How To Play A Bladesinger Wizard In Dungeons & Dragons 5e

greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode before we get into this week's topic we just wanted to shout out to the sponsors for this week's episode our very own dungeons of drakenheim campaign which is now live on kickstarter our campaign has already blown past its goals in the first five minutes and we are now looking at hitting all of our stretch goals so make sure to jump on the project so that you can help unlock all of the great goodies waiting in the worlds of drakenheim in this project we are bringing to life as a full fifth edition campaign for characters level 1-13 the campaign that we ran here on twitch and youtube uh over the past couple years so if you watched our live streams and found 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and with that let's get on to this week's topic today we are talking about how to play a blade singer wizard in d5e now after we did our most recent tier ranking videos for wizards that came up a few weeks ago a lot of people actually asked us for a guide on how to play a blade singer so this one's for you we're going to look at the different features that you gain as a blade singer as you level up as well as many of the feat choices you might want to consider the spells that you might want to look at and other build options races and backgrounds that you may consider when looking at a blade singer wizard there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling so monty why would we want to play a blade singer wizard let's face it the archetype of weaving swords and spells together um is one of the classic images of fantasy itself and it is a really fun play style to embrace with the blade singer wizard you get to have the full experience of playing a spellcaster that gets all the way up to 9th level spells if you want to in addition to gaining features that allow you to draw your sword and jump into combat those beholders better would beware because that anti-magic feel that they're gonna send on your blade singers probably gonna work against them there are several archetypes in the game that present themselves as this sort of gish playstyle gish being the combination of sword and spell but it's really starting to seem that blade singer might be one of the coolest options out there to have your full spell casting but also excel in melee combat the other impressive thing about the blade singer is folks that have crunched the numbers far better than us uh have worked out how much damage a blade singer can actually deal by combining all of the various spells available to wizards with the ability to make attacks with a weapon oftentimes when we think of a melee damage damage dealer in d5e we often think of the paladin or the barbarian or even a fighter that is using a pole arm taking polar master great weapon master or a rogue pulling some sort of shenanigans but a blade singer does great damage and they do it all with say a short sword or a rapier so as we set out to build our blade singer wizard one of the first complications that we run into is where we're going to put our ability scores unlike something like the hex blade warlock which allows you to use your charisma for your attack and damage roles the blade singer doesn't give you that option so you do have to consider how heavy of a hitter you want to be and how good you want to be at spell casting and with spell casting we often look at constitution as another aspect of being able to maintain your concentration so here we have a look at intelligence we have a look at dexterity and constitution so those are probably going to be your three primary stats that you want as a blade singer wizard but how are we going to get all of those singing together to make this fit for our wizard yeah the big question is do you want to make your intelligence or your dexterity your highest ability score as a blade singer we're going to gain features like blade song and extra attack which we'll talk about shortly that are going to drive you towards making attacks with one-handed finesse weapons so we're going to want to have a good dexterity score if we want to actually make attacks with weapons so when we look at the ability score array that you and i use in our games where we take a 17 a 15 a 13 a 12 a 10 and an eight for me i think i want to put my 17 in intelligence and my 15 into dexterity and then my 13 into constitution where i'm gonna put the rest of the scores doesn't really matter too much that's more gonna be a role-playing thing i'm probably gonna dump my strength and have that just be the eight i think that most blade singers are definitely going to be in the dexterity spectrum and you're probably going to want a bit of wisdom and maybe charisma because if we look at the abilities there are nods to charisma in there from there we can look at our lineage to sort of round out these ability scores and even them up a little bit so kelly what do you what stands out to you as lineage options that we could take and especially if we're using the tash's rules where we can bounce our stats around where do you think he would go with this if you can bounce your stats around using tash's rules then i think one of the primary choices for a blade singer is the half elf and the half health actually still speaks to the lore of what a blade singer is because previously blade singer was exclusive to elves or half elves so if you are kind of set on that lore using the nutash's options to mix and match the half elf is one of the only subclass options that allows you to pick three different ability scores to boost one gets a plus two and the other two get a plus one so from that you could round everything out if you picked intelligence as your highest and dexterity is your second and then khan is your third i would actually put the plus two and maybe dexterity the plus one in intelligence and the other plus one in con and then that way your dexterity and intelligence are more even uh you could also put the plus two in intelligence in the plus one in dexterity if you wanted to go heavier on the spell casting yeah i think also there's a a straight up a case here to still go with the variant human and do plus one intel into intelligence plus one into dexterity and then i personally would take resilient constitution which is going to boost my con from 13 to 14 but also give me proficiency and constitution saving throws because even though bladesong is going to boost our ability to concentrate on our spells by stacking that with a decent con score proficiency and constitution savings throws and that it means that even when we're on the front lines taking those hits we're probably not going to lose concentration on the critical spell that's keeping us there we really don't want to lose concentration as a blade singer and that is one thing to keep in mind is that the abilities that grant you bonuses to your saving throws for concentration it still might not account for the fact that if you're on the front lines and you get hit three or four times that's a lot of dice rolls to make so there's still that chance that you could go down so the more layers of protection you have against losing your concentration the better you're going to be at being a blade singer yeah and i think speaking of having those layers of protection when we look at the spells that we want to take starting out we definitely want to have shield in their arsenal we definitely want to have absorb elements and we definitely i think i think mage armor is worth considering even though blade blade singers do get proficiency in light armor at low levels of play you might only be able to afford um basic leather armor which is only 11 ac plus your dexterity where so major armor is going to be giving you a plus two eventually you might get magic studded leather armor which is going to be better than whatever you have from mage armor they don't you can't stack them unfortunately so it might be worthwhile taking major armor of course you're absolutely going to want to have fine familiar and i do think at low levels of play especially before you really get your blade song and your melee combat stuff rolling this is a cool opportunity to bring spells like thunder wave and burning hands because you still might want to get in there but i think the biggest thing we got to talk about right out the gate though is kandrips what are we going to choose for our kandra so if you're going into the blade singer i think one of the greatest cantrips that you can use is going to be booming blade now booming blade is great because not only does it allow you to add extra damage to your attack but also if you can get away from the target which we'll talk about ways that you can do that with future spell choices but if you can get away from the target booming blade is a free way to dish out extra damage and then lock that creature down a lot of people look at booming blade and they say well i don't get it the creature just doesn't have to move and then they don't take that extra damage so how is it a good cancer the point is don't think about the extra damage think of that as a penalty for the lockdown that you are giving the creature that you hit if you can hit a target deal that extra damage and move away if that target doesn't have ranged attacks guess what they're useless now on their next turn unless they break into a movement which will deal a ton of extra damage to them now me personally i think for candidates for the blade singer you still want to take a cantrip like firebolt or chill touch or possibly even frostbite because the ability to just throw a cantrip at range if you need to i think is really handy to have in your back pocket beyond that i would almost certainly take you know a mage hand or press the digitization or something else like that i think after that you just want to look at regular wizardy things and especially if you are starting your character out at level one you're probably going to want to bring something along like sleep because it's really good at these levels and this is one of those things to remember with a blade singer is that you are still a wizard and don't get ahead of yourself because you want to go and hit things with your sword if there's an opportunity for you to end a combat encounter by casting sleep do it don't go in there and start stabbing people until you put them to sleep then it's even better now with looking at our early level blade singer we should also talk about the abilities that they gain you're gonna have to survive first level just being a wizard until you actually get your class features that are gonna let you fight so what do we get when we get start off at level two well you start things off with training in war and song and this is what gives you your proficiency in light armor it also gives you proficiency with one one-handed melee weapon of your choice and it also gives you proficiency in the performance skill now this might be a reason to plan now for a half elf because you only you don't get full martial weapon proficiency from a blade singer so if you want to switch between say using two short swords to duo wield or using a rapier or using scimitars you don't actually have that flexibility you won't get proficiency with all those weapons so me personally i'm gonna go with the empty-handed sort of style there's a reason to take short swords or scimitars because you can do a wheeled through mid-levels which is pretty good but i think eventually i'm going to want to just have that hand free to make sure i can always cast a spell so i'm going to go with the rapier myself i mean i think that's pretty iconic for blade singers you have a spell in one hand and a sword in the other and that's the imagery that a lot of us are imagining with our blade singers the other feature that you gain at second level though is probably the most important feature that you will gain as a blade singer and that is blade song this is a power that you can activate a number of times per day equal to your proficiency modifier as a bonus action and this gives you a buff that lasts for one minute that has a lot of amazing features to it you gain a bonus to your ac equal to your intelligence modifier you gain an extra 10 feet on your movement speed and you have advantage on your dexterity acrobatics checks as well you're also going to get a bonus to your concentration checks equal to your intelligence modifier blade song does end however if you become incapacitated if you wear medium or heavy armor or if you use two hands to make a weapon attack so with all of that now in place let's level up our blade singer so now we're looking at around sixth level at this point you've gained another feat there's more spells that you want to choose and you're going to gain another feature that feature being extra attack this works just like the extra attack feature that many other classes get that when you take the attack action on your turn you can attack twice but blade singers gain a little bit of an extra perk with this in that they can replace one of those attacks with casting a cantrip so now what a blade singer can do is make an attack with booming blade and then attack again and that doesn't consume their bonus action which makes it very unique from the other features granted to say um eldritch knights or college of valor bards in that you still have your bonus action free to do all the other cool stuff like control animated objects or make a misty step or use the telekinetic feet so it means that you get to fight control your spells at the same time which is pretty awesome so also by the time we hit six level we're going to have either picked up another ability score increase or another feat and i think depending on the way you're building your blade singer there's a few ways to go i think in the case of the half elf which is what i would have built i would go with elven accuracy as my feet oh yeah there's so many ways to gain advantage as a blade singer just even sending in your familiar to help you you're gonna be able to really make the most of rolling three times with advantage it's awesome i think for my variant human blade singer i'm just gonna boost my dexterity by two i've got resilient constitution so i'm nice and tough on that front this is gonna bring my intelligence and my um dexterity both to 18 and i can be happy with that now this is where the spells are really going to be an important choice for you and again you're going to hear this theme a lot from us today that although there are some great spell choices to really bolster the melee combat version of the blade singer you should never discredit the main spells that a wizard wants to use when we're looking at our sixth level blade singer i think that if you haven't picked up find familiar yet you need to have it that's not only iconic for almost all wizards but especially with the blade singer it means that you can reliably gain advantage on your attacks and if you take an elven accuracy that's just going to kick it up to 11th gear i think that since we are going to be jumping into melee combat if we look at things like mirror image blink or misty step these are three spells that can be really really helpful i think the missy step actually stands out really well because it's a bonus action so you could actually run in land your booming blade dish out your multiple attacks and then missy step away now locking that person in place i also think that straight up you got to take fireball you got to take counterspell you never leave home without them yeah because there's gonna be a time with your blade singer where there's a bunch of enemies together and a blade singer doesn't want to get surrounded so if you can take the foes out by having a well-timed uh fireball go for it i also think in combining the damage dealing with the teleportation thunderstep is going to be a key piece to have in your arsenal because if you do get surrounded it's the start of your turn you need to just get out of dodge thunder step out of there and leave them with some damage as a present but the real meat that we want to talk about is what is your blade singer going to be concentrating on and how are we going to use that to actually augment our melee combat ability one of the go-to spells for blade singers is going to be something like shadow blade which allows you to conjure a blade of shadowy energy that deals psychic damage and can be used as a finesse weapon now one thing to be careful of is there was an errata that basically said that booming blade and shadow blade may not cooperate together which is something that we all love doing with our blade singers so talk to your dm about what their interpretation of that is because if you're going the booming blade route shadow blade may not be a first choice but if you didn't take booming blade it's going to be amazing the reason for this is that booming blade now has a material component which is a melee weapon worth one gold piece and shadow blade is conjuring a new weapon for you to use rather than augmenting any existing weapons and the problems actually don't stop there because one of the things that i don't see come up in many conversations about blade singers at all is blade singers and magic items and shadow blade magic items because a blade singer is going to want a magic sword you're a magic swordsman obviously you want a magic sword and a blade singer is a really good candidate for amazing magic weapons like even just a plus two rapier or a frost brand or a flame tongue if you get your hands on one of these weapons it's a big boon especially because these weapons are often uh gravitate towards the finesse weapons in terms of their types and so um another amazing one actually for a blade singer would be a sun blade too yeah uh you can't use these weapons with shadow blade but you can use them with booming blade and so there's actually another spell that we can slot in here that is going to augment our melee damage it's going to require a concentration but uh it's not it's still going to let us use a magic weapon and that's spirit shrap spirit triad is a third level spell and it adds an extra d8 to the damage of your melee attacks it also has a couple extra cool perks to it as well and you can up cast it to increase those d8s so it might be the spell that you're looking for another one that does have a really good um argument for it though straight up is haste you're gonna get be able to make an extra attack out of that you're gonna get a bonus to your ac and that ability to zip in zip out zip in zip out is really really good particularly around this level of play i think haste is actually iconic and the imagery of a blade singer using haste is so fitting that i i think it needs to be on every blade singer's list the thing is that you are also still a wizard and so hasting yourself up to deal a lot of extra damage might be the best thing to do with your your your spells but you might be standing in front of a battle where casting fireball or hypnotic pattern or slow is the more worthwhile option so you're gonna have to choose which spells you prepare really carefully and me personally i would always want to bring my go-to buff melee spell like spirit shroud or or shadow blade and then load up on all my other good defensive spells and just normal wizard spells because if i see the opportunity to end the fight by casting hypnotic pattern i'm still gonna take it yeah with that let's level our blade singer up to level 12. we're going to gain a lot along the way we're going to go from third level spells to getting fourth fifth and the sixth level spell slot we're also going to pick up some more feats or ability score increases and we at level 10 we're going to get our next blade singer class feature which is song of defense what does this do kelly so song of defense as a reaction when you take damage you can use a spell slot to mitigate damage equal to 5 times the spell slot that you give up now this is a great clutch situation oh man you just got crit and you need to get rid of the damage but in most cases i think that i would still be relying on something like shield or absorb elements to get rid of more damage for less cost but in those dire moments where you get crit and are about to die it might be worth it to look at blowing a small slot yeah i think a critical hit is probably the only case where i would use this ability especially if it was a critical hit that was potentially going to knock me out of concentration otherwise um but beyond that i'm going to rely on shield and my other defensive features to do this we also have to remember that when you get song of defense this is also at the point when you're only a level away from getting a spell like contingency so we can also have a contingency in place that if you get crit teleport me away or with dimension door or something like that so um because there's a lot of defensive features that are coming online for wizards through their spells here it might be pretty rare for you to actually use this feature but it's clutch when it's there i just don't feel good about spending a fifth level spell slot to negate my damage by 25. yeah it's it's a high cost for for just uh again it's basically just are you going to die in this situation then maybe it's worth it yeah if it's if i have a fifth level spell in play and it's the choice of reducing this damage or having to cast that fifth level spell again totally worth it so we got ability score increases or feats at level eight and twelve and so i think that i would be looking at warcaster around this time i think you get a lot of mileage out of warcaster here but i think you could also be forgiven for just boosting whatever isn't maxed out from your intelligence and dexterity so in the case of my blade singer i would basically flip a coin and decide which of those two i want to boost up first for example if i got a really nice magic sword that had a plus two attack rules on it i might go with the intelligence route first right so that's where i would want to be reactive here based on how the campaign's going based on what kind of enemies i'm fighting based on what kind of magic items i have and decide then yeah now when we look at these spells for around this level i think that some of the key ones that we want to keep in mind are things like dimension door and banishment dimension door again maneuverability on the battlefield is going to be pretty key for a blade singer because you have a lot of power when you're in melee combat but as soon as you're in trouble you want to be able to get away or i mean dimension door is just an iconic spell in general same with banishment i feel like banishment is one of those spells that doesn't really speak to the blade singer but speaks to wizards in general as a way to end combat encounters i also think you'd absolutely want to pack polymorph as a blade singer especially by this level when you can have contingency with that as well because i think kelly your contingency is amazing for a blade singer i had a contingency that if i was dropped below i think it was like 15 hit points or 20 hit points or something i immediately polymorphed myself into a t-rex yeah and that just allowed me to survive so if you are a blade singer and you're in the thick of it and you get hit and hit hard you don't want to be surrounded when you have only like 20 hp left but if you turn into a t-rex you can be eaten dudes and tail whip and other dudes and you now gain a large amount of hit points to stay the course in the front lines if you love buffing yourself up as well with things like mirror image and blink that don't require concentration you might also want to take fire shield here as well because that's another concentration free buff up there's a lot of fantastic spells that we can take as our go-to spell but the reality of it is is that whether or not you're a blade singer the best option for damage dealing with a wizard at these levels of play is often animate objects and i love the mental image of carrying an extra bag of silver long swords on your back to use as animate objects and then at the start of combat you cast the animated objects and the swords fly around you that is a cool blade singer image and then you just have this dance of blades swinging around you and of course you want silver swords because silver weapons are or adamantium ones uh you can actually have both in a bag of holding that you animate and send out and that way you do get some coverage for getting around damage reduction uh so yeah go go get yourself a a bag of holding filled with silver swords or silver uh or silver automation swords uh i think maybe you might have to go with daggers to go with the the best version of the the damage that you can get but just the idea of of being surrounded by magic swords it's it's the perfect image yeah yeah i also think if we're looking at spells that are going to enhance your game play as a blade singer in melee combat i think that we need to pay attention to greater invisibility as well greater invisibility is going to be key because what's scarier than a wizard who can hit you with a sword a wizard who can hit you with a sword that you can't even see greater invisibility is a great tool to have when you need that mixture of defense and offense as well because you're going to get the advantage on attack rolls from that really good with the elven accuracy uh play there as well i think we did mention for six level spells that you could also consider taking um contingency for sure don't leave home without it i would absolutely take create homunculus as well so we have the homunculus and the familiar standard wizard stuff there's an argument pretentious transformation this is a very maligned spell because when you cast tensor's transformation you can't cast other spells but it does buff you up quite a bit um tensor's transformation to me is most useful in those cases when you're facing an enemy that is resistant or immune to non-magical damage so your animated objects are not going to do the trick anymore so one last spell that you should look at is wall of force and no wizard should ever leave home without it but blade singers can do something a little bit different with wall of force that can be a lot of fun if you're feeling daring and ready to boost your ac up and just go to town with your blade you can drop wall of force around you and a chosen enemy and you can pull rorschach's famous i'm not trapped in here with you you're trapped in here with me now for a little bit of a different take on this if you're going up against enemy spellcasters at this level you might want to pack globe of invulnerability this is a beginning point where the theme of the blade singer as a mage slayer can really come into play uh and if you're bringing global vulnerability and counterspell and dispel magic you're as a blade singer you are capable of fighting pretty well even when the magic gets turned off and so being able to do that yourself dropping global vulnerability when you're up against other spell casters that's going to let you really even the odds there and catch up with them yeah so one last level up for our blade singer we're now going to look at our level 16 blade singer wizard and they gain their final features a few more spells and a final feat to choose from so along the way to level 16 we're going to hit level 14 where we get song of victory and now we're going to be adding our intelligence modifier to our damage rolls of all of our melee attacks so that we're going to have a pretty hard-hitting one-two punch when we go booming blade extra attack and we're gonna have all these amazing concentration spells going on at the same time at this level of play you're gonna get a final feat choice here and i actually think that either fae touched or shadow touch to just add a few extra elements of spell casting onto your blade singer might be a cool option but i also think that if you don't have enough ways to get out of combat when you need to yet mobile actually speaks really well to the blade singer not only does it give you additional movement but mobile also allows you to move away from enemies that you're attacking without provoking opportunity attacks again with the instance of using booming blade mobile might be a key feature also if you're running low on spell slots and you're in the thick of it and you're low on hp it might be a good move to back up and start being a wizard this is also the time when you might want to take warcaster and there's a few reasons for this by high levels of play as a as a high level wizard you could have some really cool magic items and you might want to be able to hold on to your flame tongue long sword and your staff of power at the same time this is going to make casting spells very difficult having warcaster might help you get around that this is like that fringe benefit of warcaster that a lot of people forget about but that could come into play in an important way for a blade singer as you go up the levels um yes you're gonna have the opportunity to take advantage of the advantage on concentration checks and also being able to hit someone with a spell as an opportunity attack is going to be really good up here as well so i think by now the benefits of taking warcaster have become too much to ignore i would love to be able to fit in things like telekinetic or telepathic or lucky if i could it's just really hard to get everything in there so i again by this by this level play i'm going to look back on how i've done until this point and really assess what is going to fit best for the character at this level of play our spell selection is going to lean away from the melee combat focus and just be more generic wizard spells but that's because wizard have some amazing spells at this level of play i'm thinking things like force cage and teleportation are going to just double down on all the things you're already doing yeah yeah and i think i'm probably going to end up taking spells with my other selections here like simulacrum clone mind blank and of course as we go on to 9th level spells i think at that point you're still taking things like wish and prismatic wall and maybe you might even take blade of disaster uh i think at that point it doesn't you just have fun right well like yeah by the time you get to the ninth level spells it's all kind of out the window at this stage of the game um but and whether or not you want to you know go with the standard wizard shenanigans or still double down and just turn yourself into a dragon um go for it yeah i think that there's a lot of classes in dnd that are hybrids where you are making a big sacrifice um they're or a trade-off i think the blade singer doesn't really sacrifice that much i don't know if the blade singer on their own is the most amazing damage dealer in the game they're definitely in the upper echelons i don't think that they are the best spellcaster but they're in the upper echelons and when you have someone that is playing in the big leagues in both categories then you have a really impressive character and you know we've talked about hex blades before as well as having that main character syndrome um and i think you'd really feel that with this class there's there's really nothing you can't do here it's such a cool archetype to play so the whole package of the blade singer presents a really interesting option for players in dungeon dragons i think that this really speaks to that idea of mixing the spell and sword and i think it does it really really well you do have to be aware of your ability scores what feats and play style you want to bring to life with your blade singer but hopefully some of the options that we presented give you some cool ideas to really make your blade singer sing so this has been a look at the blade singer in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about your favorite ways to play blade singer in the comments below the videos we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters we thank them deeply from the bottoms of our hearts if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider joining our community by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6 p.m eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more guides to various character classes in d5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

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Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021