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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rofel Wodring" data-source="post: 7266938" data-attributes="member: 6873189">Here's the experience that changed my mind about the utility of a Bladesinger. Mild spoilers.I've played the character in other DDAL modules, but my first real adventure was in Storm King's Thunder. And I played the character like a typical sorta-OP Bladesinger: focus on melee combat, use your spells as backup. This tactic does work pretty okay in SKT, because even during the traveling phase resources get stretched out.However, what changed was when we went to location [REDACTED] and fought an adult [REDACTED] dragon. We got some advance warning and I was looking through my spells to see what would help. Right away you know you're going to have a bad time trying to melee a dragon with the Bladesinger toolkit. None of your Disadvantage-on-Demand spells at level 9 or so help and dragons got enough attacks at a high enough bonus to break through Bladesong + Shield without too much trouble. Since I knew dragons had Legendary saves, my backup plan of Web / Evard's / Suggestion / etc. wouldn't work too well, especially since my regular group at the time was melee-heavy except for a Dragonborn Sorcerer.So while agonizing over how to deal with this situation and going through my spell list repeatedly, I noticed something: during a throwaway game of DDAL, I was lucky enough to meet up with another wizard and got to copy his spells. We were only level 5 at the time, but adding 20 spells to your spellbook is not an opportunity you turn down. And there was one spell I had completely overlooked until then: Ray of Enfeeblement. I realized that if I just spent the whole combat casting that, the only thing I'd have to worry about is the dragon breath (which is still a huge worry!). They could Legendary Save all they want, but I'd still get at least one round of halving all of their strength damage.That turned an encounter I was dreading into a joke. The ancient blue dragon only got off one dragon's breath and the party laughed off the attacks. Yes, by round three I was drawing the dragon's full attention, but only about half of the attacks from then on hit me (I rolled terribly on the Wing Attack saves, sigh) between Shield and it was survivable. Everyone else rolled like crap -- I was super-fortunate to hit every round, since at a +4 INT/+4 proficiency bonus hitting was not guaranteed.That encounter taught me two things: the first one is that there are some things a Bladesinger can do that a lot of traditional wizards can't do. The other one is that I would be playing more like a traditional wizard from then on out.</blockquote>

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