D&D 5E Analyzing Bless

[FrogReaver]

So, it's a general consensus that bless is very powerful. I challenge that consensus. I believe Bless is only considered very powerful because it's one of the cheapest and best buffs to the truly very powerful 'power attack -5/+10' feats. We will develop a framework to analyze bless here and then plug in some "real world" numbers to see how strong it truly is absent those feats.

Even if we find out that Bless isn't very powerful it's still going to be situationally powerful because it adds to saves and anytime a character or the party needs to makes saves bless will excel at that.

But onward with the damage comparison!

(See the next post)

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm assuming a party of 6 because it's going to allow me to make better more generalized assumption on down the road.

Step 1: Let every character in the party be an exact replica. This means bless will impact each character the same. (This isn't real world yet, but if we handle this case first we can later come back and add party member differences into the party).

Analysis
Base Case: Bless is not cast. Each party member contributes 100% of their base damage each turn for a total of 600% damage per round. If the combat lasts 4 rounds that's 2400% of a party members base damage.

Bless Case 1: In the best case scenario the party member casting bless will win initiative and go first. This sets his damage that turn to 0% (assuming he doesn't pick himself as one of the 3 targets).

Assumption: 50% chance to hit
With a 50% chance to hit that means bless will up net chance to hit to 62.5% chance to hit. That will increase damage by 25% for 3 party members. At the end each round the damage will be as follows:

round 1: 575%
round 2: 1250%
round 3: 1925%
round 4: 2600%

Bless Case 2: In the worst case scenario the party member casting bless will do so at the end of the round.

Assumption: 50% chance to hit

round 1: 500%
round 2: 1175%
round 3: 1850%
round 4: 2525%

Bless Average: I'm going to average out the best case and worst cases to get a quasi average case

round 1: 537.5
round 2: 1212.5
round 3: 1887.5
round 4: 2562.5

In the average case scenario with 6 identical party members you are increasing the party's damage by less than 7% after 4 rounds of combat. It comes at the opportunity cost of doing 10% less damage on turn 1.

Keep in mind that higher damage now is more important that higher damage later. Eliminating enemies earlier in combat has a very profound effect on how much damage the party takes in a fight. So killing that monster on turn 1 as opposed to turn to is 1 less monster turn. Even if the bless character makes up the difference by turn 2 it' still potentially 1 less attack on the party.

Final comparison before real data is attempted to be placed in:

What if the bless caster doesn't cast bless but instead casts a damage spell. I'm going to assume a level 1 spell will do about 150% of your normal damage (this may not hold if we are looking at level 20 characters but it should be a fairly good approximation.

This changes the damage layout to:
round 1: 650
round 2: 1250
round 3: 1850
round 4: 2450

Doing this gets the bless caster a 5% damage increase after 4 rounds of combat. However, he's 17% damage behind at round 1. He doesn't catch up in damage till round 3. Since damage now is better than damage later I would be inclined to say bless isn't nearly that good in this fictional whiteroom.

Now things may change and I may be proven wrong when we add in some actual characters to look at but I'll work on the analysis and post it later.

 

[Lanliss]

Last session with [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] Bless from the Paladin made a lot of misses into hits, and saved my character from being possessed by a ghost. a +1-4 is pretty dang powerful, considering other areas of the game are stingy about even giving a +1. Heck, Proficiency only goes up by 1 after four levels. it takes a full ASI to get a +1 to some attack rolls, saving throws and ability checks. An instant +1, at least? Sounds awesome to me.

Also, this was a featless game, so no connection to -5/+10.

 

[aco175]

I like bless overall. In my games it does not get used as much as it perhaps should. The cleric casts it after some of the party gets hit with some save things, but the bard can also cast a 1d8 bonus to saves. There does seem to be only a few cool spells for 1st level.

The spell spirit guardians is the one that upset a few parts of my game. It is not used as much as it could as well, so only a few fights every day or two become easier than the numbers may say.

Overall there is not a big problem, but some things skew towards the PCs. They do not seem to be not having fun with the easier encounters. The fun=good equation seems to be working.

 

[iserith]

Last session with [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] Bless from the Paladin made a lot of misses into hits, and saved my character from being possessed by a ghost. a +1-4 is pretty dang powerful, considering other areas of the game are stingy about even giving a +1. Heck, Proficiency only goes up by 1 after four levels. it takes a full ASI to get a +1 to some attack rolls, saving throws and ability checks. An instant +1, at least? Sounds awesome to me.

Also, this was a featless game, so no connection to -5/+10.

Where you guys needed the help was on your ability checks since most of the session was an extended social interaction challenge! Bless can't help with that. I wonder if that should weigh on the utility of the spell in this calculation in some way.

 

[Prism]

I played a cleric to 10th level in a party of 4 and found it variable. We played it so that we only made the extra 1d4 when it was needed - as in a target AC or saving throw was just missed. I rarely cast it on the druid as he often didn't make attack rolls when casting spells. Whole combats could go by where barely anybody needed to roll the d4. Occasionally to turned an important miss into to hit. The rest of the party became indifferent about it.

In addition due to concentration, and the fact that my cleric would fairly often be the target of attacks, the spell rarely lasted more than a round or two in a combat. I found hold person and banishment better uses of my concentration spell. Those two spells often changed the whole encounter.

So in summary, standard size party, only two combat focused characters, nobody with GMW or SS - I'd say not that good a spell unless you really want the saving throw benefit for the party. Then again, for a first level spell its always worth having around

 

[aco175]

An instant +1, at least? Sounds awesome to me.

I made a NPC with a +1 sword that had a special power 1/rest. It allowed a +1 to an attack or save within 30ft. I forget which old spell did this, but I miss it in 5e. The NPC stayed around for only a few weeks of play, but the +1 came in handy a few times.

 

[FrogReaver]

I played a cleric to 10th level in a party of 4 and found it variable. We played it so that we only made the extra 1d4 when it was needed - as in a target AC or saving throw was just missed. I rarely cast it on the druid as he often didn't make attack rolls when casting spells. Whole combats could go by where barely anybody needed to roll the d4. Occasionally to turned an important miss into to hit. The rest of the party became indifferent about it.

In addition due to concentration, and the fact that my cleric would fairly often be the target of attacks, the spell rarely lasted more than a round or two in a combat. I found hold person and banishment better uses of my concentration spell. Those two spells often changed the whole encounter.

So in summary, standard size party, only two combat focused characters, nobody with GMW or SS - I'd say not that good a spell unless you really want the saving throw benefit for the party. Then again, for a first level spell its always worth having around

I totally agree it's worth having in your bag of tricks. I also agree that the concentration aspect to bless and it being fairly easy to turn off in the middle of combat is something to many people overlook.

BTW thanks for your observational experience! I've actually not seen bless used enough to make any experience based judgments.

I will say that bless scales very well and at high level play it will probably be one of only a few useful level 1 spells... When your cantrips do more damage than most of your level 1 spells then there aren't many useful options left...

 

[Yunru]

I'm assuming a party of 6 because it's going to allow me to make better more generalized assumption on down the road.

Step 1: Let every character in the party be an exact replica. This means bless will impact each character the same. (This isn't real world yet, but if we handle this case first we can later come back and add party member differences into the party).

Analysis
Base Case: Bless is not cast. Each party member contributes 100% of their base damage each turn for a total of 600% damage per round. If the combat lasts 4 rounds that's 2400% of a party members base damage.

Bless Case 1: In the best case scenario the party member casting bless will win initiative and go first. This sets his damage that turn to 0% (assuming he doesn't pick himself as one of the 3 targets).

Assumption: 50% chance to hit
With a 50% chance to hit that means bless will up net chance to hit to 62.5% chance to hit. That will increase damage by 25% for 3 party members. At the end each round the damage will be as follows:

round 1: 575%
round 2: 1250%
round 3: 1925%
round 4: 2600%

Bless Case 2: In the worst case scenario the party member casting bless will do so at the end of the round.

Assumption: 50% chance to hit

round 1: 500%
round 2: 1175%
round 3: 1850%
round 4: 2525%

Bless Average: I'm going to average out the best case and worst cases to get a quasi average case

round 1: 537.5
round 2: 1212.5
round 3: 1887.5
round 4: 2562.5

In the average case scenario with 6 identical party members you are increasing the party's damage by less than 7% after 4 rounds of combat. It comes at the opportunity cost of doing 10% less damage on turn 1.

Keep in mind that higher damage now is more important that higher damage later. Eliminating enemies earlier in combat has a very profound effect on how much damage the party takes in a fight. So killing that monster on turn 1 as opposed to turn to is 1 less monster turn. Even if the bless character makes up the difference by turn 2 it' still potentially 1 less attack on the party.

Final comparison before real data is attempted to be placed in:

What if the bless caster doesn't cast bless but instead casts a damage spell. I'm going to assume a level 1 spell will do about 150% of your normal damage (this may not hold if we are looking at level 20 characters but it should be a fairly good approximation.

This changes the damage layout to:
round 1: 650
round 2: 1250
round 3: 1850
round 4: 2450

Doing this gets the bless caster a 5% damage increase after 4 rounds of combat. However, he's 17% damage behind at round 1. He doesn't catch up in damage till round 3. Since damage now is better than damage later I would be inclined to say bless isn't nearly that good in this fictional whiteroom.

Now things may change and I may be proven wrong when we add in some actual characters to look at but I'll work on the analysis and post it later.

Let's make that a tad more realistic. A party of four instead of six:
400% damage per round.
1600% after four rounds.

At the start of the round:
round 1: 375%
round 2: 850%
round 3: 1325%
round 4: 1800%

At the end of the round:
round 1: 300%
round 2: 775%
round 3: 1250%
round 4: 1725%

Psuedo-averages:
round 1: 337.5%
round 2: 812.5%
round 3: 1287.5%
round 4: 1762.5%

At best that's an 12.5% increase, after four turns, assuming all survive that long, versus regular damage.
(General rule of thumb appears to be 1/2X increase, where X is the number of people in the party)

 

[Jester David]

The attack bonus of bless is more of a buff at low levels when you really need that extra +1d4 to hit. At high levels it becomes less cool as accuracy goes up.

However, the +1d4 to saving throws becomes much more amazing at high levels, when your chances of making an untrained saving throw decrease. Bless can save your ass against higher level monsters.