When There Are Mixed Groups

So this specific issue came up for me yesterday at an AL game where I'm playing a Sorcerer with Sleep. At current, we are only level 2, so neither we nor our enemies are really swimming in hit points.

The situation was that on the left was my sorcerer, to the right was a goblin, and above me was another goblin. Notably, I had taken a beating so was at risk of going down (maybe 6 hit points left), one of the goblins was near death, and the other unscathed. Furthermore, the quarters were relatively tight.

|G|

|S||G|

For this specific situation, it would have been difficult for me to cast Sleep under the 2014 rules and affect just the goblins because of the need to place to place a point 20' away that hits both goblins but omitted myself (walls aren't shown by are probably 10' away from us). However, under the 2024 rules, this a perfect situation for me because:

Each creature of your choice in a 5-foot-radius Sphere centered on a point within range

So now, I can force just the goblins to save and choose to leave myself out of the effect.

This means in a Tier 1 situation, I was able to effectively cast the 2024 version of Sleep and I removed 1 enemy (the other saved). Had I used the 2014 version, I could have gotten them both and probably myself as well.

Beyond Tier 1 and Against High Hit Points

The biggest problem with Sleep under the 2014 rules was it lacked staying power. 5d8 worth of hit points is, on average, only 22.5. Granted you can upcast it adding 9 to that average for each spell level, but you also have a lot better choices for control spells when you have access to 2nd and 3rd level spells.

A CR2 ogre under the 2014 rules has 59 hit points. If your party knocks half of those off then you might manage to put the ogre to sleep if you roll well on your 1st level spell, or you might not roll well and get nothing.

Conversely, under the 2024 rules while we don't know how many hit points ogres will have until the revised Monster Manual comes out, we don't need to worry about that anymore. It's just a Wisdom save and generally ogres aren't very wise, so it's pretty reliable that they will fail. It's true that the ogre will get a second save to shake off the effect, however, they will still spend that first round being Incapacitated which means they can really only just move. This is a massive limitation to an enemy who is meant to both be a road block of hit points and deal a bunch of damage on its turn.

Regardless, whether you're dealing with enemies at Tier 1 with a lot of hit points relative to the party, or at Tier 4 where everyone has a minimum of over 100 hit points, the 2024 version of Sleep can offer a form of battlefield control now. If you see a clump of enemies together, it's a target for Sleep.

So to summarize in these high hit point scenarios, under the 2014 rules you're generally either getting 0 or 1 enemies depending on how well you roll. Under the 2024 rules, you can generally get 1 or more if you choose your targets carefully.

Where It's Worse

A notable change for the 2024 version is that it is now a Concentration spell. In the early game, this should be fine as you probably don't have a lot of spells that are in competition for your Concentration. But when you get to Tier 2 and higher, it's very likely that as an arcane caster casting Sleep may not be your first choice for control on the battlefield.

However, you might still want to prepare it. You can't usually predict where enemies will be in a battle and while spells like Haste are still very powerful areas to put your Concentration towards, you still might have a situation where 3 brutes are clumped together that you can simply cast Sleep and have a pretty good chance of taking 1 turn if not all their turns with a single 1st level spell.

In addition, while you are playing a Wizard, their counterpart of Sorcerers have a means to reduce enemy save success via the Heighten Spell metamagic. My point is, in Tier 2 and beyond, Sleep remains a choice. And it's now in competition with other choices.

So to quantify, under the 2014 rules Sleep is almost definitely going to be on your list of spells you prepare when in Tier 1, but past that point it's very likely going to be replaced with something that's either more reliable or impactful. However, for the 2024 rules Sleep is likely to stay on the prepared list for awhile as it remains a useful option to shutdown targets who are likely to fit the 'big dumb' category.