Paladin Spells 5e: Guide to the Best Paladin Spells – RPGBOT (2024)

Introduction

Paladin spells are primarily buffs, healing, and support options, many ofwhich are borrowed from the Cleric’s spell list. However, they have numerouspowerful and unique options, including Smite spells, Compelled Duel, and FindSteed.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Paladin Spells
  • Cantrips
  • 1st-Level Spells
  • 2nd-Level Spells
  • 3rd-Level Spells
  • 4th-Level Spells
  • 5th-Level Spells

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

• Red: Bad, useless options, or options whichare extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
• Orange: OK options, or useful optionsthat only apply in rare circ*mstances. Useful sometimes.
• Green: Good options. Useful often.
• Blue: Fantastic options, often essentialto the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Paladin Spells

Optionalspellsaremarkedbelowwith(Optional)followingthespell’sname.Thesespellsareconsideredoptionalrules,asdescribedinTasha’sCauldronofEverything.ConsultyourDMbeforedecidingtousethesespells.

Cantrips

Fighting Style (Blessed Warrior) introduces the possibility of cantrips. Inorder to justify the opportunity cost of choosing Blessed Warrior over anyother fighting style, your choice of cantrips in the context of the rest ofyour build needs to both justify the opportunity cost and answer the question“why not just play a cleric?”

Since cantrips reduce your reliance on Strength or Dexterity, we’ll assumethat you’re maximizing Charisma when considering cantrips. Unfortunately,since the Paladin is a martial character and you’ll lack effective offensiveoptions beyond these cantrips, utility spells are harder to justify.

• Guidance^(PHB): Really good, but youlikely can’t make room for it.
• Light^(PHB): Buy a torch.
• Mending^(PHB): Too situational.
• Resistance^(PHB): Bad.
• Sacred Flame^(PHB): Not as much damage asToll the Dead, and unless you plan to fight a lot of undead and you’ll useboth in the same situations so you can only justify having one of thetwo.
• Spare the Dying^(PHB): You have Lay onHands.
• Thaumaturgy^(PHB): Disappointingutility.
• Toll the Dead^(XGtE): 60 ft. range, thedamage is measured in d12’s, and since it’s necrotic damage almost nothingwill resist it. This is your best single-target damage option.
• Word of Radiance^(XGtE): A great way to handlecrowds of multiple enemies. Grab full plate and a shield and walk into acrowd of enemies. See our article onMelee Cantrips vs. Extra Attackfor a breakdown of the math comparing melee cantrip spells to normal martialattacks.

1st-Level Spells

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• Bless^(PHB): If you don’t havesomething else on which to use your Concentration, use Bless. +1d4 to attackrolls is huge in 5e.
• Ceremony^(XGtE): This is a weird spell.The fact that it exists implies that clerics perform burial rites, weddingceremonies, and rites of passage magically at a cost of 25gp each, placing aheavy financial burden on poor commoners, and removing the possibility ofnon-magical clergy performing these functions. It certainly feels cool for acleric to have a dedicated mechanic for performing these functions, but Idon’t know why this isn’t just a Religion check or something.

  Regardless of all of that, the spell provides weird incentives to dothings like getting married before a dungeon crawl or a boss fight. As aDM I would discourage players from abusing these options.

• Command^(PHB): Difficult for thePaladin to use with few spell slots and relatively low save DC.
• Compelled Duel^(PHB): Forcing a foe intosingle combat with you is extremely helpful. You are your party’s Defender,and while much of the time that only requires you to stand in the rightplace, sometimes you will need to actively force enemies to attack youinstead of your allies.
• Cure Wounds^(PHB): Use lay on hands. Youdon’t get enough spell slots to spend them on healing.
• Detect Evil and Good^(PHB): Situationally useful,and you can use it to find invisible enemies or detect enemies through thinwalls.
• Detect Magic^(PHB): Someone in the partyneeds this, and ideally it should be someone with the ability to castrituals.
• Detect Poison and Disease^(PHB): Very situational, andunless you can also cast Protection From Poison there’s little you can doabout it anyway. Fortunately, this can be cast as a ritual, but you can’t dothat so leave it to someone who can.
• Divine Favor^(PHB): More damage than you’llget from Divine Smite, and it’s especially effective if you have PolearmMaster and Extra Attack.
• Heroism^(PHB): A truly fantastic bufffor a 1st-level spell, but you’re going to be the one taking damage andConcentration will make the spell difficult to rely upon. Shield of Faithmay be more effective, especially if your AC is already high.
• Protection from Evil and Good^(PHB): A fantastic defensivebuff, and even though it requires Concentration it will be reliable betweenDisadvantage on attacks against you and your high AC while stomping aroundin heavy armor.
• Purify Food and Drink^(PHB): One of many reasonsthat Dungeons and Dragons makes a terrible wilderness survival game. Leavethis for someone who can cast rituals if possible.
• Searing Smite^(PHB): A great way to dealongoing damage to an enemy with poor Constitution saves which you’re havingtrouble hitting (like a spellcaster with defensive buffs), but if you justwant damage you’ll get more consistent results from Divine Smite or DivineFavor.
• Shield of Faith^(PHB): Not very exciting, andit takes Concentration, but a paladin with full plate, a shield, Defensefighting style, and Shield of Faith has an AC of 23, which will keep youvery safe for a very long time.
• Thunderous Smite^(PHB): You only lose 2 damageon average compared to Divine Smite, and knocking enemies prone is easilyworth the lost damage.
• Wrathful Smite^(PHB): Many big toughcreatures like beasts and giants have poor Wisdom saves, which which makesthis an easy way to debuff them. Once the spell is in place, the targetneeds to pass a wisdom check as an Action to remove the effect. Notonly is that a horrifyingly high Action cost, but few creatures will be ableto reliably beat the DC even if they’re built around Wisdom simply becauseyour save DC will scale better than their Wisdom modifier even with thePaladin’s relatively poor spell save DC compared to full spellcasters.

2nd-Level Spells

• Aid^(PHB): Not essential, but agood way to pad your party’s hit points throughout the day. Just be careful;if the spell ends while you’re below 5 hit points you’ll fall to 0 and fallunconscious.

  Aid’s casting time allows it to be used in combat, which is unusual butoffers an interesting option. With three targets and a 30-foot range, youcan cast it to both buff and heal your allies during combat. Targetscurrent hit points and hit point maximum both increase, so allies at 0 hitpoints are healed in addition to having their hit point maximum raised,thereby allowing Aid to serve a similar function to Mass Healing Word.

  However, since spells don’t stack with themselves, it’s hard to repeatthis trick. You’ll need to cast Aid again using higher-level spell slots,which can get expensive quickly, so Mass Healing Word is probably betterif Aid is already running and if Mass Healing Word is an option for yourparty.

• Branding Smite^(PHB): You need to hit aninvisible enemy to use this meaningfully, and that’s hard to do unless youalready have a way to make them visible. If you already have a way to makeinvisible foes visible, why do you need this spell?
• Find Steed^(PHB): Exclusive to thePaladin spell list, Find Steed gives you a magical horse. While this steeddoesn’t get anything to make it more durable than a normal horse, it’ssmarter than a typical animal and has some cool abilities. Among them, youcan share the effect on any spell that you cast which targets only yourself.That means many buffs like Protection From Evil and Good, but you can alsouse spells like Cure Wounds to heal yourself and your mount at the sametime. Unfortunately, you can’t do this with spells like Branding Smitebecausethe target of the spell is the creature which you attack.
• Gentle Repose^(PHB) (Optional): Verysituational, but it solves some interesting problems. Normally you cancremate a body to prevent it from becoming undead, but cremating a bodytakes an alarmingly large amount of fuel which you probably don’t havelaying about. You can mutilate the body, but that’s gross and in manycampaign settings the gods view that sort of thing as evil. So if you needto maintain a body until you can give it a real burial, this is your bestbet.

  Gentle Repose also pauses the timer on effects which raise the dead.While this is specifically called out as working with Raise Dead, it workswith anything that raises creatures from the dead. That includes Revivify.So if you keep this prepared, you can haul your allies around until youcan cast 3rd-level spells and until you can scrape together enough diamonddust to raise them.

  Remember that while spells don’t stack, their durations can overlap so ifyou cast Gentle Repose early to avoid gaps in spell duration you can keepbodies preserved indefinitely.

• Lesser Restoration^(PHB): Situational, but asituation that comes up often. If you don’t have a cleric in the party youmay be the only one with access to this spell, so you’ll want to take it atsome point.
• Locate Object^(PHB): Too situational, andtoo easy to counter. Anyone with any knowledge of magic that’s trying tohide something will wrap it in lead.
• Magic Weapon^(PHB): If your game uses magicitems, skip this. If it doesn’t, someone in your party needs to have thisavailable. I hope that it’s not you, but it needs to be someone.
• Prayer of Healing^(PHB) (Optional): Essentiallya Short Rest worth of hit points in 10 minutes. Fine, but not especiallyimportant since Hit Dice exist.
• Protection From Poison^(PHB): Situational, but poisonis common across the full CR range, so this is a fantastic defensive optionat any level. The 1-hour duration means that you can get a lot of mileageout of a single spell slot even if you cast it ahead of time.
• Warding Bond^(PHB) (Optional): Fewcharacters are so well-suited to use this spell as the Paladin. With d10 hitdice and Lay on Hands you have a huge well of hit points, and using thisprovides a great deal of protection to comparably fragile allies. This alsodoesn’t require Concentration, so you can combine it with options likeHeroism to further mitigate damage.
• Zone of Truth^(PHB): Situational and muchless reliable than you would hope. Creatures are aware that they’re underthe effect, and they can choose to “be evasive”, which means that they couldgive you true but useless answers or simply not answer. Creatures other thanthe caster also don’t know who passed or failed the save, so unless theyalready trust you other creatures might not believe you when you tell themthat a creature is telling the truth.

  If a creature is willing to talk, they can prove that they are sayingwhat they believe to be true, and you can know whether or not they believeit to be true. But if the creature is incorrect, if you’re lying to othercreatures (which they might believe that you are), or if any other numberof other things go wrong, this spell simply fails to meet its intendedpurpose.

  In short, this helps honest creatures prove to you that they are beinghonest. Nothing else. If you want to get answers from an unwilling orunhelpful subject, cast Detect Thoughts.

3rd-Level Spells

• Aura of Vitality^(PHB): Never use this incombat, but 20d6 healing for a 3rd-level spell is very efficient. EvenHealing Spirit can’t match this amount of healing at the same spell level(with the 2020 errata and a +5 spellcasting mod, 6 uses, 2d6 healing whencast at 3rd level, total 12d6 healing).
• Blinding Smite^(PHB): Compared to burning thespell slot for Divine Smite you lose 1d8 damage, but you canblindthe target. That’s a really good trade even if the blindness only lasts forone round.
• Create Food and Water^(PHB): Rations are cheap, butit’s good that you can prepare this if you somehow find yourself somewherewithout food for extended periods. This also lets you create 30 gallons ofwater, which is enough for a nice bath but not enough to fill a 5-footcube.
• Crusader’s Mantle^(PHB): Divine Favor, but foryourself and all of your allies within 30 ft. It gets better in largerparties, especially if you have allies who make lots of attacks usingTwo-Weapon Fighting or Crossbow Expert.
• Daylight^(PHB): Useful, but you getvery few spell slots to throw around so it may be hard to justify if youhave other ways to get light.
• Dispel Magic^(PHB): Useful, but you getthis so much later that your party should have access to this from a fullspellcaster.
• Elemental Weapon^(PHB): Divine Favor will getyou the same amount of extra damage, so the only appeal is the +1 toattacks. If you need the +1 to attacks, cast Magic Weapon.
• Magic Circle^(PHB): With a 1-minute castingtime, you can’t use this in combat unless you have time to prepare and yourenemies are coming to you. Even then, using this in combat isn’t reliableprotection because it doesn’t mitigate the effects of spells and abilitieswhich don’t require attack rolls like breath weapons or fireballs. The bestuse case is generally to invert the effects and use a spell to summon acreature so that you can bargain with it without risk of the creatureescaping. Even then, the 1-hour duration may not be enough to guarantee yoursafety. If you want similar effects in combat, Protection From Evil and Goodwill do the trick.
• Spirit Shroud^(TCoE) (Optional): With a1-minute duration and Extra Attack, you can get a lot of damage out of this.But, like any good paladin, you need to consider if this is going to beworth on your precious few smite slots. At 1d8 damage per attack, twoattacks per turn, and one minute duration, you can deal at most 20d8 damage(avg. 90). Adjusting for the expected 65% miss chance, that’s 58.5 damage,provided that you do nothing else with your Action and that combat last longenough. If you use the same slot on a critical hit (the best time to smite)at any point in that full minute, you’ll get 8d6 damage (avg. 36). You’llscore a critical hit once in those 20 attacks made over the course of aminute of combat, so it’s a fair comparison.

  So Spirit Shroud will deal more total damage, especially if you have away to make more attacks, such as Haste or Polearm Master. However, thatdepends on combat being lengthy. A typical combat last 3 to 5 rounds, soyou can expect to get half of that 58.5 damage. Things tip more towardSpirit Shroud when you upcast it to 5th level, doubling the damage fromSpirit Shroud but only adding 4d8 additional damage to your Divine Smiteon a critical hit.

  To summarize: this is good if you have more than two attacks and/or ifyou upcast it to 5th level, but it’s not much better than Divine Smitewhen cast at 3rd level with just two attacks per turn, and you need todeal with the risks imposed by Concentration.

• Remove Curse^(PHB): Situational, butirreplaceable. Fortunately, you can usually wait a day to prepare this.
• Revivify^(PHB): Too good to forgo.Everyone who can get this should take it.

4th-Level Spells

• Aura of Life^(PHB): Only usefulif you know that you’re facing the types of undead which reduce your hitpoint maximum (there are several).
• Aura of Purity^(PHB): Technicallysituational, but the defenses are broad enough that you can cover a widevariety of situations. In most encounters it’s unlikely that you’ll be hitwith more than one or two negative status conditions, but Aura of Purityprovides broad enough protection that you’ll be able to common many of themost common conditions with the same spell.
• Banishment^(PHB): Useful, but drop itonce you can cast Banishing Smite.
• Death Ward^(PHB): This will absolutelysave your life, and with an 8 hour duration you can cast it at the beginningof the day before you go do anything dangerous.
• Find Greater Steed^(XGtE): A linear improvementto Find Steed, cast this on a day when you’re not adventuring and get anawesome new mount. Flight is a massive tactical advantage, so unfortunatelycool options like dire wolf and rhinoceros aren’t a good idea unless youspend most of your time riding around in dungeons with weirdly wide roomsbut low ceilings.
• Locate Creature^(PHB): More effective thanmundane tracking, but the 1,000-foot range can be a problem if the target isactively fleeing from you. If you’re going to use this, be sure that you’removing faster than your target.
• Staggering Smite^(PHB): This would be muchbetter if the effect lasted more than one round.

5th-Level Spells

• Banishing Smite^(PHB): You can’t use DivineSmite with 5th-level spell slots, so this is arguably the Paladin’s bestsmite option. The rider effect doesn’t allow a saving throw, and banishingthe target could dramatically affect the outcome of an encounter. 50 hitpoints is a reasonably large window, especially since you check it afterapplying damage from your attack, but ask anyone who has tried to use PowerWord Kill how frustrating it is to guess how many hit points a target has.It’s frequently easier to just kill them.
• Circle of Power^(PHB): Technicallysituational, but spellcasting enemies are common at such high level.
• Destructive Smite / Destructive Wave^(PHB): This is a fantastic AOEfor a class that otherwise struggles to handle groups of foes. 10d6 damageis a big pile, and the damage types are very rarely resisted.
• Dispel Evil and Good^(PHB): In most cases,Protection from Evil and Good will do the trick, but Dispel Evil and Goodhas two additional effects. You can prematurely end the spell to end acharm/frighten/possession effect, or to attempt to banish creatures fromother planes. They do still get a saving throw, and if the creatures arenative to the plane they’re on, nothing happens.

  It’s very important to note that the banishment effect isn’t limited bythe spell’s duration: creatures banished this way are sent to anotherplane and must return by normal means. However, since the banishmenteffect doesn’t effect creatures on their home plane, the banishment maynot be as appealing as spells like Banishment which can affect creaturesnative to your current plane.

• Geas^(PHB): This spell issituational by design. It has a 1-minute casting time and Verbal components,so you’re not going to break this out in combat or while sneaking around ina dungeon. You’re going to restrain the subject, and stand around chantingfor a full minute and hope that they fail the save. Once that’s done, youneed to give them a suitable command (read the spell description). Generallyyou’ll want it to be something that benefits you, but will also take thetarget most of the duration to keep them from becoming a problem for you.Also remember that the base effect of the Charmed condition makes it easierfor you to talk the creature into doing things with Charisma checks, so aGeased creature may be a useful ally for the duration of the effect even ifthe original order isn’t directly related to what you want them to do.

  Increasing the spell level extends the duration, but weirdly the damagedoesn’t increase. 5d10 is a nice pile of damage, but it doesn’t scale withspell level and at some point the target will get smart enough to wake up,trigger the 5d10 damage, take a short rest, then go about their business.If the damage scaled this would be less of a problem, but damage is soeasily repaired in 5e outside of combat that without further penaltiesGeas is more a tax on hit dice than the magical shackles it’s intended tobe.

  If you want a homebrew fix, add a level of fatigue each day that thetarget is out of compliance, or make the damage impossible to heal untilthey go a day without taking it. Neither of those is a perfect solution,but they’re miles better than an average of 27.5 damage.

• Holy Weapon^(XGtE): This spell is amazing.+2d8 radiant damage on hit means that you’re doing as much damage as youwould do by burning a low-level spell slot to use Holy Smite. Your weaponbecomes a magic weapon so you can bypass many creatures’ damage reduction.You get all of this for an hour with Concentration, and you can cast it as aBonus Action. You can also dismiss the spell for a cool burst of damage, butthat’s probably not going to see a lot of use unless the duration happens torun out while you’re fighting.
• Raise Dead^(PHB): Essential, but by thislevel you should have access to Raise Dead already from other spellcastersin the party.
• Summon Celestial^(TCoE) (Optional): A reallygreat spell, but it works much better on a full caster. You get this far toolate to enjoy the full benefits of the spell, and for the same spell slotyou could cast Holy Weapon.

  For more help, see ourPractical Guide to Summoning Spells.