Divine Favor: Smite Lite
Usable By: Paladin
Spell Level: 1
School: Evocation
Casting Time: 1 bonus action
Range: Self
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S
Your prayer empowers you with divine radiance. Until the spell ends, your weapon attacks deal an extra 1d4 radiant damage on a hit.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Radiant light erupts from the mace; the festering zombies' faces turn back from the paladin. Clad in glorious golden steel, the knight smashes the glowing bludgeon down into the undead monstrosity's skull, shattering it and dissolving the cursed flesh into dust.
Divine Favor is a war domain cleric spell first, and a paladin spell second. It is cheap to cast, and can add up over a long fight, but when attached to concentration and smites are on the table, it quickly becomes apparent how much worse this is than just dealing 2d8 radiant damage in a burst with a single attack.
Adding 1d4 to weapon damage is fine, especially for a bonus action. Hunter's Mark and Hex are two spells I rate quite highly, and this fits in a similar camp. On ranged paladins or war domain clerics (which aren’t particularly common), this will feel similar, and open up your bonus action to do other things as you go. War domain clerics do get access to all martial weapons, including a longbow, and can use their war priest feature to shoot extra times. Paired with Divine Favor over a single fight this can add up quickly to 4-5d4 bonus damage, which is perfectly fine for a 1st level slot. When you move into melee range, this becomes much more suspect.
Concentration on frontline characters is difficult to manage. Often it’ll be on high impact effects that either protect the caster from breaking concentration (as Protection from Evil and Good does). Divine Favor only boosts your weapon damage, meaning you’re getting hit fairly often still. Each time you are hit, there’s a chance the spell just goes away. In the low tiers of play (when you’re happiest to be concentrating on this instead of something else), you’re making a single attack roll a round. To make this then deal more damage than just the 9 average damage of a divine smite, you need to hit FOUR times. FOUR. You have to concentrate on this for at least four rounds, assuming every attack hits. At that point, you’ve gotten 1 point of extra damage on average versus the up front (which normally is better) 2d8 damage you’d be getting from smiting.
Divine Favor would majorly benefit from a longer duration and no concentration requirement. As it is, there will be niche builds that use it early and retire it quickly. The average paladin and war domain cleric definitely have better things to spend their spell slots on, though. You probably don’t want to be casting Divine Favor.
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