Shillelagh: Stick It to the Man

Usable By: Druid

Spell Level: 0 (cantrip)

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 bonus action

Range: Touch

Duration: 1 minute

Components: V, S, M (mistletoe, a shamrock leaf and a club or quarterstaff)

The wood of a club or quarterstaff you are holding is imbued with nature’s power. For the duration, you can use your spellcasting ability instead of Strength for the attack and damage rolls of melee attacks using that weapon, and the weapon’s damage die becomes a d8. The weapon also becomes magical, if it isn’t already. The spell ends if you cast it again or if you let go of the weapon.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Druids are posed to be a mid-range caster like clerics with their wild shape escape options, defensive spell pool, and moderate armor and weapon proficiencies. Shillelagh rounds out this positioning with a way to allow for them to make melee weapon attacks without compromising their Wisdom modifier or requiring a +3 Str or Dex, which is great. Attacking with a d8+3 weapon that hits with +5 is going to look similar to your paladin or fighter's longsword attacks. That won’t be the highest damage attack happening at any tier, but in the early game, this is an entirely reasonable option that eclipses most other damaging cantrips in its viability.
Shillelagh to me is a sleek design that plays well in practice. Bonus action to turn it on means you’re not giving up any turns in combat to empower your melee threat potential. No concentration means you can maintain impactful action cast spells like Entangle or Summon Beast without worry while still ensuring your a moderate threat in hand to hand combat. You don’t necessarily want to be in the frontline fighting things while trying to also keep up a longer duration concentration effect, but when you need to be, hitting for a d8+3 instead of a flat d6 or d8 is going to feel better.

A big point of note with Shillelagh when compared to other damaging cantrips like Poison Spray is its minimum damage. Yes, Poison Spray has the potential to deal 1 more damage than the 11 you get from an 8 on a d8+3 club, but when the floor of Poison Spray is 1 poison damage, and the floor on Shillelagh hits is 4 magical bludgeoning damage, you’ll feel better about lower rolls more often. Dealing 1 damage with a cantrip often feels akin to wasting a turn. Dealing 4 damage can still contribute a moderate contribution to bringing an enemy down, sometimes outright killing lower CR enemies where poison spray just couldn’t.

If you want your druid to hit stuff with a stick, Shillelagh is a great way to do it. It doesn’t scale at all, which is a MASSIVE oversight to me, but seeing as you stop tending to cast a lot of cantrips in the mid to upper tiers anyway, it's not that major of a drawback. For the first three to four levels, Shillelagh can feel perfectly reasonable to use. I’d take it over most other damaging cantrips.

5e Spells

Shillelagh: Stick It to the Man