Martials, Casters, and Balance

 If you play D&D casually, you probably aren't terribly invested in which classes or subclasses are the most powerful. You can have a great time playing any class, or even any (well, many) multiclass abominations.

But if you are cursed like me with the philosophical inclination to be all about story and thematic resonance but with a sick little addiction to making number go big, (or if you're just an unapologetic min-maxxer) you're probably aware that the general consensus is that spellcasters in D&D are more powerful than martial characters.

I think this is a problem for the following reason:

The point of balance in a game like this is, in my opinion, there to make your story-and-thematic choices for your character's build ones that feel like they're rewarding you instead of punishing you. The point of D&D should be for you to make a character that fulfills the story you've imagined in your head. Essentially, balance is the rules getting out of the way of the story.

Now, playing a spellcaster in D&D naturally comes with a power fantasy - you want to have supernatural capabilities that no human being has ever had in the real world (or outside of extraordinary and unverified tales if that's your belief system). But there is a fantasy as well in being the powerful martial character: you want to be the kind of person who can keep pace with such magical people with nothing but your wits, skills, and strength.

Ok, but what causes this imbalance?

On its surface, you could conclude that a spellcaster is not going to deal as much damage turn-to-turn because a cantrip doesn't scale as well as extra attack: consider Fire Bolt, among the highest-damage-potential cantrips in the game. At tier 1, it's doing 1d10 fire damage, which is 5.5. A character wielding a d8 weapon, though, will do 1d8+3, probably, at tier 1, meaning that they'd be doing 7.5 damage on a hit. While most classes don't get much beyond that extra attack boost at level 5, while a cantrip scales up at each tier of play, two attacks for 1d8+5 would be 9.5 each and thus 19 total, which does, yes, fall behind a tier 4 Fire Bolt (which does 4d10 and thus an average of 22) but many martial classes will have ways to get around that - Fighters getting more attacks, Barbarians adding larger rage bonuses, Paladins getting an extra d8 of damage, and Monks getting a higher damage die.

But while playing a pure caster in tier 1 is an exercise in spell slot conservation, pretty quickly, they can be more liberal with their spell slots, even if the higher-level ones are still somewhat precious. And while cantrips might not do a ton of damage, a Fireball that hits three or more targets is going to do more damage (generally) than a martial character would do in several turns. And even against a single target, a 5th level Wizard casting Fireball will do 28 damage on average (or 14 on a successful save - if we imagine a 50% success chance, it's an average of 21 damage overall).

Even in single target situations, casters can often outpace martial characters: I've written a lot about the Conjure Minor Elementals/Scorching Ray interaction, which does truly insane damage numbers. And that's before we even get into the harder-to-quantify utility of having spells that can teleport, crowd-control, or otherwise reshape the battlefield, as well as crucially important non-combat spells that can aid with traversal, finding objectives, and just generally helping the party.

The balance, then, I believe, is that martial characters are supposed to be more sustainable. Spell slots are a limited resource, and most classes don't get them back except on a long rest. Meanwhile, a Fighter's "swing sword" ability (aka, The Attack Action) never runs out. It's a cantrip, essentially, but other enhancements can also be bolted onto it. Weapon Masteries can add additional effects to your attacks, and also never run out. Feats like Great Weapon Master will also enhance those attacks, and never run out.

This is all well and good, but I think there are two issues as to why I don't think that's what we actually see:

First off, as many have pointed out, the way we play D&D in the 5E era, adventures tend to be more plot-oriented. The days of long, slow dungeon crawls are mostly in the past, such that other game systems have even been designed to try to recreate that old-school feel. In an edition shaped to a large extent by actual play shows like Critical Role, the idea of a lengthy day with as many as ten combat encounters between long rests is pretty alien. Instead, it's more likely that an adventuring day has one, two, or maybe three encounters if it's a really lengthy day. To make up for this, the encounters tend to be more challenging, with more and/or deadlier monsters. The 2024 DMG updating its encounter-building math to make fights significantly harder, giving a much larger XP budget than we had in 2014, and generally giving tougher encounters than the guidance in Xanathar's.

But what I think is often overlooked is the other issue: PC HP.

At a certain point, it's just not feasible for players to continue adventuring. If people are sitting at bloodied after using up all their hit dice on a short rest, they're simply not going to push on, and will instead do whatever they can to find an opportunity for a long rest. And not only do narratives often allow for this (in a dungeon crawl, it's usually not that hard to just retrace your steps back to the entrance and camp outside) but there are also lots of mechanics that really protect the ability to take a long rest at will - spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion in particular are the spells that will just pretty much say "no, I get to take a long rest and you (the DM) cannot prevent me from doing so."

If you imagine you've got a group of adventurers at, say, level 4, going through some dungeon, we can imagine that a Fighter might have, say, 40 HP. Even if they're fighting really low-level monsters, like Skeletons, each hit is going to be taking about 6.5 off of that total. If we figure a Skeleton had a 50% chance of hitting them (a +5 attack bonus against someone in chain mail with a 16 AC) then it would take roughly 12 attacks to take the Fighter down. That might seem like a lot, but if they're level 4, and fighting such low-CR monsters, that might only be two rounds of attacks against them, because they'll be fighting so many.

In a game where you have 6 fights over the course of a day, a Wizard is going to have to pick and choose which of those fights gets to see one of their, in this case, 2nd level spells. But after three of them, there's a good chance that the Fighter is so beaten up that they can't really carry on.

So, how would I solve this?

Well, naturally this is something that would need ample playtesting, but my general instinct is to boost PCs HP, and particularly Martial classes.

As it stands, a Monk doesn't inherently have any more HP than a Druid. Monks are, of course, a weird exception - frankly, I think that they missed an opportunity to make their hit die a d10 or even a d12 in 5.5 (what does a hit die represent, exactly? Surely if it's general hardiness, a Monk who has relentlessly trained their body would be more resilient than some Warlock begging magic from their patron?) But even if we look at Paladins and Fighters, a d10 hit die only means, on average, one more HP per level (well, two more at level 1) than a d8. My Wizard will be getting a +4 to Con when he hits level 12, meaning that at that level, he'll have 98 HP. A Paladin in that party with a +2 to Con will have 100. Between my Coat of the Crest (a magic item out of Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn that, among other things, adds +1 to your AC), Mage Armor, and the Shield spell, you could argue that my Wizard is actually a more resilient front-line fighter than the tanky paladin with a shield and plate armor.

That doesn't seem right.

I don't know if just changing hit dice would be enough. What I'd be tempted to do is instead give martial characters way more HP. If we were starting with just hit dice, we could say that rather than rolling your die or taking the average (rounded up) each level, you'd just get the maximum. This would expand the gap between martials and casters - if that were the case, my Wizard at level 12 would have 120 HP and the Paladin would have 144. If I hadn't rolled such high stats, and only had a +2 to Con, instead I'd have 96.

What this would mean, then, is that the martials could keep on fighting longer, weathering more encounters.

But while this would solve the latter problem, I think we'd be left with the more broadly recognized issue, which is just that we don't do long, grueling days with lots of combat encounters.

One solution is to just give martial characters more diverse capabilities. I see this in a game like Draw Steel, where there's far less of a divide between spellcasters and martial characters because every class fundamentally works on the same principles and resource system (even if the resources themselves are a bit different).

But if we don't actually want to mess with the game's mechanics themselves, and approach this simply as a Dungeon Master, what might our approach be?

First off, I think we can recognize that a single adventuring day need not take place in a single session. I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a really action-packed day. As DM, you have some dials you can turn to prevent a party from getting a long rest. The simplest, easiest one is the clock.

Characters cannot benefit from a Long Rest more than twice in a 24-hour period. Thus, if your party gets through one easy or moderate combat encounter and seeks to rest after it, you can simply say that it's still morning. The rest won't come.

The next is to simply keep the pressure on them. If players prefer more cinematic storytelling with action set-pieces, have monsters hound them. The old "you cannot rest here, enemies are nearby" technique.

But, of course, these will punish martials pretty much as much as casters given the gradual (or not so gradual if the fights are big) reduction in HP. And that's why you'd want to combine this with... copious amounts of healing items. Give out healing potions with reckless abandon. Because a healing potion will, you know, heal a character, but it doesn't give them any other resources. Thus, a Rogue or Monk who can "do this all day" when it comes to their character abilities (Monks do have to ration their Focus Points, but they've made it easier to get those back, and still get to make three attacks per turn for free every turn) will actually be able to do this all day if they're getting frequent healing. Thus, the party will actually start to feel like it's good that they aren't all-in on full spellcasters.

High Magic and High Fantasy

 WotC is moving on from its "Season of Horror" to its "Season of Magic," which raises some questions: what is "magic" as a theme in fantasy?

To me, my definition of fantasy is that it must involve the supernatural. This creates a very broad umbrella under which fantasy stories can fall, though there are plenty of genres that sit in borderlands and frontiers. In theory, you could write a whole secondary-world that involves a bunch of medieval politics of made-up countries with made-up histories, and that might seem like fantasy, but even drier, "harder" works of fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire still have these supernatural elements, even if they are focused on less than the mundane, human-level politicking and interpersonal drama. But were you to write a truly-magic-less work of fiction like that, I think I'd be inclined to say that it was some other genre and not truly fantasy. Fantasy must have the supernatural, and magic, generally is a catch-all term for the supernatural.

D&D would have to be extraordinarily limited to avoid any magic. You'd basically only have humanoid and beast monsters (and lots of humanoids would also be banned,) and furthermore, you'd have to cut out a whole bunch of classes and some of the subclasses for the remaining ones.

I don't think there are many who would prefer to play that way. The magical and supernatural as a storytelling device is a license to allow our imaginations to run wild and free.

Which brings us to this question: how do we focus on magic when magic is already so prevalent in the game?

I think the answer is to delve into High Magic.

D&D in particular inherited and in many ways codified a kind of street-level magic. A scrappy bar-brawl might involve, sure, people pulling out swords or clubs or crossbows, but in a D&D world, it's just as common to have someone (maybe it's uncommon, but not unheard of) toss a Fire Bolt. There's a whole sort of trope and subgenre of a world in which random schmucks running around with kind of magical ability forces society to adapt. A shop with "enchanters will be prosecuted" on a sign in the window, or maybe the local tavern having a permanent illusion spell that works a bit like an animated neon sign.

But there's also a grand tradition in fantasy of this sort of higher, deeper, more profound magic - something on the cutting edge. If you think about it, the spells you cast in D&D, almost all of them, are temporary effects. They're also primarily battle-magic. High Magic, though, is the sort that can shape the world, truly creating lasting changes. It might even be something that changes the way magic works in the first place.

And that's... hard to build into a rules system.

Indeed, there's a kind of sense that when you hit certain tiers of play, you become heroes (or at least powerful individuals - nothing in D&D says you have to be a good guy) of historical levels of power. And certainly, the kinds of things you can pull off as an 18th level Wizard are pretty nuts. But it's pretty rare to have big, sweeping, permanent effects on the world outside of the Wish spell - typically the only other options being the ones you have to cast once a day for a year, and these might just effectively create a building.

So, I think there are two approaches to take here:

First off, there's the villainous plot: indeed, I think you could argue that many if not most plots involve a villainous archmage or lich trying to enact some grand scheme. We could look at published adventures: the Cult of the Dragon trying to summon Tiamat to the prime material plane in Tyranny of Dragons, or Acererak's efforts to create a new, evil god in Tomb of Annihilation. The players in these campaigns are trying to halt the effort and preserve the natural way of things as they exist already.

Another approach, though, could be one in which an act of high magic spurs forward a new adventure: perhaps some group of mages opens a number of stable, permanent portals to other worlds or planes. Now, there's a rush to explore these new worlds and/or deal with some of the new threats that come through said portals. Maybe new forms of magic suddenly become available - you could have a setting in which magic either didn't exist, or perhaps was only accessible through narrow means (perhaps it was a world of Warlocks only, but now mere mortals are able to access magic without a patron).

Of course, a third approach could be that it is the party who is seeking to achieve an act of great magic. The quests they embark on would be the steps required to achieve their grand work.

Now, in terms of aesthetics, I think High Magic should tend toward the surreal - mazes and other strange and confusing environments. Likewise, strange creatures are good options for your combat encounters - constructs, elementals, and monstrosities created through experimental magic are all strong options here.

While a Lich can be a great antagonist for a campaign focused on high magic (as it appears to be with the upcoming Deadfall campaign, with Szass Tam as the big bad) I would say that if you want to lean into this high fantasy vibe rather than dark fantasy, you might actually downplay the classic "army of the dead" minions that a Lich villain often has. Liches are undead, sure, but they're also powerful wizards, and thus might eschew armies all together in favor of greater magical creations.

As a last point: I'd go pretty heavy on providing magic items to the party, but I'd also favor "interesting solution" items. While I think you should always ensure that your party's, say, Barbarian, gets a cool magic weapon, I think this is the kind of campaign where I'd really favor things like Immovable Rods, Alchemy Jugs, Potions of Gaseous Form, and other things that don't have an obvious combat utility, but which encourage the party to get creative.

Extra Attack and the Smoothing of Probability

 Just an interesting bit of design philosophy:

Hitting level 5 in D&D feels amazing. Every class, with the exception of the Rogue (who oddly gets a defensive ability) will get something that really dramatically increases their power. Pure spellcasters get 3rd level spells, which include such bangers as Fireball and Spirit Guardians, while martials get Extra Attack.

And why does Extra Attack feel so good to get (I'll lump in the cantrip progression of Eldritch Blast here as well)?

Because it smooths out the probability of landing a hit.

Analyzing "damage per round" things like I've been doing with all sorts of classes and builds is an abstraction. When you attack with a Maul, you're not really doing, like, 70% of 2d6+3 and then 5% of 2d6. You're either hitting or you're not. Probability tells you how likely one or another thing is going to happen before it does, but once it does happen, it's locked in. (This is why being "due for a win" in games of chance after losing many times is a logical illusion - before you started, you might have said that you would win after X attempts, but once you've lost in X-1 previous attempts, that model is no longer accurate).

In statistics, larger sample sizes produce more accurate results. Asking 10 people, for example, who they're going to vote for in an election, might produce a very skewed result if the actual electorate is a hundred thousand people, because you might purely by chance happen to pick all people who are voting for the yellow candidate, giving you the false impression that they have 100% of the electorate's support. If you instead had a sample size of 100, it'd be much less likely that none of the purple candidate's managed to get into the sample. Even if the purple candidate only has 5% of the electorate's actual votes (30,000) the chance that you don't get a single person who supports them in a group of 10 is 95% to the 10th power, or about 60%, but the chance you don't get one in a group of a hundred drops to about .6%.

It's the same idea: if you attack once and have a 60% chance of hitting a target (say you've got an attack bonus of +5 and your target has an AC of 14, you'll land a hit and get to deal damage... 6 times out of 10. But if you have extra attack, the chance you get to do something with an attack goes up by a lot - to 84%. Now, each attack still only has a 60% chance, but the chance you'll only miss drops from 40% to 16%. (Incidentally, the chance that you hit both times is only 36%).

Now, the good feeling of Extra Attack goes beyond this: we deal more damage on average. Indeed, we basically double our damage output. It is probably the biggest jump in power that any player characters actually experience. Even when a Fighter gets a third and later fourth attack, this is a jump of 50% and later 33%, compared to this 100% damage bump at level 5.

We often talk about tier 2 as feeling like the sweet-spot of D&D 5E, when the game feels the most balanced and satisfying. Now, comparing this with tier 3 and especially tier 4, a big part of this is because players don't have absurd solutions to every problem, like long-distance teleportation spells or great big extradimensional spaces. Saving throw DCs for players' features tend not to get to 20 or above at these levels.

But the reason I think tier 1 feels... maybe not bad, but kind of limited is that we run into these kind of binary situations - you hit or you miss, and at these levels, monster damage is high enough relative to our HP that we don't have a lot of recourse if some Incubus crits us for 26 damage (a level 4 Wizard with a +2 to Con would have 26 HP if not rolling for HP).

There's a feeling upon hitting level 5 that one has "arrived on the scene." You go from being desperate scrappers that aren't that much more powerful than the civilians you're there to save to being real professional hero-types.

Here, though, is why I think that effects like Graze are really interesting - from level 1, your attacks will always do something, but you still prefer to hit so that you can do a bit more.

    It's interesting, then, to see how this principle is approached in games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart.

In Draw Steel, there is no attack roll - essentially, you skip ahead to the damage roll on any of your abilities. Thus, there's no reason for something like Extra Attack to exist, as it would purely just increase your damage. Your damage does go up, but primarily because you're accruing more heroic resources faster to spend on more powerful (and expensive) abilities, and because your gradually rising main characteristics will make it more likely to get a tier 3 result on power rolls (and less likely to get minimal tier 1 results). But I also think (theoretically) that the progression of power in that game is smoother - things like Signature Abilities don't really do more damage, but you have to rely on them less.

In Daggerheart, there's almost an opposite direction that they take: you have to roll to do anything in combat (including casting spells) but you don't get more attacks because that would make it more likely that you have to pass the spotlight back to the GM. However, instead, you wind up rolling additional damage dice based on your tier of play (or whatever the equivalent term is). Essentially, everyone has more Rogue-like scaling in Daggerheart.

I think one of the things that can be frustrating for higher-level play is that the universality of scaling breaks down. Fighters and, now, Monks, effectively get more attacks at higher levels (Monks though through Flurry of Blows' upgrade at level 10) while Paladins add a new damage die to each attack, and then Barbarians have Brutal Strikes, which brings utility but can sometimes wind up being a net damage loss if the target's AC is high enough. And Rangers... don't really get anything.

But also, while Fighters and again, sort of Monks, get this greater "damage smoothing" effect, the others don't.

A Vision for Martial Abilities in Some Future 6E

 One thing you'll quickly notice when looking through 5E D&D is that most classes have some form of spellcasting. The spellcasting system is a really powerful way to not only give players more options on how to play, but also just makes the decision-making process from moment to moment kind of more interesting.

It's also kind of an odd system, when you look at it: a Wizard might have a mix of utility spells like Detect Magic, Sending, or Leomund's Tiny Hut along with very combat-focused spells like Fireball or Summon Elemental.

This creates a tension - while many spells are Rituals, and can generally be cast for free outside of combat, the more times you send a 25-word voice message long-distance in a day, the fewer giant explosions of fire you can produce.

I've talked a lot on this blog about how excited I am to try Draw Steel, which I think really makes part of its mission to make playing a Martial character just as fun and interesting as playing a Spellcaster character - these distinctions don't really exist in Draw Steel, because everyone's just using a few abilities they gain from their classes, subclasses, and sometimes kits.

There's an elegance to Draw Steel's abilities, which feels a little more like a Blizzard RPG like World of Warcraft or Diablo (both Blizzard and MCDM are headquartered in Orange County). But I'm not really advocating for D&D to go the same route:

People love the endless possibilities of an ever-expanding spell list.

And so, we're presented with an interesting challenge:

Can we come up with something that is as versatile as spells that we give to martial characters, but that feels distinct?

To be clear, this is not something we could bolt on to 5E. Even if there's a (probably correct) sense that martial characters lack the utility and choices that a spellcaster could use, this would add so much to these classes that I'd really want to just do a thorough redesign.

    I think where I'd start is to give martial characters something like an equivalent to cantrips and leveled attacks.

One of the things that honestly kind of surprised me when I started playing D&D was that martial often just "take the attack action," and a Ranger shooting a bow, a Rogue stabbing with a dagger, or a Barbarian slashing with a greataxe all basically work the same way.

Weapon Masteries, I think, kind of gave weapon attacks something like the effects of a cantrip. Slow is pretty much what you get from Ray of Frost, for example.

While I really like Weapon Masteries, I think what I'd probably do is get rid of them and instead attach them to these "cantrip" attacks.

Picture this: you're playing a Paladin, and at 1st level, you get two "basic strikes." You could pick "Vexing Strike," which gives you advantage on your next attack if you hit, or "Grazing Slash," which guarantees your Strength bonus on a melee attack.

Different classes might gain access to different basic strikes. Rogues might get access to those that thematically fit more with the kinds of weapons a rogue would use.

We need not be limited to the weapon masteries - indeed, I think we could potentially re-create some melee cantrips in this way. Booming Blade, or something along these lines, could be an option, perhaps flavored less as something magical and more like you inflict some injury on their legs that damages them (with, like, piercing damage) if they move. Something like Shocking Grasp, that prevents opportunity attacks, could be another.

Now, there's a question of scaling: most Martial Classes get Extra Attack at level 5, and then things like Radiant Strikes, the Fighter's third (and later fourth) attack, and such give them some scaling.

We could give these basic strikes scaling with level similar to cantrips, though we don't want to double-dip too much.

Indeed, we could just get rid of Extra Attack and make the damage scaling work with these and the "leveled strikes" we haven't covered yet. But one really big advantage of Extra Attack is that it smooths out the probability of hitting and missing. Especially at higher levels, when combat takes a lot more time, missing with your only attack on a turn feels really awful, but having more attacks means you're less likely to do nothing on your turn.

Thus, we'd need to figure out the proper scaling to ensure that this remains balanced.

Now, if we wanted to go the simplest route, we could give martials the same 9 levels of "leveled strikes" and the same number of "strike slots" that casters get.

Naturally, some of these strikes would probably be big combat abilities. I imagine you could have things like Whirlwind (you do damage in an emanation around you, maybe with a Dex save for half) or Titanic Strike (you make an attack and deal something like 6d8 damage to a target and knock them prone). You might also have some more utility options: something like Temper Weapon, where you could give a weapon an attack and damage bonus of +1 for 8 hours or something.

This could also be a place to get some tools for social and exploration encounters.

    A couple things would have to follow from this:

First off, some of these "strikes" or "maneuvers" or whatever you want to call them would probably be redundant with other class abilities.

You'd also likely need to dial back some class abilities in general to deal with the new power martials would get (Wizards are arguably the most powerful class in the game, and they get barely any actual core class features beyond their spellcasting feature).

How would half-casters work? I could imagine giving Rangers and Paladins similar half-progression with martial strikes the way that they do with spells. Artificers are a little weirder - I'd argue that Alchemists, Artillerists, Cartographers, and Reanimators probably should actually be full casters anyway, while you could treat Battle Smiths and Armorers in a similar manner to Rangers and Paladins.

There's also a potential downside: the simplicity of martial characters can sometimes be appealing to players first learning how to play D&D. While I, as someone with over ten years of experience with D&D, find the Champion Fighter pretty dang boring, I also get that it's a really solid option if a player only want to have to remember more or less how to make attack rolls.

This would basically make every class as complex as a full caster. And while generally my experience with most players is that even beginners don't shy away from complex classes (even when they maybe should,) it might still be helpful to have something a little simpler and approachable for those who prefer it.

Still, I think there's a lot of open design space if we were to give martial characters the same kind of customizability that spellcasters get.

Sorting Out Critical Role's Campaign Four (At the End of the First Convergence)

 Critical Role's 4th Campaign is a big departure in many ways: it's not set on Exandria (with no suggestion that these even take place in the same universe - the mention of a magic item being the equivalent of a Vestige of Divergence was misconstrued by a lot of fans,) it's got a different Dungeon Master, there are several more players, and there are separate "tables" for different groups of characters on different arcs.

Indeed, as we found at the end of this first "convergence," in which the entire "party" came together, the tables aren't going to have fixed memberships, with some Schemers heading out as Seekers and some Soliders staying behind.

I'm going to get into some heavy spoilers here, so I'll do a cut, but I'm more interested in the broader speculation about what's coming down the line more than necessarily going over every shocking plot twist.

Anyway, spoilers ahead.

Revisiting the Summon Spells of 5.5

 Tasha's Cauldron of Everything introduced some of my favorite spells in 5E. While there had been plenty of "Conjure X" spells, which pulled (usually multiple) creatures from the Monster Manual out and put them into battle (sometimes with really insane consequences, like allowing you to summon 8 Pixies that can each cast Polymorph once a day) these spells created a consistent, single, powerful minion that used your spell attack modifier.

And each works the same way - getting a number of attacks equal to half the spell's level rounded down (the lowest-level one of them is the 2nd level spell Summon Beast, so no issues with having zero attacks) and getting a damage boost on the attacks' damage for the spell's level.

The consistency does let you, to a large extent, pick your favorite for thematic reasons. A classic Merlin-style Wizard might go for Summon Elemental or Summon Construct, while a darker spellcaster might go Summon Undead or Summon Fiend.

Wizards and I want to say Warlocks gain access to the most options here, but Artificers, Bards, Druids, Clerics, Paladins and Rangers get some as well (Sorcerer subclasses often get one, but the base class, I believe, doesn't get any).

5.5 saw the old Conjure spells significantly changed to be more like ongoing spell effects (including the insanely powerful Conjure Minor Elementals,) with an intent to make these the primary "I put more creatures onto the battlefield" spells. Now, there are actually a handful of additional spells that can do things like this. Giant Insect is actually essentially another one of these spells. In contrast, though, Animate Dead and Create Undead are much more like their 5.0 versions - the real distinction being that the monsters don't despawn when the spell ends; you just lose control of them.

One spell from 5.0 didn't make the transition to 5.5, and while it should work just fine, I'm going to leave it out in our comparison here. Summon Shadowspawn is actually very conceptually cool, and I love having non-undead monsters for the Shadowfell. Eh, maybe we'll cover it at the end of this.

I'm going to compare the various summoned spirits by three primary criteria: damage output, survivability, and utility.

To make a fair comparison, we'll consider these when cast at 6th level, which is the highest base level for any of them (Summon Fiend). Notably, Warlocks don't actually get to cast any but Summon Fiend at 6th level because of how Pact Magic works (they can pick up Summon Fiend as their 6th level Mystic Arcanum, though they also can't upcast it to 8th level). Naturally, Artificers, Paladins, and Rangers can't cast these at 6th level (unless they multiclass with a pure spellcaster) but every spell should be available to at least one pure spellcaster.

Thus, each will get three attacks, and we'll total the damage output along those lines. Now, there's a subtle nuance - some creatures use a higher damage die, which means that crits will be a little more powerful even if they have the same average damage as another, though this is a pretty subtle difference.

A summoned spirit's AC and HP tend to scale with their spell level, and again, we'll list the 6th level version. Damage can also vary on the form that the summoned spirit takes, so we'll list each version.

    Giant Insect:

While not called "Summon Giant Insect," as mentioned before, this effectively works just like one of these spells, with two major differences: first, it has no material component, meaning that you don't need to buy the (actually pretty costly) components that the rest of these need. However, it only lasts 10 minutes, meaning you might not be able to get quite as much use out of it.

Damage: 1d6+9+1d4, or 15 (mix of piercing and poison) per hit, so 45 total. Alternatively, 1d10+9, or 14.5 (bludgeoning), so 43.5 total.

Defensive: AC 17, HP 50

Utility: The insect in Spider form (yes, I know, it's an arachnid - the spell should be Giant Bug) can reduce a creature's movement speed to 0 on a hit, and this attack is even ranged. In Centipede form, it can attempt to poison a nearby target as a bonus action. Wasp form can fly.

    Summon Aberration: (Warlock, Wizard)

Damage: 1d10+9 (slashing), or 14.5, for 43.5 total, or 1d8+9 (psychic), or 13.5, for 40.5 total. (Potentially 2d6, or 7, AoE psychic damage)

Defensive: AC 17, HP 60

Utility: Slaad has regeneration and also prevents healing with its slashing attack. Beholderkin can fly with hover and has ranged attacks. Mind Flayer has AoE aura (save for none, can do friendly fire).

    Summon Beast: (Druid, Ranger)

Damage: 1d8+10 (piercing), or 14.5, for 43.5 total.

Defensive: AC 17, HP 40 (air) or 50 (land or water)

Utility: Land has a climb speed, water has a swim speed, air has a 60 foot fly speed. Air has flyby, Water has Water Breathing (not amphibious) and Land and Water have Pack Tactics.

    Summon Celestial: (Cleric, Paladin)

Damage: 1d10+9 (radiant) or 14.5, for 43.5 total, or 2d6+8 (radiant) or 15, for 45 total.

Defensive: AC 17, or 19 (defender), HP 60

Utility: Radiant resistance, 40 foot fly speed. Has a 1/day healing touch for 2d8+6 (15 average). Defender grants 1d10 temp HP to itself or a nearby friend on hit with its attack.

    Summon Construct: (Artificer, Wizard)

Damage: 1d8+10 (bludgeoning) or 14.5, for 43.5 total.

Defensive: AC 19, HP 70

Utility: Resistant to poison, does 1d10 damage to attackers or grapplers (Metal), slows and prevent opportunity attacks to nearby creatures (can hit friends) on a failed wisdom save (Stone) or gets reaction attacks or free movement as a reaction when taking damage (Clay)

    Summon Dragon: (Wizard)

Damage: 1d6+10 (piercing) or 13.5, for 40.5, plus AoE cone for 2d6 (7) of draconic elemental damage.

Defensive: AC 20, HP 60

Utility: Swim speed, 60 foot fly speed, resistance to Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, and Poison damage, Blindsight, shares one of its resistances with you (chosen at summoning).

    Summon Elemental: (Druid, Ranger, Wizard)

Damage: 1d10+10 (bludgeoning, cold, lightning, or fire, depending on element,) or 15.5, for 46.5 total.

Defensive: AC 17 HP 70

Utility: 40 foot speed, with Burrow (Earth) Fly with hover (Air) and Swim (Water). Amorphous Form (Air, Fire, Water). Immunity to fire damage (Fire) or resistance to Lighting and Thunder (Air), Acid (Water) or Piercing and Slashing (Earth). Full immunity to poison.

    Summon Fey: (Druid, Ranger, Warlock, Wizard)

Damage: 2d6+9 (Force) or 16, for 48 total.

Defensive: AC 18, HP 60

Utility: Fly speed, immune to charmed, bonus action with 30-foot teleport and secondary effects: spirit gains advantage on next attack (Fuming,) charms a nearby creature on failed wisdom save, both you and fey spirit charm the target (Mirthful) or creates 10-foot cube of magical darkness (Tricksy).

    Summon Fiend: (Warlock, Wizard)

Damage: 1d12+9 (necrotic) or 15.5, for 46.5 total, or 1d8+9 (slashing) or 13.5 for 40.5 total, or 2d6+9 (fire) or 16, for 48 total.

Defensive: AC 18, HP 50 (demon,) 40 (devil,) or 60 (yugoloth)

Utility: 40 foot movement speed, climb speed (demon) or 60 foot fly speed (devil). Yugoloth teleports 30 feet with each attack. Magic Resistance and resistance to fire. Devil has devil's sight. Demon explodes when reduced to 0 HP, doing 2d10 fire (11 average) in a 10-foot emanation (dex save for half). (Can cause friendly fire). Devil's attacks are ranged.

    Summon Undead: (Warlock, Wizard)

Damage: 1d8+9 (necrotic) or 13.5, for 40.5, or 2d4+9 (necrotic) for 14, or 42, or 1d6+9 (slashing) or 12.5 for 37.5.

Defensive: AC 17, HP 60 (ghostly or putrid) or 50 (skeletal)

Utility: Ghostly gets 40 foot fly speed with hover. Immunity to necrotic and poison damage. Ghostly has incorporeal passage. Putrid has emanation that poisons on a failed con save, and attacks that paralyze a poisoned target. Skeletal has ranged attacks. Ghostly frightens on hit.

    Conclusions and Results:

In terms of damage output, the Devil version of Summon Fiend and the Fey spirit both wind up doing the most. The devil can fly and its attacks are ranged, allowing it to stay out of the melee, though the Fey's force damage will basically always do it to whatever you're attacking.

Defenses are fairly consistent, though the dragon gets the highest AC of them all, with runners-up being the Guardian form of the Celestial and the Construct. For HP, the Elemental is the big winner, and is the only one that scales up 15 HP per spell slot, rather than 10.

For utility, this is a lot harder to evaluate, and depends on your situation. The Undead Spirit has some very powerful utility (especially if you have other ways of getting a target poisoned).

I think it's notable that the Aberration, Fiend, and Undead all have ranged options, which can be very good if you want to just use them as a distant turret. Of these, the Aberration and Fiend can also fly, which allows them to not only be distant but truly out of reach of many monsters.

Another potential thing to consider is size: the Celestial, Dragon, and Fiend are all Large, which means you could ride on them, and the former two have fly speeds while the latter has one form with a fly speed. Technically they go after your turn in combat, but if your DM is cool, they might let you have the spirit act simultaneously with you to function as a kind of uncontrolled-controlled mount. (Oh, also the Giant Insect, lest I forget.)

All this being said, though, I really think you can pretty confidently pick whichever of these you think seems most in-theme with your character. Even the ones that don't do quite as much damage, like Summon Beast, are still nearly doing as much when upcast.

Bladesinger (Using One Spell Slot, for Damage at Least) vs Wyvern

 The Bladesinger and the Eldritch Knight are two sides of the same coin - one is the Fighter who gets a bit of wizardry and the other is a Wizard who becomes a martial class. While I love my EK dearly (and I'm champing at the bit for a chance to play one again - ideally bringing my old character Jax back because our party was ostensibly temporarily in the Nine Hells but the campaign fell apart before we could get out, and I don't love that as a fate for him) I'll also say that I'm almost certain a Bladesinger is the more powerful option, simply because Wizards are, well, super-powerful.

Now, part of that power is that you don't actually have to use all that martial stuff. Literally any Wizard of high-enough level could get their hands on Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray and do just absurd amounts of damage, scaling remarkably well each time you get access to higher-level spell slots (you could even multiclass to Sorcerer if you have enough Charisma to get Innate Sorcery because your spell slot progression will continue even if you can't pick higher-level spells).

The math is real easy for that - at 10th level, you have 5th level spell slots, so you'd just cast CME at 5th level on turn 1, and then for the rest of combat, get within 15 feet of your targets and burn your other high-level slots on Scorching Ray (maybe reserving your 5th level to recast if you lose concentration). If you have a +9 to hit with your spells, you'll land it on a 5 or higher against a wyvern. That's (3d8+2d6)x5 if you're doing a 4th level Scorching Ray. Each one lands for 20.5, and so if you've got an 80% chance to hit, and then 5% chance to crit, each one's landing for 20.5x85%, or 17.425, so a 4th level spell slot gets you freaking 87 damage per turn.

Even when we account for the first turn requiring set-up, that's still an average of 43.5 per turn in a two-round combat, and it jumps up to 58 over three turns, making it far better than any of these other builds (though the Eldritch Knight, pulling off far more shenanigans, does comparable stuff, and that was even with the Staff-and-Board build, meaning that a Great Weapon Master build would probably do better.

Yes, CME is kind of a busted spell, and even with its nerf in errata, it's still among the most powerful in the game when used like this. (Scorching Ray is fine, but surely wasn't designed with the assumption you'd be adding damage to each attack).

But what if we wanted something more sustainable?

Here's the limitation we'll set: we are not going to use more than one spell slot. We're going to make use of our Bladesong to make melee attacks.

In other words, we're going to pick some decent concentration spell and then go to town.

Let's start building:

    Stats:

Funny story: when I rolled stats on the Wizard I've now been playing almost five years, I was tempted to go Bladesinger, because I rolled so well, starting with an 18 in Int, +3 to Con, and +2 to Dex. But I had already come up with a story that very firmly made him an Order of Scribes Wizard (he was an apprentice archivist at the Cobalt Soul in Port Damali, and during the campaign he's been made an Expositor).

The new Bladesinger, though, is a little less stat-dependent, due in large part to the fact that your Bladesong now allows you to use Intelligence for your attacks.

Having decent Dexterity is still not a bad thing - it'll still increase your AC, and indeed, given that you can no longer wear any armor, rather than getting access to Light Armor, so that Dex is going to be slightly more precious. That said, Bladesong will also give you AC equal to your Intelligence modifier - we still benefit from Dex, but as long as we're decent, we can focus our attention on just boosting Int as far as it will go (indeed, we also get that for Concentration saves, meaning we're truly Int all the way).

    Gear:

The interesting thing is that while the SCAG/Tasha's Bladesinger would pretty much always go rapier, as it's the highest-damage finesse weapon, you actually have a lot of freedom now - you can go with a Warhammer, even, as long as you're not wielding it in its Versatile mode. Basically, a d8 weapon is going to be our assumption, but whether it's a Longsword, Rapier, Flail, Harpoon, or whatever is kind of irrelevant. We don't get Weapon Mastery, so it's really up to you (and up to what magic weapons your DM is handing out). Now, you could pick some alternatives. If you get Polearm Master, a Quarterstaff or Spear are both solid options. And if you want a little bit of reach, you can take a Whip, which does step you down two damage dice, but the reach can be great if you want to attack outside of the reach of most creatures.

And no armor, so that's simple.

    Feats:

I'd be tempted to grab some martial feats - Polearm Master would actually work great if we wanted to fight with a Spear or Quarterstaff (the Pole Strike making up for the lower damage die) but I also think we need to race to a 20 Int here. As such, what I might do is just grab War Caster at level 4 (assuming we've gotten a 17 Int from our background) and then just ASI at 8 to ensure we're capped on it. That actually leaves us with the freedom to pursue non-Int General Feats at levels 12 and 16 if we get to those levels without guilt.

For Origins Feats, of course, I tend to ignore these. Savage Attacker could boost us slightly, but I generally don't find it worth it, and would prefer Lucky, Tough, or Alert.

    Spells:

While we're not spending more than one spell slot, we will be using a Cantrip, which we can wave into our Multiattack. The cantrips will of course be either Green-Flame Blade or Booming Blade, the former if there's an opportunity for cleave (or we're fighting something that is vulnerable to fire or otherwise harmed more by it like a Troll) and the latter in single-target situations.

Now, what of our concentration spell?

Well, CME is still a very solid choice. At 5th level, we'd be adding 3d8 damage to each of our attacks, which could mean 6d8 total. If that's what we're getting, are there any spells that can beat it?

Wizards have a lot of spells, so this is a challenging question. We're going to ignore spells that hinder a specific foe, as we'd prefer to just have all this active to attack as many targets as we like, even if we're assuming we're just hitting a Wyvern in a white room. We also don't want one that uses our action, as we want to take advantage of our Extra Attack, so nothing like Dragon's Breath.

Haste would net us an extra attack each turn, but our attacks themselves don't actually deal a ton of damage. We're doing like 1d8+5 per attack, so 9.5 versus the 3d8 we'd be getting from CME, or 13.5, or really 6d8 or 27 given two attacks. Now, if we had something like a Vicious Weapon, this would start to look more appealing, but even then it would only give us one extra attack that deals 1d8+2d6+5, or 16.5, which still isn't matching that.

(EDIT: It occurred to me re-reading this post that, technically, given that we can get the Attack Action as one of our hasted actions, we might be able to "replace" that one attack with a use of Booming Blade - essentially, this attack action would be an "Extra Attack" of 1. That's up for DMs to maybe rule on. This would bump the damage to an extra 2d8+5 rather than 1d8+5, so it comes to an average of 14. This still doesn't beat CME, though, because across two attacks, we're still getting nearly, but not quite, twice as much damage.)

What about Summon Spells? One among this category that I think has gotten a buff thanks to the fact that fewer monsters have resistance/immunity to nonmagical kinetic damage is Summon Elemental. While there's not as much utility to them as something like an Undead spirit, they hit hard. If we cast this at 4th level, we get two attacks from them for 1d10+8, which winds up being 13.5 damage, and that means that we're actually doing about as much with them as we would with CME at 5th level (it's slightly less because their crits don't hit as hard). Some other advantages in this specific situation are that an Earth Elemental is resistant to piercing and slashing damage, and they're all immune to poison, which makes it harder for the Wyvern to actually kill them.

And you know what, CME gets used so much. This is more fun. Summon Elemental it is! (And this leaves us a nice 5th level slot if we need it later on.)

Actually, before we move on, I wanted to mention a fun one that my best friend's Bard sometimes uses in our Ravnica game - Yolande's Regal Presence. This lets you knock back foes and make them prone if they enter an emanation around you, or if your emanation enters their space. It deals 4d6 psychic damage on a failed wisdom save, or half as much as a success. The reason I'd consider this is to take advantage of Booming Blade, similar to what we did with the Eldritch Knight's use of the Push mastery. But the sequence here isn't quite right - we'd need to bounce them and then run up to them to take advantage if we knocked them prone.

    Gameplan:

Pretty simple: if possible, we have the Elemental up (we're going Earth - while it'd be good to have a flying one to chase the Wyvern down, those lesser dragons are so fast that our Elemental wouldn't be able to catch up anyway, so it doesn't really matter). If not, we spend our first turn casting that. Then, as a bonus action, we activate our Bladesong. It honestly might not be a terrible idea for the Earth Elemental to try to grapple the Wyvern just to keep it in place, though your DM might be very strict about whether Extra Attack and Multiattack are the same thing, and if they can use one attack to grapple and a second to make a Slam.

The Elemental makes its attacks and then, turn two, we step in and start attacking as well.

And that's about it. I'll be honest, I'm not predicting this to do amazing damage, but we'll see. This is a resource-conservative build - we know we can go hog wild on them and do insane damage when we want, but this is for serious dungeon crawling.

    Mathing It Out:

Both we and our Elemental have a +9 to hit, which means an 80% hit chance.

The Elemental hits for 1d10+8, or 13.5, and an extra 5.5 on a crit. That's 10.8 plus .275, so 11.075 per attack. That then becomes 22.15 with two attacks.

Turn two, we're going to make two attacks, but the first is Booming Blade (or Green-Flame Blade).

Thus, this one is going to hit for 2d8+5, or 14, adding 9 on a crit, so 14x80% is 11.2 and 9x5% is .45, so we get 11.65 damage here.

Then, our second attack is just a normal attack for 1d8+5, so 9.5 on a hit and adding 4.5 on a crit. 9.5x80% is 7.6 and 4.5x5% is .225, so we get 7.825, or 7.83 to round off.

Thus, by turn two, we get a total of 41.63, or rounded off to 41.6.

And you know what, I think that's actually pretty damned respectable. It's not blowing the socks off of our other builds, but this is doing it all with a single spell slot that isn't even our highest-level slot.

There are also some nice defensive benefits here:

The Earth Elemental, for one, is going to be resistant or immune to all of the damage the Wyvern puts out. The Wyvern's most deadly attack is its tail stinger, but the Earth Elemental will take only 5 damage on average from it (when it normally does 35 total).

As for us, if we assume a +2 to Dex, we can cast Mage Armor, which, along with Bladesong, will put our AC at 20. Then, the Shield spell can push that to 25. Get our hands on some Bracers of Defense, and you're matching my super-tanky Eldritch Knight. Then, if we managed a +3 to Con, we'll get a +8 to concentration saves. On top of this, if we do get hit anyway, Song of Defense will allow us to spend spell slots to prevent 5 damage per spell level, which also means lowering the concentration save DC by 10 per spell level (of course still a minimum of 10). In other words, if we took the full burst of an Ancient Green Dragon's breath weapon (for other dragons we'd just use Absorb Elements,) which does 77 damage on average, we could expend a 5th level spell slot to drop that by 25. The 32 remaining damage would call for a concentration save with a DC of 16, which we would get on an 8 or higher, but with advantage, that 65% chance becomes an 87.75% chance to maintain concentration (our elemental would be fine). I mean, for sure if it was an ancient dragon and we were level 10, we'd want to spend our turn getting the hell out of there as quickly as we could, but still. Not bad.