Resistance: Pièce de Résistance
Usable By: Artificer, Cleric, Druid
Spell Level: 0 (cantrip)
School: Abjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S, M (a miniature cloak)
You touch one willing creature. Once before the spell ends, the target can roll a d4 and add the number rolled to one saving throw of its choice. It can roll the die before or after making the saving throw. The spell then ends.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Guidance is a cantrip I can’t rave enough about. It's a supportive skill check cantrip that is easy to use, helps the whole team succeed at what they built themselves to succeed at, and costs you just a cantrip. Resistance is supposed to be the same thing for saving throws, and while it may be ever so slightly underrated, is still utter trash by comparison.
When a creature is making a saving throw, often that is spontaneous. A dragon’s breath weapon isn’t guaranteed to occur exactly when a fight starts, nor will you necessarily know when the fight itself will begin. Hypothetically you can just continually recast it every minute to keep uo the effect, which sure, can help against the first save you make, but man is that a lot of mental effort for something that might not even occur. This is at its best defending you, as you don’t need another person next to you for that effect to occur. Adding a d4 to the first save you make in most situations is fine, but it isn’t the same supportive kind of fine that makes everyone feel better. It’ll occasionally make you pass an extra save in the early tiers when you don’t mind this eating your concentration.
The moment you grow out of the early tier, though, and concentration becomes something you actually care about, this becomes a LOT worse. You can’t both be keeping up detection based concentration effects to find magical traps like Detect Magic while also spamming resistance. You get one, and you’ll probably pick the one that actually helps circumnavigate the danger entirely. If you want to be keeping up other defensive effects to mitigate the harm of saves, Resistance can’t double up with that. It just ceases helping at all.
Some niche cases will occur where you know a trap is directly in front of you, the barbarian intends to just set it off with the aid of trap sense, and Resistance can add on a bit to help them succeed on the save. That’s the best use case scenario for Resistance. The rest of the time, this is something you forget you have because the upkeep is a pain to keep reminding the DM of, or you can’t use because you want to be concentrating on a 1st level or higher effect. It just doesn’t give the same support you need it to. If it was a reaction with a player per long rest gate, I’d be over the moon for this kind of effect; as it is, this is a mediocre cantrip early that becomes a lot worse in the upper tiers you probably don’t want to invest in.
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