I have only played the 1st edition AD&D rules on the table, a long time ago. But I think that there were few damage-inflicting spells that could totally miss. Normally the target gets a savethrow that halves the damage. Maybe this is different in 5e. For me a big frustration are the spell misses. Some battles go real fast, and the first rounds are decisive. So, if the first 3 of your powerful damage-inflicting spells all miss and do 0 damage (with 60% hit chance), while the opposition is pummeling you with something like 8 HP of fire and acid damage per attack, the fun quickly goes away.
Can happen of course, but I find it happens way too often.
It's not that that's less of a thing in 5e, and more that Larian's vision has focused exceptionally heavily on attack roll spells, and their tweaks to the rules have all been around attack roll spells and abilities, with complete disregard and lack of thought for what that is doing to saving throw spells.
MOST damage-dealing spells in 5e ARE saving throw spells. Many cantrips have attack rolls, but beyond that, it's actually a very small number that use attack rolls. The vast majority of spells of 1st level or higher all force saves, and in most cases, the target(s) still take half damage on a success.
However, even with the current system, Larian's design has increased monster HP (this weakens saving throw spells by relation), decreased monster AC (favouing attack roll spells and doing nothing for saving throw spells), increased monster stats marginally (which in most cases has improved at least one or two of their saves, weakening saving throw spells further), made advantage free and all the time for everyone (favouring attack roll spells which benefit from this, but doing nothing for saving throw spells), and also as a result, removed a large portion of the tactical incentive for using leveled spells, many of which serve a controlling or advantage-giving purpose, which is now mostly redundant most of the time.
Please, while folks debate what can be done about an unhappy number of misses in combat, consider all of the repercussions and elements that need to be considered - Larian didn't; Don't make the same mistake. Please avoid just suggesting fixes that only talk about rolling to hit, Ac and missing - that's only one part of the game, and Larian have already hamstrung another part of play in the process of changing it.
Regarding misses themselves:
The RNG that they use is a very poorly written one - you can even watch and observe the wave pattern that it goes in. People notice their misses a LOT more when they have a number of them clustered together, which is currently what will happen at the low ends of the wave... and having a visible wave like that also increases the percentage of times that you'll miss on an easy advantage, because, if you are in a low trough, you're far more likely to get two rolls under 5 for that advantage where you only needed 6 to hit.
At the risk of inciting Tucco, I'll also point out something else: Whether Larian admits it or not, there is already a subtle dice bias going on, and you can test it: Enemies on low HP (below 20%) and boss creatures (the 'head' of any fixed encounter, and named enemies) get a slightly fudged RNG. I checked 200 rolls in combat situations, and
despite feeling like I was missing more often than felt good, the actual reality was that the numbers rolled on the dice themselves more or less (within an acceptable margin of variation), lined up with what one would expect of a standard distribution. What was strange, and outlying, however, was that boss creatures and creatures below 20% of their hp received an unacceptably large margin more of the misses than anything else - this doesn't mean that rolls against them were always low, but they were frequently, more frequently than acceptable margins, just low *enough*.
Compared to this, testing that I've done with a couple of other games that use an RNG to determine outcomes (NWN, NWN2 and Solasta), over the course of 200 rolls each on various early-game enemies, also displayed a more or less standard distribution of die results, but did not display the obvious wave motion of peaks and troughs, and (possibly as a result) did not leave me coming away with any points where the amount of misses felt unfair or annoying. They also didn't show the odd favouring towards nearly dead creatures and boss creatures.
I think if they used a better RNG algorithm, that would actually clear up many people's impression of missing a lot; there would be slightly fewer high advantage misses, which we always noticed badly, and individual misses would be less clustered up, which we also notice badly... so even if folks were missing more or less the same amount of times, the conscious awareness of it, and feeling of frustration surrounding it, would likely be lessened for many people.
