D&D Chronurgist Wizard Build: The Time Lord

hey up to mancers chris here so this one's been a long time coming but we're finally going to get to do a build for the chronoges wizard if you are unaware the chronogist is a subclass from explorer's guide to wild mount and is often cited as the most powerful wizard subclass in the game this is an evaluation i would agree with chronogess wizards focus on the manipulation of time there are unique spells in wild mount referred to as dunamancy that cover these spells as well as the spells of gravitatious the other subclass of wizards in wild mounts specialize in as a result there's going to be some spells on this build you may not be familiar with so i'm going to go over those spells in more detail now for wizards in general since the introduction of the artificer is to dip artificer at level 1 for wizard builds then go straightwizard from that point this has the downside of delaying your access to higher level spells by one level which is a significant downside but there are a lot of advantages to this dip including medium armor and shield proficiency proficiency and constitution saving throws which will be the most common save you make as a wizard access to some good spells not normally available to wizards and the artificer dip requires no additional ability score requirements beyond the good intelligence which you're going to have already and finally although it does hinder our spell level progression it doesn't hinder our spell slot progression so we'll be treated as our full level in terms of getting our spell slots when we combine a dip in artificer with chronologist this is referred to in the optimization community as an artichron which is generally considered one of the most powerful builds in the game if for no other reason because the artificer dip works so well on wizards and chronologists being widely considered the most powerful subclass for the most powerful class now i should recognize so i'm going to that there is an artichron guide created by ronald jackson that i am linking in the video description now if you are looking for the artichron built that uses a lot of rules interactions that some dms are likely going to consider questionable but they're still really creative and fun to read then check out the link in the video description otherwise for my artichron build i'll be approaching it in a more practical way just what i consider strong choices for a build of this kind thematically this character is the master of time a lord of time if you will before i get into the specifics i would like to thank some of the people who make this content possible if you would consider supporting this content a link to my patreon is in the video description patrons can see these videos early and ad free and belong to an exclusive community on my discord server where top level patrons can play d d every month dmd by me today i would like to recognize scott dunnington sig stephen edmondson t-u-m tasel and thomas barrero let's get [Music] started [Music] our character's name is artie and we obviously need to have critical role content turned on so we can access the wild mount content now there is no time lord race available in dungeon dragon so i'm going to use custom lineage today to kind of represent a custom race our size will be medium and obviously the ability score increase we'll be looking at is an intelligence increase the feat i'll be looking for at level one is fade touched and we're going to increase our intelligence of course this is one of the primary advantages of doing custom lineage is because you get the free feet and you can choose a feat that increases your intelligence and we get the plus two to intelligence we can actually begin the game with a plus four ability score modifier for intelligence this is normally not something you can do you can only really do it with custom lineage and fade touched is a great feat because not only do we get the plus one to intelligence we get a pretty good ability on top of that and that's the ability to learn two spells that we know we can cast them using our spell slots but we can also cast each of them once for free each day and one of them is going to be the misty step spell automatically which is no problem misty step is a great spell glad to have it anyway and then we can select one additional spell and because dunamancy is definitely available to us then we can choose gift of alacrity gift of alacrity is a touch spell lasts for eight hours does not use concentration it's a first level spell and it provides a bonus of 1d8 on all initiative checks this is a fantastic spell for first level now when i'm a first level character i don't necessarily want to be using a spell slot on it but i won't have to i can do it for free it's going to last for eight hours that's likely going to cover my entire adventuring day when i get to higher levels this might be something i might be willing to spend some additional slots for additional characters within my party to get this bonus as well we're going to get the variable trait and we can choose either a skill proficiency or dark vision we'll take dark vision but i wouldn't say it's necessary for the build as i mentioned we will be choosing artificer as our first level for this character so this gives us our medium armor and shield proficiency that means we're going to start out with a very good armor class and be able to maintain a very good armor class for our entire career and of course as a wizard we're going to have access to the shield spell that we can do on top of having medium armor and shield which is one of the big advantages of wizards who wear armor is they can achieve better armor classes than most of the other classes in the game we're going to get a couple proficiencies and what i would recommend here is number one take perception it just tends to be the skill that gets used the most and the second skill i'm going to recommend is history we are a time lord and a master of time of course we should have the history skill now the tool proficiency doesn't really matter you can choose whatever you want it just occurs to me that a screwdriver is a carpenter's tool and if you are a fan of doctor who you already know why you might want that we're going to get two cantrips and one of the advantages of multi-classing with artificer for wizard is we don't have to worry about ability score requirements if i'm going to multi-class a cleric with wizard which i sometimes do then i need to be careful to avoid spells that might rely on wisdom but in this case if i choose any cantrips that rely on my primary ability score it's going to use intelligence which is going to be my primary ability score for wizard as well so there is no reason to avoid any particular cantrips here but definitely the first choice i will be making is guidance and this is because guidance is one of the best kantrips in the game it's a one minute spell it does use your concentration but it's going to give you a d4 on an ability check and because it's a cantrip you can just use it over and over and over again as long as you're not concentrating on anything else technically speaking we could even cast guns on ourselves if we know we're going into a combat and then we could have the guidance add to our initiative check just like gift of alacrity is adding to our initiative check and suddenly we're adding both the d8 and d4 to our initiative which is quite a big bonus but guidance is going to come up all over the place when you're making an investigation check when you're making a history check when you're making any kind of ability check or anyone in your party is you cast a guidance there are a lot of cases where you're going to make an ability check where you know beforehand so you can buff it up second choice will be firebolt and firebolt will be kind of my standard attack can trip fireball has a great range at 120 feet it does as much damage as any kantrip is likely to do technically told the dead might do more damage but told the dead provides a saving throw i find that generally speaking cantrips that require an attack role are going to hit more often than kantrips that require saving throw have them fail now there is one really nice thing about firebolt that we tend not to see in other attack hand traps we certainly don't see it with chill touch or ray of frost or even aldridge blast and that is we can hurl the motive fire at a creature or object this is actually something i've noticed in play is a much bigger deal than you would think there's obvious things like there's a locked door and you can just keep blasting it with firebolts till it is destroyed but there are tactical uses for attacking objects as well here is a map that i played on recently where we had this enemy goblin and it was kind of a mutant and it was a threat to the party and my character used a fire bolt to attack a fragile wooden cover of pits below hand and the goblin fell into the pit and we won the combat with a single casting of firebolt these are the kinds of things that being able to cast on objects provides you gives you some more options in combat so i've previously discussed how i think ray of frost and chill touch are as strong as firebolt because they provide secondary options but fireball provides a secondary option too that i probably didn't consider enough originally and the more i play with it the more i've decided that firebolt is kind of my go-to attack kantrip now we are going to get three prepared spells at first level and this is really nice because when we are playing a wizard sometimes prepared spells are a real challenge especially when you have spells like absorb elements that you want to prepare but that preparation slot becomes really valuable as the game continues so we can just grab absorb elements now and then we don't have to worry about accessing it as a wizard other than that i'd like to have a couple spells that i can't access as wizard so one of them i'm going to grab is cure wounds and i do find cure wounds is often underrated people look at healing word and because healing word is a bonus action and as range it is often just simply ranked higher than care wounds and i would agree that overall healing word is a better spell but cure wounds does have advantages let's say i'm concentrating on something like a bigby's hand my bonus action might be more valuable than my action on following turns and so it's not always better for a spell to be a bonus action than an action the other thing of course is that wounds does more healing than a healing word healing word is a d4 plus ability modifier while cure wounds is a d8 plus your ability modifier my final choice will be fairy fire this gives me a ranged area of effect spell that i can cast it is reasonably effective at first level and it is reasonably effective for a number of levels after that there comes a point where we have a lot better options for a concentration than ferry fire but it is something that if you're wanting to conserve spell slots it's a low level cantrip that can provide advantage to the rest of your party against multiple targets fairy fire is also just a nice utility to have sometimes in combat you end up fighting somebody and they turn invisible or something and fairy fire can reveal them and that has an advantage that carries to higher levels as well so we're probably just going to keep these three spells prepared for our entire career we also get magical tinkering with artificer at first level this is a minor ability it's mostly flavor but it's a little bit reminiscent of the presta digitation cantrip but it allows you to do a little bit different things that are more within the flavor of a tinkerer now our character is definitely a far traveler from the background and that will give us insight and we can choose an additional skill now remember we could change insight as well if we want to you can customize origins this is right from the player's handbook it's not too big a concern for me the only other skill that i really feel like i need to have proficiency in is investigation and this is an intelligence-based skill so i will be very good at that so it is definitely something i would want in the mix insight if you wanted to switch it out to something like arcana maybe that would be a good choice but i would say that changing it is not required for this build at all we're going to get a tool proficiency and i will be definitely taking the flute for starting equipment we're going to get a light crossbow we can choose two simple weapons take whatever you like we're going to get thieves tools and a dungeoneers pack we will also get scale mail armor we could choose studded leather don't choose studded leather choose the scale mail it's going to give you a better armor class and we will also want to purchase a shield but the shield is 10 gold pieces just buy one as soon as you can for starting ability scores we're going to use a point by and the very first thing we do is raise our intelligence to maximum so that's a 15 plus our plus 2 from our custom lineage brings it to 17 and then our fee touch feet brings it to an 18 that is a plus 4 bonus right off the bat not something you can get with anything other than a custom lineage next thing we're going to want to do is make sure that our dexterity is a 14 this is necessary to get the maximum armor class we can from medium armor next thing we're going to do is get our constitution to 14. this is a reasonably good constitution score and then the last thing we're going to do is get our wisdom to 12. this is going to help our wisdom saving throws a little bit remember as an artificer we're not proficient in wisdom saving throws so our character at first level is actually doing really well one thing about artificer is although it doesn't get the spell casting progression that other spell casters do it does do well at level one because it gets just as many spells as a primary spell caster but it also gets that armor and shield so in a lot of ways a first level artificer just is going to find things easier than say a first level wizard will now our most powerful combat spell at this point is fairy fire it's certainly not going to be as effective as say a sleep spell would be at this level but it's still a reasonably good spell so you have a couple times where you can do something a little more effective than your standard can trips so that ends our time as an artificer then we move into wizard from now on so with our first level of wizard we're now a second level character and we get arcane recovery this is going to give us a chance to recover one of our first level spells taking a short rest so normally you would get three first level spells at second level we'll be able to do four on most adventuring days so we will get three cantrips and the cantrips i will recommend you know that first off i'm going to recommend we pick up minor illusion super useful kantrip and if it's available i generally take it second one i'm going to suggest is mine sliver what minesliver does is it's a savings thorough cantrip so it works in situations where fireball might not work because maybe attacking isn't so good because the enemy maybe has partial cover maybe they have a really high armor class maybe we would have disadvantage on attacks for some reason or another and mind sliver is just a straight saving throw and it's an intelligence save which tends to be weaker than most other saving throws damage isn't great but it also has the secondary effect of reducing their next saving throw by a d4 this is a good thing to do when we're working with other party members i mean technically speaking if they haven't made a saving throw before your next turn you could then cast a saving throw spell at them but i find that usually mine sliver somebody's going to take advantage of it usually within the next few turns and finally i'm going to recommend mage hand which is basically like a mini telekinesis spell very useful as a cantrip it's not really used in combat very often but as a utility it'll come up all the time with first level wizard you get six spells right off the bat that are first level and remember with a wizard we have ritual casting and we don't need to prepare ritual spells to be able to cast them so it's really good idea to pick up some ritual spells we don't have a whole lot of first level spell slots we also have spells prepared through artifice or we might want to cast so when i have a wizard that is first or second level i like to grab lots of rituals especially because a lot of the best rituals for wizard are right at first level you know the first one i'm going to select is find familiar best ritual probably in the game and it is even better on a chronogens wizard believe it or not we'll be going over that as we level up but i want to grab some more rituals let's grab comprehend languages very useful ritual let's grab detect magic very very useful utility ritual we're going to grab unseen servant also a really useful ritual it's not only good as utility it actually has some combat applications as well just because you can use your bonus action and command the unseen servant to go interact with objects and this can definitely come up on the battlefield then we're going to take two spells that we're actually going to prepare and those will be sleep and shield now it would have been lovely to have sleep first level sleep is amazing at first level but it is still really good at second level it's not something we're going to keep prepared throughout our career but right here at second level sleep is probably going to be my go-to spell and shield of course gives you a plus five armor class against all attacks for an entire round and it's a reaction to cast which we can cast after we've been hit changing the result this is definitely a spell i will keep prepared through the career of this character now what we end up with here is we end up with more prepared spells available then we have spells we need to prepare this is okay don't worry about that at all remember we have three spells prepared through artificer we have these two spells we want to have prepared as a wizard and our spell slots are going to be gone there is not going to be any spell slots remaining we can prepare 10 more spells we're not going to be able to cast them and that's the big thing right we're going to be casting sleep probably more than once we'll probably be casting shield at some point we'll probably be casting cure wounds at some point and we're going to have three or four first level spell slots for the entire adventuring day so just to fill that up you can prepare your detect magics comprehend languages unseen servants maybe there will be a situation where you want to cast them as an action probably not but you might as well fill up your preparations so third level is a good level for us because this is where we're going to pick up our wizard subclass now chronergy is considered by a lot of people including me to be the most powerful subclass for wizard and that's a big claim because we're going against some really amazing subclasses divination wizards the portland ability is massively powerful blade singers are really powerful were wizards with their ability to increase their saving throws after they would have failed by plus 4 is massive but the thing about chronergy is that they get no bad abilities and a lot of their abilities are really really good and right at second level they're going to get two abilities and they are both top notch now i would say that as a second level wizard there would be an argument to say that the war wizard might be more powerful there would be an argument to say that even the divination wizard might be more powerful than a chronologist but it will not last as we continue to increase in levels chronergy just becomes the clear winner at least in my opinion first thing we're going to get is the chronal shift this allows us to use our reaction after we or a creature we can see within 30 feet of us makes an attack role in the ability check or saving throw and if we don't like the result we make them re-roll and we do this after we already know the results of the role this of course is a big advantage now there is both defensive and offensive uses for this defensively of course let's say we fail an important saving throw well we could reroll it or a party member fails an important saving throw you have them re-roll it but it is also good to use on enemy saving throws so they make a saving throw you didn't want them to make you make them re-roll now unlike portent this is not going to guarantee anything it's a re-roll but still the ability to make them re-roll after you already know the result is a very good ability it's like luck but more flexible we can use this twice every long rest it's a great ability but we're going to add on that temporal awareness and this gives us our intelligence modifier to initiative roles war mages get the basically the same thing and in both cases it is amazing initiative is really important for wizards and it's not just important for offense because yeah you can maybe do that blast that might have had friendly fire if you win initiative you can often do that before the enemy gets mixed up with your allies but it's also really effective for setting up battlefield controls because again they are not mixed up with your allies so we can do things like separating our enemies or maybe restraining some of our enemies before they take an action and that is really useful the other thing that can be really good about winning initiative is just setting up defenses or buffs on allies these kinds of things if they're going to affect the first turn of combat can prevent those attacks from hitting or give our allies the best chance to take out those enemies before they get a chance to do anything i would say initiative is more important on a wizard than any other class and remember we're not just adding our dexterity and our intelligence to our initiative but we have gift of alacrity which we will be adding to our initiative as well so we're getting the plus two from dexterity the plus four from intelligence so that's a plus six plus a d8 we're probably looking at a plus 10 to plus 11 on our initiative we're going to get two more first level spells i am going to recommend that we pick up grease grease is a non-concentration spell this is one of the nice things about it so it is something that we might do when we're concentrating on another spell and grease is one of those spells that never becomes obsolete it's not super powerful you cast it it's a 10 foot square and creatures on that square make saving throws their dexterity or they fall prone also if any creature ends its turn on the grease they have to make their savings throw or fall prone that doesn't happen all that often usually creatures will choose not to end their turn on a grease though sometimes if we have force movement or restraining or anything like that it can be a situation where they don't have a choice and remember if you know you grease something that's in a web and it's restrained it's gonna have disadvantage on its saving throw against the grease and it's going to become prone and restrained the other spell i'm going to recommend is tensors floating disc this is a ritual spell and it's a utility spell and basically this disc follows you around and it carries up to 500 pounds worth of junk that you find when you're adventuring as before we have more preparations than we need but we are definitely going to add grease and then three additional spells that you choose and none of those additional spells we're going to keep prepared but we'll prepare them when we're third level now i'll note that at this level we now have second level spell slots no second level spells we'll have two second level spell slots to use your best bet with those spell slots are either a sleep spell which you can up cast it's going to do an additional 2 to 8 hit points sleep is starting to fall behind here at third level and we will definitely want to get something a little more effective next level but if we up cast it to second level that additional 2d8 does make a significant difference the other spell i might upcast is cure wounds kirwoon's deals 1d8 plus your spell casting ability modifier in healing so for us it's a d8 plus 4 but if we upcast at the second level it's 2d8 plus 4. at this level that's an average of about 13 hit points if we use a second level slot on a third level character 13 hit points is a fair amount it's not going to bring somebody who's heavily wounded right up to full but it is probably going to be close to half their hit points so i'm going to take this character right up to 18th level and that will get us up to our ninth level spells now i will say that starting at level one when we first started this character this character is going to function perfectly well at this point i'd say the character's functioning quite well we have that huge bonus to initiative we have the ability to affect other creatures saving throws or our own or any other role we wanted to twice per day but this character is going to remain reasonably good right all the way up but as it is the case with wizards it's going to get more and more powerful as we go up and level compared to everybody else with the case of chronologist this is multiplied but i want to hit some of the big levels that we see with chronergy so this is now a seventh level character we will have fourth level spell slots we will have third level spells we're going to get an ability score improvement at fourth level in wizard and at six level in wizard we'll get our next chronergy ability this is probably the weakest chronergy ability but that doesn't mean it's bad it's actually reasonably good it just happens to be the weakest one that chronologists get so the ability score improvement at fourth level and wizard what i will recommend here is warcaster now we're already proficient in constitution saving throws but i like warcaster on any spellcaster that uses a shield just because i find that quite often you end up holding something in your other hand and you want to be able to cast all your spells and in order to be able to do that warcaster is the best way to do it and that advantage on constitution saving throws is still really good now the six level ability we get with chronogist is called momentary stasis and this is an action and it only works on a creature that's large or smaller has to be within 60 feet of us we give them a constitution saving throw which is not ideal now if they fail that saving throw the creature becomes incapacitated and gains a speed of zero and we can do this a number of times equal to our intelligence modifier so in our case this is four times per long rest so we're talking about one round incapacitated using our action and targeting constitution so that is not a great mix one thing i will mention about momentary stasis though is being able to incapacitate a creature without using our concentration is pretty unique remember that if a creature is concentrating on a spell for example if we hit them with a momentary stasis and they fail they will lose that concentration and that constitution saving throw they make against our spell dc is definitely going to be higher than concentration savings throw they make when we do a little bit of damage through our spells second thing speed of zero remember that if we nail this on a creature that's flying unless that creature has hover they will immediately fall and if they're 10 feet or higher in the air they will fall prone and take falling damage so momentary stasis what we want to do with this is we want to keep it in our back pocket and when we are concentrating on another spell that is when we do momentary stasis because this is going to be definitely more effective than using a crappy can trip with your action this is not something i would do instead of casting a concentration spell cast a concentration spell once you're already concentrating and your next turn comes up i get asked all the time what should we do when we're concentrating and we can't cast very many spells well you can cast a cantrip you can dodge people forget dodge action but momentary stasis gives us a pretty solid option with chronergy wizard as i said i think this is the weakest ability that kroner just gets but it's not bad not bad at all now let's talk about our spell progression so at third level and fourth level in wizard we will be taking two second level spells for each of those and for our fifth and sixth level wizard we'll be selecting two third level spells the very first second level spell i will be selecting is web and the moment we get to third level and wizard web is our go-to spell this is an array of effects spell causes the restrained condition on multiple enemies it also is just this area in the battlefield that enemies can be knocked into using the various force movement tash has really made webb a lot better and it was already a fantastic spell and as a third level wizard i think it pretty much has to be your initial go-to spell now i'd just like to address that misty step would be a spell i would definitely take if i didn't already have it but remember we took the fade touch feet so we have misty step already and we can cast it once for free mirror image another spell we're definitely going to want this is a non-concentration spell it creates three duplicates those duplicates can prevent up to three hits and once again when we're talking about things to cast when you're concentrating on something else mirror image is definitely a good option it's also a good option if you ever get a chance to prepare for a combat we're also going to take tash's mind whip tash's mind whip again a spell that does not use their concentration works well on a creature who's caught in a web and creatures make an intelligence safe this is the save we want them to make they can't take a reaction if they fail and on their turn they get to choose move take an action or a bonus action and that's a pretty tough selection damage is 3d6 psychic on a failed save or half as much on a successful save our final selection is fortune's favor this is a dunamancy spell and this again not using our concentration so we have our concentration for webb whenever we need it in fortune's favor really useful spell it is an out of combat spell takes a minute to cast but it lasts for an hour and essentially it's like a luck point so if you have the lucky feet you know how luck works but if you don't normally have the lucky feet this is how it works is let's say you fail an ability check or an attack roll or saving throw that was really important then you can use a lock point to get a re-roll in this case you use the fortune's favor spell to get a re-roll so a nice ability again it can be an ability that if we have additional slots we can cast it on ourselves and on party members at the same time if we want really nice little buff defensive and can be used offensively as well now our third level selections you know right away i'm going to be taking counter spell counterspell is one of the reasons why wizards and sorcerers often make better casters than other classes because they have counter spell which can prevent enemy casters from casting spells warlocks technically can get counterspell as well but they don't really have a lot of slots to use it with wizards and sorcerers with counterspell very effective against other casters lehman's tiny hut also in contention for one of the best rituals in the game lehman's tiny hot means safe long rests doesn't use a spell slot and when you need that eight hour rest lehman's tiny hut is going to make sure you get it now we're going to get two additional spells and remember that our character is a master of time so i think the choices here are kind of made for us and fortunately they're not bad choices haste i recently talked about in another build video about how the good thing about haste although if you read it it's not super powerful if we look at spells that absolutely remove enemies from combat or things like that it's easy to see how those spells are more powerful than haste but the thing about haste is it always works i can cast hypnotic pattern and every enemy makes their savings throw and then i did nothing i just wasted a spell slot haste always always works does use your concentration but it's just that thing you do when you can't be certain anything else you're going to do is going to work haste is what you want to cast then this is a 30 foot range friendly buff whoever you haste they get a bonus to their armor class they get advantage on dexterity saving throws and they get an additional action on their turn now keep in mind that if they are doing the attack action which tends to be the most common with that extra action they can only make one weapon attack but depending on who you haste that's maybe not such a big deal if you are hasting any character that has one big attack things like rogues are the most obvious but sometimes it might be something like your wild shaped druid whatever it is that one additional attack can make quite a big difference and just so you know how it works mechanically if you haste the rogue what they want to do is with that additional action they want to ready it so then they can do another attack when it's not their turn the other one we're going to take obviously is slow and slow is not quite as flashy as something like hypnotic pattern but in a lot of ways it's better nobody's immune to slow we don't care about charm immunity we don't care about immunity to the frightened condition we also don't care about friendly fire because with slo we're choosing which enemies we want to affect within that 40 foot cube and the 40 foot cube quite a big area of effect to choose from creatures that fail their saving throw against slow get hindered pretty severely their speed is reduced their armor class is reduced their dexterity saving throws are reduced they can't take reactions and probably the biggest one is that they can't make more than one attack on their turn and as we get into higher levels some creatures have a lot of attacks reducing them to one attack is almost completely neutralizing them now disadvantage is slow they're going to get saving throws at the end of each of their turns but slow very effective third level spell and thematically super appropriate for this particular build we're also going to get one additional cantrip and we'll grab message message is just a useful utility spell it is almost telepathy you whisper a message somebody hears it they can whisper a message back you can hear it nobody else can hear it at this point our preparations are still pretty easy this is partially due to the fact that we have a high intelligence score but preparations at this point we're going to make sure greece is prepared shield is prepared i wouldn't bother with sleep anymore we want fortune's favor prepared mirror image prepared attaches mind whip web counter spell haste and slow and we're going to have one additional preparation you could put it in the ritual of your choice now we have fourth level slots available and none of web haste or slow up casts for any increased effect so what i'd actually recommend with those fourth level slots is fortune's favor fortune's favor will affect three people if you use a fourth level slot on it another option for us is tash's mind whip which up casts reasonably well you can target an additional creature if you use a higher level slot for it so if we use the fourth level slot we could target three creatures with tash's mind whip so that's also a decent option for upcasting so now we're going to take our wizard to 10th level and chronergy gets really really interesting now we're going to get an ability score improvement here and this one i don't think is nearly as concrete as a lot of the other build decisions we've made but what i will mention is because we took artificer we have proficiency in constitution saving throws which is great but you will not just make constitution saving throws you will make wisdom saving throws and you will make dexterity saving throws and picking up resilient in order to get two out of three is generally what i recommend on builds as soon as you're able to and this would be the point where this build is able to do that and i think it's the way i would go and when it comes to dexterity and wisdom they're both useful saving throws to have but i tend to weigh the wisdom saving throw a little bit higher just because there are more things under wisdom that are going to completely wreck your character than dexterity and i also think it's really important that when you have abilities that allow you to re-roll saving throws and we actually have multiple abilities that allow us to do that we can use our chronolog shift but we also have fortune's favor which we might have up a lot of the time and in each case it's a re-roll now if i have a wisdom saving throw of plus one and i need to make a you know wisdom dc 19 savings throw well i will likely fail and if i get a re-roll i will likely fail the re-roll as well and the re-roll isn't all that advantageous but if i have a wisdom saving throw off say plus six or plus seven and i make that dc 19 and saving throw and i fail and i reroll i have at least a reasonable chance of that re-roll paying off for me so i find the same thing with fighters you really want to have a good bonus to your saving throws because those re-rolls are actually significantly better if your saving throw bonus is good enough that you have a decent chance of saving these kinds of abilities work really well when there's a saving throw we really should have made or could have made and we are unlucky then as saving throw we were not likely to make in the first place then they're not very useful at all so when we get to seventh level and eighth level in wizard so eighth or ninth level as a character we're going to be picking up fourth level spells or up to fourth level spells with our level up picks but what i'm going to be doing is i'm only going to be taking three fourth level spells i'm gonna go back and pick up a fifth third level spell the very first fourth level spell i will pick up is polymorph polymorph of course is an amazing buff it can throw over 100 hit points onto an ally in an instant but polymorph is also a debuff we can cast it on an enemy and we can turn them into you know a frog and they have to fail a wisdom-saving throw where nothing happens thing about chronologist is we have more ways to make that enemy fail and we will continue to get more ways to make that enemy fail as we go up in level so polymorph actually is a better offensive spell than it normally is in the hands of a chronologist wizard so we're getting really good buffing plus a pretty good debuff that we have ways of making even better we're going to grab dimension door this is a moderate range teleport and the big two advantages of dimension door over misty step are number one we can take a passenger along as long as their our size are smaller and they're within five feet of us and number two we don't need to be able to see our destination so we can go through doors we can teleport into the middle of that castle those kinds of things and we're going to pick up everds black tentacles now in a lot of ways this is similar to a web spell but overall it is more effective if a creature fails its saving throw to ever's black tentacles it is restrained by the tentacles until it makes its strength or dexterity check to break free even if it's moved out of the tentacles and that's kind of an interesting little tidbit so if we have say an enemy has a way to get force movement or even if they teleport out of those tentacles until they make their dexterity or wisdom saving throw technically speaking according to the text of the spell they are still restrained they will stop taking the bludgeoning damage but the restrained condition it's on them until they make that strength or dexterity check now i'll say that there are a lot of other good choices if you're not a fan of everspock tentacles or you feel it's too redundant with a web spell then i might suggest maybe one of the summoning spells watery sphere is a pretty good control spell as well but for me as i mentioned i'm going to with my fourth selection go back to third level because i want to pick up another ritual spell and the ritual spell i want to grab is phantom steed so phantom steed doesn't use a spell slot gives you a horse and if you're on a horse you move fast you can disengage and all these things without using your own action to do so doesn't use your concentration lasts an hour phantom steed dies and they will die all the time then we can simply cast it again get another one next time we have a chance to do so we pick up our final cantrip at this point and what i'm going to recommend here you could go any way you want but i'm going to pick up press to digitization i just find it just a fun role playing spell to have and i have pretty much all the cantrips i need to have so this is kind of a luxury pick it's a lot of fun there's just so many different things you can do with it none of them are powerful so at ninth and tenth level we will be getting fifth level spells we're going to take four of them first one i'm going to recommend is bigby's hand this is a very versatile spell uses your concentration but worth your concentration we can use it to shut down enemies we can use it to deliver damage uses our bonus action each turn to use it's also incredibly durable it has your hip points as its total hit points meaning it is not easy for enemies to destroy also at ninth level i'll pick up wall of force of course i will while the force is an amazing spell while the force often can just win a fight and the enemy doesn't even get a saving throw one thing about wall of force and bigby's hand is they allow you to do things to hinder enemies that don't provide saving throws and as we get into these kind of levels those become more and more valuable because more and more enemies have legendary resistances and i am constantly asked how to deal with legendary resistances as a wizard and the best way to deal with legendary resistances as a wizard is to not provide a saving throw and at level 10 we're going to pick up transmute rock speaking of not providing saving throw transmute rock will actually reduce enemy movement speeds down to one quarter now there is a saving throw involved if they fail their savings oh they're restrained but the movement that is severely hindered has no save at all and it fills a big area and it doesn't use concentration and we'll grab rari's telepathic bond because our preparation slots now are going to get pretty stretched so we want to have some rituals so as i mentioned this is the first point where i prepare spells start to get a little bit stretched so the spell i'm going to recommend on preparing is tash's mind whip we might also choose grease we might use a lot of our first level slots on things like absorb elements and shield anyways now i need to talk about one of the most powerful features in the game certainly the most powerful 10th level feature that i'm aware of in the game and that is arcane obeyance and this really is the ability that first sets chronergis apart from other wizards lots of wizard subclasses are really good and a lot of them by the time they get to this level are still really good but arcane abeyance is going to take the chronologist that was competing with those subclasses up to now and set them apart this is how it reads when you cast a spell using a spell slot a fourth level or lower you can condense the spell's magic into a moat the spell is frozen in time at the moment of casting and held within a gray bead for one hour this bead is a tiny object with an armor class of 15 and one hit point it is immune to poison and psychic damage when the duration ends or if the beat is destroyed it vanishes in a flash of light and the spell is lost now here's the part that gets really interesting a creature holding the bead can use its action to release the spell within whereupon the bead disappears now some people read disappears is not destroyed i read it as it's gone the spell uses your spell attack bonus and save dc and the spell treats the creature who released it as the caster for all other purposes once you create a bead with this feature you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest so first off we can use this multiple times per day as long as we have a short rest and number two whatever creature has the bead can cast the spell can concentrate on the spell and we don't have to that is amazing now if we are giving it to other party members those party members maybe had something good to do with their action anyway but we can give it to our familiar and our familiar can use their action to cast it and what was our familiar doing well maybe the help action the cost of this is almost nothing and you know one of the spells you can put in arcana bands is find familiar this means take a little bit of off time you can give an arcane of bands to every member of your party they can all have their own familiars and heck you can give your familiars familiars if you want to as well or at least it's legal to do so i would talk to your dm before you get into that kind of looping but technically speaking legally you could have a near infinite number of familiars and so then you go into combat and you want your everest black tentacles but you don't want to concentrate on it so i mean in theory you could give your familiars familiar the bead they use it and then your familiar can use their action to send their familiar to their pocket dimension so that that concentration can't be broken that of course is game breaking and 100 legal and with a lot of game breaking stuff i look at and go well you've really kind of interpreted the rules to your advantage here and i don't think a dm is necessarily going to read it that way but this one is pretty rock solid now if i'm your dm i'm not going to let your familiar have a familiar and although that is technically a house rule it's a way to not destroy my game but having other players get familiar that one's kind of hard to avoid and again if it's just you're familiar casting the spell this is allowing concentration on two spells that you've cast at the same time and that is massive it's something no other wizard can do unless your dm was foolish enough to give you a ring of spell storing and this will always be amazing this is going to be amazing when you first get it and it is going to be amazing at 20th level the other thing to note here is that we don't care what the casting time of the spell is because whoever has the bead can release the spell as an action and this is a mistake on the part of the designers it should take the same amount of time to release as it took to cast because what this allows us to do is have things like ritual spells take place immediately now i've mentioned this before but it's just so overwhelming i think i should mention it again you could do a liam's tiny hot in an arcane of bands and suddenly you have a gray bead that has one action you can bring this impenetrable wall of force around you and your allies that the enemies can't walk through or attack through and unlike a wall of force or something you don't even need to concentrate on it now i should specify uh just so that i'm not misunderstood that if you were to cast a ritual spell and put it in a bead you wouldn't be able to cast as a ritual you would have to cast it as a regular spell this means you would need to have it prepared because arcane advance requires that you expend the spell slot uh and if you cast as a ritual you don't expend a spell slot so it doesn't work so i just want to make it clear that if you wanted to do something like a lehman's tiny hut in an arcane band speed you would have to prepare liam's tiny hut and you would have to cast it with the third level spouse slot but you could do that and you almost have to be at the point where when you are playing an artichron you have to self-police because the options here are so incredibly powerful so we kind of have to decide how powerful do i want to start becoming before i start wrecking the game i don't want to wreck the game i'm playing d d for fun and when we get to the point where we're whipping out lehman's tiny huts in the middle of a combat that is the point where i'm starting to wonder if that is going to hinder the fun of the campaign so this is an odd situation to be in where you have to look at something and go maybe i shouldn't because it's just too good but that's where arcane advance is that's how powerful this ability is and this point 10th level chronogist most powerful subclass for wizard in my opinion if for nothing else just being able to concentrate on two spells at once that's huge and like i said if you want to make sure that you're familiar it's not going to drop their concentration use your action dismiss them back to their pocket dimension and then they can keep concentrating and there is nothing your enemies can do to drop that concentration so the next chronology ability comes at level 14 of wizard so this is a level 15 character at this point once again we're going to build the that is really really good i'm not sure this one is as good as arcane advance but as far as 14th level abilities go this one is pretty much as good as 90 of the wizard subclass abilities the illusion level 14 subclass ability is probably better that's about it we're going to get another ability score improvement at 12th level i'm going to recommend this is the point where we probably want to get our intelligence up to 20. though you can take a feed if you like lucky's a good feat alert is a good feat but i would probably just increase my intelligence to 20 at this point remember we're not just increasing the dc on all our saving throws we are also improving our initiative here's what convergent future does so at 14th level we're going to get this ability or 14th level of wizard 15th level character you can peer through possible futures and magically pull one of them into events around you ensuring a particular outcome when you are a creature you can see within 60 feet of you makes an attack roll an ability check and this is the big one or a saving throw you can use your reaction to ignore the die roll and decide whether the number rolled is the minimum needed to succeed or one less than that number in other words the role that they would just fail by when you use this feature you gain one level of exhaustion only by finishing a long rest can you remove a level of exhaustion gain this way so the important thing here is we can do this multiple times we can do this technically six times it will die after the sixth time we do it but we can do it multiple times in the same fight and we just talked about avoiding legendary resistances but one thing we can do is also burn them with convergent future you can take a creature that made a saving throw have it fail the saving throw instead and then it would need to use its legendary to make the saving throw instead and our character has more levels of exhaustion than that enemy has legendary saving throws so eventually we can basically have any creature in the game fail a savings throw on a save or suck spell like polymorph now convergent future very very powerful ability but exhaustion is a big deal and it's not something you want to just use willy-nilly those exhaustion levels build up they become debilitating and they are very slow to get rid of but if you really need to take out that big big big bad guy convergent future is very powerful so our six level spells we want to take number one we're going to grab contingency this is just a fantastic spell that we can use to have a spell a fifth level or lower take place on a trigger that we have previously set now i generally recommend dimension door as the contingency so for example if i reach x number of hit points dimension door goes off and it give me a chance to get away now i have heard some people say that on tables that they run dimension door the direction and distance would need to be set at the time of casting not when the spell goes off in that case we probably want to do a different contingency so maybe our contingency is we polymorph into a great ape or maybe we want to pick up auto luke's resilient sphere and have that go off instead so i just wanted to mention that because i have had people tell me that at their tables dimension door doesn't work with contingency i know i allow it as a dm and the dm's i've played with have allowed it but i do want to recognize that some people have said that their dms don't let it fly second spell i'm going to recommend is mass suggestion this allows us to target many creatures there's no concentration on this spell it has a duration of 24 hours the most common that i recommend and i've seen and that dms will tend to go for with almost without exception is hey you don't want to die why don't you run away from this fight and never come back i have seen dms that will have people actually switch sides using mass ejection spells i generally wouldn't expect that from a dm but there's definitely some subjectivity to the spell then we're going to pick up scatter this is just a great way to move everyone around on a battlefield we can move allies we can move enemies if they fail their saving throw we can target some allies some enemies this is a really good way to get allies out of trouble it's also a really good way to ensure that enemies have their least tactical advantage often this can be done in a way that will allow us to divide our enemies as well finally we're going to select magic jar magic jar is a super fun spell i have an entire video devoted to how incredibly powerful magic jar is it's a complicated spell so if you don't know how it works i would recommend watching that video i can't explain it in a couple minutes i'll link that video in the video description then our seventh level spell the first one we'll take is simulacrum what's more deadly than an artichron two artichrons and what's more deadly than two artichons three artichons four artichrons etc etc etc talk about times you need to self-police simulacrum is one of them it is the most broken spell in the game in my opinion and i think the reason why that isn't commonly known is because a lot of people never get to the levels where simulacrum is really used but i think if you start playing and people are casting simulacrum you're soon going to realize what i'm talking about now the spell does specify that if you cast a spell again and then any simulator you created with the spell is destroyed the problem is that if you have the simulacrum spell and you cast it on yourself that simulacrum could cast simulacrum on you and then that simulacrum could cast simulacrum on you and so on and so on and so on there's no limit to it so it's essentially an infinite loop and that's why you need to self police on it second spell i'm going to take is teleport now naturally we're going to want to add for flavor a little police box we can walk into before we do our teleport but this is going to transport us and our party to pretty much anywhere we want to and this is a one action casting we can do it right in the middle of combat if we want and of course we're going to pick up force cage this is just one of those amazing spells that it's like wall of force without concentration that's a little more limited in how we can shape it but it is a combat winner and unlike wall of force creatures that can teleport have to make a saving throw to do so and finally we'll pick up etherealness really powerful seventh level spell eight hour duration no concentration you can end the spell at any point during those eight hours and if we use an eighth level slot we might be able to bring the entire party and then you just ethereally go to wherever you want appear do what horrible things you're going to do so we're going to talk about the final three levels of this build today this is going to take us to a total level of 18 but generally i find when we get to 17th level wizard we get ninth level spells you're never going to get anything that compares to that we get an ability score improvement at 16th level i'm going to throw lucky on this character roost is another way to re-roll when i want to re-roll but if you want to get silly with initiative you could grab alert if you want to get a ton of hit points you could take tough there are a few different options here you could go for at eight level we're going to pick up clone flavor wise we're going to look a little bit different every time we cast clone but whenever we die we're going to come back a wizard with clone becomes pretty much impossible to kill and have it stick debbie planes going to give us our area where it's bigger on the inside demiplane is a super useful spell basically it's like a the ultimate bag of holding it's a great way to you know get creatures from one place to another the door is only big enough to allow medium creatures to pass through unhindered now unhindered would suggest to me that a large creature still might be able to squeeze in but you're not going to be able to force them in maze for me is just a go-to spell because we're going to cast on enemy there's no saving throw they go goodbye and they have to make a dc 20 intelligence check to return a lot of creatures can't even make that check which means they could be gone 10 minutes if we want to concentrate that long and it doesn't matter if they have legendary resistances this is one generally speaking i find eight level spells not overwhelmingly powerful compared to seventh level spells maze earns its spot and mind blank which is just a powerful buff makes you immune to psychic damage makes you immune to divination spells and it makes you immune to the charm condition and it lasts for a full day no concentration and that brings us to our almighty ninth level spells and i'll tell you what you should take and i'll tell you what you might take you should take wish and drew polymorph they are probably the two most powerful ninth level spells for wizards and they're always a good choice when they're available but if we want to be a little bit thematic we should probably make time stop one of them now i'm not a huge fan of time stop i have to be honest but i do think that if i am a chronogist i want it in my spell book i'm probably going to prepare it as well and there may be occasions where it is the right spell to cast but it's time stop and i am a chronogist wizard i just kind of think it needs to be there and then you want to take one spell that you're definitely going to want to cast is definitely going to be worth that ninth level slot and that might be wish but i'm going to go a different direction this time and take shape change now shape change isn't as powerful as wish arguably less powerful than true polymorph as well though i think that is debatable thing about shape change is when you cast it you can take the form of a different creature we're not restricted to beasts or anything like the polymorph spell would restrict us and we also retain all our class abilities so we can still cast all our spells we can still use all our chronergy abilities so if we were to say shape change into i know a planetar for example we would have that 19 natural armor class but we could cast shield on top of it we could potentially even wear a shield on top of it have a really good armor class 200 hit points is nice and strong our physical ability scores would all be 20 or higher we get damage resistances we get condition immunities we get true sight 120 feet and all these spell abilities because they are innate spell casting we would get all of them we get magic resistance we get just kind of weird but potentially useful abilities like always knowing if you hear a lie but if let's say we were to cast a spell we could use convergent future to have them fail that saving throw and because we're immune to exhaustion we wouldn't gain any levels of exhaustion in fact we could use convergent future every round if we wanted to and we would never gain a level of exhaustion from it and i just think that's a really nice combination and it would make shape change just a bit more fun than it normally is and shape change is a pretty fun spell i have to say does it make it better than wish probably not but i do think it's well worth your ninth level slot so our final list of prepared spells of course we have all our cantrips but we're going to have grease and shield and remember we have absorb elements fairy fire and cure wounds through artificer for second level spells we'll have fortune's favor mirror image and web for third level spells we'll have counterspell haste and slow for fourth level spells we'll have dimension door everts black tentacles polymorph for fifth level spells bigby's hand transmute rock and wall of force six level spells mass suggestion and scatter seventh level spells force cage and teleport eighth level spells maze and mind blank and ninth level spells shape change and time stop so we will have multiple spells of every level and the levels one through five where we have the most slots we will have the most spells prepared so we're always going to have a good selection of spells for all our spouse slots so that is the time lord if you want to see this final build i will link it in the video description this is going to be the most powerful multi-class you can really do for wizards and the most powerful subclass for wizard and a pretty insane selection of spells so if that's what you're looking for the most powerful combination possible i think this is practically the best way you can go and like i said with arcana bands simulacrum you probably even want to do some self-policing so let me know what you think of the time lord otherwise until next time i'm going to sit back relax and have some fun d ds for everyone thanks everyone talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: Treantmonk's Temple

Views: 100,080

Keywords: dnd, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Optimization, Guide, Wizard, Wizards, charop, ultimate, best, most powerful, artichron, Artichron, Chronurgist build, Chronurgist wizard, Chronurgist

Id: Xpee6SC4Q2g

Length: 66min 2sec (3962 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021