One of the golden opportunities for the 2024 Player's Handbook is to take certain options that were severely underpowered in the 2014 version and make them viable. I've already gone over how True Strike has gone from a laughably useless cantrip to becoming actually one of the best options, but let's talk about another "Trap" spell that has seen big changes.
Yep, we're talking Witch Bolt.
Infamously, in the 2014 PHB, Warlocks are encouraged to pick Witch Bolt along with Hex as their starting spells in the "quick build" guidance. And Witch Bolt looks, on paper, like it's pretty good - once you hit with the initial attack, you can keep pumping in damage each turn automatically. That sounds really effecient.
But it has some problems:
First, I think the benefits of the spell look better before you understand how enormous a round in D&D combat is. In my longrunning Ravnica campaign, one of the two Storm Sorcerers tries to make this spell work (largely to get the lightning damage) but two things usually get in the way of its being effecting. The first is that monsters often die pretty quickly. When you imagine this working wonderfully is if you have a really long combat where you get 3, 4, 5 rounds of witchy goodness crackling away on the target. However, unless you're dealing with a boss monster (and even then, not so often) the monster is probably going to be dead before you get more than two rounds out of this spell.
The second issue is that it's just so easy for a monster to break out of it. The range on 2014 Witch Bolt is only 30 feet - meaning you have to be within most creature's walking speed of the target to cast it. And that means that they can almost always move out of that range with a single movement.
We can also talk about how the damage is pretty low - 1d12 for a leveled spell... basically I think any time you expend a spell slot on a spell, you should be doing more than one die of damage if that's what the spell is meant to do. This is barely more damage than a cantrip like Fire Bolt.
But we all know Witch Bolt is bad. The question, then, is: has it been fixed?
The first major change is that its range has been doubled. With a 60-foot range, you can now target a creature that won't be able to simply use its movement speed to get out of the radius. Would I have maybe bumped this up to more, like 90 or 120 feet? Perhaps. But 60 feet will usually cover a pretty big chunk of the map (Roll 20's default map size is 25x25 squares, or 125 feet, meaning if you're in the center of the map, you'll basically cover the entire thing).
The second change is that its initial damage is now 2d12 - essentially, the spell has been automatically upcast compared to its 2014 version. A Warlock casting this at 5th level when they're level 9+ will deal 6d12 damage with it, or about 39 on average.
However, probably the biggest change is the third one - on subsequent turns, you can use a Bonus Action to deal 1d12 Lightning damage to the target automatically, without rolling to hit, even if the initial attack missed. The spell ends early if the target is outside its range or gets behind Total Cover.
So, this is the potential game changer. The previous version forced you to use your Action to continue to deal the damage, and if you missed the initial attack, the spell had no effect.
Does this fix the spell?
Well, I think the spell has perhaps graduated from terrible to moderately decent. It will depend heavily on whether you want to use your bonus action for something or not. My Wizard, for example, only tends to use his bonus action if he needs to Misty Step or to direct his Manifest Mind (Scribe Wizard feature) around the battlefield. If you find yourself often not needing to use a bonus action, there's little opportunity cost in tacking on an extra 6.5 lightning damage each turn.
The other thing is that it's guaranteed damage. Not a ton, mind you, but still, particularly at low levels, that extra d12 can potentially be significant.
All this being said, I don't think this spell is worth upcasting - only the initial damage gets buffed when you do, and I think that there are plenty of better spells to use. The spell also still takes your concentration, which you might want to use for higher-level, more impactful things. But if you have a very elusive target - some heavily-armored monster at levels when you don't have the attack bonus to consistently overcome their AC - this can be nice.
I will also say that if you're fighting a foe that is concentrating on a spell, having consistent damage coming at them to force saves can be helpful.
I have to say that, personally, I'm still not convinced this is an amazing spell now - there might be some odd combos that could amp it up into something really impressive, but as it stands I think they've mostly ameliorated, rather than eliminated some of the spell's biggest flaws.
However, I think that I'll be less inclined to steer new players away from Witch Bolt - it feels like it now has a place as an offbeat, fun spell, rather than just being a pure "bad choice" option.
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