D&D 5E What's Divine Smite Worth?

[FormerlyHemlock]

The # combats/day thing is ridiculous. Leomunds is a 3rd level spell that can be cast as a ritual and completely breaks that. So you say it only lasts 8 hours, and you can only benefit from one rest every 24 hours? Just 're-cast it and sit back down. What about wandering monsters - just pile up an army outside the leomunds to attack when it drops. Some situations ok, but wilderness or tombs where the undead or constructs are guardians. And in the situations that it does work, those wanderers are going to be around to attack whether you are sitting still or not. There just starts to be a real breakdown in the logic and feels like you are punishing the players for a perfectly reasonable use of a design features of the game.

Getting in a "free" long rest in exchange for having to fight every monster in the whole dungeon simultaneously sounds like a fair trade.

Also, enemies can do things like drop the ceiling on your Leomund's Hut to bury you in dirt, dig trenches around your hut, or tunnel underneath it. Many enemies won't do anything like that, but the ones who don't are probably ones you weren't too worried about in the first place. (Mindless animals.)

I agree with you about not punishing the players, and you'd probably be 90% safe at my table inside of a Leomund's Hut, but 10% is still a risk.

 

[steeldragons]

Should have quoted the person a few posts up who said they have one combat per day and smite breaks that. I was proposing it for them, where they know A Priori that they will have only X number a day. I'm not saying that's reasonable or advocating for it, just proposing the fix to end the conversation.

Ah. Gotcha.

 

[Faenor]

Right. So the logic breaks down goes like this. If the dungeon is big enough to need a long rest at all, so more than 6-8 encounters, which would be a small dungeon, then you need to provide an opportunity to get a long rest. So how do you design so that they get The right number of encounters then get some space? Then, once they've found that space, what's to stop them from retreating there after each encounter? There may be a creative solution or two you can think of, but not something new and different for every dungeon and every adventuring day.

Also, how does it even make sense time wise? The scale of a typical dungeon map is like 100' or less between each encounter. With a typical encounter taking about 30 seconds, it doesn't add up to a 16 hour day even with short rests after every encounter and lots of time spent searching. Trips through the underdark work for this model, where you just arm wave a couple hours of traveling, but not in a more typical ravenloft type castle raid.

 

[Faenor]

In the old days of against the giants and keep on the borderlands, the premise was you'd poke your head in, do some clearing, then retreat to a safe spot, rest, rinse and repeat.

 

[GrumpyGamer]

I am a bit surprised that people in this thread are pointing at Paladins as being a damage a outlier, compared to battle master fighters>other fighters>barbarians>paladins/rogues. Yes they do a lot of damage in melee, but so do all of the other classes. What they have that is special is the ability to add damage on demand to a crit which while memorable does not come up very often.

The one thing I would do as a DM in a home campaign is not let them multiclass. This dramatically cuts down on the number of spell slots they have.

 

[NotActuallyTim]

626 points if they all crit on every smite, yes.

You. Don't read anything anyone else says, do you?

They do 626 points. Without critting. On average. As long as they hit something.

EDIT: Sorry, had to check. 628 points.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

You. Don't read anything anyone else says, do you?

They do 626 points. Without critting. On average. As long as they hit something.

EDIT: Sorry, had to check. 628 points.

Pardon me if I misunderstood your intent. You said "To put this in perspective, 4 pallies would have a combined DS only value of 626 points" and I took you at your word, since it was in the right ballpark for four times my previously-calculated Divine Smite value of 153 if every smite crits. Now that you raise the issue, I see that you were actually intending to refer to your own calculation of 156.5 from combined smiting + physical damage, which you calculated from "(76 Radiant from smites, 2*7 from dueling flat, 35 from a maxed Dexterity/Strength and 4.5*7 from a 1d8 weapon-assuming no crits and that GWF doesn't reroll DS dice)".

Sorry that I failed to read your mind. When you said "DS only," I thought you meant "Divine Smite only (exclusive of physical damage)," since excluding physical damage is a reasonable way to analyze the issue. I see you as a reasonable person who doesn't usually get snippy over minor misunderstandings, and I hope all is well with you in real life.