Paladin Sacred Oath: Oath of Ancients 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Where Devotion and Vengeance clearly highlight holy knights driven by holy power or a vendetta against sinners, Oath of Ancients presents a group of paladins who fundamentally look different than their divine counterparts. These are set up as natural wardens embracing nature like their hippie cousins Druids and Rangers.

Where Nature Domain massively fails to do anything interesting with a cleric/druid hybrid, Oath of Ancients actually provides something useful that pairs well with the base paladin play pattern in a unique way. While certainly far from perfect, I do think you can get the bulwark of nature fantasy to come together with this Oath and can feel great to play with at most tables.

3rd Level: Oath Spells and Channel Divinities

Ensnaring Strike and Speak With Animals as 1st-level Oath Spells start us off strong as far as getting tools to feel like a nature-themed paladin.

Ensnaring Strike has a lot of the problems the smite spells do in its concentration requirement and having to compete with the Divine Smite feature. Still, having a restraint on hit that either damages over time or forces the target to waste actions to break free is sweet. It's nice that you can pair this with thrown weapons to lock down enemies at range before engaging their allies. It's a new tool to encourage a varied weapon loadout, which I’m always a fan of.
Speak with Animals definitely wants to just be a ritual effect. There will be some windows, though, where you’ll spontaneously need to chat with a badger who saw an ambush or a rat in some rubble to get an idea of what happened. It's a surprisingly useful little tool to have access to, making it a reasonable low-tier Oath Spell to expand how you engage with the world outside of combat.

Nature’s Wrath and Turn the Faithless are your two Channel Divinity options.

Nature’s Wrath is way over costed in terms of what it gives you, as a 10 ft. ranged restraint isn’t worth your Channel Divinity typically, especially as an action. It does double up with Ensaring Strike if you want to build towards a paladin who locks down creatures in place to empower persistent damage effects, which is neat at least.
Turn the Faithless is a Turn Undead for fiends and fey, which is great against specifically fiends and fey. Having this silver bullet for those encounters will give you clear windows to feel like a legend. With your other option being usable in more fights, while it may feel a bit clunky, you can still get enough use out of both to feel fine enough with this option at most tables early on.

5th Level: 2nd Level Oath Spells

Moonbeam and Misty Step both add a lot to a paladin in place of a druid.

Moonbeam wants to hit a creature locked in place, which is something we’ve seen this option wants to excel in. On top of that, any form of persistent damage round after round for your concentration is reasonable on paladins who do a decent job defending their concentration with a high AC and Con score for concentration saves. If you can get two instances of damage off with the Moonbeam without needing to spend actions moving it, it’ll justify the cast. That isn’t given, and normally a smite is going to be a better use of your spell slots, but if you want to get a payoff for your restraints, this can work.
Misty Step I’m a lot more excited about. Bonus action teleportation on melee characters is just so useful. Not only do you not need to forgo attacks to get the teleport, but you can also get yourself in range of attacks by using it like a bonus action dash in a pinch. It gets you out when you’re in over your head, can be a out of combat exploration tool for infiltration and dungeon delving, and just looks and feels good to use on a nature-based defender. It's fey magic at its finest, on an option that embraces their natural magic.

7th Level: Aura of Warding

Aura of Warding, while a bit inconsistent in value table to table, shines brightly as a huge boon at high-powered spell-focused tables. Passive resistance to spell damage to you and creatures near you is a massive deal. Standing in Fireball formation no longer feels so bad when the damage is halved on both successful and failed saves. The higher the damage dealt, the better the resistance. Even on your own, resistance to spell damage can be one of the best forms of damage resistance in the game.

At tables highlighting more creatures without spells, this feature can do little to nothing, though. Most groups will use some amount of spellcasting in mid to upper-tier fights, but your mileage may vary with just how much damage this mitigates.

9th Level: 3rd Level Oath Spells

I’m a huge fan of both Plant Growth and Protection from Energy as Oath Spells.

Plant Growth continues with the lockdown theme presented with Ensnaring Strike and Nature’s Wrath by creating a massive area of super-difficult terrain. Plus, it acts as a delightful flavor-rich feature for inspiring local farmers or supporting the local forest. As a melee character, getting next to threatening enemies first, then slamming down a plant growth to lock them in place can debilitate some encounters. It works even better when you’ve got ample ranged options, which once again encourages you to go with some other weapon choices than the standard longsword and shield or greatsword.

Protection from Energy has a bit of overlap with Aura of Warding. Still, plenty of high-damage elemental effects aren’t spells. Having a tool for mitigating a breath weapon against yourself or an ally prior to a fight is nice to have, and while I’d never go out of my way to prepare it most of the time, being able to fall back on it when elemental damage pops up unexpectedly feels great.

13th Level: 4th Level Oath Spells

Ice Storm gives you an area of effect damage spell if you absolutely need one, but not in a particularly powerful way. 2d8+4d6 damage as a spell gained at 13th level is laughable when Fireball has been dealing 8d6 since 5th level. Still, sometimes you just want a way to deal a decent chunk of damage in a 20 ft. radius area. This will do that with some temporary difficult terrain to stack on top of your Plant Growth.

Stoneskin honestly doesn’t do much. Resistance to non-magical weapons is something other characters have had access to for ten or more levels in some cases, and it requiring concentration majorly limits how much actual damage it can reduce. As you get higher and higher tier, instances of non-magical damage tend to shrink as well, leaving this feeling like a lackluster defensive option not worth the cast.

15th Level: Undying Sentinel

Undying Sentinel is the boar’s Relentless trait in a trenchcoat with some anti-aging cream slathered on top. I’m never a big fan of effects that only do something when your character would drop to zero, and this feature is no exception. Still, it can do something in any lethal encounter, which is more than I can say for some other defensive 15th-level features. Not the greatest feature in the world, but when you pair it with Misty Step, it can be a way to stay alive in dire circumstances that you have no business surviving through.

17th Level: 5th Level Oath Spells

Closing out the Oath Spells are Commune with Nature and Tree Stride. Oof.

Commune with Nature has long since lost any of the value it might have contributed to exploration by this point. 17th level encompasses all divination magic 1st through 9th level with ample amounts of effects for instantly teleporting between worlds. Learning what creatures are within a few miles of you isn’t remotely close to the power you want out of your half-caster 5th-level slots.

Tree Stride, while thematically an absolute banger, suffers the same issues. 17th-level fights in D&D aren’t going to be happening in Sherwood Forest anymore. In a world full of meteors raining form the skies and demigods conjuring swarms of hellish warriors, being able to teleport from tree to tree is laughable. You’re likely not going to be facing a lot of environments where this is even usable, and in those encounters, likely aren’t going to find it is having nearly a high enough impact to justify messing around with it.

20th Level: Elder Champion

Elder Champion got the memo of what a 20th-level paladin feature needs to be. It gives you a minute where you passively regenerate 10 hit points a round, can cast any paladin spell as a bonus action instead of an action, and impose disadvantage on saves against your spells and Channel Divinity for any creature within 10 feet of you. While I’m no fan of Ice Storm, Ice Storm as a bonus action is ludicrous. On top of making two attacks a turn, you can be firing off empowered Banishments that creatures have disadvantage to save against, up-cast to hit multiple things at once. I’m not typically recommending Destructive Wave, but when it's a bonus action, and everything close to you has disadvantage on the save against it it looks pretty sweet to me.

All Together

Despite some mediocre Channel Divinity options, an Oath Spell list that is just reasonable on a good day, and some features that range in power table to table, I think if you dig the thematics of the natural warden defending life with thorn and bark, Oath of Ancients will help you satisfy that fantasy. This isn’t usually going to show up at the highest power tables, but in a game focused around nature and working against ecological disaster, it will be a perfect fit.

If you want to strangle enemies in roots and dampen enemy magic while enhancing your own, Oath of Ancients is here for you.

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