Hey everyone,

I'm running a re designed home brew campaign based around a fantasy setting with giant robots piloted by PC's.

The party are currently level 6 and have started getting into having extra attacks and spells, the usual situation. The blade singer in the group has taken the spell sniper feat and picked up Eldritch blast as an additional cantrip.During the last session the team attacked an enemy convoy transporting slaves and the blade singer starts spamming eldritch blast. Due to his level he gets 2 attacks per turn with 2 beams of Eldritch blast per attack, which destroyed a couple of the enemies they were facing in no time at all. He was getting between 40/60 points of damage out per turn with mods included.

Since the party was down 2 players for the evening I let it slide, but I was curious can you can cast 2 spells per attack action like that? I have looked through the PBH and DM's Guide and I cannot see anything that states yes or no from a rules standpoint.

Has anyone had this issue before or know the answer, I would appreciate the help as I'd rather not just tell him no without proper research.

Thanks,

JG

Extra Attack only works with the Attack action.

Extra Attack

Starting at 6th level, you can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn.

Casting Eldritch Blast uses the Cast A Spell action.

Also note that each attack roll is 1 attack; Eldritch Blast doesn't give you "two beams per attack" at 5th level; each beam is a separate attack.

I also want to point out that in no way should he be getting 40/60 points of damage from that described course.  Even IF he could do so (which as InquisitiveCoder indicates, he cannot, it is an ACTION to cast Eldritch Blast, not an 'attack', 'attack' being a different choice entirely for using your action, described in chapter 9), he would be dealing 1d10 per beam, with 4 beams total.  the 4d10 is on average 22.  No class feature of the Bladesinger would allow him to add any ability modifier to the roll, so that should be it.  So a normal character doing that would be dealing on average 22, with an absolute max of 40, if he rolled all 10s, which has a 1/10,000 chance of occurring.  He should be doing 30 or Under 92% of the time, unless something else is broken that you haven't indicated yet, and if so, that also bears looking at and fixing.

The only way, by the way, you could do 2 Eldritch Blast spells per turn is if you were a sorcerer and used sorcery points to 'quicken spell' to cast Eldritch Blast as a bonus action, as well as using a normal action for it.  So the total amount of damage per turn for this character should be on average 11, max 20, typically 15 or under, and that's assuming both attack rolls hit.  Your player was dealing between 4 and 6 times normal damage, it's unsurprising enemies were falling with abnormal speed.

Thanks guys, TBH it felt OP at the time. I obviously didn't explain myself very clearly previously.

He was using the 'extra attack' of the blade singer incorrectly and I wasn't aware there was a difference between a 'cast a spell' and 'attack action'. As a result he was casting his 2 beams of Eldritch blast then using the 'extra attack' to cast a further 2 beams at the same targets.

The figure I gave was the total across that scenario.

Thanks for helping out a new DM, I'm still getting used to 5e after switching from fate and since there is a fair amount of home brew to this game its hard to keep up sometimes.

Thanks,

JG

You'll also notice the difference between these game mechanics with Booming Blade & Green-Flame Blade cantrips. These are a cast a spell action that make an attack as part of the cast a spell action. They do not grant the extra attack. This means that for your Bladesinger, it is a choice between the spell or the extra attack (extra attack is usually the better option unless you want the control element of Booming Blade).