Fundamentally, save or suck effects are impossible to balance.
No, save or suck effects aren't impossible to balance. They problem is that, even if balanced, they're unfun; neither "I used my cool power, and nothing happened" nor "I used my cool power and instantly won the fight" creates a fun, dramatic encounter.
This is mostly a problem with solo monster fights; if you're fighting a group of monsters, eliminating (or failing to eliminate) a particular adversary is not a huge issue for the encounter as a whole.
Ultimately the best way to balance them would be to rewrite the spells entirely, so that there's always some effect, but you can never take somebody out of the fight on a single roll.
No, that really depends on the target. Yes, taking out your only opponent with a single roll is a problem, but if you're fighting multiple opponents, eliminating one of them with a single action may be fine; if you're fighting enough opponents, eliminating multiple of them with a single action is fine.
The simplest balanced save or suck in 5e rules is just something like "do XdY damage; a creature reduced to 0 HP by this damage is <X> instead of killed". This works quite well for effects like banishment or petrifaction; it works much less well for effects that are intended to be transient. A lot of those can be handled by giving the status effect hit points which can be damaged, but doing so is significantly more complex than the above.
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No, save or suck effects aren't impossible to balance. They problem is that, even if balanced, they're unfun; neither "I used my cool power, and nothing happened" nor "I used my cool power and instantly won the fight" creates a fun, dramatic encounter.
This is mostly a problem with solo monster fights; if you're fighting a group of monsters, eliminating (or failing to eliminate) a particular adversary is not a huge issue for the encounter as a whole.
No, that really depends on the target. Yes, taking out your only opponent with a single roll is a problem, but if you're fighting multiple opponents, eliminating one of them with a single action may be fine; if you're fighting enough opponents, eliminating multiple of them with a single action is fine.
The simplest balanced save or suck in 5e rules is just something like "do XdY damage; a creature reduced to 0 HP by this damage is <X> instead of killed". This works quite well for effects like banishment or petrifaction; it works much less well for effects that are intended to be transient. A lot of those can be handled by giving the status effect hit points which can be damaged, but doing so is significantly more complex than the above.