D&D 5E Plane shift. The Best save or suck spell?

[TaranTheWanderer]

So, unlike the previous edition I've played, Plane Shift lets you target an unwilling person and put them permanently into a different plane. Essentially, it's a suped up Banishment spell that requires no concentration. And you get to choose the destination!

Goodbye villain, go to the abyss...or the elemental plane of fire...
I don't like Demons, go visit your celestial friends.

Paired up with a Divination wizard, it's pretty amazing. Has anyone used it offensively instead of as a transportation spell?

 

[Asisreo]

Its possible to use it as such, but there's a few problems:

It has a costly material component (one for each plane you want to send enemies to) so its not like you can send anyone to any other plane immediately.

It has both an attack roll and Charisma Save. These things can stack to make actually activating the spell pretty difficult. If you have a 65% chance to hit and they have a 65% chance to fail, that's still only a 42% chance of it hitting. The likelier scenario is 65% chance to hit and 20-30% chance to fail.

It is a magical charisma save. Almost all fiends have magic resistance and almost all high-level creatures have high Charisma and Legendary Resistance. With Legendary Resistance, the enemy can easily evade the already small chance of success.

So, with all the stars aligning, it definitely has the potential to be an extremely powerful spell. Unfortunately, the fact that its basically reduced three-fold makes it unlikely to actually be useful in combat scenarios. Once you gain the material component (or cast through Wish), it does open the gate for more intricate exploration of the world through planar travel.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

Right. Material component. I had a staff of the magi so I didn’t need to worry about that! Good points