D&D 5E Why Green Flame Blade is Over Rated- And You Are Doing it Wrong.

Yunru said:

I've made them d12 cantrips in my games. After all, if you're going to be casting the best melee cantrip, it should do more damage than the best ranged cantrip.

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Do keep in mind that the melee cantrips already have a few advantages over ranged ones: they don't suffer disadvantage when in melee, they can be augmented by abilities that effect your weapon attacks (for example, sneak attack or divine smite), they can be augmented by the properties of your weapon if your weapon is magical or poisoned, they run off of your weapon attack mod instead of spell attack mod, and they come with a rider (which ranged cantrips often do, but not the hard hitting ones).

My only thing with gfb & booming blade is we only get fire or thunder so I have to build options for different damage types

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Undrhil said:

My Sorcerer is Fire-based and has GFB and likes to stack the CHA-mod on the off-loaded damage if there's someone else standing nearby. 2d8+8 is better than 2d8+4

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So I realize this is an old thread, but there's something very important about what makes Green-Flame blade good for sorcerers that nobody has mentioned yet: it's a cantrip, which means that you can quicken it for 1 sorcery point. So basically, it gives sorcerers a low-cost double attack that hits two opponents. At 18 Charisma and 16 Dex, it hits for 2d8+7 / 1d8+8 per attack, and twice that is a total of 6d8+30, or an average of 57 damage, which well out-does even the 33 damage [3*(2d6+4)] that a fighter does with extra attacks, and is on par with the damage Fireball does to each target (8d6+4=32). Yes, it doesn't do as much damage as casting a powerful spell, but it's far cheaper and more effective against a smaller number of opponents, plus it can be chained from an easy-to-hit target to a hard-to-hit one.

A bladesinger wizard can also make fantastic use of this spell for a couple reasons. I feel a lot of people overlook the fact that you must have a hand free to cast spells that have somatic or material components, therefore making dual wielding not viable. And as advantage is very easy to get through find familiar or flanking bonuses (which you can manipulate with lightning lure or similar) the damage of green flame blade will exceed the extra attack of other classes. This is because at level five you get an extra d8 of damage to both the target of the melee and the spell. This causes your damage on the melee target to be slightly below extra attack as you only get one use of the damage mod, but you're also essentially hitting an entire extra enemy. The only time it isn't good for bladesinger s that I can think of is if you get to wizard 6/ fighter 2 and use action surge to attack 4 times in a single round, but that can only happen once per rest.

P.s. forgot to mention this but green flame blade has a required material component so (despite the fact that the material is your weapon) you technically can not use it while dual wielding

Booming Blade + Shadow Blade + Twin Spell (or Quicken) = Sorcerer multiattack.

Greenflame Blade is a fine situational spell, but Booming Blade is better for many builds. It can be used with War Magic Feat.

GFB isn't useless it's just good on classes you you may not expect like arcane clerics.

Sorcerers and Bladesingers are a bit more obvious.