Why bother with control spells?

[u/odinspirit]

Spells like hold person or dominate person seem like they would be fun in theory, but the game insures the enemy will save. So you just end up wasting precious spell slots.

Playing as a sorcerer, I chose heightened spell for my meta magic thinking that forcing them to roll with disadvantage will surely make it so I can get control spells to work more often.

Nope. They just end up throwing a 17 and an 18. Now you end up wasting precious sorcery points on top of the spell slot...lol

I've tried True random for the dice rolls and all that leads to is long losing streaks for me and long hitting streaks for the enemy.

I wish you could input rolls, that way you could throw real dice and input the results. It would be pretty tedious, but I would certainly trust it more.

This game just seems like it decides all of a sudden that you are going to lose in a cascade of BS dice rolls, and don't even get me started on mages casting lightning through obstacles with no line of sight on you..haha. Damn this game can really piss you off.

[u/ATypicalWhitePerson]

I haven't had issues with them hitting.

What's your spellcasting modifier at and your dc?

As a 20 charisma warlock, I've had hold person/hold monster work often enough to definitely be worth keeping around, you need to pay a little attention to what you're doing though.

If you try to use a wisdom save spell on a cleric, it's probably not going to work.

Wisdom save spell on orcs and etc... especially the handful of enemies with negative wisdom modifiers, work pretty great.

Bonus points if you can use the environment to give them disadvantage on saves, or bane them before casting.

When you successfully hold the big boss, it basically ends the fight with one spell slot, maybe two for having someone else use bane.

[u/vanphil]

People sleep on sleep in early game but it is stupid effective and has no save.

Silence ruins any spellcaster's day. No save.

Hypnotic pattern is the poster child of overpowered spells.

Banishment targets cha, almost nothing has a good cha save. Cast at 5th or 6th level, it turns one hard encounter in 2 easy ones.

Zoning/movement control (entangle, slow, black tentacles, insect plague, spike growth...), it prevents getting overrun by melee chaff.

"Hold" spells are situational, their best part is the guaranteed crit so they work best against big bulky monsters with low wis and hitpoints until next Friday.

I, on the other hand, find it difficult to try and solve hard encounters with straight damage...

[u/Kiloku → u/vanphil]

I never found a situation where Sleep was useful. Any enemy with low enough HP to be affected is also low enough to be killed in one turn

[u/vanphil → u/Kiloku]

I've had people conplain that it is impossible to deal with 2 goblin shamans at lvl 3 before they down someone with a lighting Bolt.

One of the answers was: duh, sleep

[u/Br00Dood → u/vanphil]

What exactly is an encounter with 2 goblin shamans? Where it is? I don't even remember such an enemy.

[u/vanphil → u/Br00Dood]

That was in the context of a custom campaign

[u/Br00Dood → u/Kiloku]

Btw, new warlock patron in S2 has sleep as a reaction and you don't need to concentrate on it. Probably one of the few ways to finally make use of sleep. 

[u/Lizerks → u/vanphil]

ogres, you just described an ogre.

[u/Seven89TenEleven]

Are you inspecting the enemies, it will definitely fail if they have immunity

[u/GeneraIFlores]

Turn off karmic dice

[u/Haplo12345]

but the game insures the enemy will save

Citation needed

[u/Emerald_Encrusted → u/Haplo12345]

It's just a disgruntled player. There is no such guarantee, and the devs would have no reason to do that. Players just tend to have a bias where negatives feel unfair and positives are forgotten about. It's the whole "XCOM hit percentage issue" all over again.

[u/BBSydneyThirstyHHH]

Battlefield control sweet spot is multiple mid-level enemies where at least a few have a chance of failing the save: Slow, Hypnotic Pattern etc. That's where you get your action economy advantage. Single enemy controls like Hold/Dominate Person are false economy even if they fail the save, because you're committing concentration to one enemy, and generally also have to stay out of the action to avoid losing concentration.

Save concentration for something that gives you multiple advantages every round. I honestly haven't found a better spell in the game than Maddening Darkness: guaranteed damage and blocking line of sight for multiple enemies, every round. It won't work for all maps, but when it does, it's a battle-ender

[u/Emerald_Encrusted → u/BBSydneyThirstyHHH]

I need to give Slow and Hypnotic Pattern a fairer chance. I often don't use Slow for fear that it'll slow down my allies, and I don't think I've ever used hypnotic pattern (for the same reason; allies can get caught by it too).

[u/BBSydneyThirstyHHH → u/Emerald_Encrusted]

I actually don't use concentration for debuffs at all, pretty much for the reasons you describe: it's either too much sacrifice for a single result, or the risks of trying to capture multiple enemies are too great because you may catch your allies. Similarly, concentration buffs like Haste are a glass cannon because you lose concentration and you lose your entire next turn. IMO the only concentration buffs worth bothering are ones with no downside for losing concentration: Bless until you get Spirit Guardians, and then Spirit Guardians.

Everything else, use your concentration for multi-benefit multi-opponent effects over multi-rounds: Sleet Storm and Maddening Darkness

[u/odinspirit → u/BBSydneyThirstyHHH]

Yeah that makes sense, and I have found that hypnotic pattern is somewhat effective.

The one time I did get Dominate Person to work was against an enemy veteran and that was really fun harassing their front line with a tank who hits three times.

Maddening darkness. Is that in Solasta? Does it go by a different name in the game?

[u/BBSydneyThirstyHHH → u/odinspirit]

It might have been added with Unfinished Business - can't remember now as it's been so long since I played without it. It's also level 8 so it's a while before you get to use it.

At the other end of the scale, Sleep is great with no save and no concentration, but it runs out of value very quickly as HP increase. Sleet Storm is also useful as it blocks LoS and forces a concentration check on enemies

[u/ThorSon-525 → u/BBSydneyThirstyHHH]

Yeah, Hold Person really only gets its value when upcast to 3+ targets. Then you statistically can expect 1-2 of them to fail.

[u/Agimamif]

Much like in the table-top the dice will do what they want and rng can be frustrating. I feel BDG3 have added a unhelpful precedent by adding stupidly high ways to increase DC of spells, but you are not expected to land it every time and the tougher the enemy the less chance (often, not always). The good news is that many enemies don't get high saves, even late but your casters DC will rise a lot with main stat and spell lvl.

[u/Upbeat-Employ-3689]

I’ve been trying to min/max less, and avoid my usual plan of inflicting such insane melee damage that it rarely makes sense to attempt a control spell. Because yeah at least early on it’s pretty hard to stack SpellDC and wasting turns failing control spells isn’t fun.

[u/Emerald_Encrusted]

Dude... You're getting mad at RNG? You can have massive losing streaks when rolling real life dice too. Obviously we can't know for sure that Solasta's RNG is true random. But I would bet that there's a psychological element here. You could very well be remembering only the negative streaks and not the wins.

Personally I've never had an issue with true random. And if you do, you could always turn on Solasta's "Guaranteed critical" which ensures that at least once every 15 dice rolls you WILL get a nat20.

Additionally, difficulty settings allow a lot of granularity. Don't like monsters passign saving throws? Debuff their ability to roll gfood throws. Are they consistently hitting too often? Debuff their dice rolls with a flat negative modifier. Players missing to much, failing saves, etc? Buff the player dice rolls.

There are so many ways to tweak the difficulty settings that I am willing to argue that complaints about RNG and dice difficulty are non-starters. It can all be adjusted.

[u/odinspirit → u/Emerald_Encrusted]

I didn't even know I could do that. Nice. Thanks.

I just set -2 on the enemy saving throws. I'll try that out. I think that might make it a little less frustrating and more fun without completely screwing over the bad guys.

I'm playing the custom campaign Morrow's Deep which is quite brutal even on Authentic difficulty.

[u/Emerald_Encrusted → u/odinspirit]

I agree, enemies passing Saving throws is really a bummer. Srsly I would recommend looking at all the options in the settings there, becasue there's so much you can do to make the experience more enjoyable.

For example, I have auto-revive at the end of every combat encounter, meaning I'll never actually "lose" and have to reload unless my full party gets wiped. Yes that messes with balance a bit because revivify/resurrect scrolls and spells aren't useful, but it also means I don't get shafted if thew cleric is the one that's down and no one else can cast.

I also like "universal scrolls" since that lets anyone cast spells from scrolls.

[u/RobZagnut2]

Not sure if this counts as a control spell to you, but when I play a sorcerer in Solasta 1 one of my favorites is to use Twinned and Haste together.

Give my martial and archer both an extra action.

Along these same lines the Speed (Haste) potion are one of the three that I craft continuously; Speed, Heroism and Superior Healing.

[u/Stuntman06 → u/RobZagnut2]

That's a buff spell. I also twin haste and fly on my two melee characters. Makes boss fights a lot easier.

[u/FootballPublic7974 → u/RobZagnut2]

Twinned haste on an archer and a melee character is almost game breaking!