So, idea and a very huge question, can you stack Divine Smite, Divine Strike, and Eldritch Smite in one attack?
This is just a game question and I just want to know if this is allowed or not in D&D (I'm pretty sure this isn't intended but it's still funny to me)
The Build
Cleric 8 - Any subclass that has the Divine Strike feature. For the purposes of damage type, let's say Trickster cleric for poison damage
Warlock 5 - Doesn't matter the patron, as long as you go for Pact of the Blade so you can get Eldritch Smite
Paladin 7 - Gonna need them Divine Smites
The Plan
In one turn, use bonus action to cast Branding Smite. Next, two attacks from Extra Attack of Paladin. Assuming both attacks hit, for the first attack, use 5th-level spell slot for Divine smite, 3rd-level spell slot for Eldritch Smite (since you can only use warlock spell slots for this and the max you have here is two 3rd-level spell slots), then finally an extra 1d8 from Divine Strike. For the sake of maximizing damage, let's say another 5th-level Divine for the second attack.
So in terms of damage, that's:
5th level divine smites: 12d8 - 54 radiant
3rd level eldritch smite: 3d8 - 14 force
Divine strike: 1d8 - 5 poison damage
Branding Smite: 2d6 - 7 radiant damage
That's 80 points of damage in one turn, average. Pretty decent but then again this is like a level 20 character. But still super funny.
Yes, the resource management is far from efficient, that's 4 spell slots burned in one turn. But still, can we multiclass like this? And will the features we get play out like this or did I make mistake somewhere that I might have missed?
Alternative title for this post: The Ultimate Sugar Baby
There is no need for the capitals and the "very important question" in the title when it clearly isn't more important that other questions on the forums.
Divine Smite does a max of 5d8 so using a 5th level slot has the same impact as using a 4th. This reduces your damage by 9 but everything else seems OK (though I can see some DMs not allowig divine smite and eldritch smite on the same attack). You also didn't include the base weapon damage, you are likely to have a powerful magic weapon at this point I will keep it simple and say you have a +3 longsword so deal an average of 25damage on 2 hits getting you to 96. If you want it a bit higher branding smite can be upcast.
I am not sure why you went 8 levels of cleric, you get divine strike but at level 11 a paladin causes an extra 1d8 damage on ALL their attacks.
At level 20 you expct PCs to do a lot of damage An oath of conquest paladin at level 20 using invincible conquerer gets a third attack on all the turn for a minute (which they can also use divine smite) and will crit on a 19. Meteor storm does an average of 140 damage to any creature in the area that fails the save (4*40ft spheres) and 70 if they succeed.
You would be better served by switching the Cleric levels to Sorcerer or more Paladin levels. Sorcerer gives the same spell slot progression as Cleric while consolidating your Ability Score dependency to Charisma for all of your spells and attacks (thank you Warlock). Sorcerer also offers a much wider array of spells to choose from; the default Cleric & Paladin spell lists overlap heavily. If there are Cleric spells you desperately want, which are unavailable via Paladin, then Divine Soul Sorcerer is the perfect choice.
[edit] and the reasoning behind it is that taking 8 levels of Cleric for Divine Strike is not worth it for your kind of build. Divine Strike is simply meant to compensate for not having Extra Attack, as it only applies to a maximum of one attack per turn. Having Extra Attack already from Paladin severely reduces the overall impact of having DS. Levels in Bard would also be highly effective, and you'd get a ton more out of Bard than you would with Cleric in your scenario.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
I agree there are betteroptions than cleric. For a smiting paladin / warlock, you need high strength (even if you are going hex warrior you need 15 str for plate), charisma and Con. So investing 13 into Wis is a bit of a luxury and evemn then you wouldn't be effective at spells that rely on Wis.
If you are wanting levels in full caster in order to get more spell slots another option is Bard. College od swords works really well with this idea. Slashing flourish increases the damage on your attacks, compared to divine strike, while it is a limited resource get the feature at Bard 3 so don't have to wait until you have 8 levels of cleric. A sword Bard also gets a fighting style so you can have say defence and dueling. (Depending on how you plan to level you might want ot use martial versatility to initially have duelling, then swap it out for denfence then get dueling back as a Bard fighint style).
A new errata for the PHB in the Sage Advice Compendium actually said that the new maximum is 6d8, not 5d8. Which I believe doesn't count the extra 1d8 from Improved Divine Smite yet.
But yes, that is still a lot of damage even if by comparison it still is smaller than a regular level 20 Paladin or let's a multiclass combination like Sorcerer/Paladin. It really is just funny to me like imagining 3 sources of sort of divine magic like smiting down on this one guy like lol.
Oh yeah Sorcerer is definitely better than Cleric. The Divine Strike-Smite interaction was just funny for me. Don't worry, I don't think I'm making or even playing this build at all. It's just really the interaction.
Oh yeah Sorcerer is definitely better than Cleric. The Divine Strike-Smite interaction was just funny for me. Don't worry, I don't think I'm making or even playing this build at all. It's just really the interaction.
This thread is the equivalent of Michael Scott calling David Wallace pretending to be from David's daughter's school (forgiveness if you haven't watched the american Office to get that reference)
and 80 damage for all those resources at level 20 is laughably bad.
So, idea and a very huge question, can you stack Divine Smite, Divine Strike, and Eldritch Smite in one attack?
This is just a game question and I just want to know if this is allowed or not in D&D (I'm pretty sure this isn't intended but it's still funny to me)
The Build
Cleric 8 - Any subclass that has the Divine Strike feature. For the purposes of damage type, let's say Trickster cleric for poison damage
Warlock 5 - Doesn't matter the patron, as long as you go for Pact of the Blade so you can get Eldritch Smite
Paladin 7 - Gonna need them Divine Smites
The Plan
In one turn, use bonus action to cast Branding Smite. Next, two attacks from Extra Attack of Paladin. Assuming both attacks hit, for the first attack, use 5th-level spell slot for Divine smite, 3rd-level spell slot for Eldritch Smite (since you can only use warlock spell slots for this and the max you have here is two 3rd-level spell slots), then finally an extra 1d8 from Divine Strike. For the sake of maximizing damage, let's say another 5th-level Divine for the second attack.
So in terms of damage, that's:
5th level divine smites: 12d8 - 54 radiant
3rd level eldritch smite: 3d8 - 14 force
Divine strike: 1d8 - 5 poison damage
Branding Smite: 2d6 - 7 radiant damage
That's 80 points of damage in one turn, average. Pretty decent but then again this is like a level 20 character. But still super funny.
Yes, the resource management is far from efficient, that's 4 spell slots burned in one turn. But still, can we multiclass like this? And will the features we get play out like this or did I make mistake somewhere that I might have missed?
Alternative title for this post: The Ultimate Sugar Baby
Only mistakes I see are you left out the weapon damage, damage modifier from attack stat, and any critting. In fact, the second hit is more likely to crit than the first, so the divine strike should honestly skip the first strike even though the second might miss, if the target can be knocked prone.
80 damage in one turn is weak as hell for a paladin; paladins designed for murder are designed to fish for crits, so they can double the damage of their divine smite. Granted, your real damage out might be much higher if you're hiding a plan for amazing crits, but branding smite causes a drastic reduction in dpr, so color me skeptical.
If you want to go all in all paladin murder, here's a very rough sketch of an example build that will outperform what you just said, by a lot:
Half-Elf Vengeance Paladin 17/Hexblade Warlock 3
Feats: PAM, Great Weapon Master, Elven Accuracy (ends up at CHA 18), +2 CHA (you can be Paladin 16/Warlock 4 if you want another ASI, but here I went for L5 spells instead)
Battle plan: summon a pegasus just after breakfast and cast haste on yourself just before battle so you're riding a hasted pegasus, then fly into your enmity target and hit them twice with the hooves and then, at triple advantage, hit them 4 times with your polearm - you're going to crit, so make sure you save the higher level spell slots for the crits. Then, if they attack you, hit them a fifth time with your polearm.
Each hoof is baseline 2d6+4=11 damage.
One of the polearm strikes is 1d4+1d8+15=22
The remaining three are 1d10+1d8+15=25, but with bigger dice, the fact we're ignoring misses and more importantly crits is getting wonkier. 25*3=75
If the target attacks and triggers the Paladin's class feature, there's another swing at 25. If the target leaves, they trigger an OA from the Paladin and the Pegasus, for 36.
Paladin has 1 L5 slot, 2 L4 slots (one went to the Pegasus - mobility matters!), and 2 L3 slots (thanks to Haste) on tap. So that's another 6+2*5+4=20d8 damage = 90, with another 18 for the reaction attack.
So we have, baseline, 11+22+75+90=198 damage, with another 43 damage in the wings if they fight back, 54 if they run away.
And bear in mind for this, I sacrificed DPR for accuracy - if you're doing napkin numbers without accounting for missing and critting, the 4 warlock levels and elven accuracy do nothing whatsoever, so you're better off with just more paladin levels for more higher level spell slots for more damage right now. Plus you'll immediately gain an ASI (and probably spend it on mounted combatant).
198-241-252 is a lot more than 80, and I really need to emphasize, once you account for accuracy, what I just pitched will gain a bigger lead over what you pitched.
Caveat for those paying attention: these numbers are so low because I ignored GWF, as I have no idea which of the RAWs for it your DM follows (the ones in the book under Fighter and Paladin, where you re-roll the damage dice for the attack, or the one in the SAC, where you re-roll the damage dice for the weapon). The SAC version adds so little damage to anything it's a rounding error, so functionally this damage assumes that version (assume the paladin took defense). If you use the PHB version, the DPR skyrockets.
Why it just go paladin 11/warlock 9, get a longsword for 1d10 + 5 dmg, be pact of the blade so you use charisma to make it less MAD, you get a + 1d8 for being an 11th level paladin, get booming blade as a warlock cantrip, then use a fifth level spell slot for both normal smite and eldritch smite,then use a 3rd level spell slot for branding smite, this is (1d10 + 5) + (1d8) + (3d8) + (5d8) + (5d8) for a max of 127 damage, then if you crit you get 254 damage in a single attack, they also take 4d8 damage or a max of 32 when they move for a total of 286, fyi this isn't the most efficient way of using spell slots, but eh, also you have extra attack from paladin, this means you can use another smite which would be of only third level as you've used your warlock smites and you don't get an extra bonus action for a total of your normal weapon attack (cause you cant use booming blade again) which would be an extra (1d10 + 5) + (3d8) for the smite, + (1d8) for the improved divine smite at 11th level paladin, then if we say this crits, that's an extra 94 damage, which adds to the previous total to make 380 damage total, also, (editing this in later), by being an oath of devotion paladin, you can use your Channel divinity to add you charisma mod again to your weapon attacks, this is an extra +5, which is doubled cause of the nat 20 earlier to make it 400 damage total (+20 cause of both attacks), there's likely something wrong with this so please tell me.
So, idea and a very huge question, can you stack Divine Smite, Divine Strike, and Eldritch Smite in one attack?
This is just a game question and I just want to know if this is allowed or not in D&D (I'm pretty sure this isn't intended but it's still funny to me)
The Build
Cleric 8 - Any subclass that has the Divine Strike feature. For the purposes of damage type, let's say Trickster cleric for poison damage
Warlock 5 - Doesn't matter the patron, as long as you go for Pact of the Blade so you can get Eldritch Smite
Paladin 7 - Gonna need them Divine Smites
The Plan
In one turn, use bonus action to cast Branding Smite. Next, two attacks from Extra Attack of Paladin. Assuming both attacks hit, for the first attack, use 5th-level spell slot for Divine smite, 3rd-level spell slot for Eldritch Smite (since you can only use warlock spell slots for this and the max you have here is two 3rd-level spell slots), then finally an extra 1d8 from Divine Strike. For the sake of maximizing damage, let's say another 5th-level Divine for the second attack.
So in terms of damage, that's:
5th level divine smites: 12d8 - 54 radiant
3rd level eldritch smite: 3d8 - 14 force
Divine strike: 1d8 - 5 poison damage
Branding Smite: 2d6 - 7 radiant damage
That's 80 points of damage in one turn, average. Pretty decent but then again this is like a level 20 character. But still super funny.
Yes, the resource management is far from efficient, that's 4 spell slots burned in one turn. But still, can we multiclass like this? And will the features we get play out like this or did I make mistake somewhere that I might have missed?
Alternative title for this post: The Ultimate Sugar Baby
Yes they should all stack if you hit with a melee weapon (pact) and burn all these ressources.
Thanks, that's all I needed to hear
There is no need for the capitals and the "very important question" in the title when it clearly isn't more important that other questions on the forums.
Divine Smite does a max of 5d8 so using a 5th level slot has the same impact as using a 4th. This reduces your damage by 9 but everything else seems OK (though I can see some DMs not allowig divine smite and eldritch smite on the same attack). You also didn't include the base weapon damage, you are likely to have a powerful magic weapon at this point I will keep it simple and say you have a +3 longsword so deal an average of 25damage on 2 hits getting you to 96. If you want it a bit higher branding smite can be upcast.
I am not sure why you went 8 levels of cleric, you get divine strike but at level 11 a paladin causes an extra 1d8 damage on ALL their attacks.
At level 20 you expct PCs to do a lot of damage An oath of conquest paladin at level 20 using invincible conquerer gets a third attack on all the turn for a minute (which they can also use divine smite) and will crit on a 19. Meteor storm does an average of 140 damage to any creature in the area that fails the save (4*40ft spheres) and 70 if they succeed.
You would be better served by switching the Cleric levels to Sorcerer or more Paladin levels. Sorcerer gives the same spell slot progression as Cleric while consolidating your Ability Score dependency to Charisma for all of your spells and attacks (thank you Warlock). Sorcerer also offers a much wider array of spells to choose from; the default Cleric & Paladin spell lists overlap heavily. If there are Cleric spells you desperately want, which are unavailable via Paladin, then Divine Soul Sorcerer is the perfect choice.
[edit] and the reasoning behind it is that taking 8 levels of Cleric for Divine Strike is not worth it for your kind of build. Divine Strike is simply meant to compensate for not having Extra Attack, as it only applies to a maximum of one attack per turn. Having Extra Attack already from Paladin severely reduces the overall impact of having DS. Levels in Bard would also be highly effective, and you'd get a ton more out of Bard than you would with Cleric in your scenario.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
I agree there are betteroptions than cleric. For a smiting paladin / warlock, you need high strength (even if you are going hex warrior you need 15 str for plate), charisma and Con. So investing 13 into Wis is a bit of a luxury and evemn then you wouldn't be effective at spells that rely on Wis.
If you are wanting levels in full caster in order to get more spell slots another option is Bard. College od swords works really well with this idea. Slashing flourish increases the damage on your attacks, compared to divine strike, while it is a limited resource get the feature at Bard 3 so don't have to wait until you have 8 levels of cleric. A sword Bard also gets a fighting style so you can have say defence and dueling. (Depending on how you plan to level you might want ot use martial versatility to initially have duelling, then swap it out for denfence then get dueling back as a Bard fighint style).
A new errata for the PHB in the Sage Advice Compendium actually said that the new maximum is 6d8, not 5d8. Which I believe doesn't count the extra 1d8 from Improved Divine Smite yet.
But yes, that is still a lot of damage even if by comparison it still is smaller than a regular level 20 Paladin or let's a multiclass combination like Sorcerer/Paladin. It really is just funny to me like imagining 3 sources of sort of divine magic like smiting down on this one guy like lol.
You could probably do paladin 11/warlock 5/bard 4
At paladin 11, you get improved divine smite which adds a d8 to attacks same as divine strike.
Going pact of the blade lets you keep STR at 13 (15 for plate) and focus on CHA for damage, plus hexblade curse increases crit range.
Sword bard can add 1d6 sword flourishes to the equation.
Oh yeah Sorcerer is definitely better than Cleric. The Divine Strike-Smite interaction was just funny for me. Don't worry, I don't think I'm making or even playing this build at all. It's just really the interaction.
Well that doesn't sound VERY IMPORTANT at all...
This thread is the equivalent of Michael Scott calling David Wallace pretending to be from David's daughter's school (forgiveness if you haven't watched the american Office to get that reference)
and 80 damage for all those resources at level 20 is laughably bad.
Only mistakes I see are you left out the weapon damage, damage modifier from attack stat, and any critting. In fact, the second hit is more likely to crit than the first, so the divine strike should honestly skip the first strike even though the second might miss, if the target can be knocked prone.
80 damage in one turn is weak as hell for a paladin; paladins designed for murder are designed to fish for crits, so they can double the damage of their divine smite. Granted, your real damage out might be much higher if you're hiding a plan for amazing crits, but branding smite causes a drastic reduction in dpr, so color me skeptical.
If you want to go all in all paladin murder, here's a very rough sketch of an example build that will outperform what you just said, by a lot:
Half-Elf Vengeance Paladin 17/Hexblade Warlock 3
Feats: PAM, Great Weapon Master, Elven Accuracy (ends up at CHA 18), +2 CHA (you can be Paladin 16/Warlock 4 if you want another ASI, but here I went for L5 spells instead)
Battle plan: summon a pegasus just after breakfast and cast haste on yourself just before battle so you're riding a hasted pegasus, then fly into your enmity target and hit them twice with the hooves and then, at triple advantage, hit them 4 times with your polearm - you're going to crit, so make sure you save the higher level spell slots for the crits. Then, if they attack you, hit them a fifth time with your polearm.
Each hoof is baseline 2d6+4=11 damage.
One of the polearm strikes is 1d4+1d8+15=22
The remaining three are 1d10+1d8+15=25, but with bigger dice, the fact we're ignoring misses and more importantly crits is getting wonkier. 25*3=75
If the target attacks and triggers the Paladin's class feature, there's another swing at 25. If the target leaves, they trigger an OA from the Paladin and the Pegasus, for 36.
Paladin has 1 L5 slot, 2 L4 slots (one went to the Pegasus - mobility matters!), and 2 L3 slots (thanks to Haste) on tap. So that's another 6+2*5+4=20d8 damage = 90, with another 18 for the reaction attack.
So we have, baseline, 11+22+75+90=198 damage, with another 43 damage in the wings if they fight back, 54 if they run away.
And bear in mind for this, I sacrificed DPR for accuracy - if you're doing napkin numbers without accounting for missing and critting, the 4 warlock levels and elven accuracy do nothing whatsoever, so you're better off with just more paladin levels for more higher level spell slots for more damage right now. Plus you'll immediately gain an ASI (and probably spend it on mounted combatant).
198-241-252 is a lot more than 80, and I really need to emphasize, once you account for accuracy, what I just pitched will gain a bigger lead over what you pitched.
Caveat for those paying attention: these numbers are so low because I ignored GWF, as I have no idea which of the RAWs for it your DM follows (the ones in the book under Fighter and Paladin, where you re-roll the damage dice for the attack, or the one in the SAC, where you re-roll the damage dice for the weapon). The SAC version adds so little damage to anything it's a rounding error, so functionally this damage assumes that version (assume the paladin took defense). If you use the PHB version, the DPR skyrockets.
Why it just go paladin 11/warlock 9, get a longsword for 1d10 + 5 dmg, be pact of the blade so you use charisma to make it less MAD, you get a + 1d8 for being an 11th level paladin, get booming blade as a warlock cantrip, then use a fifth level spell slot for both normal smite and eldritch smite,then use a 3rd level spell slot for branding smite, this is (1d10 + 5) + (1d8) + (3d8) + (5d8) + (5d8) for a max of 127 damage, then if you crit you get 254 damage in a single attack, they also take 4d8 damage or a max of 32 when they move for a total of 286, fyi this isn't the most efficient way of using spell slots, but eh, also you have extra attack from paladin, this means you can use another smite which would be of only third level as you've used your warlock smites and you don't get an extra bonus action for a total of your normal weapon attack (cause you cant use booming blade again) which would be an extra (1d10 + 5) + (3d8) for the smite, + (1d8) for the improved divine smite at 11th level paladin, then if we say this crits, that's an extra 94 damage, which adds to the previous total to make 380 damage total, also, (editing this in later), by being an oath of devotion paladin, you can use your Channel divinity to add you charisma mod again to your weapon attacks, this is an extra +5, which is doubled cause of the nat 20 earlier to make it 400 damage total (+20 cause of both attacks), there's likely something wrong with this so please tell me.