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On fireball: I remember the designers back at the release of the edition talked about how the made fireball the most 3rd level spell because it was "iconic"

Tempest clerics also have destructive wave on their spell lists at level 9

Last time I checked, it’s not damaging spells that make full casters amazing. It’s battlefield control and debuff spells such as spells like forcecage, wall of force, web, etc. that makes full casters amazing. Any spells like those that can quite easily take an enemy or enemies out of the fight without the need to deal significant damage.

Wizards not following their own rules? Nah... *looks at the monster creation table*

Luke brought down the pain to the entire Peak DnD group in LairCon 21. His BBEG cast the “Holy Blender” (aka Spirit Guardians) and then sent pigeons to consume their souls when someone goes down.

I will say that one thing DMs should do is include more enemies that have dispel magic. Counterspell is annoying, but dispel magic is somewhat fair. The player's spell gets to go off, but ones that linger might be prematurely ended if the dice decide so

Easiest way to deal with conjure animals or woodland beings is to run it as written. DMs choice, nothing about players choice beyond CR rating.

So conjure woodland beings... You conjure pixies. You tell them to polymorph you into trex. They dont know what trex is. Oops.

The goal in creating broken stuff for DnD and Pathfinder is to make money. It's called an arms race. It's been the business model since at least 2nd Edition DnD. Make new supplements with more powerful stuff to sell the new product to make more money. It makes the companies money, but it doesn't make a good TTRPG.

To be honest, I think that they should pretty much just swap all 3rd and 4th level spells. 3rd level has a huge number of really powerful spells (spirit guardians, fireball, counterspell, dispel magic, fly, haste, slow, hypnotic pattern...) whereas I find the 4th levels are, with one or two exceptions, mostly kinda mid to the point that I often end up using those slots to upcast 3rd levels anyway. There are some spells that are definitely just broken, but I feel like there are a lot of spells that are probably fine for what they do, they just need to be at a level that makes more sense for the effect that they do.

I think spells like forbiddance can be balanced by requiring the caster to see all of the space while casting. Other spells can include a material cost. But it's generally fine to have powerful spells. Enemies can use them. They are good for world building.

Speaking as a DM, I have to add one or two extra monsters to every encounter because of Spirit Guardians. Otherwise the PCs just stroll through the combats.

No silvery barbs callout?

Forbiddance has very specific material components. The easiest way to handle it is to limit these kinds of material components, and enforce the specific requirements. No you can't just burn the 1K gold and cast it. You gotta find the rubies and get them powdered. You gotta find the rare incense, etc. As mentioned by others, there are other monsters that don't fall into the categories for this spell. Spirit Guardians lasts 10 minutes. out of combat that isn't that long. Break up encounters. have ranged attackers. Maybe I'm the oddball, but trying to find ways to both challenge my players but also allow them to use their cool abilities is part of my fun as a DM. I've had conjure woodland beings break an encounter before, but the players enjoyed just being able to totally tip the scale in their favor. That's not frustrating for me, its fun. They felt awesome.

I just want spells to not be so conveluted.

Akshually Lore bards, as all other bards, can get Destructive Wave at level 10 - their additional magical secrets are at level 6, so they are restricted to 3- level spells for them.

1:25 Domain Expansion: Malevolent Shrine.

Forbidance is blocked by total cover as well, so doors and walls stop it.

With spells being in the conversation I really think it would be cool for each spell to have its verbal and somatic components described. Also less spells with more versatility.

My number 1 wish for the next incarnation is to go back to 3rd edition.

As a 5E DM I easily solved all of these OP options and broken mechanics. I stopped running 5E.

The crazy thing with Spirit Guardians is that it’s damage isn’t once per round. It’s *at least* once per round since the enemy takes damage when they first enter the area on a turn (i.e. when the player moves to have the aoe encompass them) *and* once their turn starts if they’re still in the area, which it’s very unlikely they won’t be. So generally, it’s more like 6d8 per round.

"Why do you think it's a mehm" hit me harder than expected😂

Personally, the idea of polymorph/shapechange giving you a brand new HP pool--or when that pool depletes you just revert back to your normal form with full HP--is OP. But then I am a guy who has played Rolemaster for a few decades. So my idea of balance is not the same.

Go back a few editions and sees that Forbiddance required the area to be forbiddanced to first be consecrated. This brings the spell back into balance as the area must be purged of entities to cast it.

Spirit Guardians go down easily with concentration. I have no issues with the party using it. The monsters use it as well.

2edition D&D is well balanced and still gaming it today. I think 5th edition D&D are junk up hero's on steroids

Forbiddance trivialized a 14th level dracolich encounter i was running where the party cast it in its lair and it just had to leave or die...

A DM has the responsibility to limit which spells are available in their campaign or to adjust them.

I think the furthest I would ever go to rebalance an overpowered spell is to give it a specific material component that has a cost and is consumed on use but typically just play with people that won’t ruin your game

I want to point out that the balance on the spells vs say the cleric class feature or other "unique to a class" features. I like the strength being in the limited things you get with a class or a build to be very strong in comparison to magic literally any spell caster can take. Battlemaster for example should just have been the basic fighter. Classes being stronger and tools being just tools are what I think 5e got super inconsistent, they were concerned with overall power level but seem to not be taking into account what made each thing god. Druids wildshape when its not circle of the moon comes to mind as well. If you're playing a ninja it never stops being amazing. If you're relying on it for combat you want to go Moon. A choice made where you want the strength of the class. Don't care to combat shapes late game, Stars, Fire, Dreams or Spores. Plenty of other weirdness to get up to. The classes that take it the worst IMO are the half casters, Arcane Tricster, Paladin, "Warlock" and Artificer pay for their "unqiue abilities" with extremely weak versions of other things. AT is considered good at my usual table. But i consider the rogue to be extremely low tier in general AT doesn't fix that. Meanwhile Paladin is a great class, and very strong. it shows what it should be to select a class. Meanwhlie its subclass features are either forgettable or niche by comparison IMO. Arty and Lock are sorta in the same space, what they do well they do extremely well but their tacked on features aren't strong enough to keep up with either martial skills or spell progression IMO. TL;DR Balance isn't right because 5e is concerned with over all player power not unique to class power then supplimented by everything else.

I love ALL the DM Lair videos!!!! ❤

The Devs have stated for years that Fireball was OP on purpose. It's the first big-damage spell that makes players remember why they wanted to play a Wizard. Of course, back in 'the day', wizards had fewer HP, fewer spells, etc so Fireball was their reward for playing the glass cannon for the first 4 levels.

Dnd should be more balanced but without killing the fun, a raising tide raises all ships. Buff everything up to the cool powers, and close abusive loopholes, only have slight nerfs... why not make spirit guardians a lv 4 spell it will still get plenty of use.

There are very good spells but i've never had problems with most of them...i think that classes like the Twilight domain, the gloomstalker, the peace domain, the hexblade dip and the chronurgy wizard are far worst for the game and that's why i always ban them or play phb only. I do that out of personal experience, i've had an entire campaign owned by a twilight domain, i've had a campaign with 3 CHA classes in a party ALL taking Hexblade dip, i've had a campaign where i had to give light cantrip to enemies in most of the fights because the gloomstalker is permainvisible for 90% of the monster manual from lvl 3 onward, i've had a chronurgy wizard owning half campaign just using leomund tiny hut mid fight with instacast on his "Time beads". I got to the point i said enough and banned those classes, my campaigns quality suddendly drastically improved.

Most of the wizard's damage spells are so weak that only one or two per level are really worth it. I'm not a big fan of fireball, but it's actually one of the only damage spells that are worth comparing to a martial's damage output, and it still consumes slots.

3:18 is actually real. The DMG was outsourced and not written by the original team, which is why there are so many contradictions in it.

I ran a lot of high level(13+) battle royale games with the only rule that abilities and spells that stun lock players were banned. Not a single spell could come close to the damage caused by critical meelee hits. You know, the thing that might occur everytime a Paladin, Figther, Barbarian or Monk does a simple attack. With some of them attacking 3 times or more each round. My arena even had 3 floors and portals to facilitate movement and also, flight, invisibility and greater invisibility were not banned. Not a single spellcaster ever won. Spells are not really OP, if it looks so, then the enemies the party is facing are just weak.

I want to make spell components not handwavable. It would make players want to adventure and explore more if they have to use them and would fix the problem of players having endless cash they don't use

Destructive Wave is on the Tempest Cleric expanded list. And they can Channel Divinity to max out the thunder part of the damage. Literally overturns encounters. And did you mention that a failed save also knocks prone?

I'm pretty sure that those rules in the DMG are intend for DMs/PC Wizards creating all new unique spells. They were never intended to cover the spells in the PH.

Sometimes I wonder if spells should be split into two categories. Those in the player books which are balanced, and those in the DMG that have extra kick. Many spells feel too powerful to be given to players for free upon level-up. Wish, spirit guardians, leomund's tiny hut, and forbiddence are all examples of spells that should be earned by the players through adventuring, not selected for free on level-up. Moving some spells to the DM's realm so they can be given at the right time seems better than players grabbing spells because they are powerful, not thematic or fitting. (These thoughts apply to myself as a player too, by the way.)

Quick house rule: a creature can’t cast the same spell with a spell slot more than once per short rest

Tbh if the whole party are t-rexes then they can't do much damage to a lot of high level enemies. In some cases, enemies will just be immune because t-rex natural attacks are not magical.

I recently discovered the power of Nathair's Mischief + Enthralling Gaze as a battlefield controlling combo. Sure, you need to be careful to not catch your allies in the 20 foot cube of Mischief, but let me tell you, it feels good to incapacitate werewolves as a level 4 wizard (3 were caught in that combo at time of discovery).

Honestly most of these "problem spells" get resolved pretty fast if you just give your boss monster and their top two lieutenants antimagic fields. The T-Rex party glitch gets resolved if you introduce narrow halls and doorways to the equation, or just rule that protection from evil and good blocks both fey creatures snd creatures twisted by fey magic. If those solutions don't work give enemies charms that absorb a certain amount of damage of the element in question before dissolving.

Forbiddance doesn't ignore things like walls or doors. Forbiddance area is roughly one battle mat sized area. A multi-floor dungeon goes a long way to prevent Forbiddance from clearing out the dungeon as hands free as everyone claims. It can only target 5 types of enemies. The monster manual has more than 5 types of enemies. Constructs for example. It takes 10 minutes to cast. The spell casting can be detected and interrupted. If an enemy caster lives there, it stands to reason that they might have some kind of scrying active. Even if they don't, it only takes a few minutes to get word from the minions that spot the person casting Forbiddance, the enemy caster can then scry to see what the problem is, and formulate a response based on what they see. Minions can be harassing the caster. Let's say it goes off. And for shits and giggles, lets say it goes through walls and doors. SOMEONE in those 5 enemy types has Dispel Magic. Fey and Fiends and Celestials in particular. Maybe a round or two goes by until someone remembers its on their spell list and dispels it. Spirit Guardians area is 15ft. Fairly easy to avoid. Fairly easy to have minions fill up a choke point while others make ranged attacks. Or spread everyone out. Have a big minion kite/taunt/peel/bait the one with Spirit Guardians away from the denser pack of minions. Or god forbid anyone ever cast Dispel Magic. You let them wreck house for a fight or two, but then someone shuts it down. 10 minutes of Spirit Guardians? Plenty of time to enjoy the spell for a bit and then dispel. Remind people why you prioritize casters, buff removal is a potent debuff. None of what I have said above invalidates the point of this video. Spell design is terrible in 5th, arguably the worst it's ever been.

You didn't even begin to scratch the surface on problematic spells in D&D. There are so many more that can wreck an entire play session. I found a very simple solution to all of these balance problems in D&D: I play Savage Worlds instead, now. Game is extremely well balanced...I've yet to find anything truly OP. I can actually challenge PCs. And I don't even need stuff like CR to make an interesting encounter, because the game sort of does that automatically for you. Really, the solution best solution is to play a better-designed game. Savage Worlds is not the only one -- there are many others (DCC, Shadowdark, Darkmaster, Forbidden Lands, Pathfinder...)

It is better to include those spells. It is easier to nerf or ban a spell than to create them from scratch.

What about spell damage scaling with class level? So, for example, instead of Fireball doing 8d6 damage regardless of class level, the damage would start at 3d6 then increase by 1d6 every 1 (or 2) class levels, doing 3d6 damage at 3rd level and 8d6 at 8th (or 13th) level.

I mean... You've heard of resistances right... Fire is the most common resistance type, that fireball suddenly does next to nothing if the target is resistant a d succeeds the save. Got a cleric in your group that loves getting in the thick of it with spirit gaurdians...some tougher enemies might be resistant. Like magic is the easiest thing to balance an encounter for. Got a fireball happy party, welp half the dudes in the dungeon are fire resistant. I've seen my groups totem bear barb shrug off an almost max damage 5th lvl fireball and take almost nothing. Damage is not a problem, if you feel a spell does a little too much, talk to the player about reducing the damage a little. Example of this. My Tabaxi pseudo Cleric is a devine soul sorc played as a front line ac tank. All her magical damage is changed to radiant (story reasons) and she has lightening bolt (renamed to devine blast because radiant damage) My DM originally wanted it nurfed to 6D6 because he thought 8D6 radiant was too strong. He changed his mind the very next session when our Barbarian did nearly 60 damage in a single round. And this is a DM that openly dislikes spell casters as PCs. I hear the DMs and martial lovers complain a lot about spell casters being op. (Not counting the 7th lvl up spells that break reality) And the issue is....the DM. Spell casters are balanced around 3-5 encounters a day. Martials are balanced around short rests. Most DMs shut down a casters idea to use a spell to overcome a problem outside of combat, then complain when the caster can drop 3 fireballs in a row because they have all their spell slots. An encounter doesn't have to be a fight, it can just be a problem that uses up a spell slot or two to solve.

There are opportunitiesto balance some things in 5e, and i hope the 2024 5e books tackle them. But most the game is fine and fun.

It's such a mehm that all wizards cast fireball

[all bards can get Destructive wave at 10. says my Eloquence bard who has it]

One thing you missed is "nostalgia" from previous editions

Luke, what's going on is commerce. WATC is a for profit company the vast majority of it's customers are Players not DMs. It's a Players job to expand it's character's power and influence. That begins with Min-Maxing, grows into lobbying the DM for "better" spells and character builds. Finally they turn to lobbying WATC for all these things and of course WATC's in the business of selling what their customers want. None of this is evil or even bad. Those of us who seek a better balance in the game need to make our voices heard as well. Exactly what you're doing, Luke. Ahead of the curve as usual!😀

Thanks for another solid video.

the 2024 PHB is fixing this.

Yeah some things aren't meant to be used offensively and I know you've talked about it before but forbiddance is a great example of that. I think your ruling is the spell as intended. But you could always also say it fails if cast on a space in which an extra planar creature already stands or that the boss of the dungeon already cast it meaning it can't be overlapped. etc I think some of the stuff mentioned is fine for use. Like destructive wrath is just a big fireball. And for the most part damaging stuff is fine no matter how much damage it deals. One change I think they're making is making more spells that fit a particular function not appear on the spell list so they can't be taken by bard. And I think healing spirit would have been perfectly acceptable without the errata if it were a ranger only spell. Even as is I don't think healing up between combats is such a bad thing for the game. In the future we'll probably see some paladin spells and ranger spells that are great for their level because they're designed to be useful at about twice the level you'd expect to get a spell of that level. I think one of the reasons rangers and artificers didn't feel as powerful as they ought to be is that prior limitation. Half casters still need abilities scaled to the level they're at.

Fireball does do more damage than it should for a 3rd level spell but fire resistance is also a VERY common trait among monsters, so it kind of balances itself out.

Salvage is the only spell you ever need

Pretty sure the DM decides what creatures are summoned by the woodland being spell, not the player. Don't give your players Pixies, unless you know they are going to wander in to a tough encounter.

No, you make a good, if meandering, point. Spells that are clearly superior to other spells gives the player, let alone the DM who has to deal with them fewer options. When presented with Melf's Minute Meteors or Fireball for damage, the Wizard is going to pick the option that not only does more damage period, but also does it over a larger area and thus more enemies. Why concern yourself with Stinking Cloud and try and put a huge debuff on the enemy when killing them is just better? To that end, I'm actually minutely shocked that the grand poohbah of best spell in the game wasn't mentioned here: Counter Spell.

I will also say this, and imma use spirit gaurdians as the example. Its good sustain damage damage for a cleric. I jad a game last night where i managed to keep spirit gaurdians up for 2 combats. Overpowered right.... Then the Barbarian basically one rounded the bbeg of the dungoens first phase dealing about 150-200 damage within 2 rounds (including 2 op attacks). While my spirit gaurdians was dealing...12 damage a round... Yes totally op. Oh my cleric was also oit of spell slots, so all she could do was auto attack or sacred flame for 2d6 a rpund.

I don't think conjure woodland beings is broken. I think polymorph is broken; but just because challenge rating is broken. The spells did nothing wrong D:

And how many of those spells are from editions other than 5th? As opposed to changing them to fit the new rules, they just used the older editions and called it good

6d6 is more than 3d8, so whats the issue with spirit guardians?

Lots of people forget that the rules in the DMG for creating monsters and spells are NOT the same rules they make internally. It's been said before. Besides, why should the world be in balance?

I would personally change up forbidden for my campaign due to the fact that it's so undead heavy. Along with the wish spell good luck convincing me you deserve a wish..

"If a spell is so good that a caster would want to use it all the time" Honestly, Banishment became that in one campaign once the Cleric discovered that they could banish something, assemble the avengers, have everyone hold action and then drop concentration to nova whatever came back - usually the most threatening thing in an encounter. This meant that "boss" or more accurately "mini-boss" type monsters, where you have one scary thing backed up by supporting monsters was no longer a viable encounter design. Shame, because it's an iconic encounter design. I got so far as to consider nerfing or banning Banishment. But then I went the other way. The players were having fun with this. And this is a game, thus fun is the primary objective. So I let them have their fun and continued to design encounters that would be thwarted by this tactic, but used them more sparingly, used alternative designs, like trios of problematic monsters more often - the party were put through their paces, had more hard fights and fewer boring ones. Because that was my main concern, that being able to cheese every fight would be boring (it would) - and this worked. Anyway, the point isn't so much that these spells are bad, or badly designed, but that adventures need to be aware they exist and allow them to exist where it is fun, and thwart them where their use would be less fun. Forbiddance is a good example: you have to pick the mode for the damage. Make it so that picking everything is *bad* or not even possible. I had a dungeon once that already had a forbiddance applied to it to keep celestials out, which caused the characters to fail in their use of one to kill the demons they expected to be in there. This became relevant because they also tried to summon a celestial and it went *very* badly for the poor creature (a named NPC) Anyway, sorry this is a long comment, but I thought these were some fun stories about possible problematic spells and how, maybe, they're spells that have the opportunity to be fun and challenging in both directions - though doing so requires a level of system mastery to know how to work with and around them which may take some getting used to, so don't worry if the cause a few trips on the way.

Wtf is a mem Luke?!?

3:26 CR comes to mind.

Lair and legends for pf2e when? I'd love to add another 3rd party content creator to my pf2e games.

I don't think the spells you mentioned aside from conjure and forbiddance, those I think are fine as is provided GM is aware of them and can use whatever methods they want to not let it become oppressive, including talking to the player about it before hand ideally, are totally fine. Classes and spell lists exist for a reason, not every single spell will, or should for that matter, follow the custom spell guidelines. You cant take a powerful 5th level spell like Destructive Wave that typically only a high level paladin can get and say its not balanced because technically a lore bard can get it earlier, any bard can get it a little later. For starters magical secrets is a feature you only get if your investing most of your levels into it, if not pure-classing it and on top of that you have very limited choices with it, if a bard player wants to use one of their very precious magical secrets options on it then so be it, that's still balanced because its a bard's class feature and choice. Fireball is only available to sorcerers and wizards for a reason, the fact that other classes and subclasses "can" get access to it in various ways usually sacrificing it for something like lore bard or getting it for free as a light cleric, doesn't make it overpowered. Especially for spells like fireball where I agree it gets taken way too much and basically a "must pick" for anyone that's damage oriented, I still think that's totally fine. Its a reward for picking classes that have it, or getting it from somewhere else but in addition its an "iconic" spell. I think its totally fine and helpful even for newer players to have the most iconic spells even a noob has heard of be a little bit stronger than other spells in its level. I can definitely see it helping someone new who is no doubt overwhelmed with the number of spells available, spells like fireball are a beginner friendly safety choice. Besides if as a GM you're finding a spell like fireball to be too powerful in your encounters there's lots of ways to mitigate it. Sure you can beef up the encounter by giving creatures more HP but who wants that? If a player lands a fireball on a group of low level goblins that failed their save the by all means roast them! Reward the players luck and that they saved a spell slot for this fight. No one enjoys fighting creatures that half way more hp than they should just because the players deal more damage than you expect. There are MANY fire resistant enemies. Innocent NPCs nearby. Don't cluster your enemies too much, find ways to get the enemies to come from multiple directions. Casters often have lower initiative, but even if they don't or roll well, try to get enemies up close, avoid leaving large areas with only enemies. Or my personal favorites, Include more indoor battle maps. Assassination attempt on the king during your hearing? A fight in the throne room? Well the King isn't going to be pleased if you set the place on fire.. Even go so far as to have a player accidentally start a forest fire if they use it excessively in a wooded area. Its a huge explosion of fire remember, collateral damage it a thing. Similar to above, roasting goblins is one thing but what about the BBEG's Lieutenant? You enter the lavishly furnished study he stands before you in ornate leather armor, priceless paintings adorn the walls. Fight starts player casts fireball because it will hit the lieutenant and 3 goons. Fight ends. Player - "I want the armor and the paintings!" GM - "Hmmm about that..."

I'm making my own ttrpg system by myself and I could see messing up spells after making the rules for spells yourself if the time in between grows too large 😂

I don't know if some of the balance decisions or... almost anything WotC is doing are being considered well. Case in point, when trying to give martials the new weapon properties, they added the "Flex" property that allowed a one-handed weapon with the Versatile tag to do two-handed damage while being held in one hand. People crunched the numbers on how much this would help a martial character's DPR and it came out on average to about... 1. One extra point of damage per round on average. For the most part, those who looked at the skill then determined that the Flex property was not good. In fact, it was widely considered by people to be one of the weakest weapon property WotC made. WotC would soon remove the Flex property from the list in a later play test... however, their reason behind removing it was baffling to say the least. Their reasoning to why Flex needed to be removed as a weapon property was that they found it to be *too powerful*. The widely-considered weakest weapon property was too overpowered in their eyes. It's pretty obvious at that point that they are not paying much attention to outside discussions or are just not even doing basic testing. It's incredibly tone deaf as well, since they appeared to want to buff martials in these playtests, but overall only gave them marginal improvements which still weren't enough to put them on the same level as current casters (with as we can see, overtuned spells). Then they give significant buffs to most casters, widening the gap in power. It's like they did not read the assignment... or are playing Calvin Ball at this point. It's goofy AF.

yeah, I had characters try to use polymorph to turn in a t-rex, they had never seen one, they did not have the nature skill to try and see if they heard of one, and I did not even have dinos in my game, but hey that did not stop them from getting all butt hurt about it. 5e players can be awful plus that character are all the same, so happy I quite DMing.

My solution for Fireball is too make it a bigger AoE.

5e is fine. Pf2 has plenty of problems of its own. I hate to brake this to Dms but you have to follow the rules just like your players do.

No mention of silvery barbs???

not talking to each other. Hey they are corporation.

#1 The DM gets to choose what creatures appear. #2 Don't summon 8 pixies. Give them one pixie, a wolf and so forth. And they are fixing all the Conjuration spells. But somehow Luke will still try to wedge in PF2E rules into One DnD. Noobs...😅😂

personally, the imperfect balance is what makes the game good to me. if everything was perfectly balanced, then nothing would stand out, every option would be boring and samey, and everything would end up feeling underpowered. that's precisely what I dislike about Pathfinder 2e, everything just feels meh.

How easy is it to acquire these skills? What would drive your character to research these techniques? How taboo is it to use these abilities, and what are the consequences for doing so? If an adventurer effectively nukes an entire dungeon with one spell, most people would regard that as a grave threat to the world as a whole, even if he used it against a pit of fiends, so let's logic that a little... That's the job of the DM, is it not? I'm sure even NPCs take a dim view of recreational nukes being used in the same realm as them.

they threw out minions, skill challenges and like 50% of the classes (RIP Warlord, Warden, Shaman, Avenger and Runepriest) Guess which classes i played

I never quite understood campaigns that just magically give spells to players as they level up. What about the level up actually imparts the knowledge of the spell? Why not make it a narrative reason that your wizard gets the spells they get. They may NOT get all of them. The Cleric/Paladin's deity or Warlock's patron doesn't have knowledge of the spell that they want to use, for example. While that may seem annoying, it actually could give your players a goal to unlock these spells as a side quest/mission.

Did he just say mem lolol😂

This is a singularly interesting view. You have no complaints about hypnotic pattern, banishment, or any of those spells that end/trivialize combat, but adding 8 points of average damage breaks fireball? That was a bit harsh but it’s a silly stance, and yes spirit guardians is really good (some would say too good) but it actually seems to be in line with the chart which lacks a “duration” category (ex spiritual weapon looks abysmal with 1d8 when it should do 3d10). Aside from the questionable balance of spirit guardians, which you can play around, none of those spells seem to be over the top except forbiddance but I think that was intentional, it was meant to be an out of combat spell for base making, or a ritual for if they need to kill a BBEG (10 minutes =100 rounds of combat, 20 minutes =200), so I’d say it’s a fair bet that if they try to nuke a dungeon with it they probably didn’t want to do the dungeon anyway, and no dm should get blind sided by that twice. I would recommend Treantmonk’s DPR video, because you are right fireball is the best in its class, but the blasting spells drop off kinda fast. I’ve had players as they level up stick with fireball since there’s a lag of 2-3 levels for better blasting spells, so from my experience he’s right. And for the record healing spirit even out of combat cheese isn’t broken, the “balance” they added made it suck like the other healing spells, but 5 uses of 1d6 is better then 2d8+4 so yippy.

Destructive wave isn’t that good it only does about 35 damage for a 5th level slot and has to be placed on yourself, it’s a cool power for death knights but it’s not much better than fireball in the best of situations and way worse in the average situation

Destructive wave is meh, 5th level spells for damage is kinda wasting a slot because control spells are much better at that level. Spirit guardians and conjure woodland beings are the only real problems. I wouldn't even say that forbiddance needing to traverse the area its cast on is a house rule. The range is touch.. if you cant touch the entire area you cant cast the spell on it then you cant cast it on that area.

I mean, you can just rule the spells as not existing in your game.

You don’t have those problems in 3e. You still have a couple of broken spells, but not to that extreme. Fireball, for example filled a volume, rather than a fixed radius. That 20’x20’x20’ cube cast into a 5’x10’ hallway is likely to come roaring toward the caster as it fills up the volume effect. By that calculation, the 5’x10’ hallway is going to eat up two of the 5’x5’ cubes out of 64 of them, leaving another 31 5’x10’ squares to be filled up. That’s 160’ of fiery death in that hallway. The caster gets to save for half damage when it hits him too. 5e appears to have not included scaling in their spell design. A 5th level caster tossing a fireball versus a 10th level caster tossing a fireball is worlds apart in damage for earlier editions. The most damaging spells in the game at lower levels were the ones that didn’t scale up at higher levels, such as the Cleric’s Flamestrike, which was a single-target 6d6, regardless of the caster level. The spell damage issues you relate are part of why I call 5e the training wheels edition of D&D. The players are unstoppable and pretty much unkillable in it. It’s a broken game that leaves very little real challenge. Come back to 3e. You’ll have more fun and a lot more challenge that way.

The most broken spell in the game is undoubtedly Shield. It shatters the game’s math, nullifies caster fragility, and is a core component of almost all optimal multi class combos. The only other spell that warps the game to the same degree is Simulacrum. Most of the spells listed here like fireball or destructive wave, aren’t actually that strong.

Powerful spells arent the problem. Getting to reload them with a quick rest, having few material components, extremely resilient casters, and handing spells out to weird subclass combinations is the problem. Older editions had remarkable spells that didnt break the game at all. The "give players everything they want and get rid of class restrictions because it makes players sad" is the problem.

He said mem ironically right??

8:06 a “mem”??????

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You basically answered the question yourself. It is a bunch of different people writing stuff. That's really all there is to the situation. I'm willing to bet money that no one anticipated something like Forbiddence being used to wipe a whole dungeon because every member of the testing and quality control on it were playing your standard, 'expected' DnD. Everyone doing their part, playing their character, zero meta game, use everything as thematically intended, etc. That kind of party in its own right is the true fantasy, lol. Personally, my solution is to let them have whatever they want to have. Fireball everything? Sure. Forbiddence, Spirit Guardian? Yeah okay. But the world is going to adapt to this. The BBEG and enemies of the players are going to start to notice this trend and they'll start going out of their way to bring counters. Take approaches to dungeons and lair layouts that actually reduce the effectiveness. The party's foes won't just act like they see nothing and let this party trapeze around scrubbing entire city blocks worth of assets, lol. My argument is that if your players are getting away with broken spells then that's an issue with approaching the world like a static video game world that doesn't notice that Cloud threw down 'W Summon + Knights of the Round' and set the controller down to get a sandwich while ten minutes of animation played out, lol.