value of one attack being rerolled with the same slot and reaction and maybe missing.
Not saying SB is bad, but it's not the game changer people seem to think it is. I've played a Chronurgist, they get baaasically the same thing as a class feature. Is it useful? Yes, very useful. But I used my reaction on Shield and Counterspell a lot more than I did on Chronal Shift. If you're going to use your reaction to adjust a roll, it needs to be a very important single roll to be worth using over something else.
Quote from UltimoPanda>>Have I missed any? One is not anywhere near as useful. One is offensive spell that isn't comparable. The last has advantages, mostly that it lasts a round rather than just the one off. On the other hand, SB is far more flexible, which makes it more useful in my opinion. I do think SB is above the other L1 spells.
You missed Absorb Elements and, at a higher level, Counterspell (note that spell slot difference aside, you still only get one reaction so you'll have to pick). The reason SB is balanced that people seem to be missing is you only have one reaction and, again, stiff competition.
Anyone who said Silvery Barbs is roughly equivalent to Shield in the domain of avoiding physical attacks is just mistaken. They're about the same value against one attack (with SB being better against a single crit, because Shield can't stop a crit), but typically Shield is going to be used against a pile of attacks coming your way. Attack rolls are much more common than saving throws, and against piles of attacks? Shield just wins, full stop, not even close. The value of +5 AC for a round is being compared to the value of one attack being rerolled with the same slot and reaction and maybe missing.
Not saying SB is bad, but it's not the game changer people seem to think it is. I've played a Chronurgist, they get baaasically the same thing as a class feature. Is it useful? Yes, very useful. But I used my reaction on Shield and Counterspell a lot more than I did on Chronal Shift. If you're going to use your reaction to adjust a roll, it needs to be a very important single roll to be worth using over something else.
A class feature that you get one per day and if you use it again you get a level of exhaustion....
This is a first level spell that can be cast many more tiles per day.
And your comparison to counterspell is more apt... But that's a 3rd level spell!
Shield is needed or else spell casters would die very fast at high levels....at best you are looking at 16 AC before shield.... It's honestly not even an optional spell so it's not like you aren't going to take in. Addition to SB anyway...
I'm all for the spell existing.... Just not as a 1st level.
Well...
To that point I still say that SB helps burn through LR far faster than before. When the monk hits the legendary dragon monster with a stunning strike, and then the dragon makes its save? Previously this would have just been a waste of the monk's stunning strike. Enter: Silvery Barbs. Now the dragon needs to reroll that save, possibly failing and needing to now burn his Legendary Resistance. Your 1st level reaction spell is essentially an extra stunning strike!
And if he makes his save again after your party's wizard burned his reaction cast, well, now your cleric can give his silvery barbs a whirl too! Because this spell can be chained if you got more than one caster who knows it. That's like the cleric throwing out a stunning strike now. Because that's the effective output of +1 stunning strikes for every spellcaster who can barbs. This dragon is going to have to burn his LR and he's going to have to burn it every round now, with a bit of luck, maybe even all of them in the first round. Because even if the cleric's barb doesn't do the trick... now the bard's barb might, or paladin's. If you got spell slots, and plan to fight legendary creatures, you should probably be packing this spell.
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.
I'll be taking this with my AM sorc, I'll also be taking metamagic adept for 2 more sorc points and a 2 level warlock dip for two more pact slots. I plan on reporting my experience with it sometime in a few months.
Right, this is essentially my only gripe.
As a day-to-day spell, it's cool, but not too exciting. However, against BBEGs, which are supposed to be exciting encounters, the entire party can over-synergize to hack through their defenses. One of the major issues of previous editions was the ability for the party, or a single character, to stack on a bunch of random features/spells/bonuses and nova bosses. This ends up turning the adventuring party into one giant glass cannon, and the GM ends up giving them monsters well outside of their weight class. Eventually those monsters start getting abilities that the party can't overcome, or they become so powerful that if they do manage to land a hit, the encounter quickly turns into "TPK or Flee".
Silvery Barbs is a special kind of synergy spell that fundamentally changes the meta, even if it isn't overpowered in isolation.
100% this.
People this version have been hopping onto bandwagons and rallying for errata purely because the crowd says so, but the actual math on this particular spell? It's good, it's a fine spell. But broken? It's not even as good as the direct competition from the PHB, let alone broken. Anyone saying it's broken and "replaces shield" (as some youtubers are saying) should be looked at very, very skeptically regarding the D&D advice they give. Silvery Barbs is versatile, but it pays for that by lacking the same OOMPH that Shield has. If you use Silvery Barbs defensively on yourself instead of Shield, you might make one attack miss. Might. With Shield you can turn a flurry of painful hits into a pile of misses. That isn't an edge case, I see that happen all the time. That's what Shield does.
I think people are really underestimating the opportunity cost here from every angle. Those who can take Silvery Barbs already have really, really solid uses for their reaction. Also, at lower levels the spell slots are much more valuable and by the time you get higher level and can cast these reactions for cheap, the competition becomes even more fierce! Then it's competing with Counterspell! Sorcerers especially don't have the luxury of just taking every reaction, they kind of need to pick the best one... and that's gonna be Shield, if you're in a campaign where the DM isn't going to politely have the monsters all target the people in front.
Silvery Barbs does have advantages over Shield, and it should! But overall, as was stated beautifully in the first page, Shield is just better most of the time. The Silvery Barbs versatility is great! ...but also most of the time, enemies are going to come in groups, and will be using attack rolls. That's not always the case, but c'mon, it usually is. Being able to just say no to a big mudslide of damage coming your way? It's handy. And as for the advantage? I don't see that as a particularly notable portion of the spell, because there are just so many ways to give your teammates advantage on attack rolls. I view that as similar to the extra d6 of damage Absorb Elements gives. Nice to have, sometimes, but not the point of the spell.
All told, it's a bit early to start advocating bans. The spell just came out. At least play with it a bit with an open mind before you start bringing the hammer down.
I'm not saying it needs to be banned....
It just doesn't need to be a 1st level spell.
It's ability basically gives you a chance to re-cast a high level spell which just doesn't need to be a 1st level spell that anyone can pick up with little investment.
Making it a 2nd level spell is pretty good solution imo
So I watched that Treantmonk video, and he doesn't say it needs to be banned. He goes in depth why it's not the game breaking spell people seem to think it is. He says it's a good spell, but it will never be the only spell someone casts at 1st level, nor that it will always be better than shield, and so on. It's an enjoyable video to watch, even. For the longest of times I got an almost allergic reaction when someone mentioned his name, and then whilst bored I stumbled upon one of his vids, didn't see it was by him. I went back to one of the posts someone made that made me break out in hives. Did some double-checking, and it seems a lot of the time people are just misquoting or just pulling stuff out of context from his videos. He even corrects himself in later videos when he makes a mistake. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr7N1om5-7UemjK_stlAuTw It was the second video at time of posting.
So I've read through this whole thread and it hasn't quite gotten me on one side of the fence or the other. There's not a whole lot that I can add that hasn't been said already except maybe for one very specific way of thinking about it. Let's consider it from the game design perspective.
Silvery Barbs is a very flexible spell that can be useful in a variety of situations, but can we agree that using it to affect saving throws is probably it's most impactful use since there are not many other ways to do so? Yes we can use it to affect attack rolls, but there are plenty of other ways to do that and yes we can use it to affect ability checks, but the ones you'd most want to tank probably come in situations where openly using magic to cause them to fail is taboo.
So affecting saving throws is quite powerful because we have so few ways of doing so and in that regard Silvery Barbs is decidedly offensive since it's trigger is something succeeding a roll and the spell attempts to make them fail instead, and does not have the option to go the other way. It's placement in the action economy as a reaction is also pretty unique and new to 5E because we haven't had a spell equivalent to an offensive block breaker before. Counterspell is the arcane equivalent to a martial artist striking their opponent's wrist to disrupt their attack, while Shield is the equivalent to parrying an attack. Silvery Barbs used as a reaction on the same turn your target saves against your save-or-suck effect is the equivalent to a strike meant to tear away a shield to open up your opponent before going in for the kill.
I rather like the existence of this kind of tactical depth to combat, honestly I wish it were present in martial combat, so I do like that we have Silvery Barbs, but ... it also seems like kind of a more advanced level of wizardly combat. It also, if used for it's most optimal application, skews very offensively in a subsystem (saving throws) that so far has slightly favored defense and I'm still mulling over whether I think this is a good direction or not.
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To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
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After I said that we haven't had the magical equivalent to a block breaker before, I thought about it and yes we do have Bane and Mind Sliver, but neither of those can as easily be applied to a spell that one is casting on the same turn, requiring either a Fighter dip for Action Surge or metamagic.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
The fundamental problem with silvery barbs is that its best use is for augmenting single target save or suck spells, and save or suck spells are already low quality game play, in that they're useless much of the time, and overwhelming when not useless.
I don't think it's broken, but I would make it a higher level spell.
That's a lot for which to blame an entire category of spells. I would argue that a lot of them are pretty high quality gameplay -- something like Hideous Laughter will only make the target "suck" until the target's friends are dealt with, it won't let you murder the target with impunity because he'll probably break out of the spell if you try. There's so many of these spells that each work a little differently, I don't know how to even tackle this opinion. (I'm assuming you refer to spells where, if I fail the first saving throw, I'm basically out of the fight -- not simply any spell that requires a saving throw, as I've heard some people say. Like, yes, it does suck to fail my save against Toll the Dead, but that's not a save or suck spell.)
--
When you have something like Bane in the game you're encouraging teamwork, because the action and concentration economies don't make it cost effective for one character to use both Bane and another spell requiring a saving throw. Now I may be wrong here, but I feel like teamwork -- intra-party synergy -- combo turns -- is just about the coolest shit you can do in this game. One player setting the stage for another player to go off, I mean, it's what it's all about, right? Thor shooting lightning into Iron Man's arc reactor so he can shoot a huge laser? Love it. With Barbs in the game, though, that changes. No longer do you need two characters' turns to force through a failure. Now you can do it with just one. AND, if you don't end up needing it, you can save the spell slot. So realistically, you'd kinda be a fool to go back to boring ol' Bane or whatever else you were using. That's where my concerns come from. The spell is doing something that's way more efficient and (by my rough estimation, granted) less fun.
"But Choir," I hear you saying, "why don't you just do both? They stack!" And yes, they do, but how low do you really need to go? We're talking about the famous Bounded Accuracy here. You get diminishing returns, surely.
I'll freely admit this is all speculation on my part. Nobody's actually taken this spell in my groups. I think it feels off to people since it's a Magic setting guide thing.
I mean if it's a full spell level off, that means it's semi-broken. I'd argue that it does comparable things to the other 1st level reaction spells.
Disagree.... The fact you give ADV and effectively cast a high level spell again is more then what you get with the others.
Have watched about half this Treantmonk video so far. Two things, mostly:
1.) I still absolutely hate this guy. Watching this video is physically painful.
2.) I'm confused by why folks are citing his video as a reason Barbs is egregiously overpowered, because most of what he says seems to agree with everything I wrote at the very beginning of this thread. There's been ways to impose disadvantage on saves since 5e was printed, and literally nobody uses/likes them. The Arcane Trickster is considered one of the worst rogue subclasses outside Booming Blade nonsense despite Magical Ambush being very nearly on-demand disadvantage on saves, and the sorcerer's Heightened Spell has been doing this forever and is still considered one of the worst metamagic options. Even Treantmonk - the poster child for "your stuff sucks and you should feel bad for playing it" - is telling people to chill the hell out and stop fretting, because Barbs isn't really all that bad. Good, yes, absolutely, not not a game-shattering nightmare monster like people keep saying it is.
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Indeed. But I have now a more nuanced position on him, that his followers are worse than the man himself.
It’s the flexibility I have an issue with. Are there times other first level spells will be better? Sure. Shield is better if you are taking a bunch of attacks. BUT shield can only deal with attacks. Nothing else.
my problem with silvery barbs is this. It is never a bad option. It might not be the single most optimal spell, but it wraps similar effects to other spells, metamagic and class features in one and lets you pick each time. That’s where my problem lies. Heightened spell is expensive, hence its lack of use. It costs level 2 spells worth of points of one half of the spells effects on a reaction, and no other flexibility.
it is also perhaps the most offensive reaction spell I have ever seen. You can get some nasty failed saves out of this and you can turn advantage into what looks like elven accuracy style turbo disadvantage. And you have to know if they succeeded before you even try the spell. And it buffs counterspell
but that isn’t all it does. It then gives advantage to someone else? Why? Wasn’t this good enough?
so sure other spells may be situationally better. But there are no spells in the first or second levels that offers this wide range of use and the sheer breadth of application. This is not a first level spell. Bump it to second or even third. Then it’s fine.
one good litmus test (but not perfect) for a spell is this. If you gave the spell to NPC casters, would the players be ok with that? I would put money that this spell makes them a whole lot more nervous than shield does.
I think that's fair as a general gauge, though as you said... not perfect. I don't think it works especially well as a litmus test in this case. Enemies in encounters have advantages PCs never have.
1. There are often more NPCs, so the effect of a bunch of reactions being used to compel rerolls will have a larger impact on the other side of the field.
2. Regarding Shield specifically; Shield is best for when you already have a solid AC. AC gives accelerating returns, up to a certain point at least. NPCs tend to have pretty terrible AC, so shield is less useful for them. If you gave an enemy caster an optimized AC tower build and shield, the players would probably hate that a lot more than Silvery Barbs.
3. Enemies are disposable. They don't have to worry about resource management at all. I once had a DM use wish against my party as an opening. Not replicating a spell, the kind of wish that risks losing wish. He didn't have any real motivation to do this, hadn't tried talking us down, hadn't tried anything else in the fight yet. No PC caster would EVER, EVER do this. Risking the loss of wish is an absolute last resort once you get it. But if it's an NPC and you can just throw him away after? He can do it and it doesn't matter*. Tossing fresh spellcasters at the party with similar spell loadouts is going to tend to favor enemy casters because they are disposable.
Silvery Barbs is a fine spell, but its versatility is also the only reason it competes with more specialized reactions. Without that, it'd just be a bad spell.
*I acknowledge this particular case was an instance of poor DMing as much as anything, but it does help illustrate my point.
Like which, though?
Silvery Barbs imposes pseudo disadvantage on the enemy (meaning that you don't ever waste it on an event that was always going to go un your favour anyway (by my calculations that's a little less than double bang for your buck for other disadvantage spells), and it's also stackable with real disadvantage as well as not being cancelled by advantage, meaning that even if they'd normally have advantage, you can cancel that with disadvantage and then use SB to impose what is effectively a disadvantage, if needs be) and gives advantage to an ally. Additionally
Yeah OK, it's not the "I Win" button, but, outside of specific situations, that's doing a lot more than the other L1 Reaction spells that I can think of.
Feather Fall saves you from falling. So far, I've never had a use for it, but it doesn't seem to be comparable to SB.
Hellish Rebuke that seems pretty powerful, actually.
Shield gives you +5AC each is roughly the equivalent to what SB would do (according to others on the board, I havent done the maths, but it can only apply to you and doesn't give advantage to an ally on top. Im also unclear as to when Shield can be used, can you know if +5AC would make a difference before casting?
Have I missed any? One is not anywhere near as useful. One is offensive spell that isn't comparable. The last has advantages, mostly that it lasts a round rather than just the one off. On the other hand, SB is far more flexible, which makes it more useful in my opinion. I do think SB is above the other L1 spells.
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You missed Absorb Elements and, at a higher level, Counterspell (note that spell slot difference aside, you still only get one reaction so you'll have to pick). The reason SB is balanced that people seem to be missing is you only have one reaction and, again, stiff competition.
Anyone who said Silvery Barbs is roughly equivalent to Shield in the domain of avoiding physical attacks is just mistaken. They're about the same value against one attack (with SB being better against a single crit, because Shield can't stop a crit), but typically Shield is going to be used against a pile of attacks coming your way. Attack rolls are much more common than saving throws, and against piles of attacks? Shield just wins, full stop, not even close. The value of +5 AC for a round is being compared to the value of one attack being rerolled with the same slot and reaction and maybe missing.
Not saying SB is bad, but it's not the game changer people seem to think it is. I've played a Chronurgist, they get baaasically the same thing as a class feature. Is it useful? Yes, very useful. But I used my reaction on Shield and Counterspell a lot more than I did on Chronal Shift. If you're going to use your reaction to adjust a roll, it needs to be a very important single roll to be worth using over something else.
A class feature that you get one per day and if you use it again you get a level of exhaustion....
This is a first level spell that can be cast many more tiles per day.
And your comparison to counterspell is more apt... But that's a 3rd level spell!
Shield is needed or else spell casters would die very fast at high levels....at best you are looking at 16 AC before shield.... It's honestly not even an optional spell so it's not like you aren't going to take in. Addition to SB anyway...
I'm all for the spell existing.... Just not as a 1st level.
2nd level it's fine