Prebuffing is not tedious at all if you just make buffs expire quickly out of combat. "You can't just storm through anything by just expending enough spell slots", great, so instead you have a roll of the dice fight you just reload to your previous save if the saving throws don't go your way or the enemy rolls first initiative and CC's half your team and half heals the rest. ABSOLUTE GARBAGE DESIGN.
I mean, what's the alternative, you crying about prebuffing, but instead what we have is playing every single class play like a ranger or rogue and scramble for advantage before every fight so they don't miss half the attacks against a force that outnumbers you and will outlast you through sheer numbers of spells? Disregard the Githyanki patrol, just take the goblin camp or the regular Underdark encounters. Playing your way, the fights basically come down to the roll of a dice. To hell with that. To hell with being 2 shot by a minotaur. To hell with eating a 20+ damage attack from the Horrors on 30 HP pool characters with a 50% chance to retaliate if you don't abuse elevation, backstab, or light sources. To hell with a 24 damage Iron Foot.
It doesn't make you think and choose what to do at all, it's a garbage mechanic that means my druid will never use any spell but Moonbeam, or Flame Sphere/Flame Blade if they nerf moonbeam, because there's no point ever where Faerie Fire or Barkskin is ever worth the spell slot and concentration over Moonbream or Flame Sphere's reveal+damage. Actually try to think about this, don't offer some empty platitude. Explain when in hell a cleric will not use bless over Bane, when a druid will use Entangling Vines over Web (which does the same and can be set on fire) or Moonbeam.
Every time I get these same naive retorts about Concentration making for smart choices. Absolute garbage argument. Increasing spell combination permutations makes for SMART choices, not limiting your spell usage to a single spell out of 15+ 95% of the time.
Pre-buffing can always be exploited in video games when after a playthrough or load you know exactly what's on the other side of the door. It's a bad video game mechanic.
You don't need to cast only concentration spells. There are other powerful combos like Hold Person + Inflict Wounds. 8d10 with a 2nd level slot is rather nice.
Also worth noting that Larian's area and encounter design makes all crowd control spells less useful. Every fight tends to take place in a huge open area with a lot of verticality, even when you are indoors or in a dungeon. When you're being attacked by a tight horde of something spells like Entangle become very powerful, hence concentration. And also so that you can't stack multiple entangles or entangle + web on top of eachother for a super mass hold.
I do think that some spells like Barkskin could lose the concentration requirement, but the mechanic itself is cool and necessary.
It cannot be exploited because if they do what I said, which is that buffs outside combat expire in a matter of seconds, that Bless or Mirror Images pre-fight would be totally wasted since by the time you cast an ability and engage, the buff is gone.
Powerful combos like Hold Person+IW? Assuming your spell slot of Hold Person even lands at a pitiful 50-60% hit rate, by foregoing Bless with Shadowheart you're just spreading far more misses across your party, which means Lazael's Frightening Strike is less likely to land as well as an action surge for 40+ damage, your human mages with their abysmal hit rates in the Underdark or within an obscured dungeon setting are landing less than half of their spells if they're not cheesing magic missiles or gutting their damage output by foregoing Hex+multistrike spells like Ray of Flame by having to waste concentration on Dancing Lights cantrip requiring concentration. And that's on top of denying your party a sizable saving throws buff on top.
For reference, I just did the Duegar end of EA boat fight on lv4 characters completely kitted out on the available magical items in EA, with all current maximum paerks, and my Gale from the high grund of the back of the boat had at best a 60% hit chance on his Poison Ray cantrip (using staff of crone+poisoner's robe+ring of poison resistance since EA is bugged and staff of crones poison ray cantrip also currently damages you). And that's while I had the Duegar 2H fighter frightened with Lazael. Virtually every single Poison Ray in that fight missed, and all of Gale's damage in that fight came from using Magic Missiles afterwards. I cast 6 Poison Rays, all of them missed on Hexed targets from high ground. That's how awful it feels. Meanwhile my druid's moonbeam did reliable damage, as did Lazael. Shadowheart couldn't hit a single spell from high ground unless it was using her fire-dipped crossbow at 65% hit rate.
I don't know how anyone can pretend this is an enjoyable combat experience, watching 5-10 second turns go by per combatant in a flurry of misses unless the enemy chooses to cheese me with a cheesy 20 damage firebomb.
Area and encounter design would change nothing about CC spells being awful when they use up precious, limited spell slots to only miss half the time and do nothing else, stalling out fights by causing an opportunity cost of damage, which means giving the enemy more action turns to CC/blow your party up. The best defense has always been removing enemies from the board as quickly as possible. And even should these spells land, all you're accomplishing is screwing your fighters over as Vines and Spike Growth also hurt Lazael or your druid's forms to boot.
I am not excited at all about my Druid because virtually all my spell slots require concentration, which leaves me only using Moonbeam over and over again, unless I feel the urge to play conjure flame blade which is a far worse playstyle since it's a melee weapon conjure that places you in the thick of melee but breaks on concentration, wasting one of your three limited 2nd rank spell slots should anything sneeze on you in melee range. And since my druid is not an OP elf race with built in sleep immunity/charm resistance or the higher defenses from +2 DEX, it's been fairly often that I get summarily put to sleep and lose my melee conjure with only getting off a single swing off a 2nd rank spell slot. Never used Entangling Vines. Can't use Faerie Fire. Can't use Barkskin. Can't use Enhance Ability, also requires concentration. What's the point of Heat Metal? When I use it to debuff hit rates on a single target, and hit still goes through, concentration is broken and another spell slot wasted; far better to play a ranged moon beam druid and not expose yourself to all these risks of wasting a spell slot and doing more damage, from range, damage that is aoe (2d10 aoe, illuminates targets vs's heat metals' mediocre 2d8 damage on a single target).
The concentration mechanic only accomplishes completely monotone gameplay as it always boils down to using the optimal concentration spell for damage or the optimal utility concentration spell that will net your party the most damage. And since you get a single action per turn it's not like you can plan around swapping concentration spells in advance for benefiting a teammate and then using a damage/debuff concentration spell of your own.
It's a horrendous mechanic that only accomplishes a stifled combat experience. And it shows in the current superiority of martial classes, which would be fine if martial classes did more focused damage with more baseline survivablity while casters were the masters of utility and aoe damage, but this is total crap where a fighter with Frightening Strike at 4 uses per fight has a supremely better hit rate CC spell that also does their normal high melee damage. Or rogues currently getting to do what they do in early access.
Perhaps my druid's gameplay experience with concentration wouldn't be so horrendous if animal forms were such absolute garbage with fixed instead of scaling stats to your character, equipment, and level, and you could supplement your gameplay with in-form actions and could use moonbeam movement or heat metal reuse while in form, etc, but that is simply not the case, the animal forms are gimped, including the most awful of them all, the supposed tadpole form, and they are more liability than boon. And if you're a Land druid you don't get to use animal forms anyways because they take up a whole action slot to shapeshift instead of a bonus action.
Though it isn't too different on my wizard, cleric, or warlock currently. All their gameplay is the same. Hex+nuke for warlock/wizard, assuming you're not forced into magic missiles due to abysmal hit rates, and Bless+IW on cleric. It's even aggravating that I discovered Shadowheart is supremely more efficient playing with a crossbow+1 and weapon dipping than using her awful 40-50% hit rate Sacred Flame cantrip for a pitiful 1-7 damage or the equally unreliable Radiant Bolt that costs a spell slot to boot if the enemy is not in melee range.
