As we continue our final subclass review series, we now come to the second half of the PHB Wizard subclass options. Themed around the eight schools of magic, Wizards are one of the two classes to get a very large number of subclasses in the PHB, compared to some that only got two. We've seen a bit of variance in power levels, though any Wizard is going to benefit a lot from just their spell list.
As a note, I'm going to shorthand the "Savant" features, as these are the same across the eight PHB subclasses, just relating to their school. Your gold cost and copying time for spells of your school will be halved. It's nice but hardly exciting.
So, let's pick things up again:
School of Evocation:
If your main motivation for playing a Wizard is to toss powerful damage spells around like fireball or lightning bolt, this is the subclass that will best support that style of play. While there are some non-damaging evocation spells like Sending, most of the direct damage bursts are of this school.
You get Evocation Savant!
Also, at 2nd level you get Sculpt Spells. When you can an evocation spell that affects other creatures you can see, you can choose a number of them equal to 1 + the spell's level. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saves and even if they'd normally still take half damage on a success, they instead take none. This is huge - you can now safely drop fireballs on up to four friends without worrying about them at all. This is better than a Sorcerer's Careful Spell metamagic, as that will still allow "protected" creatures to take half damage, whereas here, they take absolutely zilch. So toss a fireball into the melee group without fear!
At 6, you get Potent Cantrip. When a creature succeeds on a saving throw against a damaging cantrip of yours, they still take half damage (but no other effects.) This means that, unless the creature is immune to the damage type or you roll a 1 on a cantrip before level 5, you can ensure that your foe will take at least some damage from every single cantrip you cast on them. Cantrips do scale up in damage, and this makes them very reliable. A great feature. This will encourage the use of saving throw cantrips like Acid Splash or Frostbite rather than attack-roll ones like Firebolt.
At 10, you get Empowered Evocation. You can add your Intelligence modifier to one damage roll of any wizard evocation spell you cast. Now, let's talk the nuances of Magic Missile. The vast majority of people treat this spell as having you roll 1d4+1 a separate time for each dart the spell creates. And I think that's a reasonable way to do it. If that were how the spell worked, you'd only add your Intelligence modifier once to the total damage of the spell. But technically, this (and I believe Scorching Ray) actually only require you to make a single roll, and each dart (or ray? Though they can crit, so I could be wrong about those) deals the same amount. This would mean that you are effectively adding your Intelligence modifier to every dart, which makes that spell way, way more powerful, and very good when up-cast. (With an Intelligence modifier of +5, if this is how it works, you'd be doing 1d4+6 per dart, or 8.5. That means that a 6th-level Magic Missile, which shoots 8 darts, would deal 68 damage. That's not super far off from the average of 75 damage Disintegrate does, but while Disintegrate is a save-for-none spell, this is an automatic hit, which is cuh-razy.) Even without these shenanigans, you're still adding a bit of damage to your spells, which is nice (and it'll include evocation cantrips.)
At 14th level, you get Overchannel. If you cast a wizard spell of 1st-through-5th level that deals damage (not just evocation) you can choose to deal the maximum damage for that spell. You can do this once safely per long rest. If you do it another time, you take 2d12 necrotic damage for each level of the spell, and each subsequent time you do it again before taking a long rest, you take an additional 1d12 damage. Notably, this ignores resistance and even immunity - you will take the damage.
Naturally, this is a feature you'll want to be careful with, but when you need to hit really freaking hard, it's a nice tool in your arsenal. This can cause spells to deal nearly double their average damage. For example, a fireball or lightning bolt does an average of 28 damage, but if you Overchannel it, it will do an automatic 48. Meteor Swarm does an average of 140 total damage, but with this it'll do 240. How's an extra hundred damage sound?
Evocation is very good at doing what it does, and what it does is what a lot of players (especially new ones, though damage output is always nice to have) want to do.
School of Illusion:
This is a subclass all about deception. Rather than directly messing with peoples' minds, you focus on their perceptions, and that can be very potent. Note that you'll need a cooperative DM to really take the ramifications of your illusions seriously, and that they'll have to roll with some crazy BS, though that's tons of fun.
You get Illusion Savant!
Also at 2 you get Improved Minor Illusion. You learn Minor Illusion if you don't know it already, and it doesn't count against your wizard cantrips known (I'd allow someone who took it early to just grab a different one. Given that as of Tasha's Wizards can just swap out cantrips on a long rest, you can treat this as a "School Spell" like Clerics have domain spells.) Additionally, when you cast Minor Illusion, you can create both a sound and image with a single cast.
At level 6, you get Malleable Illusions. Starting at 6th level, if you cast an illusion spell with a duration of 1 minute or longer, you can use your action to change the nature of that illusion within the spell's normal parameters if you can see it. This lets you adjust the illusion on the fly, which might help aid in the deception. It'll also come in handy with later features.
At 10, you get Illusory Step. As a reaction when a creature makes an attack roll against you, you can interpose an illusory duplicate between the attacker and yourself. The attack automatically misses you and then the illusion disappears. You can do this once per short or long rest. Essentially you can do a minor Mirror Image as a reaction, and anything that makes it easier for a squishy wizard to survive will be a big help.
At level 14, you get Illusory Reality. When you cast a spell of 1st level or higher, you can choose one inanimate, nonmagical object that is part of the illusion and make the object real. You can do this as a bonus action while the spell is ongoing. The object remains real for 1 minute. As an example, you can create an illusion of a bridge over a chasm and then make it real enough for your allies to cross. The object can't deal damage or harm anyone.
This is where this gets insane, and makes illusion almost more like conjuration. Consider, for instance, that if someone suspect that you're using a magical disguise and reaches for the non-existent hat you're wearing, you can suddenly make it real. And also, in that bridge scenario, maybe the monsters give chase after you cross it. So you drop concentration on the spell, and they fall into the chasm. Really, truly powerful.
This is the sort of subclass that can pull of some utterly insane stuff if the DM is willing to reward a creative player, and I love that.
School of Necromancy:
Ah, the spookiest of subclasses. You'll be stealing life, raising the dead, and overall just being a A+ spooky boy/girl/person. While Wizards of any school can potentially be bad guys, this is a subclass where you'll need to kind of work hard to justify not being at best morally neutral, and very likely just evil.
You get Necromancy Savant!
Also at 2 you get Grim Harvest. Once per turn when you kill one or more creatures with a spell of 1st level or higher, you regain hit points equal to twice the spell's level, or three times if it's a spell from the school of necromancy. You don't get this from killing constructs or undead. It is not unheard of for Wizards to get killing blows, and this can fill you back up. What I don't know is if this would count if your zombies from Danse Macabre killing something would count for this - I suspect no, but it seems within the DM's interpretation.
At 6th level, you add Animate Dead to your spellbook if it's not there already. When you cast the spell, you can target one additional corpse or pile of bones, creating an additional zombie or skeleton, respectively. When you create any undead with a Necromancy spell, the creature's hit point maximum is increased by an amount equal to your Wizard level, and it adds your proficiency bonus to weapon damage rolls. (Note that Summon Undead, from Tasha's, does count as Necromancy - while it's similar to the other "Summon" spells, it's the only one that is not of the Conjuration school, and thus works with this.)
At 10, you get Inured to Undeath. You have resistance to Necrotic damage and your hit point maximum cannot be reduced. This is pretty cool given that a lot of incorporeal undead have these sort of life-drain effects, so if your Necromancer fights a lot of undead creatures, you'll be very resilient against them.
Finally, at 14, you get Command Undead. As an action, you can choose an undead creature you can see within 60 feet of you and force them to make a Charisma saving throw. If they succeed, you cannot use this feature on them again. But if they fail, they become friendly to you and obey your commands until you use this feature again. (Notably this doesn't officially count as a charm, thus getting around any immunity to the charmed condition.)
Intelligent undead are harder to control this way. If its intelligence is 8 or higher, it has advantage on the saving throw, and if it's 12 or higher, it can repeat the save at the end of every hour until it succeeds and breaks free.
Ok.
So.
While a Lich will burn a legendary resistance to save out of this and a Death Knight has a +10 to charisma saves, and both are smart enough to be able to repeat their saves, there are some very powerful undead you can use this on. A Nightwalker, a CR 20 undead monster (which I actually had occasion to use in tonight's game,) has a -1 to Charisma and only an intelligence of 6. So you could, with this feature, permanently gain control of one of these things pretty easily. Similarly, a Mummy Lord has a good chance of saving against it, being smart enough to get advantage and with a nice +8 Charisma save bonus (actually it has Magic Resistance anyway,) but if both rolls were low, you could have a Mummy Lord under your permanent control.
Nuts. Absolutely nuts.
Necromancy is a bit harder to use than simply conjuration given that you need the bodies to raise, and the power of the creatures you get is not significantly better. But not only do Necromancers have a lot of flavor behind them, but... again, have you seen Command Undead? Have you seen that you can take control of a FREAKING NIGHTWALKER?
Ahem.
School of Transmutation:
The magic of turning things into other things. Transmutation feels very much like a great option for a lot of utility - thematically good for a "toolbox" wizard. Let's look into their features:
You get Transmutation Savant! (And that's the last of these, phew!)
At 2 you also get Minor Alchemy. You can perform a ritual on an object made entirely of wood, stone (not precious stones,) iron, copper, or silver, and transform it into a different one of those materials. Each 10 minutes you spend, you can transform up to 1 cubic foot of material. After 1 hour, or until you lose concentration, the material reverts to its original substance. The utility of this is very much up to the imagination - though the concentration limit is a big limitation. You could turn some silver trade bars into platinum and hoodwink a moneychanger. Or, if you had a werewolf stalking around you tavern, you could transform the edge of your fighter's sword into silver. This one requires some creativity.
At 6, you get Transmuter's Stone. You can spend 8 hours creating a transmuter's stone, which grants a benefit to whoever carries the stone. When you create the stone, you choose one of the following: Darkvision to a range of 60 feet, 10 feet increased walking speed (as long as the creature is unencumbered), proficiency in Constitution saving throws, or resistance to your choice of acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder damage. When you cast a transmutation spell of 1st level or higher, you can switch the effect on the stone if it's on your person. And if you create another one, the previous stone ceases to function.
This is a textbook "toolbox" feature, which you can switch with relative ease depending on the situation. It's a lot of options for many different potential situations, which is nice to have.
At 10th level, you get Shapechanger. Polymorph is added to your spellbook if not there already. You can cast it once for free each short or long rest on yourself, transforming yourself into a besat of CR 1 or lower. Polymorph is a really useful and versatile spell, and getting a free one of them to, say, turn yourself into a bird to fly around, can be very handy. Naturally, you'll probably have Polymorph already in your spellbook, but this free use is nice.
At 14, you get Master Transmuter. You can use an action to consume your transmuter stone, destroying it but getting one of the following effects immediately:
Major Transformation: You can transmute a nonmagical object no larger than a 5-foot cube into another nonmagical obeject of a similar size and mass of equal or lesser value. You must spend at least 10 minutes handling the object to do this.
Panacea: You remove all curses, diseases, and poisons affecting a creature you touch with the stone, and they regain all their hit points.
Restore Life: You cast Raise Dead on a creature you touch with the stone, without expending a spell slot or needing to have the spell in your spellbook (given that it's not a Wizard spell, I don't know how you would have it there.)
Restore Youth: You touch the stone to a willing creature, and their apparent age is reduced by 3d10 years, to a minimum of 13 years. The effect doesn't extend the creature's lifespan. (This last part is BS. If you're a Transmuter you ought to be able to get the true Philosopher's Stone effect.)
Well, I was about to write off the Transmutation Wizard as sort of decent but with nothing flashy, but damn if this last feature doesn't change my mind (I should have remembered, because Caleb from Critical Role's second campaign used Master Transmuter to salvage the party during a very dire moment in the big boss fight at the end.) It's really kind of hard to argue with a Wizard who can bring people back to life. And Panacea is the best healing spell in the game, effectively.
Appropriately, a lot of these subclasses have really exciting capstone abilities, which unfortunately also means that most players won't actually be able to use the flashiest stuff. But I think at this point we've calibrated the power levels the designers were going for in the PHB, and we can see how things look in the later books (which generally have meant increases in power for most classes.)
The order of the remaining five subclasses is going to be a little tricky - the Bladesinger was published originally in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide before its reprint in Tasha's, so I think that will be next, followed by Xanathar's War Magic. Then we'll cover the two dunamantic subclasses out of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount along with the Order of Scribes from Tasha's.
And then that will be a review of all the subclasses! It's been fun going through these (and reinforcing my attempts to have an encyclopedic understanding of D&D, I guess). I've definitely felt a growing appreciation for subclasses I previously didn't think much of, like the Alchemist Artificer or the Circle of Stars Druid, though the reverse is also true, as I've found some disappointments (such as the Great Old One Warlock, which I sadly now think is one of the least powerful warlock subclasses, despite the fact that I adore its flavor.) Anyway, I think we've got 5th Edition around for a long time to come, and of course, the beauty of these all being in non-digital books is that even if some future 6th edition comes out, we can always return to this if we like it better.
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