Well, there’s a 1st level spell that triples jump distance, so I figured it’d be fair. I could just make it double I suppose.

I take whatever Kobold gives me for extremely deadly and then multiply the difficulty by about three to actually have a difficult battle.

Yup, always go higher than the book says, especially with a high-level party. Tier 4 PCs have so much stuff they can do it’s really hard to challenge them, so you gotta get nuts.

Well, somewhat. With the way healing works in 5E it’s pretty easy to get people back up, and you can often have one PC be downed and still have the rest of the party doing pretty well. If I’m running an enemy that wants to kill the entire party, and the party is trying to kill the enemy, having one at least person go unconscious is pretty common to make it actually feel challenging. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the party is actually in danger of losing the fight.

Even with playing just the monsters in the book, high-level encounters in D&D will be incredibly swingy because there are a lot of abilities for both PCs and monsters where one character rolling well or poorly can completely change whether the fight is a near-TPK or a cakewalk. The party succeeded on the save against the cool boss ability, well they’re probably gonna be fine. Or they all failed, well now they’re fucked. The boss failed the save and now it’s paralyzed, guess you’ve pretty much won. Or it succeeded, now you’ve wasted your turn. That kinda thing.

That’s why making encounters with a bunch of swingy abilities can actually tip things back into being controllable. If your boss is getting whomped harder than expected, he gets desperate and breaks out the super-kill abilities. Or if the party is the ones getting clobbered, maybe the boss gets overcompetent and doesn’t use their super-kill ability until it’s too late.

I’ve found that at the end of the day, the PCs are generally expected to win, and they have a major advantage: when they hit zero, they get to roll death saves and can be healed, whereas the enemies usually just die. This is actually a huge factor in their favor, and explains partially why PCs can beat enemies that might seem way above their level. So honestly I don’t worry too much about making strong enemies, my parties can usually handle them. And if they handle it too easily, it’s not the end of the world.

This is a good answer. DMs have a lot of dials to turn to adjust the difficulty of an encounter even just with how they play the enemies. Really I think there are few DMs who play enemies as deadly as possible all the time.

I know I’ll sometimes play enemies more aggressively if the PCs are doing better in the fight, like attacking downed PCs or counterspelling healing. Whereas if they’re struggling, I might find other things for the enemies to do that’ll be a little less mean.

I’m probably gonna end up nerfing the blast at least a little so it feels a bit more fair overall, since a number of responses thought it was overturned. Probably take a damage die off and drop the range a little.

The dual damage types is mostly flavor, I think thunder is a little better than lightning technically? but they’re pretty close, and I don’t think you’d cast this if you’re fighting something resistant to lightning anyway.

With the main mode it seems like it’s in a fair spot, then? Better than haste, seems fair compared to guardian of nature? Part of the balancing is also that it’s self-buff only, so unlike haste and holy weapon you can’t have the 7th level Wizard give it to the Fighter.

I’ve found they usually show up in my inbox eventually.

I don’t want the AoE to take away too much from the rest of the spell, it’s like 50% there for the flavor/coolness effect anyway. My experience with taking holy weapon on my Cleric is that you’ll often end up dropping the spell from taking damage or you’ll hold off using the blast because you wanna keep swinging, so you end up not using the blast anyway. So I don’t want the blast to drag down the power of the rest of the spell. Seems like there’s a fine line between making it overpowered and making it unusable here.

You have a good point comparing it to ice storm, which only does a little more damage than the blast. Though on the other hand ice storm kinda sucks, doesn’t it?

I guess speed buff + op-attack immunity does make you pretty untouchable to melee from most humanoids, that is pretty good. I do want it to be better than haste since it’s a level higher. If I nerf the AoE a bit do you think the rest is balanced overall?

I’m not sure I’m seeing how it amounts to action surge-y? The thing about the blast is that it costs your action on that turn, so if I make it too weak then it won’t be worthwhile ever using it vs just keeping the spell up and continuing to attack with it or dropping the spell normally and doing something else with your action.

Holy weapon’s blast, which was the inspiration, is substantially more impactful: more damage (slightly), bigger area, and it can even inflict blinded, plus it’s triggered as a bonus action rather than an action. Of course my spell can’t be as good since it’s a level lower, but I do think the comparison is more than fair even given that, between the blast effects at least.

I guess, do you think I’m underrating how good the movement effect is? I’m trying to make it comparable to guardian of nature which is also 4th level and can add 1d6 damage per hit, plus it gives advantage on your attacks. Since advantage is really strong I don’t wanna just add that to my spell instead but I do want the other effects to end up being comparable. I did originally consider just giving disadvantage on opportunity attacks rather than ignoring them completely, but I figured if zephyr strike and Ashardalon’s stride could ignore them with lower level slots it should be ok.

Thanks for your feedback, I do appreciate it!

Aha, thank you! I missed guardian of nature when I was looking for spells to compare it to. That’s a good comparison because it’s the same level.

Guardian does also have the very nice benefit of adding advantage to what would probably be all of your attacks. Do you think the other benefits of my spell are good enough to be comparable? Definitely not thinking of just slapping advantage onto my spell too as I think that would be too much, but I’m wondering if this justifies a bit more oomph in there somewhere.

The other reply thought the blast was overturned too. I don’t want the blast to be too much of the focus; it’s like 50% there for flavor. Maybe dropping it down a damage die and shrinking the range as you suggested? I just don’t want it to feel like a waste of your action compared to dropping the spell normally and casting something else.

I actually bumped the blast damage up a bit right before posting, it started out at 2d6 of each. I can tone it back down if it seems unfair.

My thinking was that if you’re spending your whole action on an AoE blast it should be at least decent, and there are much better AoEs for a 4th-level slot. Flavorfully it’s sort of a letdown if the blast does less damage to an enemy that turn than just keeping the spell up and hitting them a couple more times. Holy weapon has a higher damage blast that you can trigger as a bonus action, plus it even blinds, but since that’s a level higher I couldn’t have it be that good.

There isn’t a similar enough 4th-level spell to compare it to, but on the lower-bound end there’s haste and spirit shroud which both add damage per turn with concentration plus some other benefits. This spell adds less damage per turn than spirit shroud and possibly less than haste depending on how strong your individual attacks are, which is why I felt it might be undertuned even with the movement buffs. Immunity to opportunity attacks is pretty good especially if you’re taking it on a squishy caster, but I need it to be worthwhile somehow.

Hmm, and I was worried it might be undertuned. What do you think should be changed?

There are other spells I could ask for, but I wanted to make some of my own, makes 'em feel more personalized and it makes sense for the character.

No reason? McConnell works to make the lives of thousands of people worse, on purpose. The world would be better if he wasn’t in it. Seems like enough reason to me.

The slaves don’t own capital because they are the capital!

Nowhere in the definition of capitalism does it require that everyone owns capital; in fact it’s much more the opposite.

Yup. If we’re talking regulations then regulations on how much corporations can donate to politicians should be top of the list (and ideally that amount should be zero), but obviously both the politicians and the corporations like that donations are totally allowed, making it difficult to pass such things…

Regulations are indeed an important part of managing our system as it is, but they’re fundamentally a bandaid to the problems of capitalism.

You gotta catch the corporations doing a bad thing and then tell them not to do it, meanwhile they’re buying politicians to fight against you on it. And it still doesn’t stop them from committing actions that are horribly unethical and extremely damaging to our society and to the environment, they just tone it down a bit at best, or occasionally they’ll have to put a small fraction of their money into a lawsuit without actually changing their behavior.

But the system also makes it so that when people act purely selfishly for money, that it results in good outcomes for everyone.

Why do you think this??

Look at all the constant environmental disasters and harmful products that happen because corporations did the math and determined that paying a few million to lawsuits every once in a while is cheaper than being more careful. “Voting with your wallet” does not work because the big corporations undercut the competition and bombard us with advertising to ensure they will win no matter what.

Hell, most of us are on here because Reddit started doing scummy things in the name of money, and we’re a tiny fraction of their userbase; Reddit is still unfortunately doing pretty much fine. Is that the best outcome for everyone?

And don’t forget that there are a lot of regulations passed in the last hundred years that were necessary because corporations were doing stuff like dumping so many chemicals into our waterways that rivers would constantly catch fire. This is what happens with unfettered capitalism.

Yeah I can’t blame them for posting content. It’s not ideal that 169 and shitposting take up 80% of my feed, but it’s better than nothing, right?

I look forward to talking about my first few weeks on Lemmy in years to come: “Back then I had to use an app that was in alpha and wait ten minutes to load a page full of bean memes! And then we got hacked!”

This reminds me, I do something kinda similar. At ASI levels I give out a +1 and a feat, instead of the usual +2 or a feat. I agree that it’s more fun to let people take feats instead of feeling obligated to pick the ASI!