Discussion on question by Roman Pekar: Differences between Mage Hand, Unseen Servant and Find Familiar

Feeds

13:57

Q: Differences between Mage Hand, Unseen Servant and Find Familiar

I'm playing LMoP at the moment as a player and I'm trying to see reasons why a player would choose Unseen Servant over Find Familiar. Related question - what makes Unseen Servant worth taking instead of Mage Hand? Here's a small comparison table I've created when I was trying to figure it out. ...

Purple Monkey

If you're looking for opinions you'd be better of with a forum. Unfortunately we don't do open-ended, opinion-seeking discussion.

enkryptor

@PurpleMonkey isn't "what makes spell X worth taking instead of spell Y" specific enough?

SeriousBri

This seems perfectly answerable other than the op using the word opinion, which is probably just lack of familiarity with the site.

Anagkai

@enkryptor Looking for opinions is problematic. Asking for objective advantages of the spells (or about the existence thereof) seems reasonable.

Roman Pekar

I’m quite familiar with stackoverflow part of the site and agree i should have not used the word “opinion”. I’d probably prefer to have it as a question not forum to make it easier to find by others - i’ve seen a lot of discussions around the topic but haven’t found comparison.

I’ve edited the question and removed “looking for opinions” part, would it make the question more fit for this site?

enkryptor

13:57

@RomanPekar maybe it's better to narrow down this particular question, just compare Unseen Servant to Find Familiar. Comparing Unseen Servant with Mage Hand worth its own question.

Roman Pekar

@enkryptor when i try to find reasons why would i use Unseen Servant instead of Find Familiar i always come to related question - why not Mage Hand then? That’s why i want to compare three of them

enkryptor

@RomanPekar you can compare three of them indeed, just ask different questions.

Roman Pekar

I probably need to add cantrip vs spell slot to the table, will do that later (hard to do it from the phone)

enkryptor

I took the liberty of narrowing down the question quite a bit. Feel free to roll back the edits if you think there were too much @RomanPekar

Thomas Markov

This is still entirely opinion based, I can't see why anyone would vote to reopen.

SeriousBri

13:57

Removing the mage hand comparison seems to remove half the point of the question, these are 3 spells that can basically 'move things' for you, so why remove one option just because half a question was asked by someone else?

NautArch

I'm adding the optimization tag as this question does seem interested in why a spell would be optimal.

Roman Pekar

I've edited the question back to 3-way comparison and returned the table - I feel it's a good overview of the differences, optimization tag seems to be valid as well

NautArch

Based on your table, are you just asking about use in combat? I also generally prefer questions to just have the question. The table seems.like the start of an answer.

Roman Pekar

@NautArch not only combat, but also scouting and interacting with objects. Basically it'd be good to have brief description on why would it make sense to learn Unseen Servant instead of taking Mage Hand or learning Find Familiar