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The Evocation spell "Wall of Stone" is pretty underwhelming in combat. It's supposed to cut through enemy space and push enemies to either side of the wall, with the player choosing which side of the wall they end up on.

Unlike the similar spells Wall of Fire or Wall of Ice, which do direct damage, the Wall of Stone is meant as a control spell, but it breaks apart when trying to cast across space occupied by friendlies/hostiles/neutrals.

Instead of crushing enemies or hurling them to either side, or raising friendlies to high ground, or doing something useful like that, instead the spell just fails to materialize in that space? Leaves us with a series of stone pillars instead of a wall.

It can't be used to effectively divide the battlefield with a bunch of openings like that. It's marginally useful if you can corner an isolated enemy in a single elevation area, but that's pretty niche and sorta the opposite of the control theme. Like it might as well be a banish spell at that point. It also seems pretty easy for opponents to shoot around the wall, destroy the wall, or just jump over the wall, since most areas are built around elevation platforms. Weirdly, when using jump normally the PCs will often snag on invisible walls in the environment after the player has already committed to the jump action (preview lines for jump are less accurate than they are for the spells or ranged weapons) and when this happens the player will hang on whatever edge and just fall to the lower elevation, wherever they snagged mid-jump. So I could imagine something similar for the hostiles with this spell, but that doesn't happen with the wall of stone either. The spell seems like it would be most useful in fights with many enemies or big trashmob spill-over type battles, but these situations make the spell even harder to use, since there is less unoccupied space to trace an unbroken a path for the wall.

We can only paint the wall in a straight line across the floor of the environment, and it doesn't work in any area that can't be reached already normally, so not terribly useful as a bridge or makeshift ladder either. It's also concentration spell, which means that if there are gaps in the wall such that enemies can still shoot through, it's going to be tough to maintain.

Seems buggy for big 5th level spell that should be more of a show stopper.

Here are a bunch of screens with some examples from the Nightsong Prison, showing the discrepancy between the spell previews and what we end up with...

spoilers* image heavy