So, some of the best spells have been nerfed, and some of the worst have been buffed. For instance, guidance is still good but really bad, and resistance is, at least in my opinion, the new guidance. So, I was wondering what people thought of other changes to spells, like spiritual weapon, prayer of healing, and others. In my opinion, prayer of healing is amazing now, letting classes recharge abilities in 10 minutes--maybe some of those minutes could even be productive; for instance, looting a room (thief), casting ritual spells (any caster), and others. Guidance, I guess, is understandable given how overpowered it was but then they buffed resistance by making it a reaction spell, and therefore much more powerful. What are your thoughts on these spells and others?
Although I don’t like some of the changes (Aid was a unique spell. Now it’s just another Temp HP spell, for now) I do think spells do need some balancing. Some spells are “must have” spells and some are “wouldn’t touch it with a 10’ pole” (like true strike). There shouldn’t be such a wide gap between spells. Some will always get picked over others but it shouldn’t be because one is awesome and the other sucks. But more because of character needs and some spells are just going to be situational.
have yet to play test guidance enough to say anything on it, but it looks promising. I do think that is overboard when it comes to saves with resistance.
Spiritual weapon, I kind of get where its coming from similar spells have concentration. So it kind of stacks up against say flaming sphere, though moonbeam looks better than both. But does it stack up against the tashas summons spells, well no its much weaker than those. I'm kind of the opinion that concentration got overused in 5e and it ended up putting tons of spells in the dustbin. You can only concentrate on one, so you are not going to pick the average or weak choices to slot into your concentration pile. Maybe flaming sphere and moonbeam should be balanced around not having concentration instead of trying to balance spiritual weapon around having it.
Prayer of healing is snazzy but I see the 10 minute rest slapped into it as a patch for their core design flaw of having 1 hour short rests. I'm not a huge 4e fan but the 5 minute short rest worked, the 5e 1 hour short rest imo doesn't.
Banishment I think is a waste of a spell now. A 4th level slot on a single target maybe, and even if it works it will likely only be a round or two. That is a bad use of your actions, a cantrip is usually a better choice. And on the optimization sphere it wasn't even a good spell previously, not bad but it wasn't a must take or anything.
have yet to play test guidance enough to say anything on it, but it looks promising. I do think that is overboard when it comes to saves with resistance.
Spiritual weapon, I kind of get where its coming from similar spells have concentration. So it kind of stacks up against say flaming sphere, though moonbeam looks better than both. But does it stack up against the tashas summons spells, well no its much weaker than those. I'm kind of the opinion that concentration got overused in 5e and it ended up putting tons of spells in the dustbin. You can only concentrate on one, so you are not going to pick the average or weak choices to slot into your concentration pile. Maybe flaming sphere and moonbeam should be balanced around not having concentration instead of trying to balance spiritual weapon around having it.
Prayer of healing is snazzy but I see the 10 minute rest slapped into it as a patch for their core design flaw of having 1 hour short rests. I'm not a huge 4e fan but the 5 minute short rest worked, the 5e 1 hour short rest imo doesn't.
Banishment I think is a waste of a spell now. A 4th level slot on a single target maybe, and even if it works it will likely only be a round or two. That is a bad use of your actions, a cantrip is usually a better choice. And on the optimization sphere it wasn't even a good spell previously, not bad but it wasn't a must take or anything.
Banishment needed to change. Any spell or action that can finish a fight in one casting is no good for the game. Did they need to change it to add save chances? No, but if they didn't do it that way they needed to remove the permanent banishment aspect and maybe shorten the effect to 30 seconds.
Moonbeam and flaming sphere as non concentration....I could buy that. Maybe drop the damage on moonbeam to1d10 and scale based on every two levels of upcasting. Fir flaming sphere they could just eliminate the ramming into creatures feature.
Question: Have either of you actually played a character that uses Flaming Sphere / Moonbeam? Cause it sounds like not.
Moonbeam requires an Action to move it. It is balanced against Call Lightning which is also an Action to use.
Flaming Sphere, outside of ramming it into creatures, only does damage at the end of a creature's turn. Unless the enemy is restrained (most spells that do that also require concentration) or grappled (limiting a martial character to a one-handed weapon which deals far less damage than a 2-handed one) the enemy can easily walk out of the radius on their turn and take 0 damage. And because the radius of Flaming Sphere is so small 90% of the time they can make that movement without even provoking an Attack of Opportunity. Plus Flaming Sphere can hurt your allies as well, so depending on the turn order you can end up forcing your friend to choose between an AoO or Flaming Sphere damage.
Even with requiring Spiritual Weapon to have concentration it is a significantly better spell than Flaming Sphere. SW can: (1) fly and hit enemies that aren't on the ground (FS cannot) (2) deals force damage that is unlikely to be resisted (FS deals fire damage the most resisted / immune in the game) (3) SW uses an attack roll thus can crit and has a higher change to be effective than the Dex save used by FS. (4) SW has a bigger damage die and now better scaling than FS.
Gonna disagree on the banishment issue. There are plenty of things that can finish fights in one action. Plenty of damage builds with martials can do that when facing magical style enemies which generally have lowish hit points. I've literally had a mid level party where the fighter killed a CR 18 creature in the first round in one action. And there is no legendary resistance against damage. Banishment being able to do it against the sub set of extra planar enemies is no worse than fighters doing it against magical enemies, or the myriad of other enemies with lowish hit points. And even when they don't finish it the fight is as good as over against a much wider group of enemies. People only have an issue when its the spell doing it though. There is nothing wrong with a encounter getting finished easily here and there. Let players have their awesome moments where they shine and end a powerful threat in one move, just don't make it the norm.
Now I think a lot of monsters have way too low saves,(personally I think the save system needs a total revamp, it should go back to the 3 save system so there are less weak spots to target and even your weak saves should have a reasonable chance of success unless there is a massive power disparity) in some cases ACs but that is separate from the issue. Allow the one move wins occasionally. They are fun, and there will be plenty more encounters in your campaign.
Spiritual weapon, I kind of get where its coming from similar spells have concentration. So it kind of stacks up against say flaming sphere, though moonbeam looks better than both. But does it stack up against the tashas summons spells, well no its much weaker than those. I'm kind of the opinion that concentration got overused in 5e and it ended up putting tons of spells in the dustbin. You can only concentrate on one, so you are not going to pick the average or weak choices to slot into your concentration pile. Maybe flaming sphere and moonbeam should be balanced around not having concentration instead of trying to balance spiritual weapon around having it.
To be fair, we don't know if any of the so-called "optimal" spells will remain the same. We harp a lot on the changes they've made to Banishment and Spiritual Weapon, but we don't actually know how they'll stack up with the One D&D versions of other spells.
While true I'll say if that is the case where they balance against the new spells that would just make spell casters suck.
Question: Have either of you actually played a character that uses Flaming Sphere / Moonbeam? Cause it sounds like not.
Moonbeam requires an Action to move it. It is balanced against Call Lightning which is also an Action to use.
Flaming Sphere, outside of ramming it into creatures, only does damage at the end of a creature's turn. Unless the enemy is restrained (most spells that do that also require concentration) or grappled (limiting a martial character to a one-handed weapon which deals far less damage than a 2-handed one) the enemy can easily walk out of the radius on their turn and take 0 damage. And because the radius of Flaming Sphere is so small 90% of the time they can make that movement without even provoking an Attack of Opportunity. Plus Flaming Sphere can hurt your allies as well, so depending on the turn order you can end up forcing your friend to choose between an AoO or Flaming Sphere damage.
Even with requiring Spiritual Weapon to have concentration it is a significantly better spell than Flaming Sphere. SW can: (1) fly and hit enemies that aren't on the ground (FS cannot) (2) deals force damage that is unlikely to be resisted (FS deals fire damage the most resisted / immune in the game) (3) SW uses an attack roll thus can crit and has a higher change to be effective than the Dex save used by FS. (4) SW has a bigger damage die and now better scaling than FS.
I have and while that is my experience with flaming sphere for the most part and its why I consider it a bad spell But, a lot of people here say otherwise so I expect optimal situations for its use come up more often in their campaigns. Moonbeam even needing an action is awesome since its start of turn&first entering on a turn. There are a lot of shove style effects out there which can make moonbeam wrack up a ton of damage(for a 2nd level spell) with a minimum of team work where both players feel like they are contributing.
Spiritual weapon is a very strange spell. What purpose does it serve? To weaponize a clerics bonus action so that they can make attack actions or cast action spells while still 'melee attacking' with their wisdom modifier? If that's the case then the design of the spell makes sense, why it scales the way it does, the bonus action, the ranged melee spell attack, the lack of concentration, the cleric only restriction. But changing any of those things and the purpose falls apart.
When I play my Forge Cleric, I have developed two different styles of play. If I use the terminology of 1DD and the Holy Order feature, the first is the Defender loadout. I equip a big meaty maul and rush in to melee, my action is Attack, my bonus action is either Healing Word, Sanctuary, or the activation of something like Heat Metal, a Smite spell, Aura of Vitality, or Animate Objects. Now the alternate version of this is a more support cleric, which would connect itself far more to the Scholar/Thaumaturge than Defender. In this example I'm hanging back 15-20 feet from the melee. I've got a shield equipped and nothing in my hand. My action is going to be casting my more powerful Action based spells (think Cure Wounds vs Healing Word), there are LOTS of options for me on the table. In this situation I'm going to be looking far more heavily at Spiritual Weapon to provide consistent use of my bonus action vs my defender build.
So to me, I think Spiritual weapons changes are actually fine, but we need to see a little buff to the Holy Order feature that the Scholar does not need to use concentration on Spiritual Weapon to keep the intentional use case alive.
Banishment, that ones easy to fix, IMO. "As an action on subsequent turns, you can force the banished creature to fail it's save to escape." (or if you want to prevent Legendary resistance shenanigans you can "force the creature to forego its escape attempt", but I'd rather leave that up to the DM, a boss forcing it's way out of banishment is pretty epic). It might be just me but putting Concentration + Action Locked up for 10 turns to perma-banish the foe after a minute seems fair.
IMO the purpose (and most common use I've seen) of SW is to give cleric a pseudo Extra Attack, so they can Attack with their action, and BA Attack with their SW, or they can cast a cantrip and Attack with their SW. It supports the "sustained damage" cleric build. If a cleric has better spells to cast with their action then IME they cast those immediately as an action first and don't cast SW until they run out of (or don't want to use) more action spells.
Banishment, that ones easy to fix, IMO. "As an action on subsequent turns, you can force the banished creature to fail it's save to escape." (or if you want to prevent Legendary resistance shenanigans you can "force the creature to forego its escape attempt", but I'd rather leave that up to the DM, a boss forcing it's way out of banishment is pretty epic). It might be just me but putting Concentration + Action Locked up for 10 turns to perma-banish the foe after a minute seems fair.
That's still an encounter-ender. If they could spend their action to impose disadvantage, that at least keeps some element of risk.
As for spiritual weapon, I'm fine with the proposed change. It requires concentration, but it scales better and becomes a real choice.
Question: Have either of you actually played a character that uses Flaming Sphere / Moonbeam? Cause it sounds like not.
Moonbeam requires an Action to move it. It is balanced against Call Lightning which is also an Action to use.
Flaming Sphere, outside of ramming it into creatures, only does damage at the end of a creature's turn. Unless the enemy is restrained (most spells that do that also require concentration) or grappled (limiting a martial character to a one-handed weapon which deals far less damage than a 2-handed one) the enemy can easily walk out of the radius on their turn and take 0 damage. And because the radius of Flaming Sphere is so small 90% of the time they can make that movement without even provoking an Attack of Opportunity. Plus Flaming Sphere can hurt your allies as well, so depending on the turn order you can end up forcing your friend to choose between an AoO or Flaming Sphere damage.
Even with requiring Spiritual Weapon to have concentration it is a significantly better spell than Flaming Sphere. SW can: (1) fly and hit enemies that aren't on the ground (FS cannot) (2) deals force damage that is unlikely to be resisted (FS deals fire damage the most resisted / immune in the game) (3) SW uses an attack roll thus can crit and has a higher change to be effective than the Dex save used by FS. (4) SW has a bigger damage die and now better scaling than FS.
Huge disagree with spiritual weapon. Once you get spells like Spirit Guardians or Spirit Shroud, there is no reason to ever really look at Spiritual Weapons. Flaming Sphere has been a bad spell ever since they removed the combo with pyrotechnics; flaming sphere should not be used as a measuring tool. The better damage scaling does not make up for it requiring concentration. Moon Beam can be used with forced movement for combos so it has that going for it; also both moon beam and flaming sphere are on different spell lists than spiritual weapon, which makes comparisons questionable.
In regards to banishment, counterplay, in the fact that it is a concentration spell, exists. There is always having minions break concentration before it becomes permanent. If they have a really good con save, there is always looking towards conditions like stun or paralyze to break concentration. Or just focus firing the character concentrating on the spell in an attempt to knock them to 0, which will also break concentration. From my experience, people were already handling Banishment without any real issue in 5E.
Moon Beam can be used with forced movement for combos so it has that going for it;
It also only triggers at the start of an enemy turn which makes it useless against any enemy with movement-based Legendary Actions (like all dragons have), and has the potential for anti-combos with a careless or unstrategic party (e.g. the bard blasting the enemy out of your moonbeam to avoid an AoO as they run away, or using Dissonant Whispers thinking they are "focus firing" them). Moonbeam is good but it's not a must-have, same with Call Lightning. They are both well balanced spells IMO.
Moonbeam is an excellent spell by the standards of second level damaging spells, but most second level damage spells are crud so that's not saying a lot.
Moon Beam can be used with forced movement for combos so it has that going for it;
It also only triggers at the start of an enemy turn which makes it useless against any enemy with movement-based Legendary Actions (like all dragons have), and has the potential for anti-combos with a careless or unstrategic party (e.g. the bard blasting the enemy out of your moonbeam to avoid an AoO as they run away, or using Dissonant Whispers thinking they are "focus firing" them). Moonbeam is good but it's not a must-have, same with Call Lightning. They are both well balanced spells IMO.
Eh, I consider them to be on the weaker end. Moonbeam can be a bit more useful when you compare it to the other options that Druid has, but I often find the spell being abandoned at higher levels unless the group is expecting shapeshifters or if something is weak to radiant. Also, you are wrong on that it only triggering at the start of an enemy's turn. It also triggers when a creature enters the spell's area for the first time on a turn. So you could shove someone into the moonbeam and they will take damage, then on their turn if they are not out of it, they would take the damage again.
Call Lightning is also in kind of a similar boat. I wouldn't call them well balanced spells personally.
Like you would never use it against an adult or ancient dragon, especially with how dragons tend to have high con saves.
Moon Beam can be used with forced movement for combos so it has that going for it;
It also only triggers at the start of an enemy turn which makes it useless against any enemy with movement-based Legendary Actions (like all dragons have), and has the potential for anti-combos with a careless or unstrategic party (e.g. the bard blasting the enemy out of your moonbeam to avoid an AoO as they run away, or using Dissonant Whispers thinking they are "focus firing" them). Moonbeam is good but it's not a must-have, same with Call Lightning. They are both well balanced spells IMO.
Eh, I consider them to be on the weaker end. Moonbeam can be a bit more useful when you compare it to the other options that Druid has, but I often find the spell being abandoned at higher levels unless the group is expecting shapeshifters or if something is weak to radiant. Also, you are wrong on that it only triggering at the start of an enemy's turn. It also triggers when a creature enters the spell's area for the first time on a turn. So you could shove someone into the moonbeam and they will take damage, then on their turn if they are not out of it, they would take the damage again.
Call Lightning is also in kind of a similar boat. I wouldn't call them well balanced spells personally.
Like you would never use it against an adult or ancient dragon, especially with how dragons tend to have high con saves.
Exactly, but that's why they are well balanced spells. Moonbeam is good in many situations, great in a few situations, and bad in some situations - this mean it is actually a choice whether you prepare it or not and whether you use it or not compared to other spells. It being abandoned at higher levels is also evidence it is well balanced because low level spells should be outclassed by higher level spells otherwise there is no feeling of progression as characters gain higher level spells.
Same goes with Call Lightning, usually it is good, sometimes it is great, sometimes it is useless, and you don't keep using it forever.
A spell that is always great is actually a bad spell b/c it takes away choices and diversity of play - because it is always the right answer - it also kills the feeling of progression for the character. If you're a cleric and casting Spirit Guardians every combat from level 5-13 is the most optimal choice then that is a bad thing, it makes cleric boring and repetitive and means there is no point to having the 20 other damage spells on the cleric spell list exist in the game at all...
Moon Beam can be used with forced movement for combos so it has that going for it;
It also only triggers at the start of an enemy turn which makes it useless against any enemy with movement-based Legendary Actions (like all dragons have), and has the potential for anti-combos with a careless or unstrategic party (e.g. the bard blasting the enemy out of your moonbeam to avoid an AoO as they run away, or using Dissonant Whispers thinking they are "focus firing" them). Moonbeam is good but it's not a must-have, same with Call Lightning. They are both well balanced spells IMO.
Eh, I consider them to be on the weaker end. Moonbeam can be a bit more useful when you compare it to the other options that Druid has, but I often find the spell being abandoned at higher levels unless the group is expecting shapeshifters or if something is weak to radiant. Also, you are wrong on that it only triggering at the start of an enemy's turn. It also triggers when a creature enters the spell's area for the first time on a turn. So you could shove someone into the moonbeam and they will take damage, then on their turn if they are not out of it, they would take the damage again.
Call Lightning is also in kind of a similar boat. I wouldn't call them well balanced spells personally.
Like you would never use it against an adult or ancient dragon, especially with how dragons tend to have high con saves.
Exactly, but that's why they are well balanced spells. Moonbeam is good in many situations, great in a few situations, and bad in some situations - this mean it is actually a choice whether you prepare it or not and whether you use it or not compared to other spells. It being abandoned at higher levels is also evidence it is well balanced because low level spells should be outclassed by higher level spells otherwise there is no feeling of progression as characters gain higher level spells.
Same goes with Call Lightning, usually it is good, sometimes it is great, sometimes it is useless, and you don't keep using it forever.
A spell that is always great is actually a bad spell b/c it takes away choices and diversity of play - because it is always the right answer - it also kills the feeling of progression for the character. If you're a cleric and casting Spirit Guardians every combat from level 5-13 is the most optimal choice then that is a bad thing, it makes cleric boring and repetitive and means there is no point to having the 20 other damage spells on the cleric spell list exist in the game at all...
Again I disagree. There is nothing wrong for having spells that would work in a general use loadout. You can't prepare every situational spell; the general strategy is to have a set of spells that are useful for general usage and swap them out for more situational spells if you can scout out ahead of time.
Fact is, I haven't found anyone who has found cleric to be repittive or boring. We still have choice in our spells because there are enough spells that are good in general use to have diversity because spells are for more thah just combat, but utility as well. So with that in mind, I disagree with the notion that Spirit Guardians is a bad spell; I say it is one if the better designed spells and one of the more fun ones to use.
Also, you also have to consider the spell lists each spell is on. It is flawed to compare moon beam to spiritual weapon and call lightning to spirit guardians because generally, they are not going to be on the same character due to be on different spell lists. What spell list a spell is on matters as you have to consider the class that is using the spell as well. Clerics are the usual users of Spirit Weapon and Spirit Guardians while Druid are the usual users of Moon Beam and Call Lightning.
Isn't it the same for either side of this. Its either they are fine or need to be nerfed here on repeat from both sides.
It's an irreconcilable disagreement, aye. Mana thinks everything should be buffed to match the most powerful stuff in the game already, while a couple of us believe both the top and bottom should be shifted towards the middle. It's the fundamental: big numbers vs strategy player difference. Whether you just want to roll big numbers in a power fantasy, or whether you want to have to make interesting choices that entail risks and rewards.
So, some of the best spells have been nerfed, and some of the worst have been buffed. For instance, guidance is still good but really bad, and resistance is, at least in my opinion, the new guidance. So, I was wondering what people thought of other changes to spells, like spiritual weapon, prayer of healing, and others. In my opinion, prayer of healing is amazing now, letting classes recharge abilities in 10 minutes--maybe some of those minutes could even be productive; for instance, looting a room (thief), casting ritual spells (any caster), and others. Guidance, I guess, is understandable given how overpowered it was but then they buffed resistance by making it a reaction spell, and therefore much more powerful. What are your thoughts on these spells and others?
DMing:
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle
Playing:
None sadly.
Optimization Guides:
Literally Too Angry to Die - A Guide to Optimizing a Barbarian
Although I don’t like some of the changes (Aid was a unique spell. Now it’s just another Temp HP spell, for now) I do think spells do need some balancing. Some spells are “must have” spells and some are “wouldn’t touch it with a 10’ pole” (like true strike). There shouldn’t be such a wide gap between spells. Some will always get picked over others but it shouldn’t be because one is awesome and the other sucks. But more because of character needs and some spells are just going to be situational.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
What's wrong with the proposed changes to guidance?
have yet to play test guidance enough to say anything on it, but it looks promising. I do think that is overboard when it comes to saves with resistance.
Spiritual weapon, I kind of get where its coming from similar spells have concentration. So it kind of stacks up against say flaming sphere, though moonbeam looks better than both. But does it stack up against the tashas summons spells, well no its much weaker than those. I'm kind of the opinion that concentration got overused in 5e and it ended up putting tons of spells in the dustbin. You can only concentrate on one, so you are not going to pick the average or weak choices to slot into your concentration pile. Maybe flaming sphere and moonbeam should be balanced around not having concentration instead of trying to balance spiritual weapon around having it.
Prayer of healing is snazzy but I see the 10 minute rest slapped into it as a patch for their core design flaw of having 1 hour short rests. I'm not a huge 4e fan but the 5 minute short rest worked, the 5e 1 hour short rest imo doesn't.
Banishment I think is a waste of a spell now. A 4th level slot on a single target maybe, and even if it works it will likely only be a round or two. That is a bad use of your actions, a cantrip is usually a better choice. And on the optimization sphere it wasn't even a good spell previously, not bad but it wasn't a must take or anything.
Banishment needed to change. Any spell or action that can finish a fight in one casting is no good for the game. Did they need to change it to add save chances? No, but if they didn't do it that way they needed to remove the permanent banishment aspect and maybe shorten the effect to 30 seconds.
Moonbeam and flaming sphere as non concentration....I could buy that. Maybe drop the damage on moonbeam to1d10 and scale based on every two levels of upcasting. Fir flaming sphere they could just eliminate the ramming into creatures feature.
Question: Have either of you actually played a character that uses Flaming Sphere / Moonbeam? Cause it sounds like not.
Moonbeam requires an Action to move it. It is balanced against Call Lightning which is also an Action to use.
Flaming Sphere, outside of ramming it into creatures, only does damage at the end of a creature's turn. Unless the enemy is restrained (most spells that do that also require concentration) or grappled (limiting a martial character to a one-handed weapon which deals far less damage than a 2-handed one) the enemy can easily walk out of the radius on their turn and take 0 damage. And because the radius of Flaming Sphere is so small 90% of the time they can make that movement without even provoking an Attack of Opportunity. Plus Flaming Sphere can hurt your allies as well, so depending on the turn order you can end up forcing your friend to choose between an AoO or Flaming Sphere damage.
Even with requiring Spiritual Weapon to have concentration it is a significantly better spell than Flaming Sphere.
SW can:
(1) fly and hit enemies that aren't on the ground (FS cannot)
(2) deals force damage that is unlikely to be resisted (FS deals fire damage the most resisted / immune in the game)
(3) SW uses an attack roll thus can crit and has a higher change to be effective than the Dex save used by FS.
(4) SW has a bigger damage die and now better scaling than FS.
Gonna disagree on the banishment issue. There are plenty of things that can finish fights in one action. Plenty of damage builds with martials can do that when facing magical style enemies which generally have lowish hit points. I've literally had a mid level party where the fighter killed a CR 18 creature in the first round in one action. And there is no legendary resistance against damage. Banishment being able to do it against the sub set of extra planar enemies is no worse than fighters doing it against magical enemies, or the myriad of other enemies with lowish hit points. And even when they don't finish it the fight is as good as over against a much wider group of enemies. People only have an issue when its the spell doing it though. There is nothing wrong with a encounter getting finished easily here and there. Let players have their awesome moments where they shine and end a powerful threat in one move, just don't make it the norm.
Now I think a lot of monsters have way too low saves,(personally I think the save system needs a total revamp, it should go back to the 3 save system so there are less weak spots to target and even your weak saves should have a reasonable chance of success unless there is a massive power disparity) in some cases ACs but that is separate from the issue. Allow the one move wins occasionally. They are fun, and there will be plenty more encounters in your campaign.
While true I'll say if that is the case where they balance against the new spells that would just make spell casters suck.
I have and while that is my experience with flaming sphere for the most part and its why I consider it a bad spell But, a lot of people here say otherwise so I expect optimal situations for its use come up more often in their campaigns. Moonbeam even needing an action is awesome since its start of turn&first entering on a turn. There are a lot of shove style effects out there which can make moonbeam wrack up a ton of damage(for a 2nd level spell) with a minimum of team work where both players feel like they are contributing.
Spiritual weapon is a very strange spell. What purpose does it serve? To weaponize a clerics bonus action so that they can make attack actions or cast action spells while still 'melee attacking' with their wisdom modifier? If that's the case then the design of the spell makes sense, why it scales the way it does, the bonus action, the ranged melee spell attack, the lack of concentration, the cleric only restriction. But changing any of those things and the purpose falls apart.
When I play my Forge Cleric, I have developed two different styles of play. If I use the terminology of 1DD and the Holy Order feature, the first is the Defender loadout. I equip a big meaty maul and rush in to melee, my action is Attack, my bonus action is either Healing Word, Sanctuary, or the activation of something like Heat Metal, a Smite spell, Aura of Vitality, or Animate Objects. Now the alternate version of this is a more support cleric, which would connect itself far more to the Scholar/Thaumaturge than Defender. In this example I'm hanging back 15-20 feet from the melee. I've got a shield equipped and nothing in my hand. My action is going to be casting my more powerful Action based spells (think Cure Wounds vs Healing Word), there are LOTS of options for me on the table. In this situation I'm going to be looking far more heavily at Spiritual Weapon to provide consistent use of my bonus action vs my defender build.
So to me, I think Spiritual weapons changes are actually fine, but we need to see a little buff to the Holy Order feature that the Scholar does not need to use concentration on Spiritual Weapon to keep the intentional use case alive.
Banishment, that ones easy to fix, IMO. "As an action on subsequent turns, you can force the banished creature to fail it's save to escape." (or if you want to prevent Legendary resistance shenanigans you can "force the creature to forego its escape attempt", but I'd rather leave that up to the DM, a boss forcing it's way out of banishment is pretty epic). It might be just me but putting Concentration + Action Locked up for 10 turns to perma-banish the foe after a minute seems fair.
IMO the purpose (and most common use I've seen) of SW is to give cleric a pseudo Extra Attack, so they can Attack with their action, and BA Attack with their SW, or they can cast a cantrip and Attack with their SW. It supports the "sustained damage" cleric build. If a cleric has better spells to cast with their action then IME they cast those immediately as an action first and don't cast SW until they run out of (or don't want to use) more action spells.
That's still an encounter-ender. If they could spend their action to impose disadvantage, that at least keeps some element of risk.
As for spiritual weapon, I'm fine with the proposed change. It requires concentration, but it scales better and becomes a real choice.
Huge disagree with spiritual weapon. Once you get spells like Spirit Guardians or Spirit Shroud, there is no reason to ever really look at Spiritual Weapons. Flaming Sphere has been a bad spell ever since they removed the combo with pyrotechnics; flaming sphere should not be used as a measuring tool. The better damage scaling does not make up for it requiring concentration. Moon Beam can be used with forced movement for combos so it has that going for it; also both moon beam and flaming sphere are on different spell lists than spiritual weapon, which makes comparisons questionable.
In regards to banishment, counterplay, in the fact that it is a concentration spell, exists. There is always having minions break concentration before it becomes permanent. If they have a really good con save, there is always looking towards conditions like stun or paralyze to break concentration. Or just focus firing the character concentrating on the spell in an attempt to knock them to 0, which will also break concentration. From my experience, people were already handling Banishment without any real issue in 5E.
It also only triggers at the start of an enemy turn which makes it useless against any enemy with movement-based Legendary Actions (like all dragons have), and has the potential for anti-combos with a careless or unstrategic party (e.g. the bard blasting the enemy out of your moonbeam to avoid an AoO as they run away, or using Dissonant Whispers thinking they are "focus firing" them). Moonbeam is good but it's not a must-have, same with Call Lightning. They are both well balanced spells IMO.
Moonbeam is an excellent spell by the standards of second level damaging spells, but most second level damage spells are crud so that's not saying a lot.
Eh, I consider them to be on the weaker end. Moonbeam can be a bit more useful when you compare it to the other options that Druid has, but I often find the spell being abandoned at higher levels unless the group is expecting shapeshifters or if something is weak to radiant. Also, you are wrong on that it only triggering at the start of an enemy's turn. It also triggers when a creature enters the spell's area for the first time on a turn. So you could shove someone into the moonbeam and they will take damage, then on their turn if they are not out of it, they would take the damage again.
Call Lightning is also in kind of a similar boat. I wouldn't call them well balanced spells personally.
Like you would never use it against an adult or ancient dragon, especially with how dragons tend to have high con saves.
Exactly, but that's why they are well balanced spells. Moonbeam is good in many situations, great in a few situations, and bad in some situations - this mean it is actually a choice whether you prepare it or not and whether you use it or not compared to other spells. It being abandoned at higher levels is also evidence it is well balanced because low level spells should be outclassed by higher level spells otherwise there is no feeling of progression as characters gain higher level spells.
Same goes with Call Lightning, usually it is good, sometimes it is great, sometimes it is useless, and you don't keep using it forever.
A spell that is always great is actually a bad spell b/c it takes away choices and diversity of play - because it is always the right answer - it also kills the feeling of progression for the character. If you're a cleric and casting Spirit Guardians every combat from level 5-13 is the most optimal choice then that is a bad thing, it makes cleric boring and repetitive and means there is no point to having the 20 other damage spells on the cleric spell list exist in the game at all...
Again I disagree. There is nothing wrong for having spells that would work in a general use loadout. You can't prepare every situational spell; the general strategy is to have a set of spells that are useful for general usage and swap them out for more situational spells if you can scout out ahead of time.
Fact is, I haven't found anyone who has found cleric to be repittive or boring. We still have choice in our spells because there are enough spells that are good in general use to have diversity because spells are for more thah just combat, but utility as well. So with that in mind, I disagree with the notion that Spirit Guardians is a bad spell; I say it is one if the better designed spells and one of the more fun ones to use.
Also, you also have to consider the spell lists each spell is on. It is flawed to compare moon beam to spiritual weapon and call lightning to spirit guardians because generally, they are not going to be on the same character due to be on different spell lists. What spell list a spell is on matters as you have to consider the class that is using the spell as well. Clerics are the usual users of Spirit Weapon and Spirit Guardians while Druid are the usual users of Moon Beam and Call Lightning.
Isn't it the same for either side of this. Its either they are fine or need to be nerfed here on repeat from both sides.
It's an irreconcilable disagreement, aye. Mana thinks everything should be buffed to match the most powerful stuff in the game already, while a couple of us believe both the top and bottom should be shifted towards the middle. It's the fundamental: big numbers vs strategy player difference. Whether you just want to roll big numbers in a power fantasy, or whether you want to have to make interesting choices that entail risks and rewards.