Blade Ward fix?

[Sillybird99]

Blade Ward
Abjuration cantrip
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: touch
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 round
You extend your hand and trace a sigil of warding in the air. Until the end of your next turn, the target creature has resistance against bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage dealt by weapon attacks. Any creature who hits the warded creature with a melee weapon attack takes damage of the type dealt by their attack equal to your character level.


Just making it a touch cantrip adds a lot more use cases, and although the original version technically scales with damage dealt by enemies, I figured adding minor scaling retributive damage makes it a cooler use of your action. The retributive damage is balanced by only working vs melee attacks.

Is it now worth taking? Abusable?

[heavyfuel]

My personal fix is that after cast, you create a visibly threatening ward around you, and you can use your reaction to extinguish the spell and deal 1d8 Force damage to the last enemy that damaged you (this last attack is still "blocked"). This damage increases with levels as any cantrip.

At first it was d4 Force damage, but then a player picked it and it was less than stellar, so I bumped it to d8 and it was still felt subpar.

I mean, it takes a cantrip slot that you can only use if you are being targeted (and most casters don't want to be targeted in the first place), it requires that you use an action preemptively (so you waste your action if you're not attacked), the enemy intuitively knows this ward is dangerous and can choose to ignore you, you have to use your reaction IF an enemy deals damage (so you don't do damage if the enemy misses), and - on top of it all - you don't get to pick for sure who is receiving the damage.

[Sillybird99]

That is a neat fix though, even if it's still less than spectacular. It doesn't need to be spectacular though, it's a cantrip and at least more useful with your fix.

[truemane]

Metamagic Mod: duplicate thread.