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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7121081" data-attributes="member: 6787650">It costs you your opportunity to do 2d6 damage with Thunderous Smite AND possibly knock the enemy away and prone, or 1d6 psychic damage with Wrathful Smite and a good chance to render it combat-ineffective. Is the extra 2 points of damage (Thunderous Smite) or 5.5 points of damage (Wrathful Smite) really that critical to your combat strategy?RE: "smite on a crit." It's not really compatible with the initiative system I use (everybody declares, then everybody acts), and my players find smiting on a crit absurd anyway (at least, I remember one paladin's player openly mocking the idea of deciding AFTER the hit lands whether or not you're going to smite), so I have no experience actually playing with it. I'm skeptical however that crit-smites are sufficiently better than regular smites to make abolishing smites a significant balance nerf--now you have a slightly wider window of utility (have to guess correctly that a foe is within 36 HP of death instead of 18) but a narrower window of opportunity (have to make said guess correctly at a time when you just happen to roll a critical hit). See below.Isn't this in bold the same as the example you quoted, only with less specificity?It isn't enough for an appropriately-sized smite to drop an opponent where a normal hit would not. You have to do that on a turn where the enemy is about to inflict 70+ HP of damage on the PCs before anyone else can act. Could be a table thing, but IME that's quite rare, outside the glassy glass cannon Meteor Swarm scenario already mentioned, or equivalent ones such as an already-damaged Flameskull casting Fireball when four or more PCs are in Fireball Formation. Since players (at my table) don't know the monster's remaining HP or spell loadouts, they wouldn't even know for sure they were in this optimal scenario even if it did arrive--you could waste your spell slots on smiting AND STILL get Fireballed, and now you will have trouble even healing the damage because you already blew the spell slots.Divine Smite isn't a bad capability to have, but I predict the proposed nerf (basically removing it from the game entirely) will have little impact on game balance.Per above, it's possible that deciding to smite AFTER rolling a crit could alter the above analysis--I don't play that way myself, but I'm open to arguments from those who do. And yet, I rather doubt it.</blockquote>

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