The "Conjure" spells from the Player's Handbook were mostly changed to be more table-friendly. Now, if you want to put another creature on the battlefield to fight alongside you, you're mostly going to be using the updated versions of the "Summon" spells from Tasha's (which did get a few minor tweaks). The Conjure spells, which used to send players digging through the Monster Manual (or, for those who knew the overpowered options, might have you summon a bunch of Pixies who could then polymorph the party into T-Rexes).
It's certainly an open question of whether these are nerfs or buffs. The Gruul Storm Sorcerer in my Ravnica game decided not to convert to the new system in large part because it would lose him the ability to summon a number of creatures he's used as mounts (I think Summon Dragon is, unlike Summon Draconic Spirit, not actually available to Sorcerers).
But the spell causing a big controversy is Conjure Minor Elementals - a spell that appears to be so powerful that there are some who assume it will get errata to reduce its power.
Here's how it works:
As an action, you conjure a kind of swarm of elemental spirits that swirl around you in a 15-foot emanation. The emanation is difficult terrain for your enemies, but the biggest deal here is that when you hit with an attack against an enemy within that emanation, you deal an extra 2d8 damage (of various elemental damage types, your choice). And I think it lasts a minute.
This is, I think, at base level relatively fair, but where it blows up is in its scaling: the spell is 4th level, but every level above 4, you add 2d8 to the damage.
Meaning that, upcast to only 6th level (which is, fair enough, a very limited spell slot) you're looking at 6d8 extra damage on every hit.
It's insanely powerful, but if we assume that it doesn't get banned by many tables, what is the build that can best take advantage of it?
As I see it, there are two ways we can push its damage up - more attacks and upcasting.
Now, Eldritch Knight Fighters can take this spell at level 17, when they get their 4th level spells. Their scaling here, though, only gets one more attack in at level 20, meaning on a straight-class build, we're getting a potential extra 8d8 per turn. We could, of course, Action Surge to double that, getting us 16d8 on a subsequent turn (though I think I'd be more tempted to action surge on the turn I cast it to make use of the damage immediately and also minimize the chance I drop concentration on it before I get some benefit from it.
The Fighter does also get another advantage here: if we have a dual-wield build (which I will say I like less for a Fighter than a Paladin, Ranger, or Paladin because the additional attacks Fighters get benefit more from something like Great Weapon Master) with the Dual Wielder feat and an off-hand weapon with Nick (the latter being, in my mind, basically a prerequisite for the former) we could make 5 attacks with our action and a 6th with our bonus action at level 20. Thus, that 2d8 becomes 12d8 (or 54 on average). If we were going GWM instead, we'd be getting only 8d8, but also 24 additional damage, for an average of 60.
But let's think of other possibilities.
Again, part of the spell's power is its upcasting. Pure EKs will never have the spell slots to cast it at higher levels.
The next obvious option would be the Valor Bard. As a martial subclass for a pure caster class, they'll get a bit of the best of both worlds.
In the Bard's case, we'll assume they are leaning heavily into the martial side of things, and will have picked up the Weapon Master feat along with the Dual Wielder feat to allow them to fight with something like a Shortsword and Scimitar, and make two attacks with the Shortsword and one with the Scimitar with an action, and then a second hit with the Scimitar as a bonus action.
That means four attacks per turn, but we'll absolutely need to make it through a turn concentrating on the spell before we can do it (with the exception, I guess, of opportunity attacks or other reaction attacks).
So, after at turn of set-up, we can potentially get four attacks for a total of 8d8 damage out of the spell when cast at its base level (which Bards will get way earlier... but not at level 7, but rather at level 10, when we get Magical Secrets, as this isn't inherently a Bard spell).
So, this falls behind the EK, but we're also at a way lower level. But what about upcasting?
Essentially, this just becomes a progression every two levels - 8d8 becomes 16d8 if we cast it with a 5th level slot, then 24d8 with a 6th level slot - by the time we're in tier 4, with a 9th level slot, we're looking at 12d8 per hit, giving us 48d8, or 216 damage in a single turn.
And here, the question of upcasting versus getting more attacks obviously favors upcasting.
Now, lest you think I've forgotten them, we should also mention the Bladesinger Wizard, who seems like a potential option in all of this. Bladesinger will of course get this earlier than the Bard, and contrary to my assumptions, it does not appear that there is any restriction on dual-wielding (though you could run into some issues regarding having a hand free for somatic or material components, but I think War Caster is likely to be part of your build here.)
But what about multiclassing?
Fighters' Extra Attack feature doesn't become any better than other classes' until level 11, which means our spell progression will still be rather slow. An EK adds a third of their Fighter level rounded down to their total spellcaster level, meaning if we put 11 levels into the class, we are getting only 3 caster levels (we could do one extra level and pick up an additional feat and get 4 caster levels out of it).
Still, if we multiclassed with a Bladesinger (we could also do so with a Valor Bard, but it might be beneficial for all our spells to work with the same stat) by level 20, we could have either Fighter 11/Wizard 9 (giving us a total of 12 caster levels, allowing for 6th level spells) or Fighter 12/Wizard 8 (which also gives us 12 caster levels - we won't be able to cast 5th level Wizard spells, but if we're really just focusing on upcasting this, we should be ok - this will also leave us with 6 feats compared with 5).
So, at level 20, we'd be able to get three attacks in and cast the spell at 6th level. With Nick and Dual-Wielder (both pretty easy to get thanks to our Fighter levels) we're talking really 5 attacks in a turn (and it can even be the turn we cast the spell thanks to Action Surge). At 6th level that's 6d8 per attack and thus we're looking at 30d8 potential damage from the spell (135 damage).
Thus, I think it's still technically better to go with a pure caster all the way, but I will say that there's a benefit to this multiclass build: because our first level is Fighter, we have Con save proficiency. And we're picking up War Caster anyway to be able to cast spells while holding our weapons. Losing concentration on this spell would be pretty devastating, so it might be worth taking the hit to your damage.
That said, if we are really talking about maximizing damage, it does seem that going pure caster is better than getting more attacks from a Fighter - at least in terms of maximizing the damage of this spell.
No comments:
Post a Comment