Quote Originally Posted by Cybren View Post
So here's the thing about those 'useless final fantasy spells'.
They aren't useless, there's usually a logical application for them, it's just that figuring out which enemies are weak to which spells is more effort than just mashing attack until the combat is over.
They're not useless, because they serve their purpose really well in Final Fantasy, and their purpose is to dunk. You dunk on the muggles with your god-wizard powers to show-off how powerful and cool of a super-being you are. These kinds of dunk-powers, of course, have no place in a climactic throw-down between equally powerful super-people. That would be anti-climactic, after all.

In my ideal version of DnD, it would be the same their. But a degree more than what 5e has already achieved is going to be needed to move the table culture of the game towards a place where dunking on minions is considered properly fun without "optimizers" shutting things down, and/or demanding "dunk" abilities work equally well on every main villain or climactic end-conflict. Pathfinder 2 has made great strides in this area, but it has other issues in other areas.