It's not very good for the high cost and very low chance of working against exactly the enemies you'd most want it to work on.
Fast enemies that tend to run away? It isn't much of a high cost, really. You deal 2d6 instead of 2d8, it is two points of damage on average. For the chance to trigger advantage for all your melee allies.
No, it's not. It's mediocre/niche spell that will see very limited use in actual play and does basically no damage.
You are welcome to that opinion, but I've already seen it in play. The damage is low, but fear is a great control condition. Having it on tap is very good, especially since it prevents enemies from getting past you.
LOL which would be great if it say, ignored the disadvantage to hit an invisible opponent, but as it stands, you have to both know exactly where the invisible opponent is, and stand around whiffing with Disadvantage until you hit, before you can do this. Faerie Fire you only need their general location and you can hit a whole bunch of targets. Plus this is Concentration. It's mid at best.
I agree, you do need to hit first. Know what is great? You whiff the attack? You don't spend your bonus action on the spell. So since you are theoritically trying to hit this invisible enemy anyways, the fact that the spell can now be cast on a hit is a major boon compared to before when you had to cast and concentrate on it before swinging.
And if it moved from utter garbage I never prepared to mid? That's a MASSIVE boost.
You clearly don't understand the melee critique, which weakens your responses in general.
No, I don't understand why a paladin in melee is a bad thing.
No. It's the dead minimum required to render a pointless trash-spell not pointless.
That's still a buff. Taking something from pointless trash to an actual option is a big buff.
It's really dumb, yeah hopefully they changed it. It's like, pick a limitation! You can't have both! I think the save is a lot better because otherwise it's a silly guessing game as to whether they're below 50 HP.
Agreed. Just having it be a save would be perfectly fine, and likely what I will do with it if they don't change it.
I don't consider them buffs. I consider them minimal fixes. If they were already borderline viable, and just needed to be improved, sure, I'd consider that a buff, but these were completely non-functional - most Paladins went their entire career without using any of them, or using 1-2, finding out how bad they were, and dropping them forever.
Minimal fixes that increase useability are still buffs. I don't see how we can argue otherwise. You either buff, sidegrade, don't touch, or nerf. These are buffs, taking things from trash to actually viable options.
I don't think I am at all. I've played an absolute ton of 5E, and the best and only consistent CC of enemies in the entire game is death. Inflicting drastically less damage to create a puny condition, especially on a spell with Concentration (which they have some potential competition for), or worse, an easy save is not good, especially as a lot of spells have strong conditions. The one real exception is when you can apply a condition without a save, and that's why Blinding Smite is good - trading 2d8 (9) damage for blinding the enemy for at least 1 turn (even a boss with Legendary Resistance, technically, though I can see a lot of DMs trying to weasel out of that) is really nice, especially as it might potentially last longer. The more I think about that Smite, the more I like it.
Of course the problem is, as you pointed out with Banishing Smite, these may not be what they get. If they are, then they don't really mitigate the Paladin nerf, but at least they give a sort of direction to the Paladin, as this like, condition-inflicter. But if, say, they moved the Blinding Smite save to the beginning of their turn, i.e. before attacks, it would go from great to "kind of a dud", pretty much immediately.
Yes, dead is the best condition. But when the enemy has 60 hp, and you are hitting for either 20 or 29... those conditions might make a bigger difference than that damage. Thunderous smite can knock an enemy prone, giving an ally advantage on their attacks, which if that turns a miss into a hit, is a lot more than 2 damage that you added to the fight. A lot of these paladin smites are great for setting up or protecting allies, which is exactly what a paladin should be doing.
And sure, we can't know the exact wording changes, and a simple shift in those could make them less good. But I'm confident that the changes they proposed got enough goodwill from the community, and they explicitly stated in an interview that they buffed these spells, that I think we are actually looking at a good situation here for paladin smiting.
