[RPG] Why would I ever cast True Strike

dnd-5espells

One of my players has complained several times that True Strike is a useless spell. The effect of True Strike is:

On your next turn, you gain advantage on your first attack roll against the target, provided that this spell hasn't ended.

His argument is that casting True Strike takes your action, preventing you from attacking, but attacking twice without advantage is better than attacking once with advantage, since you still roll twice but there's also the chance of hitting twice. This is obviously true, especially since you have to maintain concentration until your next turn to get any benefit out of the spell at all.

So why would you ever cast True Strike? Is it just a useless spell?

Best Answer

There are several reasons why you might want to cast True Strike. The first is that depending on your class, you might be able to get a bonus action attack after casting it, giving you one attack with advantage and one without, a definite improvement on two attacks without.

The second is that you might use it to overcome disadvantage:

  • When you need a die result of 9 or higher to hit, a single normal attack becomes more likely to hit than 2 attacks with disadvantage, so it's worth the trade-off of using True Strike.
  • When you need 8 or below, though, two attacks with disadvantage are more likely to hit, so just attack away without True Strike.

The third reason is that you might want advantage for something. For example, a Rogue might use True Strike to grant advantage to allow use of Sneak Attack.

Another reason is that you might know in advance that there was going to be combat, and cast True Strike for advantage on the first round. This would probably only happen when ambushing, but is still worth mentioning.

The final reason is that you might have an attack that you particularly wanted to hit. A Wizard using Plane Shift to send an enemy to the Abyss, for example, would want to be certain that the melee spell attack required would hit, otherwise they've wasted a high-level spell slot for nothing. Casting True Strike first would make it considerably less likely to miss.

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