D&D (2024) Should Green Flame Blade and Booming Blade be in the new PHB?

[Kurotowa]

Fighting styles, maneuvers, and smites don't work well with the weapon cantrips, because they're features of classes that rely on Extra Attack. Any time you use a weapon cantrip, you're sacrificing Extra Attack. Unless the bonus damage from the cantrip exceeds the damage of a whole other attack -- which it very seldom does -- you're coming out behind. A fighting style which boosts the damage of each attack is just putting you even further behind. Maneuvers and smite attacks also put you further behind, because you can only apply them on a hit, and you're more likely to miss one attack than two.

As an example of how far you have to go to make the weapon cantrips keep up with Extra Attack, one of the narrow cases that does is Celestial Bladelock under the UA rules. The right build can triple-drip adding their Cha modifier to an attack with Green-Flame Blade. This does roughly the same as two normal weapon attacks, and more if the GFB cleave activates. But it's all or nothing, where as two attacks is more likely to land at least one hit per turn. It's also only for the 6th-10th level range, because as soon as you hit 11th and get a third weapon attack your normal attacks pull ahead. Getting up to three applications of any sort of per-hit bonus, like Hex + Lifedrinker or a good magic weapon, completely outscales GFB's extra 1d8.

The weapon cantrips really only are good if you're either a Rogue, or you have a subclass feature to enable it like Bladesinger or Eldritch Knight.

 

[Undrave]

Singular/plural a 5mwd rarely ever finished the adventure by itself. Long or short rest fueled 5mewd the resulting impact on combat is identical. The only difference between the two is that it's even easier for players to avoid consequences other than those triggering an escalating spiral of adversarial fiat &player pushback when the players short rest beside the corpses before continuing with a new 5mwd than it it for them to go outside and long rest in the forest or whatever then come back. As long as 2-3 PCs in a 4-5 person party are warlock/monk+something like action surge early and often fighter the players are 100% highly incentivized to short rest after every fight to make their short rest abilities into st will ones.

And casters can just nova and ask for a long rest? At least with a short rest the rest of the day isn't lost. Would you find it as annoying if a shor rest was just 10 min?

I think you're saying the same thing I'm about to say...

Fighting styles, maneuvers, and smites don't work well with the weapon cantrips, because they're features of classes that rely on Extra Attack. Any time you use a weapon cantrip, you're sacrificing Extra Attack. Unless the bonus damage from the cantrip exceeds the damage of a whole other attack -- which it very seldom does -- you're coming out behind. A fighting style which boosts the damage of each attack is just putting you even further behind. Maneuvers and smite attacks also put you further behind, because you can only apply them on a hit, and you're more likely to miss one attack than two.

The weapon cantrips only combo effectively with Sneak Attack. And they do combo pretty well there, especially if you play an Arcane Trickster, which lets you pick them up without spending a feat. Even so, you're giving up the opportunity to dual wield, so there are tradeoffs to be made. The cantrip frees up your bonus action (which rogues can usually put to good use) and can sometimes trigger a powerful secondary effect. Dual wielding gives you two cracks at landing Sneak Attack instead of one, plus the off-hand weapon partly offsets the cantrip's bonus damage; if you don't get the secondary effect, dual wielding will inflict more damage on average. A smart rogue will switch off depending on circumstances, rather than spamming the cantrip every round.

Since rogue damage is generally sub-par unless you can arrange to get an out-of-turn Sneak Attack, I don't see this as a dire concern.

Yeah pretty much my position.

The weapon cantrips really only are good if you're either a Rogue, or you have a subclass feature to enable it like Bladesinger or Eldritch Knight.

My biggest problem is that they're TOO good with the Rogue that they feel like a MUST have. A Rogue shouldn't need magic to be good, ya know?

 

[mellored]

My biggest problem is that they're TOO good with the Rogue that they feel like a MUST have. A Rogue shouldn't need magic to be good, ya know?

What if it's like the new TrueStrike?
In that you have to use your casting mod.

 

[tetrasodium]

And casters can just nova and ask for a long rest? At least with a short rest the rest of the day isn't lost. Would you find it as annoying if a shor rest was just 10 min?

Your ignoring the accusations that brought up resting. The difference between "all casters" and the two short rest recover all ki/discipline/spell slot classes is that they can enjoy that all nova all the time 5mwd benefit with a much lower bar and do it while blaming the class design rather than their own unwillingness to pace themselves if the gm pushes back. Wotc seems 100% onboard with that

Yeah pretty much my position.

My biggest problem is that they're TOO good with the Rogue that they feel like a MUST have. A Rogue shouldn't need magic to be good, ya know?

Pretty much. Either they are pretty bad or they are mandatory overpowered. Their bad design negatively impacts both caster types martial types and gish types

 

[Kurotowa]

What if it's like the new TrueStrike?
In that you have to use your casting mod.

That would make them too good for Bladesingers and too bad for Eldritch Knights.

My biggest problem is that they're TOO good with the Rogue that they feel like a MUST have. A Rogue shouldn't need magic to be good, ya know?

Yeah, I get that. Right now there's very little downside. But the meta may change with the PHB'24; Mastery traits may make off-hand weapons more popular, and access to the whip may make a reach weapon very attractive. Or we may see revised versions of the cantrips included in the PHB'24 that tweak their functionality for a second time.

 

[Undrave]

Your ignoring the accusations that brought up resting. The difference between "all casters" and the two short rest recover all ki/discipline/spell slot classes is that they can enjoy that all nova all the time 5mwd benefit with a much lower bar and do it while blaming the class design rather than their own unwillingness to pace themselves if the gm pushes back. Wotc seems 100% onboard with that

There's supposed to be a short rest after two encounters, stopping after only 1 is hardly a great sacrifice. A short rest 'nova' is nothing compared to a real long rest nova.

You just seem mad people are trying to take short rests and not deferring to the casters to set the pace at every corner. Don't most classes have a short rest feature to recharge anyway? Except the Rogue.

 

[tetrasodium]

There's supposed to be a short rest after two encounters, stopping after only 1 is hardly a great sacrifice. A short rest 'nova' is nothing compared to a real long rest nova.

You just seem mad people are trying to take short rests and not deferring to the casters to set the pace at every corner. Don't most classes have a short rest feature to recharge anyway? Except the Rogue.

And? Tier one ends pretty quick... Designing to force the GM to allow it makes those worse, your immediate effort to shift from the bad design to absolve player resource burn by blaming the gm shows the problem faced by the gm rather clearly convenient how the rest rules are written to almost guarantee players can extend those short rest classes to all nova all the time barring fiat eh?

 

[Undrave]

And? Tier one ends pretty quick... Designing to force the GM to allow it makes those worse, your immediate effort to shift from the bad design to absolve player resource burn by blaming the gm shows the problem faced by the gm rather clearly convenient how the rest rules are written to almost guarantee players can extend those short rest classes to all nova all the time barring fiat eh?

I'm not blaming the GM? Everybody know the rest schedule is borked anyway. But usually it's a problem because of the long rest classes being able to outshine the short rest one because nobody does 6 encounters a day.

So the Short Rest Classes get to do their shtick after a short rest, why is that a problem? Yeah they should probably pace themselves to have ressouces for two fights but it's hardly the end of the world if they get a little foolish.

Not sure what tier one has to do with anything here?

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm not blaming the GM?

You did when you copied the lead set in 113 & opined about me as a gm

Everybody know the rest schedule is borked anyway. But usually it's a problem because of the long rest classes being able to outshine the short rest one because nobody does 6 encounters a day.

"Usually"? funny how a group of 4-5 with 2-3 warlock/monk PCs shifts that to "never" but still carries the same RAW backed club both posters aimed at a GM.

So the Short Rest Classes get to do their shtick after a short rest, why is that a problem? Yeah they should probably pace themselves to have ressouces for two fights but it's hardly the end of the world if they get a little foolish.

Same as above.that is little more than an example of how easy it is to use bad design to demand 5mwd while claiming the GM is unreasonable if they resort to fiat in pushing back against excess after being left with no other options by the rest and recovery wording

Not sure what tier one has to do with anything here?

I believe I mentioned that after it came up in 113. Kinda goes to show how little there is to support a defense of booming blade and gfb that this barb of distraction is still being propelled.

 

[Undrave]

"Usually"? funny how a group of 4-5 with 2-3 warlock/monk PCs shifts that to "never" but still carries the same RAW backed club both posters aimed at a GM.

Daily classes have way more swingy effect and can easily take all the spotlight with a single spell slot used judiciously.

Same as above.that is little more than an example of how easy it is to use bad design to demand 5mwd while claiming the GM is unreasonable if they resort to fiat in pushing back against excess after being left with no other options by the rest and recovery wording

You clearly have a chip on your shoulder about something that happened in your games. Aside from the Monk, the short rest class are fine pushing through an ordinary encounter without their full ressources in my experience. I suppose it would be better if they could handle 6 encounters back to back, but, really, once they're out of juice the encounters would just end up being the same slog over and over so I'm not sure how great that would be either. Just a Warlock plunking away with Eldritch Blast for 4 encounters while the Fighter swings his sword and forces the Cleric to just spend all their spell slot on healing to keep them topped off enough to keep going, losing any versatility they might have had with their spells otherwise.

Basically the rest schedule sucks, and everything would be better with 10 min short rests.