This bears repeating. If what people really want is the ability to summon a bunch of horses (or seahorses, or pegasi etc) for that arguably cool moment of getting the party from point A to point B overland in style... let's just make a new spell specifically for that then, and make it impossible to cast in combat, and make the gaggle of mounts flee from a fight etc.
Why is it necessary to have magically summoned mounts flee from combat? Regular mounts that players can buy or rent in any major city don't automatically flee from combat. Find Steed mounts don't automatically flee from combat. Phantom Steeds don't automatically flee from combat. Why should a druid's magically conjured mounts flee from combat?
Yeah; just keeping them from having combat-tier attacks does most of the work. How often do you see people trying to have Riding Horses or Warhorses attack in combat, and if you've ever seen it, how effective was it?
The utility that could be provided by beasts is greatly overrated; other than combat, it's mostly for burrowing and getting running, flying, or swimming mounts.
As was pointed out in the recent reveal of the 2024 books and the "adventure retrospective" at the con, another use was as "trap springers" (which I have had happen, so I laughed appropriately) and as diversions, food supplies, solutions to a starving village, solutions to a dangerously harmed village, and so forth (once had a party gift a fisherman a haul of 8 tuna).
The focus on combat tends to override the larger contextual value of the spells as a tool -- and I am still very much pleased by these changes, but, again, for my own reasons. I'm pretty good with them all being retained, but regardless I will be keeping the new spells myself and my feedback will include positive results.
The issue seems to me to be the absence of specificity in what can be conjured and the sheer annoyance of the whole "here's a handful of small lynxes to deal with in combat" and the impact in practical time. meanwhile the mob rules are still present in the overall game, and could easily be used to handle the small mob of critters (however annoying to the PC) for speed of play, but they do have issues.
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Yeah; just keeping them from having combat-tier attacks does most of the work. How often do you see people trying to have Riding Horses or Warhorses attack in combat, and if you've ever seen it, how effective was it?
Paladin warhorse? Quite effective. Riding horse, not so much. regular warhorse, pretty effective.
Expensive for the PCs, since my bad guys tend towards expedience and tactical pragmatism, but that's a separate issue.
Will not get into the Axe-beak mounts.
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Yeah; just keeping them from having combat-tier attacks does most of the work. How often do you see people trying to have Riding Horses or Warhorses attack in combat, and if you've ever seen it, how effective was it?
Sorry, but then why does everyone believe that druids always summon 8 CR 1/4 creatures using Conjure Animals? A Warhorse is CR 1/2 so is significantly more powerful in terms of attacking in combat than the 8 mooks you can conjure with conjure animals. If it's not worth having your Warhorse attack in combat, why would it be worthwhile to conjure a bunch of Ax beaks?
Yeah; just keeping them from having combat-tier attacks does most of the work. How often do you see people trying to have Riding Horses or Warhorses attack in combat, and if you've ever seen it, how effective was it?
Sorry, but then why does everyone believe that druids always summon 8 CR 1/4 creatures using Conjure Animals? A Warhorse is CR 1/2 so is significantly more powerful in terms of attacking in combat than the 8 mooks you can conjure with conjure animals. If it's not worth having your Warhorse attack in combat, why would it be worthwhile to conjure a bunch of Ax beaks?
A Giant Owl is also CR 1/4, and can do 8 damage on a hit, and has flyby.
And while 8 is the meme standard for the spell, it's worth mentioning that upcasting it to 5th level lets you swarm the field with 16 Giant Owls.
It also has a +3 to hit, what is that doing at 9th level.
The reason people use 8x CR 1/4 is because it's the most effective option the vast majority of the time, and the situations where it's not effective (say, lots of fireballs going off) it's typically not worth using the spell at all.
Easy fix to bring 2014 version into 2024, by limiting it to the same creature selections as the Druid and only allow one of the creatures to attack per turn.
Conjure AnimalsConcentratio
LEVEL
3rd
CASTING TIME
1 Minute
RANGE/AREA
60 ft
COMPONENTS
V, S
DURATION
Concentration 1 Hour
SCHOOL
Conjuration
ATTACK/SAVE
None
DAMAGE/EFFECT
Summoning
You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. Choose one of the following options for what appears:
One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower
Two beasts of challenge rating 1 or lower
Four beasts of challenge rating 1/2 or lower
Eight beasts of challenge rating 1/4 or lower
Each beast is also considered fey, and it disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. In combat the creatures share your initiative and take their turn immediately after you. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them. As part of any Action you take on your turn you may command any number of creatures to move and one creature to use it’s it’s Action and/or Bonus action on its turn. If you don't issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions.
You may select creatures of the appropriate CR from the Player’s Handbook.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th or 6th level, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 4 hours. When you use a spell slot of 7th level or higher, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 16 hours.
I suppose at the end of the day Conjure Animals isn't worse than Animate Objects on numbers. Which arguably also highlights how arbitrary it is for them to only remove Conjure spells. Now, Woodland Beings can definitely create a bit too much chaos/bookkeeping with 8 Pixies. Don't think Minor Elementals creates anything particularly out there. Honestly, unless they're going to try and remove Animate Objects (which I think would probably cause a lot more negative reactions), it seems more like the biggest thing to do is just bump Pixies up to CR 1/2 or 1 so they can't swarm the field and do crazy stuff with Polymorph.
I suppose at the end of the day Conjure Animals isn't worse than Animate Objects on numbers. Which arguably also highlights how arbitrary it is for them to only remove Conjure spells.
Animate Objects needs fixing as well, though it doesn't have the complexity problems, just the balance problem of 65 damage per round with +8 to hit.
The animate object fix is simple. Move their turn to share initiative with the caster And make it so that while all of them can move each turn only on animated object can use an Action and/or bonus action on their turn and they share 1 reaction.
Easy fix to bring 2014 version into 2024, by limiting it to the same creature selections as the Druid and only allow one of the creatures to attack per turn.
Conjure AnimalsConcentratio
LEVEL
3rd
CASTING TIME
1 Minute
RANGE/AREA
60 ft
COMPONENTS
V, S
DURATION
Concentration 1 Hour
SCHOOL
Conjuration
ATTACK/SAVE
None
DAMAGE/EFFECT
Summoning
You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. Choose one of the following options for what appears:
One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower
Two beasts of challenge rating 1 or lower
Four beasts of challenge rating 1/2 or lower
Eight beasts of challenge rating 1/4 or lower
Each beast is also considered fey, and it disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. In combat the creatures share your initiative and take their turn immediately after you. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them. As part of any Action you take on your turn you may command any number of creatures to move and one creature to use it’s it’s Action and/or Bonus action on its turn. If you don't issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions.
You may select creatures of the appropriate CR from the Player’s Handbook.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th or 6th level, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 4 hours. When you use a spell slot of 7th level or higher, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 16 hours.
While I grant that this version is saner than the 2014 version, it still outclasses Summon Beast by a significant margin unless they really restrict what beasts are in the PHB, or they buff Summon Beast from what it is now significantly.
That has to also be taken into account when thinking about how WoTC will handle these.
I forgot to include that they share 1 reaction. That should keep this spell better for OoC stuff, but still combat viable and Summon Beast better for Combat but still viable for OoC. What hurts summon beast for OoC is the beast is always small, and lacks any good OoC features. If you feel that reaction change isn’t enough to equalize the use of Summon Beast and Conjure Animals also upping the cast time of Conjure Animals to 10 minutes might help balance the two spells.
Also as I think I need to reword “as part of any Action.” It’s meant to mean as part of your Action no matter what Action you take, meaning you can only command one creature to use an action and/or bonus action per turn, but I think it reads like as “any action” so part of an Action, part of a Bonus Action, or part of a Move Action. Which it is not meant to be, but someone will argue it means you can command up to 3 beast to use an Action and/or Bonus Action. I see why designers have problems with language.
The animate object fix is simple. Move their turn to share initiative with the caster And make it so that while all of them can move each turn only on animated object can use an Action and/or bonus action on their turn and they share 1 reaction.
Allowing only a single one to attack per turn defeats the point of the spell. If I want hold concentration to do about 6 extra damage a turn, I'll use Flaming Sphere and save myself 3 spell levels.
The animate object fix is simple. Move their turn to share initiative with the caster And make it so that while all of them can move each turn only on animated object can use an Action and/or bonus action on their turn and they share 1 reaction.
Allowing only a single one to attack per turn defeats the point of the spell. If I want hold concentration to do about 6 extra damage a turn, I'll use Flaming Sphere and save myself 3 spell levels.
I wonder if they could up the damage of the single hit to make it balanced.
I think in terms of simplifying the existing 5e spells, it was Pantagruel666 that suggested earlier having more swarms that can be used. So the format of conjure animals for example could become:
One beast, or swarm of beasts, of challenge rating 2 or lower
Two beasts, or swarms of beasts, of challenge rating 1 or lower
In this way there are never more than two creatures for the purposes of combat. New "swarms" would need to be provided for this purpose, with some thought to their utility, for example:
Herd. This swarm consists of four draft horses, and can be treated as such for the purposes of using them as mounts etc.
Either that or we would need a good template for adapting creatures into a swarm based on their size. For example, a swarm might have four members and become one size class larger (so a swarm of Medium creatures becomes a Large swarm of four), with Multiattack granting two attacks at advantage with double damage dice, triple hit-points and two steps up in challenge rating (CR 1/2 becomes CR 2 etc.).
That's very much off the top of my head though so probably not even close to balanced; it might be necessary to make a table to have the conversion be more precise for different size classes and such. These swarms would also have a generic version of the above rule that lets them be treated as individuals in a similar way, and with the DM able to split the swarm if they wish, otherwise the swarm is always considered to "group up" again for the purposes of combat.
This should still give all the fun and utility of conjuring larger numbers of creatures, but without the same headaches for the DM/group. It would also be useful for these spells to include a list of sample creatures (and their swarm versions) for easy reference, to cut down on the need for looking anything up.
The other alternative is to treat the conjure spells that currently allow more a choice of numbers as specifically for summoning multiple, and only give them the option of summoning the swarm. They could then convert these to be the same as summon spells with a "swarm of beasts" creature with land, sea and air varieties, and some rules enabling them to retain a lot of the previous utility. This way they'd be limited to a single creature only, with no look-up required, but keep at least some of the utility of having multiple creatures. This could also just be provided as a "quick" option for the "full" version of the spell that allows for specific creatures to be used if you have the profiles to hand, otherwise you just use the generic one instead.
And of course whatever version is provided it should use the updating summoning format of taking the turn immediately after the summoner.
A more radical approach might be to formalise how I've sometimes handled larger numbers of summons (such as for a necromancer) which is to divide responsibility among all players. I've done this before because I'm pretty sure technically the conjured creatures are under the control of the DM, they just happen to follow instructions given by the conjurer, but that's a lot of extra work for the DM, so instead you can just give everybody one or two creatures each to run after their turn. Not entirely sure how you'd formalise that into a rule, but I've found it a more fun way to run things like that since it gives everyone something to do, rather than one player or the DM taking ages to resolve all of it at once every round. The downside of this method though is that it's still slowing the game down, and you have to make sure everybody has access to the stat block.
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The animate object fix is simple. Move their turn to share initiative with the caster And make it so that while all of them can move each turn only on animated object can use an Action and/or bonus action on their turn and they share 1 reaction.
Allowing only a single one to attack per turn defeats the point of the spell. If I want hold concentration to do about 6 extra damage a turn, I'll use Flaming Sphere and save myself 3 spell levels.
I wonder if they could up the damage of the single hit to make it balanced.
Doesn't really fix the issue there, imo; you can upcast Flaming Sphere and there's other spells that let you use your bonus action for a single instance of extra damage. If you can't make multiple attacks with Animate Objects, it has nothing to offer that isn't already on the table, mechanically speaking. Heck, it'd arguably be worse than something like Spiritual Weapon or Flaming Sphere since those can't be targeted for attacks or caught in AoE's to end the effect early.
The downside of this method though is that it's still slowing the game down, and you have to make sure everybody has access to the stat block.
Access to the stat block is not a massively insurmountable obstacle; if it's a basic rules block then anyone with a smart device can look the info up, if your group is using digital resources they can either use a content sharing feature or screenshots of the stat block, and I expect most pen and paper groups also have at least one player with access to a printer. Worst case someone can buy a stack of index cards and write up HP, AC, speed, to hit/damage, and ability scores if those are considered relevant.
I suppose at the end of the day Conjure Animals isn't worse than Animate Objects on numbers. Which arguably also highlights how arbitrary it is for them to only remove Conjure spells. Now, Woodland Beings can definitely create a bit too much chaos/bookkeeping with 8 Pixies. Don't think Minor Elementals creates anything particularly out there. Honestly, unless they're going to try and remove Animate Objects (which I think would probably cause a lot more negative reactions), it seems more like the biggest thing to do is just bump Pixies up to CR 1/2 or 1 so they can't swarm the field and do crazy stuff with Polymorph.
Pixies should be CR 1, I mean Polymorph & Counterspell? That will destroy a level 1 party unless they get the initiative, and Giant Owls should be bumped up to CR 1/2. I'd even be totally fine if all the Conjure Spells were limited to CR 1 or CR 2 options and the 1/4 and 1/2 options were removed (As long as Animate Objects gets the same nerf).
A more radical approach might be to formalise how I've sometimes handled larger numbers of summons (such as for a necromancer) which is to divide responsibility among all players.
Our table has used an assistant DM to run all the NPCs / Monsters; their experience speeds up gameplay and frees up the DM to control the game flow.
We also thought about fighters and paladins calling upon their hirelings as similar to other classes summoning and conjuring help. Apart from gameplay speed and combat complexity, we consider when a NPC / Monster requires a player to give up their action to provide orders or will they give up, retreat, flee, betray and turn, etc. There needs to be some risk to mitigate in order to obtain the benefits of summoning allies.
The animate object fix is simple. Move their turn to share initiative with the caster And make it so that while all of them can move each turn only on animated object can use an Action and/or bonus action on their turn and they share 1 reaction.
Naw, if Conjure Animals is now just a glowing circle of damage effect, Animate Objects needs the same treatment because they are parallel spells doing basically the same thing for both Arcane vs Primal casters.
So Animate Objects: 5th level Transmutation spell
You magically animate a swarm of tiny objects such as coins, pebbles, or twigs in a 5ft radius sphere. A creature that enters the swarms space on a turn or starts its turn there must make a Dexterity saving throw or take 10d4 force damage on a failure or half as much on a success. As a bonus action of your turn you can move the swarm 30ft in a direction of your choice.
If you cast the spell with a higher level spell slot increase the damage by 2d4 for each level above 5th.
Why is it necessary to have magically summoned mounts flee from combat? Regular mounts that players can buy or rent in any major city don't automatically flee from combat. Find Steed mounts don't automatically flee from combat. Phantom Steeds don't automatically flee from combat. Why should a druid's magically conjured mounts flee from combat?
Yeah; just keeping them from having combat-tier attacks does most of the work. How often do you see people trying to have Riding Horses or Warhorses attack in combat, and if you've ever seen it, how effective was it?
As was pointed out in the recent reveal of the 2024 books and the "adventure retrospective" at the con, another use was as "trap springers" (which I have had happen, so I laughed appropriately) and as diversions, food supplies, solutions to a starving village, solutions to a dangerously harmed village, and so forth (once had a party gift a fisherman a haul of 8 tuna).
The focus on combat tends to override the larger contextual value of the spells as a tool -- and I am still very much pleased by these changes, but, again, for my own reasons. I'm pretty good with them all being retained, but regardless I will be keeping the new spells myself and my feedback will include positive results.
The issue seems to me to be the absence of specificity in what can be conjured and the sheer annoyance of the whole "here's a handful of small lynxes to deal with in combat" and the impact in practical time. meanwhile the mob rules are still present in the overall game, and could easily be used to handle the small mob of critters (however annoying to the PC) for speed of play, but they do have issues.
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Paladin warhorse? Quite effective. Riding horse, not so much. regular warhorse, pretty effective.
Expensive for the PCs, since my bad guys tend towards expedience and tactical pragmatism, but that's a separate issue.
Will not get into the Axe-beak mounts.
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Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
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Sorry, but then why does everyone believe that druids always summon 8 CR 1/4 creatures using Conjure Animals? A Warhorse is CR 1/2 so is significantly more powerful in terms of attacking in combat than the 8 mooks you can conjure with conjure animals. If it's not worth having your Warhorse attack in combat, why would it be worthwhile to conjure a bunch of Ax beaks?
It also has a +3 to hit, what is that doing at 9th level.
The reason people use 8x CR 1/4 is because it's the most effective option the vast majority of the time, and the situations where it's not effective (say, lots of fireballs going off) it's typically not worth using the spell at all.
Easy fix to bring 2014 version into 2024, by limiting it to the same creature selections as the Druid and only allow one of the creatures to attack per turn.
You summon fey spirits that take the form of beasts and appear in unoccupied spaces that you can see within range. Choose one of the following options for what appears:
Each beast is also considered fey, and it disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends.
The summoned creatures are friendly to you and your companions. In combat the creatures share your initiative and take their turn immediately after you. They obey any verbal commands that you issue to them. As part of any Action you take on your turn you may command any number of creatures to move and one creature to use it’s it’s Action and/or Bonus action on its turn. If you don't issue any commands to them, they defend themselves from hostile creatures, but otherwise take no actions.
You may select creatures of the appropriate CR from the Player’s Handbook.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 5th or 6th level, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 4 hours. When you use a spell slot of 7th level or higher, you can maintain your concentration on the spell for up to 16 hours.
I suppose at the end of the day Conjure Animals isn't worse than Animate Objects on numbers. Which arguably also highlights how arbitrary it is for them to only remove Conjure spells. Now, Woodland Beings can definitely create a bit too much chaos/bookkeeping with 8 Pixies. Don't think Minor Elementals creates anything particularly out there. Honestly, unless they're going to try and remove Animate Objects (which I think would probably cause a lot more negative reactions), it seems more like the biggest thing to do is just bump Pixies up to CR 1/2 or 1 so they can't swarm the field and do crazy stuff with Polymorph.
Animate Objects needs fixing as well, though it doesn't have the complexity problems, just the balance problem of 65 damage per round with +8 to hit.
The animate object fix is simple. Move their turn to share initiative with the caster And make it so that while all of them can move each turn only on animated object can use an Action and/or bonus action on their turn and they share 1 reaction.
I forgot to include that they share 1 reaction. That should keep this spell better for OoC stuff, but still combat viable and Summon Beast better for Combat but still viable for OoC. What hurts summon beast for OoC is the beast is always small, and lacks any good OoC features. If you feel that reaction change isn’t enough to equalize the use of Summon Beast and Conjure Animals also upping the cast time of Conjure Animals to 10 minutes might help balance the two spells.
Also as I think I need to reword “as part of any Action.” It’s meant to mean as part of your Action no matter what Action you take, meaning you can only command one creature to use an action and/or bonus action per turn, but I think it reads like as “any action” so part of an Action, part of a Bonus Action, or part of a Move Action. Which it is not meant to be, but someone will argue it means you can command up to 3 beast to use an Action and/or Bonus Action. I see why designers have problems with language.
Allowing only a single one to attack per turn defeats the point of the spell. If I want hold concentration to do about 6 extra damage a turn, I'll use Flaming Sphere and save myself 3 spell levels.
I wonder if they could up the damage of the single hit to make it balanced.
I think in terms of simplifying the existing 5e spells, it was Pantagruel666 that suggested earlier having more swarms that can be used. So the format of conjure animals for example could become:
In this way there are never more than two creatures for the purposes of combat. New "swarms" would need to be provided for this purpose, with some thought to their utility, for example:
Either that or we would need a good template for adapting creatures into a swarm based on their size. For example, a swarm might have four members and become one size class larger (so a swarm of Medium creatures becomes a Large swarm of four), with Multiattack granting two attacks at advantage with double damage dice, triple hit-points and two steps up in challenge rating (CR 1/2 becomes CR 2 etc.).
That's very much off the top of my head though so probably not even close to balanced; it might be necessary to make a table to have the conversion be more precise for different size classes and such. These swarms would also have a generic version of the above rule that lets them be treated as individuals in a similar way, and with the DM able to split the swarm if they wish, otherwise the swarm is always considered to "group up" again for the purposes of combat.
This should still give all the fun and utility of conjuring larger numbers of creatures, but without the same headaches for the DM/group. It would also be useful for these spells to include a list of sample creatures (and their swarm versions) for easy reference, to cut down on the need for looking anything up.
The other alternative is to treat the conjure spells that currently allow more a choice of numbers as specifically for summoning multiple, and only give them the option of summoning the swarm. They could then convert these to be the same as summon spells with a "swarm of beasts" creature with land, sea and air varieties, and some rules enabling them to retain a lot of the previous utility. This way they'd be limited to a single creature only, with no look-up required, but keep at least some of the utility of having multiple creatures. This could also just be provided as a "quick" option for the "full" version of the spell that allows for specific creatures to be used if you have the profiles to hand, otherwise you just use the generic one instead.
And of course whatever version is provided it should use the updating summoning format of taking the turn immediately after the summoner.
A more radical approach might be to formalise how I've sometimes handled larger numbers of summons (such as for a necromancer) which is to divide responsibility among all players. I've done this before because I'm pretty sure technically the conjured creatures are under the control of the DM, they just happen to follow instructions given by the conjurer, but that's a lot of extra work for the DM, so instead you can just give everybody one or two creatures each to run after their turn. Not entirely sure how you'd formalise that into a rule, but I've found it a more fun way to run things like that since it gives everyone something to do, rather than one player or the DM taking ages to resolve all of it at once every round. The downside of this method though is that it's still slowing the game down, and you have to make sure everybody has access to the stat block.
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Doesn't really fix the issue there, imo; you can upcast Flaming Sphere and there's other spells that let you use your bonus action for a single instance of extra damage. If you can't make multiple attacks with Animate Objects, it has nothing to offer that isn't already on the table, mechanically speaking. Heck, it'd arguably be worse than something like Spiritual Weapon or Flaming Sphere since those can't be targeted for attacks or caught in AoE's to end the effect early.
Access to the stat block is not a massively insurmountable obstacle; if it's a basic rules block then anyone with a smart device can look the info up, if your group is using digital resources they can either use a content sharing feature or screenshots of the stat block, and I expect most pen and paper groups also have at least one player with access to a printer. Worst case someone can buy a stack of index cards and write up HP, AC, speed, to hit/damage, and ability scores if those are considered relevant.
Pixies should be CR 1, I mean Polymorph & Counterspell? That will destroy a level 1 party unless they get the initiative, and Giant Owls should be bumped up to CR 1/2. I'd even be totally fine if all the Conjure Spells were limited to CR 1 or CR 2 options and the 1/4 and 1/2 options were removed (As long as Animate Objects gets the same nerf).
Our table has used an assistant DM to run all the NPCs / Monsters; their experience speeds up gameplay and frees up the DM to control the game flow.
We also thought about fighters and paladins calling upon their hirelings as similar to other classes summoning and conjuring help. Apart from gameplay speed and combat complexity, we consider when a NPC / Monster requires a player to give up their action to provide orders or will they give up, retreat, flee, betray and turn, etc. There needs to be some risk to mitigate in order to obtain the benefits of summoning allies.
Naw, if Conjure Animals is now just a glowing circle of damage effect, Animate Objects needs the same treatment because they are parallel spells doing basically the same thing for both Arcane vs Primal casters.
So Animate Objects:
5th level Transmutation spell
You magically animate a swarm of tiny objects such as coins, pebbles, or twigs in a 5ft radius sphere. A creature that enters the swarms space on a turn or starts its turn there must make a Dexterity saving throw or take 10d4 force damage on a failure or half as much on a success. As a bonus action of your turn you can move the swarm 30ft in a direction of your choice.
If you cast the spell with a higher level spell slot increase the damage by 2d4 for each level above 5th.