A Dumb, Fun Trick I Thought of For My Wizard

 I have a 9th level Triton Wizard character I've been playing for a few years now. I went into the campaign understanding that Wizards aren't necessarily the most damage-focused class, but I wanted all the cool utility that the Wizard spell list affords you.

However, I thought of something dumb:

Since it was published in 2024, and even with the nerfs (which I looked at with the previous post,) I've wondered if it would be fun to play with the new Conjure Minor Elementals.

I rolled really good stats when creating this character, and I felt a certain temptation to make him a Bladesinger, but the entire concept for the character was built around him being part of the Order of Scribes (he was an apprentice archivist of the Cobalt Soul, though he has since been promoted to Expositor - importantly, he has the consciousness of an Age of Arcanum Wizard bound within a book that serves as his Manifest Mind feature - as a note, I was shocked when Emily Axford had a very similar concept when she came on as a guest in Critical Role's Campaign Three - I had already been playing mine for a couple years I think at that point. Great minds think alike?).

Given that CME really benefits from making lots of attacks at close range, I was a bit sad to realize I couldn't necessarily play in that space.

Or could I?

Let's put the pieces together:

So, we've got Conjure Minor Elementals, of course. At level 9, I can upcast this to 5th level, to deal 3d8 extra damage with each attack.

Next, we have Manifest Mind. This is such a bizarrely silly feature, where you can cast a spell as if you were in the position of your Manifested spellbook-consciousness. You can move this thing around 30 feet per turn as a bonus action. It's incorporeal and doesn't even have HP - the only way to get rid of it is a Dispel Magic. The reason this is so good for us is that, as a Squishy Wizard, we can instead cast CME from the Manifest Mind, allowing us to fly it right up to our enemies, putting them in the emanation without endangering us.

For our third piece, we run into the following issue: as a non-Bladesinger Wizard, I don't have extra attack, so is it really that exciting to add 3d8 to just a single, like, True Strike or Fire Bolt? That's, like, ok, but not really that exciting. So that's why we take Scorching Ray. Scorching Ray, a 2nd level spell, shoots three beams that each deal 2d6 fire damage. Each upcasting of the spell adds another beam. Now, of course, on its own, that means that a 3rd level Scorching Ray only does the equivalent of a fireball, but only on a single target.

But let's look at how it winds up looking when we combine these:

Turn one, we're kind of sad - just casting CME, using one of our Manifest Mind charges to cast it through Sarkavo (my ancient wizard consciousness).

Turn two, though, as long as our target is in our emanation (no matter how far we are from them) our attacks get that bonus damage. If we just cast Scorching Ray at base level, that's three beams that each deal 2d6+3d8 damage, or 17.5. That means that if we get three hits, that's 52.5 damage. Now, sure, you could argue that's more like 26.25 damage per turn, as we had to skip damage on our previous turn.

But let's go crazy:

If I wanted to Nova as big as I could, we could do a 5th level CME on turn one, and then a 4th level Scorching Ray on turn two. That would be 5 beams each dealing 17.5 damage, so we're talking 87.5 damage. In two rounds, that's 43.75 per round.

That's decently spicy at level 9.

And, the longer the fight goes, the better this does, as long as we're willing to burn a lot of spell slots (and we're only blowing our 5th level spell on a fight that we'll need tons of damage for).

Also, as a Scribes Wizard, I could change a lot of the damage types here: Having Sickening Radiance in my spellbook, I can make the Scorching Rays deal Radiant damage. (CME's a little less clear: I think you can only change the damage type when you cast it. But Acid is pretty reliable).

Let's say we're fighting an Abominable Yeti (we're in the Crystalsands Tundra right now). These have an AC of 15 and immunity to cold.

I've got a +9 to hit with my spells (maxed Int, PB 4). So I hit on a roll of 6 or higher (75% chance to hit). Because all the damage here is rolled, we can just add the 5% crit chance to this, so we're basically just looking at 80% of our damage potential.

So, turn 1: we cast CME.

Turn 2: we cast Scorching Ray at 4th level (we're fine with Fire damage on all of these). The average damage on a hit is 2d6+3d8, or, again, 17.5. 17.5x80% is 14 on the dot. We shoot 5 beams, so we're doing 70 damage on average.

Turn 3, if we do this again with another 4th level slot, we're getting another 70 damage, and by this point, the Abominable Yeti is dead.

(As a note, I have both Cold resistance and War Caster, so I'm in pretty decent shape to succeed on concentration saves against the Cold Breath.)

Yeah. Hm. I think I'm going to try to get these spells (naturally I have neither within my spellbook currently).