Its a resource sink and its pretty easy for the DM to wise up to and play around but pulling it off can be fun. I had an idea for a lightning lure combo. This means that making it harder to escape the Witch Bolt's range doesn't even matter.

Even after factoring in the fact that Witch Bolt hits automatically, using a cantrip is more beneficial than using your action to repeat the damage of Witch Bolt at level 5+. Even if you cast it as a 9th level spell, the second action still only does 1d12 damage. In return, you do unreliable, cantrip-like damage, while spending spell slots, two feats, a slew of sorcery points, and all your actions.įourth thing, Witch Bolt's damage is utterly abysmal, and doesn't scale with upcasting properly. unless you're quickening it, which burns sorcery points really fast. It takes an action to repeat the damage from witch bolt (and Witch Bolt ends if you do anything else with your Action), and it takes an action to use lightning lure. Additionally, making it slightly harder to escape the range of Witch Bolt wouldn't even matter, because of the fourth thing. Lightning Lure does not work with Spell Sniper, because it does not use an attack roll. but you could have done that by just casting a different, less useless spell anyways. So pretty much all you're doing is bypassing resistance. It adds only ~0.08 average damage to a successful Witch Bolt. Elemental Adept only very, very slightly increases average damage, especially for d12s (which are the most unlikely damage dice to roll 1s, and therefore gain the least benefit). still doing less output than just about anything else you could have been doing.įirst thing, Elemental Adept. You've now spent a whopping two feats, extra actions, and a cantrip slot on. If anything, this would make the investment worse, not better. Lightning Lure with the Spell Sniper Feat for extra range, in combination with the Witch Bolt Spell, would result in Witch Bolt no longer being totally useless.Īnd now you really want the Elemental Adept feat for Lightning damage.Just.

Lighting blot dnd tools