Reducing a saving throw to nothing?

[MercCpt]

Hello all me again with another stupid idea, would love help on these two thnigs.

1. As a singular entity what is the most effective way to reduce or force a failed saving throw. (Divination Wizard?)

2. As a party what is the most negatives you can stack onto on creature for one save?. (unsettling words, bane ect)

[RogueJK]

1) Yes, Divination Wizard is the most effective, albeit only usable 2x per day at most, and also dependant on your Portent rolls for the day.

(There are very few other instances in which you can force an enemy to outright fail a saving throw, and they tend to be very limited, like Glamour Bard's Mantle of Majesty forcing any enemy Charmed by you to automatically fail their saving throws against Command, or first imposing the Paralyzed/Stunned condition so that the enemy automatically fails STR and DEX saves.)

After Portent, a distant second would likely be one of the few different ways to force Disadvantage in response to an enemy making a save, including the Silvery Barbs spell or the Chronurgy Wizard's Chronal Shift ability.



2) In theory, a party could stack:
Disadvantage from something like Bestow Curse/Contagion/Heightened Spell/Hound of Ill Omen/etc.
Bane for -1d4
Mind Sliver for -1d4
Eloquence Bard's Unsettling Words for -1d6 to 1d12, depending on Bard level
Stars Druid's Cosmic Omen (Woe) for -1d6

That'd work out to a Disadvantaged roll then subtracting up to an average of -15.


But the thing is, once you start getting into later Tier 2 and into Tiers 3 and 4, most major enemies are going to have Legendary Resistances. So you can jump through all those hoops to impose -15 or more, and the bad guy gets to say: "Nah, I think I'm going to succeed on this save anyway!" :smallwink:

[MercCpt]

Lore Bard's Cutting Words for -1d6 to 1d12, depending on Bard level


Thank you for your input you are right about legendary resistances I'm trying to figure a way out to reliable burn through them, however Cutting words doesn't not effect saving throws.

[RogueJK]

That's what I get for going off memory. Unsettling Words still works, though.

[DarknessEternal]

Don't bother.

Do not use save or nothing spells against enemies, ever. The current design of the game makes it far too unreliable.

[Chronos]

Don't use save-or-nothing spells against single enemies. If you can hit a half-dozen in an AoE save-or-lose, though, you'll almost certainly take out a few of them.

[Segev]

Even as a save-for-nothing single-target spell, Tasha's hideous laughter is very effective. Bounded accuracy means that you have a Reasonable chance of whammying just about anything for a round or two, and if it is the big threat or is responsible for concentrating on a mass buff or a nasty debuff or battlefield control effect, that lockdown makes handling everything else easier.

I say thus from experience using it and as a DM having it used. While the save every round is a weakness of the spells, they still can be failed even by things proficient in the save. And when they are, it is devastating.

[Hurrashane]

1)

2) In theory, a party could stack:
Disadvantage from something like Bestow Curse/Contagion/Heightened Spell/Hound of Ill Omen/etc.
Bane for -1d4
Mind Sliver for -1d4
Eloquence Bard's Unsettling Words for -1d6 to 1d12, depending on Bard level
Stars Druid's Cosmic Omen (Woe) for -1d6

That'd work out to a Disadvantaged roll then subtracting up to an average of -15.




If you have an artificer with negative int you can also use flash of genius to lower that more.

[DarknessEternal]

Even as a save-for-nothing single-target spell, Tasha's hideous laughter is very effective. Bounded accuracy means that you have a Reasonable chance of whammying just about anything for a round or two,


You also have a reasonable chance of whammying yourself. When you take an action that does nothing, that's the same thing.

[JNAProductions]

You also have a reasonable chance of whammying yourself. When you take an action that does nothing, that's the same thing.

If you're facing a solo enemy, the party has four turns for everyone one of theirs. Trading 1/4th of your side's actions to potentially remove the entire set of your opponent's actions is often a good attempt.
Also, you still have movement and bonus action.


If you have an artificer with negative int you can also use flash of genius to lower that more.

Huh. Usually it specifies "Minimum bonus of 1," but that's only for number of uses in this case. That's a weird find, but cool.

[Kenny_Snoggins]

1) Yes, Divination Wizard is the most effective
2) In theory, a party could stack:
Disadvantage from something like Bestow Curse/Contagion/Heightened Spell/Hound of Ill Omen/etc.
Bane for -1d4
Mind Sliver for -1d4
Eloquence Bard's Unsettling Words for -1d6 to 1d12, depending on Bard level
Stars Druid's Cosmic Omen (Woe) for -1d6

That'd work out to a Disadvantaged roll then subtracting up to an average of -15.


But the thing is, once you start getting into later Tier 2 and into Tiers 3 and 4, most major enemies are going to have Legendary Resistances. So you can jump through all those hoops to impose -15 or more, and the bad guy gets to say: "Nah, I think I'm going to succeed on this save anyway!" :smallwink:

I'd say the Eloquence Bard when optimized beats the Wizard. Turn one- mind sliver, bane, turn 2 unsettling words, anything nasty from the bard or someone else, then hit the saving throw with silvery barbs. That would be -1d4, -1d4, -1d6/-1d12, Disadvantage (-5?), then reroll one of the D20s if somehow they passed. Instruments of the bards aren't really hard to come by but if you can pick one up it takes the save against a charm spell to triple cherry-picked disadvantage instead of regular disadvantage which I think would just be a delta of -3 ish. Still, that's 1 PC putting down a basically impossible SSDC, granted it takes 2 turns. In most cases unsettling words and barbs will be enough.

For legendary resistances, that helps the BBEG guy a bit, but if there is only one monster that has legendary resistances it's only a matter of time. At Tier 3 almost all bards will be on a griffon or something and generally you can forget about closing on them unless it's a real knife fight in a telephone booth situation. And the bard has considerably more inspirations than the monster has legendary resistances, so if he can stay alive for 3 turns, he's going to nuke the monster inevitably. Which gives the DM a conundrum because the bard is typically pretty low down in the list of priority targets since their DPR sucks generally, but if you don't nail him he's going to delete the big monster pretty much guaranteed after 3 turns.

I'd say its better than the divination wizard because you probably get 10+ inspirations a day, instead of 2 divination dice of variable result. And it can scale up or down depending on the resources you want to use and the situation. Additionally it's really damn difficult to shut down a bard at tier 3 when they have got stuff like mirror image, probably enchanted half-plate and magical shields from the hexblade dip, a griffon thats faster than almost all monsters and can fly, the shield spell and silvery barbs for defense if anything manages to get through. They are fast enough to come in, cast magic, and then get out of retaliation range of spells generally, which is their only big vulnerability, and they can do that without using resources. I would say that gives them the edge over divination wizards.