Paladin Sacred Oath: Oath of Glory 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Mythic Odysseys of Theros, beyond introducing a stellar setting ripe with adventure and conflict between a rich pantheon of petty deities and their chosen warriors, gave us a handful of interesting player options to bring into other settings, such as the Oath of Glory.

This archetype embodies the fantasy of demigods like Heracles: divine warriors undergoing a series of trials. Where these ancient, often tragic figures didn’t necessarily love going through these trials, the Oath of Glory embraces the tests with tenants dedicated to Discipline, Challenge, and pushing their bodies to their maximum.

Mechanically, the Oath of Glory has a lot of promise to live up to. It fails to live up to basically all of them!

3rd Level: Oath Spells and Channel Divinities

Guiding Bolt and Heroism open the archetype’s Oath Spells.

Guiding Bolt starts off in an interesting direction as a form of engagement rather than ranged ally support. On paladin, this acts as a rare reasonable ranged damage option but does ask you to forgo ranged thrown weapons and be willing to sink a slot into it. It also wants a high to-hit modifier, basically mandating you have a high Charisma mod, but all of these things aren’t the end of the world to forgo, and the payoff sets up the next attack against the target with advantage alongside the 4d6 radiant damage.
Heroism isn’t as exciting of an option. Concentration really hampers any potential this spell has, as you really want this cast on yourself to get the refilling temporary hit points, but if you’re using those temporary hit points, the effect is likely to go away from your concentration breaking. Immune to the fears is nice to have in your back pocket, though, making this a fine, yet somewhat niche tool to break out when diving into fearsome threats.
Peerless Athlete is the first of the two Channel Divinities. For a bonus action, you get advantage on Athletics and Acrobatics checks, can push, drag, and lift twice as much, and jump an extra 10 feet, which is all… fine? The advantage honestly might be the most relevant text here. Jump bonuses are messy because the movement mid-air still costs you movement, and with a 10 ft. prerequisite run-up to get started, you’re capped at 20 feet of jump distance anyway. If you Dash you can use this extra speed as part of the jump distance, meaning you can hit 26-30 feet with a high Strength score. This being a bonus action does help it feel somewhat like a Jump spell, but nobody is ranting or raving about Jump. This might be the best version of the super-athlete fantasy but still is a bit underwhelming if you aren’t grappling or climbing.
Inspiring Smite adds a big boost of temporary hit points to a smite for a bonus action, granting 2d8 plus your paladin level to you or other creatures as you choose within 30 feet of you. At 3rd level, a Channel Divinity for 2d8+3 temporary hit points is pretty bad, especially when it's contingent on you smiting at all in the first place. You can’t really save this up and are encouraged to blast it off as soon as possible. At least the bonus hit points last until your next long rest, making this the kind of feature you want to use as soon as possible to ensure you get the most out of it. That is a bit at odds with Peerless Athlete, though, which you’d often want mid-adventure during dangerous encounters involving Ropers or other grappling foes. If you use Inspiring Smite for the best chance of it having a large impact, you’re reducing the potential uses of Peerless Athlete further.

5th Level: 2nd Level Oath Spells

Enhance Ability and Magic Weapon are atrocious spells that are not at all redeemed by them being Oath Spells.

Enhance Ability usually is replaceable with the Help action. In the rare case you’d want the Strength advantage for grapples mid-fight, you already have access to Peerless Athlete for a cheaper costed and faster activation with additional upside.
Magic Weapon doesn’t fair much better; +1 to hit and damage on concentration isn’t worth a 2nd level slot when you could stick 3d8 bonus radiant damage on a creature all at once. Chances are, you aren’t going to make enough additional attacks and get enough extra hits off that +1 to justify the cast over 3d8 radiant damage right now.

7th Level: Aura of Alacrity

Aura of Alacrity provides a 10 ft. speed boost to you, but only a 5 ft. speed boost to creatures of your choice within 10 feet of you at the start of their turns. There are so many issues with this feature. Passive movement improvements are given out extremely cheaply on barbarian and monk, so much so that the upgrades aren’t even costed like features. Barbarians get the +10 speed when they also get Extra Attack. This replacing your subclass-specific Aura feature that is a major element of most subclasses is just not worth a speed of 40. The +5 allied speed boost doesn’t improve this. It's a tiny bonus that’s largely inconsequential in the vast majority of fights.

9th Level: 3rd Level Oath Spells

Haste definitely is the biggest hit so far of the Oath Spells. Doubling your speed and getting an extra attack is a massive payoff, and the +2 AC will stack on your already high AC to help protect the concentration. It is high risk, high reward, though. The risk of losing an entire turn to randomly dropping concentration post getting crit can be devastating. It can be worth it, but definitely has a lot of counterplay to consider.
Protection from Energy is the other Oath Spell, and I’m happiest with this kind of effect as an auto-prepared spell. Having protection from a variety of damage types when you need it can be massively impactful. Sometimes you don’t know you need to prepare this kind of spell. When you stumble into a giant venomous snake that wants to kill you with poison damage, Protection from Energy can turn 16d6 into 8d6. You won’t likely find it to be great in most fights, but when you need it most, Protection from Energy will feel great.

13th Level: 4th Level Oath Spells

Compulsion and Freedom of Movement are the option’s 4th-level Oath Spells, and I’m more confused than anything by these choices.

Compulsion is nifty at least as you can use it to provoke your own attacks of opportunity while shifting around enemies, making this play well on an Oath of Glory paladin who is part of a martial hit squad.
Freedom of Movement has no business being as bad as it is, nor existing in this slot. This domain has gotten ample means of getting out of grapples with Peerless Athlete and, if you must use it, Enhance Ability. Freedom of Movement is ghoulish overkill that is wildly outclassed by Dimension Door, Misty Step, and other cheap teleportation effects offered to a lot of other Oaths.

15th Level: Glorious Defense

Glorious Defense continues down the path set by Compulsion to set this option up as a melee party leader, offering you a protective AC bump to allies that comes with a free reaction attack should you block the hit. +5 AC as a reaction has been established as a massive bump in AC. You getting 5 uses (assuming you’ve got a 20 Charisma by this point) will set you up to defend yourself and others with radiant light and reciprocating strikes.

As far as 15th-level features go, Glorious Defense is a big hit among a pool of misses.

17th Level: 5th Level Oath Spells

Commune and Flame Strike finish up the Oath Spells list with a whimper.

Commune in particular is egregious here. A 5th-level slot at 17th level can’t just now start communicating with the gods. Other characters have been communing with deities since 3rd level, some warlocks even earlier.
Flame Strike is fine, but fine doesn’t really cut it for 17th-level features. 5th-level Fireball damage in a sculpted area just isn’t that exciting by this stage and doesn’t have nearly large enough an impact on upper-tier fights. It just doesn’t scale as well as it needs to. Effects like Hold Monster or Counterspell work great as half-caster spells because they have a massive impact on even the highest-tier monsters. Monsters with more hit points care less about this kind of effect, making higher tier monsters not feel this nearly as hard as monsters you’d face at 9th level do.

20th Level: Living Legend

Living Legend doesn’t deserve the title. You can spend 5th level slots or your free use for a minute of ensuring at least one attack each turn hits, advantage on Charisma checks, and a reaction to reroll a failed save. That last bit is definitely the most important, given base fighter is getting three uses of Indomitable by this point, on its own when you need to spend a resource to get this, it just isn’t worth it. This feature is competing with Wish and True Polymorph. This isn’t good enough.

All Together

If this option were built around Glorious Defense we’d have an interesting defensive leader-like subclass to work with. With what’s written, I’m disappointed by basically every other feature. The Oath Spells are largely lackluster with a few specks of decency among them. The Channel Divinities are mediocre at best, with limited actual impact on most fights or out-of-combat exploration. Aura of Alacrity and Living Legend are just wildly underpowered compared to their competition, which just leaves Glorious Defense as the lone solid feature to consider when picking your Oath. A 15th level feature isn’t enough reason to play this. If you want to live for glory, I’d try Oath of Devotion or Vengeance, or really any other Oath that you can twist thematically to get the heroic archetype to come together. Oath of Glory certainly isn’t it.

Thank you for visiting!

If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.

The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.

‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.