Wrathful Smite: Would You Wrather?

Usable By: Paladin

Spell Level: 1

School: Evocation

Casting Time: 1 bonus action

Range: Self

Duration: Concentration up to 1 minute

Components: V

The next time you hit with a melee weapon attack during this spell’s duration, your attack deals an extra 1d6 psychic damage. Additionally, if the target is a creature, it must make a Wisdom saving throw or be frightened of you until the spell ends. As an action, the creature can make a Wisdom check against your spell save DC to steel its resolve and end this spell.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

God the smite spells blow. On average, you’re trading some amount of damage for a nifty little conditional effect, or a different way to deal different damage. Wrathful Smite is the prior, and suffers most from all of the main reasons why every other smite spell suffers: its damage is terrible, requires your concentration to use, and has an effect you care about maintaining while playing a frontline character intending to be hit.

The frightened condition you’re applying here can be powerful, specifically against single large entities. If you’re in a fight against primarily one dangerous entity, Wrathful Smite can be worth the cast over just a regular smite. Frightened creatures have disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks while they can see what's frightening them, and can’t move closer to them. Most of the time, this will feel like imposing disadvantage on the hit creature's attack rolls and little else; when paired with a polearm, though, you can get a neat 10 ft. stop gap preventing it from advancing into melee range. That’s a neat upside.

But with this advantage comes the tradeoffs; instead of dealing a bonus 4ish damage, you could be dealing a bonus 9 damage while concentrating on another effect. As a paladin, you’re not particularly well known for a robust spell save DC, making the frightened condition, specifically against large, mid to late game enemies, unreliable at best. To add on to the problem, if you’re fighting more than one creature (which is the vast majority of the time) AND you’re taking hits (which is one of your primary jobs as a paladin typically), your concentration is going to get routinely checked by hits. Even in the best case scenario, where you maintain concentration on the frightened effect, it's still able to attack you, just at disadvantage. It's still able to use abilities and cast spells that don’t care about attack rolls at all, some of which will break your concentration entirely. The best case scenario here is a mediocre, conditional, single target dodge-like buff. Against one massive threat who manages to fail the save, sure, its perfectly fine. Against almost every other circumstance you’d absolutely take the bonus 5 average damage.

Wrathful Smite reads like it has potential, but you won’t be casting in the majority of fights. It can occasionally be wasted when used in a fight nearing its end should you miss a few attacks in a row. It takes your bonus action, which while not typically competitive on paladins, can mess with two-weapon fighting builds or other multi-class builds making good use of their bonus action. It costs you a lot compared to a regular smite, and the trade off isn’t that much better even in the best circumstances. If you really feel like you don’t care about the other paladin spells and want to scare the shit out of something, sure, prepare it. It won’t be the end of the world. But it definitely won’t be a big, impactful, flashy use of a spell slot.

5e Spells

Wrathful Smite: Would You Wrather?