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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 7164388" data-attributes="member: 2011">One would think so reading the cantrip.But in actual game play, it almost never does anything. Or at least IME.We have a 10th level Arcana Domain Cleric with both Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade and Shillelagh. The PC is specifically designed to take advantage of these two cantrips.In nearly 10 full levels of play, Booming Blade might have done it's additional damage 6 or 8 times. A few times, the PC Wizard has dropped a Bonfire on the same foe and it has to take extra damage from one cantrip, or the other. But usually the Wizard is too busy doing something more worthwhile. And the Cleric even typically uses Booming Blade more often than Green-Flame Blade since we are playing Storm King's Thunder (a modified version of the quest so that the PCs have to go to every single giant lair as part of the quest), so we fight a lot of larger creatures, giants, etc. and they just don't stack themselves together like a bunch of small or medium foes would. Even with the situational incentive to use Booming Blade when not casting a spell, it just rarely gets its bonus damage.It might "control" the foes to some minor extent, but since the Cleric has Spiritual Guardians up nearly every non-trivial encounter, foes want to stay put anyway (and the Cleric often has a huge bullseye on her back). The control is often redundant to the control of Spiritual Guardians (i.e. if a foe moves away from Spiritual Guardians, there are often few things that prevent the Cleric from just following that foe, so many foes have an incentive to just stay put and kill the Cleric or disrupt the Concentration of the Cleric). One would think that Spiritual Guardians would incentivize NPCs to flee, but instead it often (regardless of DM) incentivizes them to attack the Cleric (at least the semi-intelligent foes).With a different build and different party makeup and different set of DMs/adventures (we have 3 rotating DMs who run the game for 3 to 6 months each depending on what else is going on in life), it could have more utility. But it doesn't seem to do that much in our group.</blockquote>

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