A bonus action, a d4 of radiant on every swing, and in 2024 it finally stopped eating your concentration.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level evocation spell called Divine Favor. This one is a paladin exclusive, the only class with it on the list, though the usual feats and dips can beg their way in. Cast it and every weapon attack you land for the next minute deals an extra 1d4 radiant damage. That’s the spell. No targets to pick, no save for the enemy to make, just you hitting harder for a full fight.
Sitting at a range of self, a casting time of one bonus action, and a duration of one minute, Divine Favor is the buff a paladin flicks on at the top of a fight and then forgets about while it quietly pads every hit. And here’s the thing that makes it interesting, the 2014 version and the 2024 version are not the same spell in one very important way, and that one change is the whole reason people are talking about it again. We’ll get there.
The personality of this spell is efficiency. It costs a bonus action, not your whole turn, so you can cast it and still attack in the same round. It deals radiant, which is one of the best damage types in the game because almost nothing resists it and a lot of nasty things are weak to it. And it rides on top of every swing you make, so the more attacks you throw, the more this little d4 earns its keep. Let’s get into the rules, and remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 bonus action
- Range: Self
- Components: V, S
- Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Here’s the 2014 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 234:
“Your prayer empowers you with divine radiance. Until the spell ends, your weapon attacks deal an extra 1d4 radiant damage on a hit.”
Short spell, so let’s slow down on it, because the value is all in what it doesn’t say.
“Your prayer empowers you with divine radiance.” The key word there is you. Divine Favor is a self buff, full stop. You cannot put it on the fighter, you cannot hand it to the rogue, it lives on the caster and only the caster. That’s the trade for how cheap it is. Bless spreads a d4 across three friends, Divine Favor gives a slightly different d4 to exactly one person, and that person is always you.
“Until the spell ends, your weapon attacks deal an extra 1d4 radiant damage on a hit.” Every word here is pulling weight. It says weapon attacks, so this is for the paladin who is swinging steel, which, good news, is every paladin. It says on a hit, so you never waste it, the d4 only shows up when you already connected. And it says radiant, which is the quiet flex of the whole spell. Radiant damage is resisted by almost nothing in the monster manual, and it goes clean through the resistances that shrug off a normal weapon, so a lot of the time your 1d4 radiant is doing more real work than a 1d4 of the weapon’s own type would.
Now here’s the part people undersell. This applies to every weapon attack, not one per turn. The moment your paladin picks up Extra Attack at level 5 and starts swinging twice, Divine Favor is adding 1d4 to each of those swings, so a full turn is 2d4 of bonus radiant. Play a two weapon or a Polearm Master build with even more attacks and the d4s pile up faster. A single d4 averages 2.5, which does not sound like much, until you multiply it by every hit you land over ten rounds of combat, and then it turns into a real chunk of a paladin’s damage for the cost of one bonus action.
At Higher Levels
Here’s a nice short section, because Divine Favor does not have one. There is no upcasting bonus. Cast it with a 1st level slot or a 5th level slot and you get the exact same 1d4 radiant either way. So always cast it at the lowest slot you have available. Feeding it a bigger slot buys you nothing, and any guide that tells you otherwise is wrong.
Limits and Cheeses
The quick version, because the real depth lives in the companion uses post.
In 2014, the single biggest limit on Divine Favor is one word buried in the duration line, concentration. A paladin only gets one concentration slot, and it is the most fought over piece of real estate on the character. Bless wants it. Searing Smite wants it. Hunter’s Mark wants it. Shield of Faith wants it. In the 2014 game, the second you cast Divine Favor you are saying no to all of those, and for most paladins, holding Bless for the whole party or Hunter’s Mark for the extra dice is just a better use of that one slot than a personal d4. That is the reason a lot of 2014 paladins looked at Divine Favor, did the math, and left it in the book.
The other quiet limit is the word weapon. It boosts weapon attacks, so if your paladin has a turn where they do something other than hit a thing with a weapon, the spell sits idle. And it’s on you only, so a mounted or backline paladin who isn’t swinging is wasting it. This is a front line, in the thick of it, swinging every round spell.
I’ll keep it short here, because the real uses, the smite stacking math, the crit fishing, and the arguments about what counts as a weapon attack all live in the Divine Favor uses post. This one is about what the spell is and the one big way it changed.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
This is the whole reason Divine Favor is worth a video in 2026, so let’s do it properly. Yes, this spell changed in the 2024 Player’s Handbook, and it changed in exactly the way paladins had been begging for.
In 2014, Divine Favor is concentration, up to 1 minute. In 2024, on page 265, it is just 1 minute. The concentration requirement is gone. That is the headline, and it genuinely changes how the spell plays. Think about what that unlocks. In the old game, casting Divine Favor meant you could not also hold Bless, or Searing Smite, or Hunter’s Mark, because they all fought over the same concentration. In the new game, Divine Favor asks for none of that. So a 2024 paladin can spend a bonus action on Divine Favor, spend a later bonus action on a concentration spell like Hunter’s Mark or Bless, and hold both at once. The spell that used to compete with your best concentration options now stacks with them. That single change takes Divine Favor from a spell most paladins skipped to a spell a lot of them auto prepare.
There is a second, smaller change worth flagging so nobody yells at you at the table. The 2024 version reclassified the spell from Evocation to Transmutation. It does not change anything you do with it, the school is mostly a label for things like Wizard subclass features and a handful of interactions, and paladins do not care, but if you’re comparing the two entries side by side and notice the school is different, that’s real, and that’s why.
Everything else held steady. Same 1st level, same bonus action to cast, same range of self, same verbal and somatic components, same 1 minute clock, same plus 1d4 radiant on your weapon hits, and still no upcasting. The 2024 wording trims the flavor sentence and reads “your attacks with weapons deal an extra 1d4 Radiant damage on a hit,” but that’s editing, not a rules change. The one thing that matters is the concentration, and losing it is a straight upgrade.
History
Now the part I love, except this time the story is short, because Divine Favor is not one of the ancient spells. There is no OD&D version, no AD&D version, no 1st or 2nd edition Divine Favor to trace. This spell was born in third edition, in the year 2000 Player’s Handbook, page 224, and everything before that simply doesn’t exist. So if you want to feel old, this spell is younger than a lot of the people casting it.
And the third edition version is a completely different animal from the one you know. In 3.0 and 3.5, Divine Favor was a 1st level spell shared by clerics and paladins, cast as a standard action, personal range, one minute. But it did not deal radiant damage at all. Instead it gave you a luck bonus to your attack rolls and your weapon damage rolls, one point for every three caster levels. And here’s the spicy part, in the original 3.0 printing that bonus climbed to a maximum of plus 5, which on a cleric who could stack it with other buffs was strong enough that Wizards openly flagged it. In 3.5 they officially nerfed it, capping the bonus at plus 3 at ninth caster level, and the designers said out loud that the spell had, in their words, too great an impact on the play experience. So the very first thing that ever happened to Divine Favor was getting told it was too good.
Fourth edition did what fourth edition did and folded everything into the powers and keyword system, so there was no standalone Divine Favor spell in that era.
Then fifth edition, in 2014, rebuilt it from scratch into the shape we’ve been talking about. Gone was the luck bonus to hit and to damage. In its place came the flat plus 1d4 of radiant on every weapon hit, it dropped off the cleric list and became paladin only, and it moved to a bonus action so it wouldn’t cost your whole turn. It also picked up concentration, which is the leash that held it back for a full decade. And in 2024, as we just covered, that leash finally came off.
So the arc is a funny one. Divine Favor started life in third edition as a buff so strong it got nerfed twice, spent fourth edition not existing, came back in fifth edition as a modest little radiant top up chained to concentration, and then in 2024 got handed the one buff that makes it genuinely good again. It’s a spell that has been on both ends of the balance conversation, which is more than most first level options can say.
Opinion
Here’s my honest take. In the 2014 game, Divine Favor was a trap for most paladins, and I’ll defend that. The math on the spell is perfectly fine. The problem was always concentration, which is the most valuable thing a paladin owns, and a personal d4 almost never beat holding Bless or Hunter’s Mark with that same slot. It was a spell you took on a very specific dual wield or crit fishing build and skipped everywhere else.
The 2024 version is a different conversation entirely, and this is the part I actually want to argue about in the comments. Free of concentration, Divine Favor turns into a bonus action you flick on turn one and never think about again, stacking happily on top of whatever real concentration spell you’re running. For a paladin who is going to be swinging every round anyway, that is close to free extra damage, and radiant is the damage type you most want to be dealing. I think it used to be skippable and is now quietly excellent, and I think a lot of 2024 paladins should be preparing it who currently aren’t.
So tell me where you land. Was Divine Favor ever worth the concentration in your 2014 games, or did Bless win that fight every single time? And in 2024, is a free bonus action d4 enough to earn a slot on your paladin, or is Searing Smite still the better click? Let me know in the comments below, go read the companion post for all the ways to squeeze this spell, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
