I think they should take another hard look at their combat design in general. The aforementioned divide and conquer style battlefield control MUST be an integral part of D&D combat, or any tactical combat for that matter. It will only get more glaring later in the levels. This includes, but is not limited to:
- designing battlefields where you actually have chokepoints
- not allowing enemies to effortlessly jump or teleport around any AoE effect you might place to hinder their movement
- allowing AoE control spells to actually do their job without coming up with various ways to instantly blow them up
- not giving almost every enemy some form of powerful new ranged attack
- torches and flaming weapons not igniting ground effects unless they actually touch them (intentional action, i.e. Dip)
A controller spellcaster must be a valid way to play the game. Blowing stuff up is fun and all but it gets old, and there should be a "smarter" way too.
Very good suggestions, I agree, not only in terms of crowd control spells, but also because of the use of pets, steel defender (in the future) and all these summoning spells. They will all be redundant if they always die instantly from explosions or, as the case may be, there are simply no enemies left.
