Welcome to the Lightning Lure spell breakdown! When it involves lassoing your foes, you’ll be shocked to seek out that the Sword Coast Adventure Guide brought over more cantrips than simply Green-Flame Blade! Lightning Lure maybe a spell that evaded our lists of best Wizard, Warlock, and Sorcerer cantrips… also as Cantrips generally. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a diamond within the rough; Dungeons and Dragons 5E features a lot of fantastic options for cantrips within the early-to-mid game, and now you’re getting to learn a new one!
You create a lash of lightning energy that strikes at one creature of your choice that you just can see within range.
The target must succeed on a Strength saving throw or be pulled up to 10 feet during a line toward you then take 1d8 lightning damage if it’s within 5 feet of you.
Contents
Lightning Lure 5e
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: 15 feet
- Components: V
- Duration: Instantaneous
- Scales: Yes
- Casters: Arcane Trickster, Eldritch Knight, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
At higher level
This spell’s damage increases by 1d8 once you reach the 5th level (2d8), 11th level (3d8), and 17th level (4d8).
Lightning Lure may be a hybrid utility/damaging spell for our three primary arcane spell users. After a Strength saving throw, an unlucky creature within 15 feet is pulled 10 feet straight towards the caster. If that finishes up being within 5 feet of said caster, get a 1d8 shock. This scales up at 5th, 11th, and 17th levels for 1d8 a bit, to a maximum of 4d8.
Simple enough! As cantrips go, it adds extra utility to travel with a somewhat low amount of single-target damage. But, let’s tie a lasso around why this is often an honest investment for a cantrip slot.
As a cantrip, Lightning Lure doesn’t get to be prepared. It doesn’t use concentration and doesn’t spend any resources to cast. However, a hidden bonus is that Lightning Lure doesn’t require a Somatic component. As long as you’ll speak, you’re ready to use this spell to tug them towards you and deliver a sudden jolt.
A significant problem with Lightning Lure is that… It moves you, a caster, into melee with something. As a caster, there are builds that are useful in melee, but most Wizards and Sorcerers struggle to search out the health to copy the build. Warlocks, on the opposite hand, do have quite strong melee builds, but spending one among your precious spell slots on Lightning Lure leaves less room for the usage of higher damage cantrips to supplement the damage-dealing role.
The spell is situational, but the situations where the spell is beneficial are surprisingly vast! It can complement any area spells you have; forcing opponents to induce pulled into traps – like Cloud of Daggers or a tripwire. It can compliment melee-ranged allies by pulling enemies into positions where they’re more easily flanked or surrounded, preventing escape and increasing the damage potential of your allies. Or, if the roof is low and there’s an enemy flying out of reach of your Barbarian, you’ll pull them down.
As time goes on, the usefulness of the spell gets overshadowed by abilities that control the battlefield far better, allow you to close the gap between yourself and your opponent more efficiently, and deal more electric damage to them. The usefulness of Lightning Lure then gets relegated to a spell you’ll cast to tug an enemy towards you once they are out-of-range of movement action, and you actually want them to be in your range next round.
