Ten years as the paladin’s signature class feature, and in 2024 it became a 1st level spell with a bonus action price tag. Half the community calls that a fix. The other half calls it a crime. Come fight me.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level evocation spell called Divine Smite. Available to Paladins, and only Paladins, since it sits on no other list and the 2024 Magic Initiate feat can’t reach it, this is the spell you cast in the half second after your sword lands. You hit something, you pour a spell slot into the wound, and the target eats an extra 2d8 radiant damage on top of the weapon, which is why every paladin at your table has the dice out before the DM finishes saying “that hits.”
Sitting at a range of self, a casting time of one bonus action that you take immediately after hitting, and a duration of instantaneous, Divine Smite is the simplest damage button in the game. The enemy gets no save, there is no attack roll of its own because you already made the attack, and there is no concentration to hold. You connect, you smite, and because radiant is one of the least resisted damage types in the monster books, the number usually goes through unmodified.
This one is the odd spell out in the series, because there is no 2014 Divine Smite spell. In the 2014 Player’s Handbook it was a paladin class feature, no components, no casting time, just a thing paladins could do. The 2024 Player’s Handbook rewrote it into an actual spell, and that one decision is behind almost every argument you will ever see about it online, the bonus action, the once per turn limit, Counterspell, all of it, and we’ll get to every piece. For now, let’s look at the rules as written, and remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 bonus action, which you take immediately after hitting a target with a Melee weapon or an Unarmed Strike
- Range: Self
- Components: V
- Duration: Instantaneous
Here’s the 2024 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 265:
“The target takes an extra 2d8 Radiant damage from the attack. The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is a Fiend or an Undead.”
Two sentences, and the casting time line above them is doing half the work, so let’s slow down.
“Which you take immediately after hitting a target.” This clause preserves the best part of old smite. You decide after the attack roll lands, never before. Miss, and you spent nothing. Hit, and you choose. Roll a natural 20, and you know it’s a crit before you commit the slot, so crit fishing is alive and well in 2024. Some people read the bonus action wording and decided you have to announce the smite before rolling. You don’t. The trigger is the hit.
“With a Melee weapon or an Unarmed Strike.” Two details hiding in here. First, unarmed strikes are spelled out, so a paladin punching someone can smite the punch. Second, the wording says melee weapon, a type of weapon, and it does not say melee attack. A javelin is a melee weapon with the thrown property, so by the letter of the rule a thrown javelin that hits is a hit with a melee weapon. The community has noticed, and we’ll cover that fight in the uses post. A longbow is a ranged weapon, so no, you still can’t smite an arrow.
“The target takes an extra 2d8 Radiant damage from the attack.” Notice the word target, where the 2014 feature said creature. The damage is part of the attack, which matters for crits. Let’s watch it work. Your 5th level paladin, Strength 18, proficiency plus 3, swings a longsword at a wight, armor class 14. You roll a 13, plus 7 is 20, hit. The longsword does 1d8 plus 4, call it a 9. Now you take your bonus action and cast Divine Smite with a 1st level slot. A wight is undead, so that’s 2d8 plus the bonus 1d8, three dice, you roll a 5, a 7, and a 3. Fifteen more. The wight just took 24 from one swing at 5th level, and you still have your second attack coming.
Now make that same swing a natural 20. Crits double every damage die involved in the attack, and the smite dice are part of the attack, so the longsword becomes 2d8 and the smite becomes 6d8 against that wight. Average it out and you’re looking at 9 from the sword, 27 from the smite, plus 4 from Strength. Forty damage from a 1st level slot and a lucky d20. That is the moment every paladin lives for, and it is exactly the moment the 2024 rules wanted to keep while cutting off the worst abuses. More on that in a minute.
“The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is a Fiend or an Undead.” Against the two creature types paladins were built to fight, every smite gets a free extra die. A 1st level smite on a goblin is 2d8. The same smite on a zombie or an imp is 3d8.
At Higher Levels
“The damage increases by 1d8 for each spell slot level above 1.” So a 2nd level slot is 3d8, a 3rd is 4d8, a 4th is 5d8, and a 5th level slot, the highest a pure paladin ever gets, is 6d8, or 7d8 against a fiend or undead. And there is no cap, which is the big break from the old version. The 2014 feature stopped you at 5d8 no matter how big the slot. The 2024 spell keeps climbing, one die per slot level, all the way up. A pure paladin never feels that. A paladin who dips into a full caster and climbs to a 9th level slot is looking at 10d8, or 11d8 on an undead, and that doubles on a crit, once per turn. We’ll do the math in the uses post, because it’s silly.
Limits and Cheeses
The quick version, because the real depth lives in the companion uses post.
The biggest limit is the bonus action. You get one per turn, so you get one Divine Smite per turn, and since you can’t take a bonus action on someone else’s turn, you can’t smite an opportunity attack anymore. That same bonus action is also wanted by Polearm Master, by the 2024 Great Weapon Master bonus attack, by Misty Step, by Divine Favor, and by Lay on Hands, which is a bonus action in 2024. You will have turns where you heal a friend, then roll a crit, and can’t smite it. That’s the tax.
The second limit is the 2024 spell slot rule. On a turn, you can expend only one spell slot to cast a spell. Divine Smite uses a slot, so you can’t cast Bless with your action and then smite with a slot on the same turn. Cantrips are fine. Your once per long rest free smite is fine, since it doesn’t expend a slot.
The third limit is the whole “it’s a spell now” problem, and it cuts both ways. Silence, a gag, Counterspell, Rage, Wild Shape, and magic immunity all stop it now. A sorcerer paladin can also Subtle Spell it and Empower it, because spells get metamagic. The 2014 versus 2024 section has the full list, and the uses post has the cheeses.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
This is the whole reason Divine Smite gets a video, so let’s do it properly. There is no 2014 Divine Smite spell to compare. The “2014 version” is the paladin’s 2nd level class feature of the same name, and here it is, straight from the paladin class in the 2014 Player’s Handbook:
“Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon’s damage. The extra damage is 2d8 for a 1st-level spell slot, plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st, to a maximum of 5d8. The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is an undead or a fiend, to a maximum of 6d8.”
Same dice, same radiant, same bonus die against undead and fiends, and almost everything around those dice changed.
Number one, it became a spell. In 2014 it was a feature with no action cost, no components, nothing to interrupt. In 2024, page 265, it is a 1st level evocation spell with a verbal component, which means Counterspell, Silence, magic immunity, and the no spells while raging rule all apply. The 2024 paladin gets a feature called Paladin’s Smite at level 2, page 110, that keeps the spell always prepared and lets you cast it once per long rest for free, but the spell is the thing.
Number two, it costs a bonus action. The 2014 feature cost no action at all, which is why old paladins could smite every hit in a turn, Extra Attack, Polearm Master bonus swing, opportunity attack, all of it, as long as the slots held out. The 2024 spell is once per turn because you only have one bonus action, and never off turn.
Number three, the cap is gone. 2014 stopped at 5d8, or 6d8 on an undead. 2024 just scales one die per slot level forever. Pure paladins barely notice. Multiclassers definitely notice.
Number four, the trigger widened. 2014 said “a creature” and “a melee weapon attack.” 2024 says “a target” and “a Melee weapon or an Unarmed Strike.” So objects are fair game, unarmed strikes are spelled out instead of argued over, and thrown melee weapons have a rules as written case they didn’t have before, since a thrown javelin in 2014 was a ranged weapon attack.
Number five, it got cheaper to reach. In 2014 you needed two paladin levels. In 2024 Paladin’s Smite is still level 2, but paladins get Spellcasting at level 1 and Divine Smite is a 1st level paladin spell, so a one level dip can prepare it the ordinary way.
It is a nerf and a fix at the same time. A 2024 paladin can’t dump four slots into one round anymore, can’t smite opportunity attacks, and has to pick between smiting and every other bonus action on the sheet. In exchange the other smite spells got buffed and most of them lost concentration. If you loved the 2014 nova, this hurts. If you DMed against it, you probably exhaled.
History
Now the part I love, and this one is short, because Divine Smite is a young idea wearing an old name. There’s no OD&D version and no AD&D version. The 1st edition paladin had detect evil, lay on hands, turn undead, and a warhorse, and no smite of any kind.
Smiting shows up in 3rd edition, the year 2000 Player’s Handbook, as a paladin class feature called Smite Evil. Once per day, later up to five times per day at 20th level, you picked one melee attack, added your Charisma bonus to the attack roll, and added one extra point of damage per paladin level. If the target turned out not to be evil, the smite fizzled and the daily use was spent anyway. No dice, no spell slots, and you had better be sure about the alignment.
4th edition didn’t have a single Divine Smite. It had a family of paladin smite powers. Radiant Smite, a 1st level encounter power on page 92 of the 2008 Player’s Handbook, was a Strength versus AC attack that dealt two weapon dice plus Strength plus Wisdom as radiant damage. Alongside it were Piercing, Fearsome, and Shielding Smite, and later Staggering, Thunder, Blinding, and Wrathful Smite. If those names sound familiar, it’s because fifth edition turned several of them into paladin smite spells and kept the plain damage one as the class feature.
Then 5th edition, 2014, built the version that defined the class for a decade. Radiant damage fueled by spell slots, decided after the hit, on every melee weapon hit you landed, with the extra die against undead and fiends. And in 2024, as we just covered, that feature became the spell on page 265, bonus action, once per turn, no cap.
So the arc is smite as a once a day alignment check, then a handful of encounter powers, then the best thing you could do with a spell slot, then an actual spell with a price.
Opinion
The 2014 Divine Smite was too good, and I know that annoys somebody. I say it as someone who has watched a paladin crit on round one and delete the boss I spent a week building. A feature that turned every spell slot into guaranteed damage, chosen after the hit, with no action cost, on every attack in a turn including reactions, was the most efficient resource dump in the game. Once per turn was overdue.
Where I land on the rest is split. The bonus action cost is the part I’d argue with, because it turns the paladin’s most iconic move into a competitor for Lay on Hands, Polearm Master, and every other bonus action on the sheet, and that makes the class feel narrower instead of tighter. Counterspell on a smite mostly doesn’t matter in practice, a monster burning a 3rd level slot and a reaction to stop 2d8 is a trade you take every time, but it stings the one time it happens. And the cap coming off is a gift to exactly the multiclass builds the rest of the redesign was trying to rein in, which is a strange choice.
So tell me where you land. Is 2024 Divine Smite the right fix, or should it have stayed a class feature with a once per turn line and nothing else? Would you house rule the bonus action away? Let me know in the comments below, go read the companion post for the crit math and the cheeses, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
