question about vamperic touch spell

[Joe dirt]

vamperic touch:
The touch of your shadow-wreathed hand can siphon force from others to heal your wounds. Make a melee spell attack against a creature within your reach. On a hit, the target takes 3d6 necrotic damage, and you regain hit points equal to half the amount of necrotic damage dealt. Until the spell ends, you can make the attack again on each of your turns as an action.

At higher level

When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, the damage increases by 1d6 for each slot level above 3rd.

so my question is can u use one hand to attack with vamperic touch and use the other to do a melee attack?

[Trampaige]

Not unless you have some way of generating extra Actions. You're using your Action to cast the spell in the first round, and your Action to make a melee spell attack in subsequent rounds.

If you were under the effects of haste, which grants an extra action that may be used to make attacks, you could.

[Aett_Thorn]

Not unless you have some way of generating extra Actions. You're using your Action to cast the spell in the first round, and your Action to make a melee spell attack in subsequent rounds.

If you were under the effects of haste, which grants an extra action that may be used to make attacks, you could.

Just to elaborate a bit here, even if you had the Extra Attack feature, you still couldn't use that to make one attack with the weapon, and then use the extra attack with your hand (as much as I'd probably allow that for rule of cool). Because the spell specifically states that you use an action to do it, and not that you can use your attack to instead hit with your hand of vampirism, then you need to use this special action instead of the Attack action.

[DarkKnightJin]

Unless you have like 18 levels of Eldritch Knight and can use Vamp Touch and get a bonus action attack, I don't think there is a way to get VT and an attack off, without a Haste effect.

[Dalebert]

Unless you have like 18 levels of Eldritch Knight and can use Vamp Touch and get a bonus action attack, I don't think there is a way to get VT and an attack off, without a Haste effect.

Strictly RAW, that only works the first round you cast it since for the rest you aren't casting a spell anymore.

[Specter]

Yep. Apparently the only way to make Vampiric Touch decent is to be Hasted, but even that is a lot of setup.

[DarkKnightJin]

Strictly RAW, that only works the first round you cast it since for the rest you aren't casting a spell anymore.

There's also that, yeah.

I like the idea of Vampiric Touch, I do.
But unless you have a Death Cleric with a Channel Divinity to up the damage and subsequently the healing they get.. it's not super useful for most casters. Unless of course you can channel all them thungs through a Familiar.. Which should be possible, I think.
I'm gonna laugh if it turns out the Familiar is the one being healed instead of the caster.

[Waffle_Iron]

I'm gonna laugh if it turns out the Familiar is the one being healed instead of the caster.

Go ahead an laugh.
The familiar "delivers the spell as if it had cast it"
Vamp Touch heals the caster.

[Joe the Rat]

For further giggles:

Range: Self. It's an enchantment alteration ensorcellment that gives you a touch attack, not a touch-range spell. Unless you can share spells, it doesn't work by RAW.

I allow it in my home game, because Vampiric Death Squirrel is too good to pass up.

(I may start redirecting healing to the familiar, though)

[Finlam]

Yep. Apparently the only way to make Vampiric Touch decent is to be Hasted, but even that is a lot of setup.
We just had a pretty in-depth discussion about optimizing Vampiric Touch (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?539456-The-Mystic-Vampire) and the findings were either haste it or go for 6 levels of Wu-Jen so can you spend pp on Brutal Strike to pump the necrotic damage (and the healing) through the roof at a 1pp to 1d6 ratio (a better ratio than you get by raising the spell level). Then add on the Giant Growth discipline for 10 feet of reach and you're good to go.

Death cleric also has a cannel divinity option for increasing necrotic damage on a melee attack by 5*cleric level, so you could pump it up pretty hard that way, but only once or twice per short rest. So if you're playing a death cleric it *might* be worth it to pick up vampiric touch, but you've also got other means of healing since you're a cleric.

You could play a sorcerer to quicken it to get two attacks with it, but only in the first round. If you're going to use metamagic with it, you'll probably get more mileage from empower.

To offer yet another option, you could go for 2 levels of wizard (necromancer) to use Grim Harvest with it, which restores 3*spell level hit points when you kill something with a necromancy spell. Not a very good return on investment, but if you really want to, you could.

[Aett_Thorn]

Sadly, this is a spell that ends up being similar to Flame Blade, where it seems like it might be good, but there is just no way to pair it with other features to allow you to make it function well past certain levels.

For instance, why can't Flame Blade be used with Extra Attack or even two-weapon fighting? Why doesn't Vampiric Touch work on unarmed attacks (which might make for a fun Monk/ multiclass)? Just seems like they wanted to prevent abuse from these types of spells, and ended up making them fairly useless.