Well, after over a year, our Wildemount campaign finally hit tier 2 as we got to level 5. Intentionally built to be a roleplay-heavy campaign, our milestones are built around the prophecy system that is detailed in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount.
Our party was also very much not built for balance - we have a Fighter (Rune Knight), two Paladins (one Oath of Redemption, one an unofficial one that's fire-themed) and two Wizards (Chronurgist and Scribes, the latter being my character).
In the fight resolving the plotline that got us to level 5, we had a rough go of it - a corrupted druid with a bunch of giant toad minions was holding two (other) paladins to power their corrupting blight, and we needed those paladins to testify on behalf of one of the characters' sisters. We just got very unlucky with attack rolls, failing to hit a bunch of AC 11 toads that didn't even have much health. As such, technically, one of the paladins died at the very end of the fight, but the DM allowed them to reroll their natural 1 death save and they got a natural 20 (while he said that this would not be a regular thing, I felt it was the right call, because the fight was actually over at that point, and you could have argued that we might be out of initiative).
Anyway, given the minions lasted way longer than they should have because of our crappy rolls, we ended that fight with every spell slot expended, every rune, channel divinity, lay on hands point, just everything spent. My wizard got knocked out toward the end of the fight, but luckily succeeded on three death saves in a row, so he stabilized and was woke up at the end.
It was hard-fought, and for me, personally, I think the only error I made (and arguably not a real error) was trying to blow the toads away with gust of wind rather than just trying to kill them quicker (this was a racial ability I used. I also put a fog cloud on top of the boss to buy us some time with the toads, preventing them from targeting anyone with spells while she was trapped in it and creating a big obstruction even when she got out). I also managed to land a Shatter on two of the toads that did nearly max damage (21) and both toads failed their save, allowing me to halve the number of monsters on the board.
We also perhaps wasted some actions trying to heal up the captured paladins, who seemed to have too many levels of exhaustion to do anything.
So, I'm hoping we don't have quite so desperate a fight again any time soon, but hitting level 5 is very nice. While I want to pick up Summon Undead, the costly material component (a 300-gold gilded skull - not consumed) is still a bit beyond my reach, so instead I took Dispel Magic and Lightning Bolt, while the other Wizard (a Fire Genasi - mine is a Triton) got Fireball and another spell TBD.
My character is a naive young Triton who basically just graduated from Wizard school (which I'm treating like college). With Wisdom as his dump stat, I've basically envisioned him as someone who will one day be a powerful, if a bit absentminded, archmage - a sort of figure like Merlin from the Disney Sword in the Stone, who would likely be a very good mentor to some kid with a heroic destiny, but right now he's the kid striving toward that destiny.
Anyway, I decided to defer to the fire-themed character to pick up Fireball, while I got the other classic, powerful damage spell. I also tend to think of lightning as blue (perhaps the result of playing a Shaman in World of Warcraft for so long) so it seemed to fit pretty well thematically (I also intend to copy the other wizard's fireball spell as soon as I can into my own spellbook). Lightning Bolt is, of course, a lot harder to hit multiple targets with (especially trying to hit more than two) but I also figure with three melee characters in our party, it might also be good to be able to weave a narrow bolt between them.
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