Treantmonk's Guide to Wizards: Subclasses

hey gamers treant monk here and this is part 1 of my guide to wizards I want to thank all my subscribers we've hit the 5000 mark which i think is appropriate for the start of this guide so what is your favorite arcane tradition for wizards I honestly can't tell you what mine is there's still some I haven't had a chance to play and I want to play them all so this is an important choice when you make a wizard it's really going to affect how your wizard feels and how it plays for the rest of the campaign so let's get into some details right now welcome to treat monk's guide to wizards [Music] so before we get into the details I want to go over my color coding system so when I put up a arcane tradition here it's going to be a particular color same thing if I put up a feature or any other option and that color is going to represent my opinions of that feature if you see that color as red then that means I think that feature just doesn't work I don't think it works as advertised it's not strong enough or it does something different than you think it's supposed to do so in the end I just don't think it's very good now if you see that color is orange then that means I think that it ability is too circumstantial I mean there's lots of Billie's in the game that are circumstantial you know a shield spell which i think is great it's still circumstantial it requires somebody to attack you but you get attacked all the time but there's certain abilities that are really circumstantial they may not come up at all in an venturing session they may not even come up over an entire campaign and in those cases that's just too circumstantial so I can't recommend that feature where I'm not excited about it even if it might be effective in the situation where it's to be used the next ranking you might see is purple now if I rank something purple I think it's fine it's good it does what it's supposed to do I'm not saying it's a bad ability and I'm not super recommending it I'm just saying that based on what you think that ability would do it pretty much does the job so it's a modest recommendation now if that color is green that I really like that ability that's something I think stands out a bit these are solid recommendations Green is a good score but it's not my best score the best score is blue if you see blue that means I think this is an outstanding ability this is something that maybe even work stronger than the designers intended I don't know but it really is exciting it's almost a must-have if you have the opportunity to get some of the blue abilities grab them up you're gonna level now as we start going into the rankings you're going to find that if you've read my wizard guide some of the colors are going to be different then you on the guide before you bother asking me why they're different the fact is is that I wrote the guide four years ago and so my opinions have changed so you're going to see some of the colors change as well for the most part they're going to be pretty much the same but there's going to be a few differences and that's why so one feature that every arcane tradition in the players handbook shares is the savant of the casting school and what savant does is it makes it so that any spells you find from that school require half the time and half the cost described to your spell book but the thing is is that copying spells into your spell book is generally reasonably cheap and reasonably fast regardless of the school and when we're talking about schools that's a small portion of the total number of spells you're going to find from your particular school so what I find in general is the overall time it's gonna take to scribe spells to book isn't gonna be reduced all that much and the cost of scrapping spells into your book isn't going to be reduced all that much either fortunately in neither case is the cost or the time going to be all that high normally scribing a spell into your spell book requires two hours per level of the spell and fifty gold per level of the spell so that means a first level spell would normally take you two hours and fifty gold or one hour and twenty-five gold if it's your specialist school so that means in a day like let's say a 16 hour day including an eight hour long rest you can do eight levels of spells so even a high-level Wizard can scribe spells reasonably quickly that doesn't make this ability all that powerful and it certainly makes it circumstantial so that's why I give it the orange rating fortunately these arcane traditions offer a lot of other fantastic abilities so this one really doesn't play a part in deciding which arcane tradition I want to play so the first school we want to talk about is the school of AB duration I get lots of comments from people saying they love this school that they have managed to prevent 800 points of damage thousand points of damage or more using the abilities of this school that's amazing amount of damage and this all comes through the arcane ward the arcane ward isn't built a game right away at second levels what the arcane war does is the first time you cast an observation spell during the day which probably just your main armor right first thing during the day you get a shield and that shield is a magical shield that blocks damage that would otherwise affect you and it's a pretty significant shield the hip points the ward has is twice your wizard level plus your intelligence modifier so even that second level assuming a 16 intelligence score then worked already talking about seven hit points now if we think about a second level wizard that's nine hit points plus a constitution modifier an additional seven is a huge boost and it's scales reasonably well because we're talking about an additional two points per level plus any boost to intelligence so that's more than we would expect from four points of Constitution but the arcane ward is better than having more hit points because it replenishes any time you cast an aberration spell equal to twice the level of the spell in addition it's not treated as taking hit points damage when you take damage this is huge for a wizard because if you are a second level caster and you're concentrating on a spell and you're hit with damage and that damage doesn't penetrate the arcane ward then you don't have to make a concentration safe because you haven't taken damage even at higher levels even if you're taking massive quantities of damage when you're concentrating on those really important spells then that arcane Ward is going to reduce the amount of damage you've taken and if you reduce the amount of damage you've taken then you reduce the difficulty of the concentration safe so you're going to make so many more concentration saves now I will mention that there is a ritual spell that is an Abbe duration spell that's alarm you could cast alarm on your backpack to make sure there's no pickpockets those kinds of things you could be using that to activate your ward work to replenish it as well now that's very time consuming very very time consuming if we're talking about replenishing the hit points of the ward but it is an option that isn't going to use any spouse and this the party has some downtime then you can use it for that so that moves us up to sixth level where we get projected Ward so instead of gaining a new ability we're just kind of improving the versatility of our initial ability now we can use our Ward to protect somebody else when you're protecting has to be within 30 feet of you and you have to use your reaction so there's a bit of cost here so I don't love this one nearly as much because assuming you're taking damage you're probably using your arcane Lord but then again your wizard you're often at the back of the party sometimes you're just not a target so then it is a good thing to be able to hand your arcane ward to somebody else they may not get the same benefit from you but then again maybe they're the cleric and they're concentrating on a bless and you save the blessed spell there's lots of ways beyond just reducing hit points that this could be useful for a party member but again you are sacrificing your own defense to do so so do so with caution when it's appropriate so that brings us to improved observation and now improved observation basically just improve spells that are already good counter spell is already a great spell the spell magic is actually a reasonably good spell - I think the spell magic is not as good as counter spell but it's not that much worse and it's pretty useful to have both especially if you're a juror because with an observer whenever you have to make a building check you get to add your proficiency bonus if your level 10 or higher now both counter spell and dispel magic scale a third level they do exactly what they should do a third level spell is completely wiped out but whenever they're facing a higher level spell you either have to increase your casting slot or you have to take the chance of making an ability check in sometimes you don't want to take that chance but with an observer your chances are much better because adding a proficiency bonus especially what your 10th level or higher is going to be a significant boost to that role so this is circumstantial but we are affecting multiple spells that we're going to be using reasonably often and with an observer you should always have both these spells prepared because this is kind of your specialty so you will be able to use this ability often enough that I think is a pretty to have and then we finish off with a capstone at 14th level spell resistance very simple ability very good ability you get resistance on saving throws versus spells you have resistance against damage of spells and of course these can go together so if you're saving for half you're more likely to save and then that half is then quartered because you're having it again I don't need to tell you the spell resistance is good it's of course good the AB duration school does exactly what you think it should do it makes you better at defense and it makes you better at dealing with magic so when I'm looking at an observer bill I like looking at how those additional hit points and our additional ability to main concentration might affect my role within a party because normally I like to have my wizard near the back of the party protected by the other party members treated as a character that could go down easy because you have less hit points but with an observer you kind of don't have that as the case so what I'm thinking might be interesting with the new jurors what if you took something like you get the Anki and then you give them medium armor and a great sword and then you make a manager and then you sent him into malay with booming blade and green flame blade i think that might be a reasonably effective role for agate ENT wizard to take and then you character ends up being a bit of a tank because you would have a pretty good armor class you could add on things like shield and you'd have pretty good hit points starting at level 2 i mean if you think about it a level to observe with even a 14 constitution is probably looking at an effective hit point total of 20 that's the same as you'd expect from a fighter with the same constitution score so pretty cool and i've told from people who play this class that you can expect that arcane ward to just reduce a massive amount of damage throughout a campaign very cool now let's move on this brings us to my favorite casting school and what i think is a pretty good arcane tradition the school of conjuration so at second level the first ability you're gonna get is minor conjuration minor conjuration does is it allows you to create a non magical object copy of something you've seen before within feet of you it can have up to three feet too aside and it can't weigh more than ten pounds and it gives off a dim glowing light so you know that it is created by a magical effect so this doesn't have a lot of super obvious uses it's going to require a little bit of creativity to come up with a way to make it useful so what exactly counts as a non magical object what exactly counts as an object itself there's a liquid count as an object I'm not quite sure you're going to need to find out from your DM but here are some examples of ways you might use this ability creatively the first is just a simple tactical thing where maybe you create a three-foot barrier to block mission it doesn't have to be heavy it could be something like a curtain or a vanity mirror and then you just hide behind it duck down so this is similar to minor illusion except it's not an illusion you're it's an actual real object now if they attack through that object that object shatters but it definitely would block vision and it doesn't matter whether they think it's an illusion or not because it's not now I wonder about poisoned because you've probably seen poison before once you've adventured for a while can you create poison with this and then give it to say the party robed poisonous blades with again I'm not sure I mean I'm not sure liquid counts as an object but what about a poisonous plant poisonous plant is certainly an object or poisonous root so then we could potentially create poison with this does the poison work I mean the way I read this I would think it would again your DM might not be so hot on that because that would be really good so what about some straight out utility use we need to get up and over this wall well we can create a grappling hook or a coil of rope or we're in a cage and we can't get to the key but we've seen the key we create the key if we haven't seen the key then we can create a lock pick for the rope to use now here's one and I think it's a little iffy again but what about spell components even costly components can you create a diamond for the cleric to use on a raised bed spell the ability doesn't say you can't make expense of items it just says they have to be non-magical and whether you DM considers that real enough to supply that spell I think I'd be skeptical about that but regular components like a bit of fleece or a bit of string I would think it could suffice for those purposes of course if liquids are allowed then that allows things like Alchemist fire or acid or if you have a prisoner and you want to hold them you could create some manacles or maybe there's something far away and you want to look at it you could create a spyglass there's lots of utility uses we can't go over them all but hopefully I've gotten your head spinning on some ideas so this isn't a super-powerful ability unless your DM has a very liberal interpretation of what you can make then it is then it's broken but I think the way I would run as a DM it would be something that you would find useful if you're creative but it wouldn't be overpowering it's reasonably good that brings us to our level six ability benign transposition man I love this one this one of course I love teleports to begin with but this one gives you a teleport of 30 feet but unlike things like misty stepped it's not using a spell slide doesn't count as casting a spell so it's not affecting what else you didn't do in their route now in addition to teleporting for 30 feet you can also use it to switch positions with somebody else so you get caught in Millay maybe you get grappled somebody has knocked you prone and now they're using the grapple to keep you down so that maybe they can attack you with advantage while you're prone what are you gonna do what are you gonna benign transposition and suddenly that guy is grappling the raging barbarian now things have changed god that's lovely and now you don't get this back until you finish a long rest or you cast a conjuration spell a first level or higher well that's easy your conjurer you probably have lots of contradiction spells you're casting all the time this one is going to be easy to get back so you're gonna be able to use it over and over again and as you level up you could be casting more and you're gonna be able to use it even more man I love this this is great the only issue here is it does use your action so that's gonna limit what else you can do in the round to your bonus action and your reactions but overall this is a lovely ability I think this is just terrific so this brings us to what I consider to be the premiere ability of this subclass and that comes at 10th level it's focused conjuration man this one allows you to avoid concentration safes from taking damage anytime you're concentrating on a conjuration spell that is amazing so what spells are we talking about there's a huge amount of spells going right from first level through ninth level and I'm just going to list them very quickly so at first level it's your fog cloud at second level cloud of daggers dust devil flaming sphere flock of familiars web at third level sleet storm sleet storms already an amazing spell now you can do it without worry of you concentration breaking stinking cloud summon lesser demons at 4th of eva's block tentacles summon greater devil watery sphere at fifth level cloud kill conjure elemental far step infernal calling at six level arcane gate at eighth level incendiary cloud maze at ninth level gate so there's a ton of spells here now some of these spells are fantastic something smells good something spells aren't so good but soon as you can do them without worry about your concentration being broken suddenly they become better than they otherwise would be let me give you an example example would be kinder elemental soken jar elemental conjurer's and elemental and elementals are reasonably good they have a ton of hit points and resistances and they do reasonably good damage and you choose something like an air elemental it can pretty much get anywhere on the board so overall as a conjuration that's a reasonably good option but it requires a concentration and if your concentration breaks that elemental doesn't disappear and in fact it turns hostile against the caster now I'm running a campaign right now where one of the players she plays a warlock and this warlock is a homebrew warlock it's a pact of the Leviathan and the Leviathan one of the things that gives you is access to the conjurer elemental spell so she grabbed that at level 9 and were at level 12 now and she's cast it I think three times and I think three times the concentration has been broken and three times the elemental has gone against the party and then they have had to defeat it and maybe it wasn't such a good thing to cast in the first place and it's kind of funny but it's also kind of too bad because she was super excited about this spell I think she still likes the spell and she's kind of enjoyed the way it's kind of turned on her sometimes but if you want to cast a spell reliably then school of conjuration is the way to do that suddenly that spell that might not always be great becomes reliable and that is huge and it makes those spells better so when we're playing a conjuration wizard I'm going to look at those kind of spells and I'm going to gravitate towards them especially once I get near and to tenth level and that brings us to our capstone at fourteenth level which is durable summons which i think is actually the least impressive of all the conservation abilities what you do is when you summon a creature it gets 30 temporary hit points now I just told you that I will probably be summoning creatures with the conjurer because has the ability to conjure something and then not have to worry about the concentration being broken is great and of course all those good summoning spells for wizards are conservation spells but honestly adding 30 extra hit points isn't a big deal now if we were druid and we got this ability that would be really good because often we are using summoning spells that are summoning multiple creatures but with a wizard the spells we would be choosing with summon one creature and increasing the casting level only increases the challenge rating of that single creature so we're talking about 30 hit points on one creature using a high-level spell that's not that big a deal so I don't think this makes a huge difference and I don't think it really works as advertised it's not terrible terrible but I think the difference for the most part is going to be pretty insignificant so that brings us to what is probably the most popular of all the arcane traditions the school of divination and the reason why people love the divination wizard is they built a game right at second level important and if you've never played a wizard before I suggest you might want to consider trying a divination wizard first just so you get to play with this sucker because it is amazing and it is fun at the beginning of every day you can roll to d20 and you're gonna take those two rolls and you're just gonna record them on your character sheet now any time before your next long rest you can choose to replace any creature you can see their attack role they're saving throw or their ability check with either of those roles and you can do that once for each role so you cast a spell on creature you want to make sure it doesn't make it safe assign a die roll you want to make a saving throw make sure you save it assign yourself a die roll and it really doesn't matter I mean the best-case scenarios are rolling 20s or ones so that you can make things guaranteed to fail or guarantee to hit or even critical hit but even if you roll 10th or 11th it's still really useful just because that's so reliable it prevents the bad roll or prevents the very good roll if we think about it each of these are as good as a mid-level spell and we're getting them both at second level it doesn't require our reaction or an action or a bonus section it requires nothing we can just do it for free twice a day is beautiful so powerful and fun so the next ability began at 6 level is expert divination now expert divination is a reasonably good ability but I think it sounds better than it is what happens is whenever we cast a divination spell of 2nd level or higher we can choose to regain a spell so of course we're going to do that of spell level lower than the one we cast so essentially if we cast a second level divination spell we can regain a first level spell slot now the first thing is that spell slot has to be gone we're not getting extra spell slots so if that second level divination spell is the first spell to capture in the game we're not gonna get anything back because we already have all our first level spell slots and the second issue is there's not as many divination spells as you think there are you're not going to be casting as many as you think you might even if you think of your character very much a diviner and you really like divination spells you're going to find that you're just not gonna cast a lot every day one divination spell tends to go a long way and often casting another divination stuff kind of becomes redundant and spells like rare ease telepathic bond we're going to be casting as a ritual so we're not even using a spouse lot to cast that in the first place now spells like arcane I am absolutely casting that it's a good spell fourth level spell I'm gonna get a third level slot back when I cast it but how many times am i casting Arcana it lasts a long time I can often explore an entire dungeon with a single casting of arcane I that's why I cast it in the first place so am i casting it again probably not and another important thing is we can't recover a spouse lot higher than fifth level so it's not like we're casting foresight and we're getting into eighth level slot back we're getting fifth level slot so what spells can we use it on well let's list them off at second level we have detect thoughts locate object mind spike see invisibility at third level clairvoyance and tongues at fourth level arcane I locate creature at fifth level contact of the plain legend lore rare ease telepathic bond which again we're casting as in rituals we're not going to be using it on this inscribed at six level true seeing ninth level foresight and that's it now that's not to say we're not gonna be using this ability once in a while and it's reasonable to think as a diviner we might have a number of these spells might cast a couple of day so we might get a couple spell slots back per day depending whether we have spell slots available of a lower level which is good but don't expect it to be huge this ability is okay it's not great it's not bad it's fine a tenth level you gain the ability the third eye so the third I just basically increases your perception abilities and you choose how it improves your perception abilities you can gain dark vision you can see through the ethereal plane you can read languages which actually you could probably do with the first level ritual so I probably wouldn't choose that and you can see invisible and you can do so until you either incapacitated or you finish a long rest so this is a nice little boost if you don't have dark vision you can get dark vision normally I'm probably going to be choose seeing the visibility with this that's pretty substantial but it's pretty useful when it does come up but depending on the character I might choose dark vision I might be looking into the ethereal plane depending on the situation so a reasonable little buff does what it's supposed to do which takes us to the capstone ability which is great important now great important doesn't actually make our important any better I don't know how you would make important any better but what it does do is it gives us an additional die so it's telling two days per day we're rolling three dice per day that's not a huge difference but it's going to feel like a pretty big difference when you're rolling three dice because pardon again is so good and it is going to continue to be good through the entire campaign being able to use it 50% more is still pretty significant and still pretty good so why do people love the divination school simple its portent those other abilities are just fine being able to get a couple spell slots back potentially depending on what spells I cast that's reasonably good and if getting and getting the ability to do things like see invisible that's also pretty good but there's nothing here that compares to portent this is all about portent and you get a right at level two so ITA's going to carry on from the moment you choose divination school to the end of you campaign you're gonna love every minute of it so when I make a divination caster what am I going to do well you know I have a bias against spells that target a single enemy and provide them a saving throw and if they make that saving throw nothing happens if I'm playing a diviner I'm a little more reasonable about those kind of spells a banishment against somebody who might save and nothing happens that concerns me but a banishment against somebody who I can set there saving through a score and make them fail and then have the effect of the banishment a hundred percent now that I'm into so when I make a diviner I'm thinking about how porned is going to affect the saving throw of creatures I get with spells what that does is it makes certain spells that before I was hesitant about seemed a lot better this is actually embedded in something like a heightened spell from a sorcerer because heightened spell from a sorcerer isn't a sure thing is a sure thing the only issue there is be careful about legendary saves of course because legendary saves can bypass your important so this is really going to be useful on creatures that don't have legendary saves so that brings us to the school of enchantment the school of enchantment like the observer and the diviner brings a huge amount right at level two we begin at second level with the hypnotic gaze if not a gaze amazing amazing ability that continues to be amazing throughout the career of the caster so on your turn as an action you can choose a creature within 5 feet of you so you can walk up to a creature and then they have to make a wisdom saving throw against your spell DC if they fail that saving throw their charmed incapacitated and their speed is reduced to zero now how long does it last as long as you want without them getting another saving throw every turn if you use an action you can simply maintain the effect so you can incapacitate a creature permanently with this and it doesn't require your concentration so it's not even like your concentration can be interrupted furthermore this is not casting a spell so if we look at abilities like magic resistance that give you advantage on saving throws versus spells that's not going to help you here this is a magical effect not a spell so no advantage on your saving throw wisdom savings are a reasonable one to effect and you can do this over and over and over again you can't do it on the same creatures but that means you can basically use this every single fight and it's better than a lot of lower-level spells and we can do it every time without using any smell slots at all and right at second level this is going to be huge you're gonna want to do this all the time and higher levels it'll give me something to do when you're concentrating on something else so very good ability right at second level this ability alone makes the enchantment school a pretty good option the next ability at 6 level is instinctive charm so what instinctive charm does is when you are targeted with an attack you can use your reaction to force the opponent to attack somebody else now they get a wisdom savings are all equal to your spell DC and if they make it they get still get to attack you if they don't make it and there is another target applicable then they will attack that target instead so we can potentially use this to get enemies to attack other enemies that is lovely furthermore we can use this ability over and over again we can only use it against any single target once but that means that any new combat we're definitely going to be able to use it again so unlike shield that constantly drains those first level slots and eventually runs out this one won't and we can use it in combination with shield so we're attacked by an opponent is there another applicable target do we want them to attack that target yes we're going to use instinctive charm no we're going to use shield so we get to kind of combine our defenses there and create a little bit of versatility and how we use them and if we do run out of first level slots and this kind of becomes our primary defense and we could just use it again over and over again this is one of the wonderful things about enchanters their abilities it just seems you can use them over and over again and they're good what a nice subclass so what 10th level we gain the ability split enchantment what split enchantment does is whenever we cast an enchantment spell the targets only one creature we can target two creatures instead so this is like twinning spells except unlike twinning spells we're not using sorcery points we can do it over and over and over again so what this does is it takes a lot of spells that I kind of considered not that great and it makes them great because it's like adding a free twin on all these spells now first level we can do this on Tosh is hideous laughter - is hideous laughs there's actually a reasonably decent spell being able to twin it for free using only a first level slide and no additional resources is fantastic now we're 10th level so first level spots not such a big deal now we can go in use our hypnotic gaze maintain the Tosh's hideous laughters with our concentration and incapacitate a third foe with our hypnotic gaze we can do that we've used one first level slot what it's also going to do is it's going to make spells like hold monster that I normally stay away from and then it's going to make them just really good I have the possibility of taking down two monsters with that doesn't require any additional resources same with spells like autos irresistible dance or feeble mind which targets intelligence and you can do it on two different targets very nice now it also includes all the power words but the power words have hit point maximums and unless you know what the hit points of your enemy are then that makes it kind of a hit or miss whether it's gonna work or not so I prefer to go on the ones that Eve's the saving throws I can hold monsters your autos irresistible dances these are spells I normally don't like but soon as you put them in the hand of an enchanter now I like them so it is going to mean different spells than I normally cast and that's a good thing because it creates some versatility when I play this character it's going to be different than the other characters I play now if I play this as my standard god style wizard it's going to end up focusing far more on debilitating enemies than buffing or using battlefield control furthermore it's probably going to be a character that gets more into the rough of things because I'm gonna want to get in close in to use that hypnotic gaze as often as I can now remember I have more defenses as well so I have ways to maintain both the hypnotic gaze and protect myself in fact I could use something like an improved invisibility I concentrate on the improved invisibility I'm moving close to somebody they can hear me so now they're applicable for hypnotic gaze and I can maintain it indefinitely so I'm holding a lot of improved invisibility and completely incapacitating what is probably one of the big tough enemies so all in all I think a chant Minh is I've called it the most underrated of all there okay introduced traditions and I think it is fantastic so that brings us to our fourteenth level of building ulta memories now one of the disadvantages of using charm type spells like a dominate monster is that once that dominate ends then that creature knows they were charmed and that makes them angry with you but with alter memories we can change that we can make alter their memories so they don't realize they were charmed now we're already essentially twinning these spells so now we can choose one of those targets maybe the one that failed they're safe now we can alter their memories as well you can also make it forget some of the time it's been charmed now it makes an intelligence savings role but a reasonably difficult one you can remove hours worth of memory just gone from their memory entirely so this is a somewhat circumstantial ability but I think it does what it's supposed to do and we are going to be using enchantment spells a lot so I think overall it's a decent ability in the end I think enchantment school is fantastic it comes in strong right at level 2 and I love that because a lot of campaigns spend a lot of time at lower levels this is a character that's going to do very well at low levels and so many of their abilities are just infinite use hypnotic gaze instinctive charm these are the low level buildings and they can just use them over and over and over again and they're good abilities on top of that that is a terrific combination so this brings us to the school of Education I kind of consider school of unification the most iconic of the wizard schools because it's your blaster right it's your guy who's gonna specialize and things like you're burning hands and you're gonna colds and they're reasonably good at it the School of Education takes what I normally recommend against and makes it good enough that I think it is worthy of a recommendation so if that is the style of caster you want to play Annie vocation wizard is a good choice and it starts right at level 2 with the most important ability they get and that's sculpt spells so one of the biggest problems with blasting is it's hard to position your spell's in a way that they're gonna get all the enemies and not your allies especially after combat has started the first round especially if you go fast you can sometimes catch the enemies before they move in but then once they move in and they kind of mix up with the rest of the party you either have to hit your allies or miss your enemies and that's not such a great situation you're an area of effect caster you're not doing the same damage that something like a sore lock can do to a single target you're looking to do a fair amount of damage to a lot of targets so that means you want to hit as many of them as possible sculpt spells allows you to do this by removing certain spots where your allies are from the spell of and you can do so equal to one plus the level of the spell so let's say first level that's only two spots but again at first level we're looking at a lot smaller areas the areas of the spells are going to increase with their level as well as the number of creatures we can exclude from the area so in the end you're really going to be able to cast these spells with impunity without worrying about hitting your allies now it was pointed out to me after my introduction to this series that sculpt spells is worded in such a way that one area you can't exclude is your own square so you can't actually cast a fireball at your feet and not hit yourself which is kind of silly I think because the idea sculpt spells is you create little pockets that it doesn't affect and you can't do your own swear but that is a restriction in the wording so if we are playing by raw we are not including our own space but that's not as big a deal as you might think because we are going to move before we cast so we can set ourselves up in a position where we're just using the area of effect on others and a lot of spells were not involved in the area anyway so things like your corn of colds or your thunder waves you couldn't even choose to be part of their a if you wanted to so that's not as big a deal as you might think the big thing is we're not hitting our allies so we can cast these spells we can hit as many of our enemies as possible without consideration of whether our allies are in the area and this affects such a massive range of spells I'm not going to list them all for you but that will say is right at first level things like Thunder Wave things that second level like shatter things at third level like fireball at fourth level we have wall of fire at fifth level we have cone of cold Sunbeam at sixth delayed fireball at seventh sunburst at eighth right two meteor swarm at ninth level every level of spell you're going to find spells that do area of effect damage might affect your allies and then this ability is going to allow you to keep those allies safe and hit as many enemies as possible it makes every one of these spells better and spells that are already pretty good like fireball it may really really good which brings us to our sixth level building which I don't think it's nearly as impressive Putin can trip and what Putin can trip does is if you cast a can trip that provides a saving throw and does damage then if the enemy fails or saving throw they take half damage because normally with a canter they would take none so this is going to end up being not a lot of damage and that six level we're already casting our can troops less than we used to and the reason we're casting them less is because they don't do good damage tantrums do scale on damage but the scaling is much much slower than the increased damage every other character can do when they do damage so it doesn't make sense for us to continue to sit on our can trips we're only really going to use them when we have nothing else to do and being able to do half the damage of damage that isn't good to begin with he's really unimpressive the only half way useful thing I've even heard about is that if we do want to force an enemy spellcaster the main concentration safe at least with potent cantrip we can be a hundred percent certain they will have to make that saving throw and that's about it and really we're probably talking about a dc-10 savings throw so it's not that impressive even in that regard overall I think this does not turn nuke and trips potent at all it's maybe a little bit better now that tools of the Dead is in the game because told the Dead is better than say acid swash but in the end it's really not going to deliver that much more damage to enemies and you're not going to be using ken trips a whole lot at this point you're only going to be using them less and this ability isn't gonna change that so overall I think this is a bit of a letdown that brings us to our level 10 ability empower to eat vacation and what it does is it allows us to add our intelligence to one damage role for any Eve occasion spell you cast so the idea here is if you cast something like Sunbeam where are you doing damage every round you only get to an ad your intelligence bonus once to that so this isn't a big bonus damage but these are the kind of spells we're going to be casting we're probably looking at +5 damage it also remember is adding +5 damage to our canned trips now one thing that definitely improved potin cantrip is the addition of frostbite that happened with the elemental guide and what frostbite does is it provides a saving throw and it does a d6 damage and then it would normally do no damage if you saved but of course you can do half damage if you save with pork and rip and then you can technically add your intelligence bonus as well so frostbite becomes a better cantrip than that otherwise would be are we casting a lot of kin trips a 10th level no and I'm not thinking that even the combination of these two things makes frostbite worth casting remember they're not getting the disadvantage on an attack role if they make their save so in terms of damage this still isn't going to be that great so I probably take it but it's not something I expect to use a lot it does add +5 bonus to our kin trips to our first level spells and in those cases that +5 is a bigger deal but even on our higher level spells I'll take a +5 damage why not so this does what it should do it's not an amazing ability but it is the kind of thing we want to do we're looking for damage bonuses here's one more and finally our capstone is over channel over channel allows us to take any vacations spell a 5th level or lower and do maximum damage with it so we cast a cone of cold does 88 now it's 64 half on a save automatically so that is pretty amazing that's a huge bonus to damage especially considering the number of creatures you can hit with something like if cone of gold now you can only do this once per long rest if you do it more than once which it can you will take damage and it's a lot of damage so I generally think exceptin maybe a big emergency I wouldn't be using it more than once but I would definitely use it once per day over channel huge monster damage put it on your fifth level spells or your fourth level spells to get the most bang for your buck so what am I going to do with an invocation wizard I'm gonna blast blast blast blast when we make an Evo keishon wizard it's going to be a blaster why because there are evoke Asian spells that are good that are not blast spells wala forces in a vacation spell Big B's hand is vacations spell these are great spells for control but with a vacation all the buildings we get really focus on one thing and that is making spells that do area of effect damage do more damage not affect our allies make them easier to place so that's what we want to do with this we're going to take spells like fireball and we're going to use them all the time and we're still going to have those other smells am I going to take law force of course I am law force is amazing still going to take contingency I'm still going to take fine familiar but the spells I'm going to cast more often are the blasts and normally I say blasts or recreation only but if you learn of ochre blasting is your job that is going to be your primary job and those other spells are available but they're going to be secondary for you so your role in combat will be to do area of effect damage hit lots of enemies and just soften them up for everybody you might even take the lower enemies right out so that brings us to our arcane tradition that I think has the most powerful feature in the game unfortunately it's gained at fourteenth level and that is the school of illusion so with this arcane tradition we start out with improved minor illusion so what happens is if you don't have minor illusion already you get it of course you got it you took it at first level so you get a different can trip instead which is just fine so you get another can trip and your minor illusion spell gets a little bit better so now what you can do is when you cast minor illusion you get both the image and the sound so you're basically getting two spells in one either these abilities are huge and sometimes you're going to be in a circumstance where one is useful and the other isn't so this isn't always going to be good now the way I read it the sound and the image don't necessarily need to be in the same spot so we could create an image over here and then a distracting sound over there so we're usually going to be able to find a way to use both now like I said in my minor illusion video we're going to find that as we go up a level we're going to use can trips less and that's still going to be the case here but at lower levels we're going to get more bang for our buck with one of the best can trips in the game so that's pretty good now does it increase it a huge amount like some of the things we've seen get twit no no we're getting one image and one sound we're not getting any flexibility on that so overall I think this ability does what it's supposed to do it's supposed to improve minor illusion it does do that reasonably good ability so at six level we gain malleable illusions valuable illusions what it does is it allows you to take an existing illusion that you've cast and you can change the parameters of that illusion now one of the things to keep in mind is when we cast that spell in the first place it had a specific range so if we cast even a major image we can't have that image travel even with malleable illusions so when we talk about valuable illusion we have to talk about perspective because I've had long conversations with people on relativity and we've gone into physics here way more than you would have thought so then what it comes down to is what can we target as a space if we target say a space in the back of a cart and we cast illusion there of say a chest filled with gold and that cart moves does the chest move with it or does that chest then just sit in the air as that cart slides from underneath it what about if the cart is on top of a ship does the chest stay with the cart or does it move with the river or does it move with the current or does it move with the land underneath the current who knows and what if you cast an illusion of say a ring on your finger now does that ring move with you or when you move your hand does the ring stay in that one spot so you need to talk to your team about that because there's not a fixed answer to that when we consider how relativity works and we consider those situations like that cart on that ship it makes it clear that the answer isn't that clear so you need to figure out how your DM use that kind of thing that's going to affect the value of malleable illusions cuz malleable illusions will not allow you to change the spot from which you first cast that spell so if you say cast a spell and you are in our room in a dungeon and then you want to use Mele of illusions to move that illusion you can't do that it stays where it is you can change what that illusion is but you can't just move it out of the initial range that isn't allowed under the rules so that is a limiting factor of malleable illusions but one way value illusions can be really good is if the illusion is just massive something like a mirage or a cane can cover a huge area and now we can change that illusion as we travel through it that might be hours worth of gameplay so you're traveling over a plane then suddenly you can create walls or structures as you need them whenever you need them without casting an additional spell just by using malleable illusions to change the initial spell but one thing I think some people don't realize is that if you cast something that has a spread like mirage or a cane into an area that you cannot see then it just simply moves around that area and it stops at that area so people who say you cast mirages arcane on a dungeon you can't do that you can do it on the room and the dungeon you're in but soon as you get to a door it stops so that's not really an option it has to be something where you can see the entire terrain and that makes it more circumstantial so overall value of illusions reasonably good ability but there's a lot of GM interpretation there are you going to need to talk to your DM beforehand to figure out how illusions work in their game you probably need to do that with an illusionist anyway there's a lot of vague stuff there and Jeremy Crawford's talked a little bit about how he runs it but there's still a lot of unanswered questions that brings us to illusory self illusory self is just a total hundred percent guaranteed failsafe but it's only usable once per day so when a creature makes an attack roll against you you can use illusory self to interpose an illusion between you and the attacker and it makes the attack automatically miss it uses your reaction so you can't use it in the same round you use a shield and unlike a shield is only usable against one attack you get this ability back after your short rest so you can probably use it a few times every day so it's okay so fro it's an OK ability more defense always that but I don't always think it's better than shield it really depends are you going to be attacked once this round or do you think you might be attacked more than once this round if you think you might be attacked more than once this round you might want to consider a shield spell instead of a loser itself so that brings us to what I think is the best arcane tradition ability in the game which is a losery reality this one is unreal so what illusory reality does is when you cast an illusion spell and there's a non magical object as part of that illusion you can use a bonus action to take that object and you make it real and I mean real it's just a real object all of a sudden and as soon as you do that it lasts for a minute it doesn't matter now whether we maintain that illusion so what you've done is you've created an object that you can maintain without concentration you've done so by using your action to cast the illusion and a bonus action to make it real so what we can do is just simple things we can do a silent image of a wall and then we can use illusory reality to make that wall real and then we can drop our concentration and all of a sudden with a first-level spell you can do things like a concentration free wall of stone this is normally a fifth level spell that requires your concentration that is insane now you are limited to one aspect of a spell per spell and you're gonna be going to be casting illusions all the time you can make them real I'm so good as a bonus action so you can do it on the same round you gots illusion and that makes that that much better but the best thing of course is that even if you stop concentrating on the spell that real object remains for a minute that's the key here that's what makes this just insanely good and I think the best ability of any ability of any of the wizard arcane traditions so what am I going to do with an illusionist well I'm definitely gonna talk to my DM about how they look at illusions I'm gonna do that before I make the character it's so important you have to have that conversation illusion is so vague that if you don't talk to your DM before head you have no idea what you're gonna get now if you played with the DM many times you we have an idea already of how they deal with illusions but if you haven't you should have that conversation but an illusionist is definitely going to be concentrating on illusions starting with minor illusion which we're going to use a lot at first level just like we would with any Wizard but we're going to use it better and then this place a lot like any other wizard for the first few levels other than minor illusion being better and we really don't start to notice the big differences until we get into malleable illusions and suddenly we can change the parameters evolution even that with most of the illusions at that point we're only using it so much I mean you've heard about the the use of it with mirage or cane but we're not always using mirage or cane and there's a lot of cases where mirage or cane isn't the right spell to cast so malleable illusion sounds amazing but it's not so great at six level now depending on how your DM perceives the location of a casting that might make malleable Lucian's better later I have a DM who said if I cast an illusion of a ring on my finger then my finger is the location of that spell so if I move that ring moves with me so if we cast major illusion with a higher level spell it becomes permanent so what I did is I cast spell of a ring on my finger I made it permanent and now I can use malleable illusions I can throw that ring and turn it into whatever I want so if your DM allows that kind of thing we can do amazing things with malleable illusion eventually but not right at six levels so this tends to be the kind of character that I want to look at in a campaign that I expect to get to a very high level and spend a lot of time at those higher levels when I can use malleable illusions more effectively and when I can use a looser re reality so that is the kind of things I'm thinking of when I make an illusion wizard so that brings us to unfortunately my least favorite of the wizard subclasses and that's the school of necromancy and I kind of like the flavor of the school of necromancy that the evil wizard is going to be stereotypically in their necromancer though I kind of think that in Chapman has a pretty evil subtext to it but necromancy is is your stereotypical iconic evil wizard and first-level the Builder you get is grim harvest now a grim harvest does is when you kill a creature with a spell you regain a number of hit points equal to twice the level of the spell three times the level if it's necromancy so there's two big problems here the first one is we're regaining hit points which means it's not temporary hit points which means the only time this is useful is if we're damaged already otherwise it's useless the second thing is is blasting is generally not as effective as other forms of spell casting so we're not killing many creatures and the third thing is is there's a bit of a trap here because it gives you three times the spell level of that spells necromancy so suddenly we start looking at the necromancy spells that do damage thing is is those spells are worse necromancy spells that do damage for some reason mechanically are worse than other spells that do damage I don't know why I don't know what the designers had against necromancy but they made those spells objectively worse and so we end up feeling like we should take those spells but they're not really going to serve us effectively and so that thought ends up being a bit of a trap in the end gloom harvest I think it's not terrible but it does become very circumstantial because we're relying on ourselves being injured and we're relying on killing enemies with spells which is not something we're overly specialized in doing now that's not to say the school of necromancy is always bad undead thralls is the level six level building I think it's a reasonably good ability so what happens is if you don't have animate dead you now get it in your spell book and then when you cast it instead of getting one skeleton or zombie you get two and in addition to that they're boosted they get your wizard level in additional hit points and they get your proficiency bonus for weapon damage rolls now this isn't something that's going to scale wonderfully well at high levels now there's some theory crafting here on how you could create literal armies of skeletons if you were a high-level wizard but that's not practical it's certainly not to optimization it's so this is really just theory crafting you're gonna have trouble actually using that in any kind of real campaign but and I'm a dead you're gonna be able to use fairly reliably in the campaign so you're gonna get a couple thralls using one third level slot and they're just a little bit better than you would expect so they have the standard use of anime dead of being that safe person who can walk through the the hallway and set off the traps but in addition in combat get a couple skeletons with bows they're gonna have a little bit of extra hit points they're gonna do a little bit of extra damage and you add that in every round and that can really add up now they still die reasonably easily but we can use another level spell to bring them back so in the end it becomes a fairly effective way to add a little bit to our action economy and add a little bit to the damage we can do in combat so overall pretty good so a tenth level we get in there to death which basically it gives us resistance necrotic damage and makes it so our hit point maximum can't be reduced so they're generally its undead that have this ability where if they attack you you make a constitution saving throw and if you fail your hit point maximum is reduced and usually there are also the creatures that do necrotic damage so it kind of goes together it makes you very good against things like wraiths but against ninety percent maybe 95 percent of the creatures you're gonna be fighting this disease I'm gonna come up necrotic damage isn't something you take a lot if you are getting a resistance to bashing slashing piercing that comes up a lot fire cold they come up a reasonable about necrotic just isn't all that common unless it you're in a campaign where that is kind of this style sometimes you know you're in a campaign where it's going to be super Undead heavy or maybe you're going up against another big tough necromancer so you know the cleric damage is on the table but in most cases it's going to be circumstantial I mean I've gone entire campaigns or have never taken necrotic damage so so again this ability useful in the right circumstance but overly circumstantial that princess to our fourteenth level ability command Undead so what command and allow you to do is it allows you to take control of an undead that you don't control even if it is normally controlled by somebody else so you pick the creature they make it charisma saving throw if they fail that's a saving throw they are under your control that could be really good you get some pretty powerful and dead that way the thing is is that as we get into more powerful undead they also intend to be more intelligent undead and if they have an intelligent score of eight or higher they get advantage on the saving throw so it's not likely to work on the vampire or the Lich which is too bad I would love to be able to have control the Lich and the thing is this doesn't even have a duration it lasts until you use this ability again so it could last a long long time you know if you ever get lucky enough to all the Lich you could potentially just keep that Lich as this feature until that Lich is destroyed it might be a long time so this ability again it's somewhat circumstantial and I'm not sure it's gonna work against the really tough undead but think about it this way a knight walker is a CR 20 creature has an intelligence of six which means they wouldn't get advantage on saves against this it has a charisma save of minus one so it's almost certainly gonna work on it and it doesn't have legendary resistance so theoretically if you're lucky enough to go up against the knight Walker you could get a CR 20 creature fairly reliably with this feature basically permanently so I can't give this a low score because it's so so good in the right circumstance so I think this is a reasonably good ability I do think there's some problems with circumstance here because we're not always going against undead or against tough undead but in the right circumstance it's so so so amazing overall I think it's a pretty good ability might be one of the best ones that the necromancer gets so what am i doing if I'm playing a necromancer character well I'm definitely taking advantage of animate data doing it at least once probably going to have some kind of character that can maybe carry around a backpack full of bowland so I can create a couple skeletons on the fly and I'm going to use that as much as I can have those animated skeletons there with bows maybe I can give the magical bow that might be useful too and just have them do that additional damage every round we can also have them do other things like deliver the help action of things that might help party members out but increasing our action economy or increasing our damage and I'm going to have to do that as often as I can starting at level six and that's kind of the way I'd be looking at making a necromancer other than that I don't think I would have a huge bias towards using necromancy spells because a lot of necromancy spells are very good so even the boost they get from necromancer aren't making them all night great they're still pretty bad so I probably would still stay away from those I would look at flavoring other spells to make them necromancy like so if I'm casting something like a light spell it's not creating a bright yellow light it's creating a sickly green light make it kind of necromancy like and we can flavor our spell so they still fit the concept of the necromancer without having the weakness of the necromancy spells the next one is the school of transportation a lot of people consider this one the worst one I think it's better than necromancy I don't think it's great though one thing I definitely don't like about it is the building you get right at second level minor alchemy allows you to change the substance of an object from one thing to another but there's a limited number of things allowed you can do wood stone iron copper and silver and you can transform it into another one of those things and you can only do so for a temporary period of time so the obvious thing is you turn a block of wood to a block of silver then you could maybe rip somebody off by selling it off as as actual silver and then an hour later they'll figure out they've been had that's about it I I don't see a lot of other uses for this and that's a pretty crappy use I mean there's other things we can do to trick people were a wizard so this ability all in all I think is a pretty bad ability so how about ability that's decent the transmitters stone so what it does is it gives you the ability to create a stone requires eight hours free to create it and then it can give you one of varying effects and you can keep it for yourself to get those effects or you can to an ally to give them the effects and whenever you cast a transmutation spell a first level or higher you can change the effect and what you can do is you can do dark vision up to 60 feet increase speed of 10 feet efficiency and Constitution saving throws or resistance to cold acid fire lightning or thunder damage you choose which one so the one that is going to happen the most often is keeping it yourself and getting proficiency in Constitution saves because Constitution saves are your safes for concentration so immediately a transmuter is better at concentration saves than other casters starting at six level now we can essentially replicate that with something like resilience Constitution but then again the transmuter could get war caster instead so now they're getting advantage plus the Constitution save bonus so overall I think it's a pretty nice boost for the transmuter makes their concentration a little bit better and that is going to affect how we look at spells because once we get to sixth level spells that require concentration we have a little more reliance that we're going to be able to maintain them it's also going to affect how we look at feats because normally we want to get to indulgence 20 as soon as possible but we're worried about concentration safe so there is this idea that maybe at 4th level or 8th level we should be looking at war caster or resilient Constitution instead but with the transmuter we're already getting that bonus to constitution saving throws if we want them which we probably do but in addition to that we're also adding some versatility because we can trade off that Constitution saving throw bonus for something else or we could give that concentrations a bonus to another caster if they're concentrating on something important so the transmitter stone is reasonably good it's not super super powerful but it's pretty powerful and it's versatile and it can be compassed around so I think it's a pretty good ability all together so now we're back to a letdown at level 10 we get shape-changer so what happens is is that 10th level we add polymorph to our spell book if we didn't have it already of course we're tenth level we're a wizard of course we took polymorph at level seven so we're not getting an additional spell at our spell book why wouldn't we polymorph already and then what we can do is we can cast polymorph what's for short rest without using a spell slot but here's the restriction can only be cast on yourself and could only be a beast with the child rating of 1 or lower so it's just utility that's all it is and it's not like you're giving yourself wild shape because unlike wild shape you're not keeping your mental stats so if you turn yourself into a fly you have the intelligence of a fly so if you're thinking that you can use that to be a great Scout okay how much does a fly really remember can I fly really go through a dungeon and come out and then tell you exactly what they saw I don't think so you're lucky if you're gonna get what was in the last room so even from a utility point I think this is pretty limited and it's limited use so all in all I just don't think it's that useful and it's a pretty big disappointment for a level 10 ability so then we get to our capstone at 14th level master transmitter this one's pretty interesting so what allows you to do is you can use an action to consume the magic in your transmitter stone so if you use this your stones destroyed you have to make a new one takes you eight hours that's it not the end of the world but it does limit how often this can be used and you need to remember that after you use it you're not going to have your transmuter stone anymore until you have that eight hours also you can't rebuild your fence meters stone till after you've had a long list which is not a big deal as major stone it's gonna take you eight hours to make anyway so there's four things you can do with your transmitters stone using this ability the first is major transformation you can transmute one non magical object no larger than a five-foot cube into another non magical object of similar size and mass of equal or lesser value you must spend 10 minutes handling the object to transform it this might have some kind of really useful use I'm not sure what that would be we already have the ability to transform this substance an item is made from I mean I think of what a concern can do at second-level and I have trouble seeing how much better this is than that or ways this is going to be used that's much better than that this is a 14th level ability and is using up our transmitter stone I'm expecting something amazing a non-magical item into another non magical item there must be some great use for this I'm not sure what it is another ability it gets is restore youth so you use up this transmitters stone and your apparent age is reduced by 3 D 10 years thing is it doesn't actually reduce your age by 3 D 10 years so you can still die of old age exactly the same as you would if you didn't use this ability so we're not actually reducing agents all we're really doing is changing appearance like you might do with say a first level disguised self spell or a hat of disguise except with less versatility again this really doesn't speak to me I'm not seeing how this is going to be of a lot of value to pretty much any character the next one is a restore life so what restore life does is you use your action destroy the stone and now you can cast a raise dead spell without using a spell slot now I guess one advantage here is raised ad normally isn't available to Wizards so now you can cast it but I mean if you read this kind of sloppily you might think that you're getting that raised dead as that action of destroying the stump but you're not what it's doing is it's giving you the ability to cast the spell so now you still have to use the verbal semantics and the costly material component you still have to use the hour of casting time so it's really just the raise dead spell now if you don't have raised dead in your party this might still be relatively useful because it is a way you can bring back dead party members so in the right kind of party this is okay but not great so that brings us to the only ability I think I've ever really used this for and that's panacea panacea for some reason is just so much better than all the other abilities you remove all curses diseases and poisons affect any creature you touch with the transmitter stone oh that's that's okay the creature also regains all its hit points so if you think about it this is a 14th level so we're a character that can probably cast 7th level spells take a look at for a moment a power he'll that's a ninth level spell the abilities here aren't that much different now the alternate effects that power word heal effects I think are better than the ones panacea effects but that either you can restore all hit points it's pretty massive for this level of ability think of a heal spell a six level heal spell heals 70 hit points casts it with the seventh level slot it's healing 70 hit points with this ability we can heal any number of hit points you can have hundreds of hit points healed with this ability now your allies don't have hundreds of hit points but they may very well have over a hundred fourteenth level that's easy to accomplish and you can bring them all back a hundred percent of them without using a spell what action that is pretty astounding so that alone I think makes visibility pretty good so it's not nearly as versatile as it sounds because it shows these four abilities but three of them I think aren't all that great but one of them is really good and so for that reason I think that ability becomes pretty good so how am I going to make a transmutation wizard that's different than other Wizards well the main thing I'm thinking about is I'm going to have that advantage on concentration says-- and so I'm thinking I would probably want to combine that with something like war caster eventually to make myself pretty much concentration proof but unlike say a conjurer wizard where you're looking at a certain type of spell we can open ourselves up to all kinds of spells and be basically concentration proof the other way you might use it is as a buff so I might use it if there's another strong spell caster in the group to give them their proficiency on concentration States I could definitely see doing that at level 6 with a cleric because a level 6 cleric is going in too Malay with that spirit Guardians that does so much but it's so easily disrupted but if you give that cleric proficiency and constitution saving throws it makes that a lot harder to bring down which is pretty useful again this isn't one of the wizards more excited about but I think there are some abilities there that make it a decent subclass so that's all the players and book arcane traditions so now we're going to talk about the two arcane traditions that aren't in the players handbook that's the blade singer and the war mage neither of these ones have the spell school savant so they're going to get additional abilities at second level that's kind of nice because in every case those are better than the sub school savant and these are both pretty good subclasses so the first one we're going to talk about is the blade sinner now the blade singer is restricted to elves are half-off solely now being restricted to elves and half-elves isn't that big a deal because those are both decent races for wizards in fact the high elf is probably one of the best races for wizards so it's not a big deal I mean you have less choices in your race selection but there are good races available for you to select so it's second level again you get two abilities because you don't get the spell school savant the first one you get is training in war and song so you get proficiency in light armor which is okay I mean generally at low levels mage armor is gonna be better than light armor so you probably going to want to use mage armor but eventually you're going to be looking at things like studded leather +2 or studded leather +3 and suddenly light armor becomes better than mage armor so then you can make that change so that's still okay you also get proficiency in one type of malaya weapon and that is probably going to be a rapier because your character is naturally going to be kind of push towards a dexterity built and so so the rapier is probably the best one-handed weapon for dexterity and so although elves get weapon proficiencies one thing they don't get is rapier so that's where you pick it up and finally you're going to get the proficiency in the performance skill I don't consider the performance skill a particularly useful skill it's certainly the matically appropriate for this kind of character so yeah okay you get some decent stuff here's the one I really like of course check the level it's blade song so what blade song does is use a bonus action to activate it you can do it twice for short rest so you're not doing it in every combat because assuming you're going to be doing more than two encounters personal arrest some combats you won't get it the other thing to remember is because of initiative you sometimes won't have it up at the very beginning of combat and enemies may be attacking you before you raise your plate song so just keep those things in mind as you listen to what this does but what it brings you is a lot of great especially defensive abilities now last for one minute or until you've incapacitate it so probably a full battle and you gain a bonus to your armor class equal to your intelligence modifier that's kind of the premier thing here so right at second level you're probably looking at a +3 bonus to armor class so you have 10 armor class plus 3 from your mage armors 13 plus 3 more from this brings you to 16 plus you could use a shield spell to bring it up to 21 that's gonna be higher than any other member of the party your walking speed increases by 10 feet which is okay I'll always take additional movement especially when I'm talking about a character that is going to be entering my way and you will as a blade Center you have advantage on dexterity acrobatics checks I think that's pretty circumstantial but it comes up maybe occasionally and then this one is the other really big one whenever you make a concentration save you're going to add your intelligence modifier to the saving throw so again another wizard that's really really good at maintaining concentration and this is kind of important for a blade Center because you're probably going to be targeted with more attacks now you can have a lot of them missed because you have a better armor class but some of them are going to hit and when they do having that bonus to sit maintain your concentration he's pretty important so overall blade songs just amazing bonus to AC bonus the concentration I love those two things and the other buildings are fine and we can do it reasonably often and it uses a bonus action which is pretty easy so overall just a terrific ability and at six level we get an extra attack now there's some question over whether we're better off using say an attack can't rip like a booming blade or a green flame blade or using an extra attack to attack twice and when it comes down to really is what kind of weapon you using if you're using a non-magical rapier yeah you're better off doing actually a booming blade most of the time assuming that once in a while you're going to trigger that secondary damage but once your weapon gets better then it's probably better for you to use the second attack unless you think you can trigger that secondary damage all the time another nice thing about extra attack is unlike booming bleh the green flame blade it's not restricted to Malay weapons because we can do our blade song while we're using a bowl and we're an elf so we can use a bowl and we probably have a good dexterity so might as well use a bowl so if we get a decent bow we still might be a decent archer on top of being a decent Malay character on top of being a full wizard and a tenth level we get song of defense now what song of defence does is when you take damage you can expend a spell slot to reduce the amount of damage you took and the amount you reduce is five times the spell level you expended so if you expend a first-level slot you reduce the damage by five if you do if you expand a fifth level slot you reduce the damage by twenty five so that's a fair amount the problem is of course is you're a wizard you hate giving up your spell slots but then again we can use this to avoid concentration safes or reduce the difficulty of concentration safes so in the right situation that's a sacrifice that's maybe still worthwhile in taking when I'm a wizard I love to layer my defenses I love to have lots of defensive options so we've got a character that's adding intelligence bonus to armor class of course we're going to have spells that improve our defense and now we have ability to reduce our damage under our control uses op resources but we can choose what resources we are willing to use up and have increased amounts of damage reduced based on the value of that resource that's a really nice ability now we tend to be more focused on defense here than offense but that's not necessarily a bad thing when we talked about rules within the party I talked about that tank character wanting to be up front and somebody who you want to be able to draw enemy attacks well this is again who can have a really really strong armor class and they can go up front and are they gonna draw enemy attacks yeah they're the wizards so they're probably casting things like hypnotic pattern now they're concentrating on it everyone wants to get them and they're upfront they're taking those enemy attacks they can have a lot of them miss by things like shield spell and the improved armor class they get through blade song but those that do hit they can often still avoid concentration saves by using this ability so I'll take this ability all day long and finally at fourteenth level song of victory finally we're getting a bonus to damage this is really the first bonus to damage that we get with a blade singer and we're going to add our intelligence modifier to any damage role and I think this is reasonably good but the thing about a blade singer is is by 14th level we're a wizard we are a full wizard fourteenth level we're into seventh level wizard spells we have a ton of spells now are we really going to want to go up and poke things with our rapier probably not very much once in a while yes what are we gonna want to do it when we're concentrating on another spell now that's when we're gonna want to hit things with a weapon and then we're gonna do a little bit of extra damage and with our extra attack it's a little bit more extra damage now this doesn't affect things like a bow this is only Millea attacks but I do think that this will come up reasonably often it's not going to be the primary purpose of what we do it's kind of give a bonus to kind of a secondary thing of what we do but that's okay I still think it's a reasonable bonus to that so blade sinner is the one that really took me the longest to get my head around because I was used to blade Center like from second edition and in second edition he made an elf that was a fighter wizard multi-class half and half right and then you took the blade singer kit and that allowed you to combine that was a little more effectively but you were kind of primarily a fighter you tended to do the standard fighter stuff most of the time with an occasional spell and then with third addition again we saw the blade sooner again and again it was kind of this class that mixed fighter and wizard kind of equally and again you would kind of mix between one and the other fairly seamlessly and you weren't as good at either of them as a straight class but you were good at both of them Mao came blade singer in 5th edition and I read it and then I thought how do I make this a decent fighter this isn't that great a fighter we don't really have all the bonuses to damage we would expect from fighter style classes so how is this going to deliver good damage in combat and I start to look at multi class options and it took me a long time to kind of figure out you don't you don't worry about doing as much damage as other things in combat you're gonna do okay damage especially at lower levels at second level when you don't have a lot of spells you're gonna be almost as good at Millay as any other character and as we go out that'll reduce a little bit as we go on but our spell casting is going to improve as we go on so the thing to remember about the blade singer is you are not a multi-class you're a wizard we're a full wizard you cast spells as well as any other wizard you just happen to be able to go into Malaya and survive and be able to hit things with a rapier and do a moderate amount of damage you can probably draw a lot of their attacks away from your party and have those attacks either miss or reduce their damage and that's kind of what a blade sinner does now do we ever want to buff ourselves to make ourselves better in my way yeah sometimes sometimes that's still a good option I'm not convinced we're always the best choice for a buff sometimes there's gonna be other characters who you talk about some like a haste someone else might get more from a haste than we would and we should really look at that and get the most out of those kinds of spells but that doesn't mean we're not gonna Millay even at higher levels again once we're concentrating on a powerful spell then you can't cast another concentration spell so what can you do that doesn't require concentration you can stab stuff so that's what you're gonna do and that's when you're gonna do it so overall blade singing a lot of fun and different different than any other wizard that brings us to our final subclass the war mage war magic this one came out in XANA thar's I was really excited for it because we were told it was going to be some kind of combination between AB duration and a vocation and wondered what that would look like once I saw it I realized it's not really a combination of AB duration and E vocation at all really what a warm age is is what we used to call a generalist or a universalist they are really pretty good at a little bit of everything so if you want a caster that's just good at casting all kinds of spells war mage is your choice it's the ultimate non-specialists and I love what the war mage gets at second level again they don't get the spell school savant which isn't a big loss instead they get two amazing abilities right at second level so the first one is our cane deflection so when you ever you are hit by an attack where you fail a saving throw you can use through your reaction to get a +2 to a C or a +4 to that sitting through a roll so one way that this is different than shield is with shields you don't know whether they hit you or not but arcane deflection you can bring into effect after they hit you know plus two bonus isn't much small other bonus than a +5 bonus but that little difference is important but when I'm mainly excited about this one is the +4 on the field saving throw because if I fail a concentration saving throw and I can go back and add +4 and make it a success that is HUGE that is HUGE at level one that is huge at level 20 because as we move up in levels we're going to be concentrating more and more and more and those concentration says become more and more important being able to turn a Miss into a success is insane and this is going to add with things like resilient con and wor caster we get this in addition to that terrific now the restriction is when we use this ability we can't cast anything but can't rates until the end of our next turn so is that a big deal well if I'm concentrating on something that's no not a big deal at all because it's the concentrating on that spell that's the important thing I'm doing I'm fine just using you can't rip until the end in my next turn now if I wasn't concentrating on anything and maybe I used it to have an attack mace that hurts a little bit especially at higher levels at lower levels not so much because we're probably doing can trips most of the time anyway and we can just use this ability over and over again so I really like it it's only good against one attack though so unlike a shield that lasts an entire and can stop many many attacks this can only be used against one so there is a limit there I think again I think the bonus to AC isn't as good as the bonus to saving throws but this bonus to saving throws isn't just for concentration saves this is for any saving throw and hint you want to make all your saving throws saving throws are usually for something important so being able to go back to a failed saving throw and add plus for after the fact is immense and that's just one of our abilities at second level I don't even know it's the best one because the other one is so good tactical wit you get a bonus to initiative equal to your intelligence modifier that's gonna be a +5 that's like the best part of the alert feat and you're getting it at level 2 for free and you could get the alert feed and you could add it on and I'm kind of tempted to do so because then that could be a +10 bonus plus your dexterity yes now if you don't know this if you are playing a character that specializes in battlefield control or area of effect spells that affect enemies and allies winning initiative is really important so this is a huge bonus for any character for a wizard it's especially good so again to just astounding abilities right at level 2 then at level 6 we get the power surge so starting at 6 level you can store magical energy within yourself to later empower your damaging spells in this stored form this energy is called a power surge you can store maximum number of power surges equal to your intelligence modifier minimum of 1 in case you playing a wizard with an intelligence of 10 I guess whenever you finish a long rest your number of power surges resets to 1 whenever you successfully end a spell with dispel magic or counter spell you gain 1 power surge as you steal magic from the spell you foiled if you end a short rest with no power surges you gain 1 power surge ok so a lot of mechanics about how you gain and you lose power surges how many you can store was a power surge do this is what it does once per turn when you deal damage to a creature or an object with the wizard spell you can spend one power surge to deal extra force damage that target the extra damage equals half your wizard level so this is not a lot of damage and we and if you look at the mechanics for how power surges are gained or lost it looks like you're going to stop start most combats with maybe two or three available and then you can add half your wizard level a few times so does this make blast spells better yes it does does it make them a lot better no it doesn't do that but it makes them a little bit better so and it also makes a counter spell a little bit better and it makes our dispel magic a little bit better and our bonus to initiative made our battle field controls a little bit better and our masked B buffs a little bit better so if you notice how this is going we're making all our spells a little bit better so what kind of spell mix do I want with his character I kind of want a little bit of everything because if I go over hard on damaging spells those power surges are gone if I go overly strong on biocontrol I'm not getting advantage of my power surges so this really encourages us to have a diverse spell list I don't mind that a bit then a tenth level we get durable magic durable magic which is good whenever we're concentrating on a spell well guess what when you're tenth level you're concentrating on spells all the time probably 80% of the time you're concentrating on a spell happens all the time most the time you're concentrating on spell and you wonder what else you should be doing because I'm busy concentrating on a spell so this is coming up pretty much all the time and while you do it you get a plus to the armor class and to all saving throws so extra defense and extra saving throw boosts both good things plus we can combine this with the arcane deflection so we could potentially get a plus 6 on our concentration says-- and we haven't even added any feats yet we're a constitution bonus yet so that is really quite good it's going to make concentration exceedingly hard to break for a weight war mage what spell school improves from that all of them again all of them they all get better from that now plus two bonus isn't a huge bonus but when we're talking about armor class and saving sauce it's actually pretty good I mean a plus two AC that's like four extra points Dex and +22 a saving throw is like first level proficiency in everything so don't get yourself that plus two is nothing it is something it is significant so so much fantastic things packed into this sub class at level 10 can we continue to level 14 nope a fourteenth level we get deflecting shroud whenever we use our RK arcane deflection feature we can absorb from the energy and send it out to somebody else up to three creatures within sixty feet take damage equal to half my wizard level so at 20th level that's ten points of damage to three creatures big deal right that's a capstone it's actually the worst ability this subclass gets is our capstone ability and that's just fine I don't hold it against the subclass at all it has given us so much level 2 at level 6 at level 10 I'm okay not getting a lot at level 14 so what kind of character am I gonna make with a war mage well I'm gonna make a character that is diverse in the kind of spells they can cast and take advantage of those general bonuses like bonuses to saving throws like Moses to concentration says furnaces to armor class voices to damage of spells and I'm probably looking for a campaign that is going to be a lower level campaign this is the kind of character I want to play in a 10 level campaign or a 12 level campaign when I'm playing a 20 level campaign now I'm looking at the Capstone's of things like the illusionist and thinking I would like to get that but if I'm playing just a regular wizard and I want to be a standard diverse wizard then this is really a good choice for you so I hope I've given you some ideas on how these different arcane traditions can create for wizards that are different from each other because although the Wizards spell list is kind of the primary feature of the wizard I think these abilities that the subclasses get are good enough that it's really going to affect which spells we take and what roles we fill within the party and I've probably given you some hints as to the way you might expect those builds to look when we get to them but the next thing we're going to look at next week is what roles the wizard can fill in the party and that's kind of why I wanted to do this class 1 first is because obviously some of the things I talked about today are going to affect some of those roles we can fill so until next time thank you so much for joining me all 5,000 of you to our first treant monks guide the Wizards and until next week I'm gonna sit back and I'm gonna relax I'm gonna have some fun because Dee Dee's for everyone thanks everyone see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Treantmonk's Temple

Views: 106,492

Rating: 4.9315929 out of 5

Keywords: Wizard, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, DnD, Guide, Treantmonk, Analysis, Spells, Feats, Races, Diviner, Bladesinger, Abjurer, Conjurer, Necromancer, Transmuter, Enchanter, Evoker, Charop, subclass, arcane tradition

Id: fSFuGYVIhGU

Length: 92min 50sec (5570 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SpikeRosered]

Some important points to take from this video:

An Illusionist and Conjurer's power directly correlates to how the DM interpretes how their abilities work.

A War Magic and Spell Singer are partly powerful because they get better abilities than the other subclasses' Savant ability at level 2.

War Magic should be considered a generalist Wizard.

Abilities that protect your capacity to concentrate on spells are king.

[u/0rdinaryGatsby]

OMG I didn't know this guy had a YouTube channel. Goodbye weekend.

[u/ilxmordy]

Any chance we can get a transcript? Hour and a half video is just too long for me! Or a podcast maybe??

[u/FoWNoob]

!remind me 6 hours