D&D 5E (2014) [GUIDE] Arrive on Time - A General Guide to Wizardry

[Anıl Akbulut]

The guide is pretty damn fantastic, I keep coming back to it whenever I'm building a wizard in 5e, which turns out is a lot. The example builds at the end are pretty damn flavourful and cool in the sense they illustrate how two spells become much better when used in tandem like the Cloud of Daggers and zombie grappling combo. I hope you add a few more and/or make the current ones level 20 because that'd make this guide even better imo.

 

[Corran21]

What are you planning to use for your concentration spell?

Weirdly enough, stoneskin. It's going to be a 1-shot and I was hoping to check exactly how bad a hexblade1/phoenix14 would do in melee. In all likelihood it is going to be an epic fail, but at least I will go out with a . Will definitely pick up at least one more concentration spell, probably something like hypnotic pattern as you suggested, as this way I will free my higher level slots to use with AoA when necessary. I was also trying to convince one of the other players who will be plaing a bard to pick wall of stone as one of his magical secrets, so we can do a wall of fire + wall of stone combo (mostly for the fun of it -fun, as in a very horrible sort of way-), but he is not buying it
Anyway, not a very optimal plan, but something I really wanna try out and see how it goes.
Oh, thanks for mentioning burning hands too, had entirely forgotten it for some reason, I'll probably pick it up too, just so that I can cover for every possible case of when using fire spells.

 

[kevin piasecki]

First of all thank you for an awesome guide and all the effort you've put into it!
I'm not sure if anyone pointed it out before but there are 15 pages of posts so it's hard to check. Regarding the Evocation school. Empowered Evocation RAI/Errata still works with Magic Missile. You only roll once per spell and every missile does that damage making it : [1d4+(1+any applicable bonuses)]*amount of darts for a single target. This was pointed out in a tweet by Crawford: https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/557823175581769729

not accounting for magic items or additional features, assuming +5 INT :

spell slot lvl: dmg range:
1 21-30
3 35-50
5 49-70
and so on

With no save or attack roll I see it as an extremely potent ability even compared to Disintegrate or high spell slot Scorching Ray. What do you think?

 

[TheBigHouse]

First of all thank you for an awesome guide and all the effort you've put into it!
I'm not sure if anyone pointed it out before but there are 15 pages of posts so it's hard to check. Regarding the Evocation school. Empowered Evocation RAI/Errata still works with Magic Missile. You only roll once per spell and every missile does that damage making it : [1d4+(1+any applicable bonuses)]*amount of darts for a single target. This was pointed out in a tweet by Crawford: https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/557823175581769729

not accounting for magic items or additional features, assuming +5 INT :

spell slot lvl: dmg range:
1 21-30
3 35-50
5 49-70
and so on

With no save or attack roll I see it as an extremely potent ability even compared to Disintegrate or high spell slot Scorching Ray. What do you think?

Hey Kevin,

Thanks for your reply and compliment .

I'm pretty sure the PHB Errata supersedes that twitter post.

http://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/Errata_PH.pdf

Empowered Evocation (p. 117). The
damage bonus applies to one damage roll
of a spell, not multiple rolls.

Unfortunately, no spell gets to add empowered evocation multiple times. If you take this RAW, you also only get to add it once to spells like vitriolic sphere, wall of fire, and melf's minute meteors, even though they do damage across multiple rounds. . . I think that's stupid though, so we make some houserule exceptions.

The general idea is multi-hit spells like scorching ray and Magic Missile don't get empowered evocation more than once. I would be careful about houseruling Magic Missile to have more power. Since it never misses and is basically never resisted, any increase in damage is very potent. Think of it this way, adding +5 per ray to a level one magic missile is +15 damage, but since it is auto-hit that's roughly equal to adding +30 damage to a spell with an attack roll. That's probably a bit excessive.

 

[Yunru]

Thing is, the point of that twitter post was that magic missile only has one damage roll, applied multiple times. Each beam does the same 1d4+1 (+Int).

 

[TheBigHouse]

Thing is, the point of that twitter post was that magic missile only has one damage roll, applied multiple times. Each beam does the same 1d4+1 (+Int).

Gotcha.

Scorching ray from a level 3 slot (+4 int)
8d6+4 = 31
31 * .6 = 18.6 (slightly optimistic hit rate)

Magic Missile from level 3 slot with +4 int
5d4+5+20 = 35 (and a better damage type)

If your DM allows it and you want to do as much damage as possible, then it would definitely be the best choice. That said, I don't think I would allow it regardless of the tweet. It makes all other single target damage spells obsolete. That doesn't seem good for game balance.

 

[Yunru]

Me neither, it seems a rather awkward ruling in general.

 

[TheBigHouse]

The guide is pretty damn fantastic, I keep coming back to it whenever I'm building a wizard in 5e, which turns out is a lot. The example builds at the end are pretty damn flavourful and cool in the sense they illustrate how two spells become much better when used in tandem like the Cloud of Daggers and zombie grappling combo. I hope you add a few more and/or make the current ones level 20 because that'd make this guide even better imo.

Thanks! Feel free to drop example builds in the thread and I will add them.

 

[Solandros]

Great guide, any plans on updating it with volo's races? I'd love to see how some of them stack up and what combinations there are. For example the Goblins fury of the small feature combined with magic missile to let 1 of the missiles pack an extra punch of guaranteed damage once per rest, or if the bugbears' better reach synergizes with SCAG cantrips etc.

 

[zoglug]

Just want to say a huge thank you for this guide and the resulting discussion.

I am no closer to my spell list for my illusion wizard but the level of info here has been fantastic! It is very much appreciated.