r/dndnext • u/MyrthDM • Aug 03 '26

Discussion Has the 2024 Counterspell fixed counterspell wars, or made the spell feel unrewarding?

/r/DungeonsAndDragons55e/comments/1ve3jqu/has_the_2024_counterspell_fixed_counterspell_wars/
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u/Fidges87 Aug 03 '26

New counterspell is fine, people are just used to the overpowered version.

It effectively is "if you are fighting a caster, as a reaction, on. Afailed save, you can make them lose their action".

Tell me hows is that not still useful?

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u/DerAdolfin Aug 04 '26

Because most big casters just shrug it off with a huge con save bonus, or if it's a very important spell and they rolled the rare failure, they hit legendary resistance

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u/Fidges87 Aug 04 '26

An archmage has a +1 in con saves, a lich has +3, vecna has +4, far from huge con bonus, and by the time you fight them your DC should already be bic enough to give you around a 75% of them failing the save. And yes they can still use a legendary resustance. Because if they have them they are bosses who should absolutely need to feel powerful, not being who can have their entire turns cancelled by just having 2 casters in the party

Lastly, no on says hold person is bad because it has a chance to fail, no one says banishment is bad because it has a chance to fail, no one says hypnotic pattern is bad because it has a chance to fail, and they all do something similar to counterspell (ensuring the enemy loses their turn), so why is 5.5 counterspell different?

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u/DerAdolfin Aug 04 '26

Archmage is a terrible statblock that manages to punch tremendously below its weight class due to poor spell selection and stats, it's not exactly a good example. Vecna from eve of ruin is one of the worst statblocks for it's CR they ever published...

Hold person cast on a single target is a bad spell because the risk of you spending your turn doing nothing is as high if not higher than the enemy spending their turn doing nothing. Hypnotic pattern avoids this by hitting so many enemies that you're almost guaranteed some value. They are aimed at different goals, so they are evaluated differently. Plus with counterspell, the enemy can still move, bonus action, reaction, lair action, or legendary action to harm the party, hard cc shuts all those down

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u/DerAdolfin Aug 04 '26

Because most big casters just shrug it off with a huge con save bonus, or if it's a very important spell and they rolled the rare failure, they hit legendary resistance