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.

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.

Vengeance Paladin vs Wyvern

 Yeah, I'm in a bit of a thing here.

Also, fair warning: it's another Great Weapon Master build. Generally, I've always liked the aesthetic of wielding a big-old weapon (classically a hammer with a head the size of one's torso - which I realize is not remotely what real warhammers look like because you wouldn't be able to lift it. But this is fantasy!)

The Paladin arguably got nerfed in the 5.5 update, but even still, it remains among the best classes in the game. It doesn't hurt that the class also has spellcasting, of course.

And in this case, this is a build that I basically did play in a Curse of Strahd game. That was 5.0, of course, but the subclass and weapon loadout are the same. I hit so hard that some of the challenges that were meant to be extremely deadly wound up being surmountable - we beat the Shambling Mound in the Death House at level 2 (we were, admittedly, on the larger size of parties, with at that point a Barbarian, Grave Cleric, ranged Fighter, and Fighter/Warlock multiclass along with me).

Funnily enough, my Paladin had rolled stats, and while I started off with an 18 in Strength and 16s in both Con and Cha, I had a 7 in Dexterity. So, she was always last in initiative and got a nickname of "the finisher" because she tended to get crit-smites once everyone else had had a turn. Multiple times I got a -1 on Initiative.

Anyway, for our build we'll assume Point Buy and basically try to start with a 17 in Strength and 16 in Charisma - while it'd be nice to get +3 to Con, I think that the Charisma is going to help us more overall, and we have a d10 hit die, so in terms of HP, it's as good as a d8 character with +3 to Con.

    Feats:

So, Paladins are a bit MAD (multi-ability dependent) and so I think we're going to just get the one juicy feat here.

Now, I think you could make a solid argument for Polearm Master, as when we get to level 11 (though this is a level 10 build) you get to add a d8 to that. The thing is, Paladins are now pretty bonus-action dependent, and while getting the Hew attack is great, Great Weapon Master's primary benefit is the ability to add our proficiency bonus to our damage during our attack aciton, which is kind of a big deal. Pole Strike is going to be dropped if we want to crit-smite or if we need a bonus action for something like Lay on Hands. There is, for sure, a world where you grab Polearm Master and maybe Sentinel to get more attacks in, but I think we've got to go simple and straightforward here.

So, at level 8, we'll just cap Strength, and then in a hypothetical level 12/16, we'll be able to take things like Inspiring Leader and another Cha-boosting feat like War Caster.

    Subclass and Spells:

We're going Vengeance. The main benefit we get here is Vow of Enmity, which allows us to use Channel Divinity when we take the attack action (no additional action required) to get advantage on attacks against our target. We can also swap it to a new target if our target goes down.

While level 7's Relentless Avenger doesn't really come into play much, we do also get a pretty exciting spell - albeit a risky one - Haste. Haste is a great spell that carries a big risk: if you lose concentration, you're incapacitated and have a speed of zero until the end of your next turn. That is a real risk. If you have an Artificer who can craft a Mind Sharpener (or your DM just gives you one) this would be a really good investment. Also, if you can manage to get Magic Initiate: Wizard, picking up the Shield spell would be very nice (though I don't know if there are any official backgrounds that grant that feat and also boost Strength and Charisma - Genie Touched grants Dex and Cha, which could work great for a Dex-based dual-wielding Oath of Genies Paladin, but that's not what we're doing right now).

If we want to play it a big safer, we could do something like Crusader's Mantle, though this prevents us from attacking on our first turn. Divine Favor doesn't even take concentration, so there's no fear of losing it. Indeed, I might cast this alongside Haste - normally, in order for Divine Favor to become worth more than a simple Divine Smite, you need to hit 4 times. That'll be more likely to happen if you're making more attacks per turn. Vengeance also gets Hunter's Mark, but I think Divine Favor is usually going to be a better option, as you're only dropping 1 damage to no longer worry about concentration or target-switching.

    Game Plan:

So, here's what we're going to do: we'll start off on turn one casting Haste. Because we've used a spell slot, we can't cast Divine Favor this turn. However, with our extra hasted action, we can take the Attack Action and thus activate Vow of Enmity. We can only make one attack with this, though. If we've got Plate Armor, our AC is now 20, and we should have a +5 to Con saves for concentration.

Next, we make our single attack.

If this attack crits, we smite. While the Hew attack would hit for 2d6+5, or 14 (if it hits), a crit Divine Smite would hit for 4d8, or 18. HOWEVER: we can only do this with our once-per-day free Divine Smite, as we, again, can't cast a spell with a spell slot twice in a turn. If we've already done that, Hew away.

On our second turn, we'll use a bonus action to cast Divine Favor. This will prevent us from Smiting both because it's a leveled spell and also because we used our bonus action. However, it means that we'll be able to add 1d4 to the three attacks we make this turn.

And then, turn three onward, we can hold our bonus action for smites.

Note that we have some options here: a smite crit is incredible, but if we need to conserve some spell slots, we can just default to Hew. Generally, I think unless our first attack is a crit, I'm going to hold off on smites. But if we get to our second attack and it's just a normal hit, a good option would be to do a 2nd (or 3rd, but those are very precious) level Searing Smite, as this does more damage overall than a Divine Smite when upcast, because its scaling is basically 2d6 rather than 1d8 (divine smite does better on crits, though).

In other words, the actual damage output is going to be a little ambiguous, as there are situational things to consider here.

    Mathing it Out:

Turn one: this is when we just cast haste. With Vow of Enmity, we've got advantage, and so our attack should hit for 2d6+9 (5 from Strength, 4 from GWM). We have Graze, so we'll ignore the 5 for now and add it at the end. So, 2d6+4, with a +9 to hit. Against a Wyvern, we hit on a 5 or higher, so that's an 80% chance to hit, or 96% with advantage, and a 9.75% chance to crit for an extra 7. 2d6+4 is 11 average, so 11x96% is 10.56 and 7x9.75% is .6825, so we're doing about 11.2, and then we add in the guaranteed 5 from Strength to give us 16.2 damage on this turn. Not great, but we're ramping up.

Turn two, we now get to make three attacks. We'll start off casting Divine Favor, adding 1d4 to each of these attacks. I believe I can just calculate this separately, as our chance to hit hasn't changed, so we can figure out what this would add on each attack. With a 96% hit chance and a 9.75% crit chance, we can take that 2.5 and multiply it by 105.75%, giving us roughly 2.6. Thus, each attack is now doing not 16.2, but 18.8. And now, we're making three of these attacks (unlike the bonus action Hew attack, we do get to add the GWM proficiency bonus damage to our Hasted attack, as it's still technically the Attack Action). Thus, we're now doing 56.4 damage on turn two. Bit of a ramp-up, no?

Ok, now, let's talk about what we do on turn three.

Now that we have our bonus action free to do other things, as I see it, we have a couple options:

If we crit, we can either Divine Smite or do our Hew attack. Hew is a little better now, as it's got that extra d4. But it's still only doing 2d6+1d4+5, or 14.5. A divine smite on a crit would be 4d8 at 1st level, which is already 18, but it's also guaranteed - that 14.5 is slightly less because of the chance to miss.

We'll hold off on doing anything with a bonus action until we know whether we crit on either attack. So, if we crit on the first one, we'll gladly smite. Thus, it's a simple question of whether we crit on any of our three attacks. With a 9.75% chance to crit, that means a 90.25% chance we don't crit. But across three attacks, that's cubed, so we get more like a 74% chance we don't crit, and thus a 26% chance we do crit. The damage is very consistent if we divine smite on a crit.

Now, we can also adjust what level we're smiting at. But for our purposes, I'll just say it's a base level. So, 4d8 is an average of 18, and thus we can say that this adds 18x26%, or about 4.7 damage.

What if we don't crit, though?

I think I'd try for a 2nd level Searing Smite, which would do 2d6 immediately and then another 2d6 on the Wyvern's turn.

Well, first off, there's a 74% chance that that's there's no crit. But then, we also need to ensure that we actually hit on the last attack, which is a 96% chance (technically 9.75% of that is the crit chance. I think this is covered by the reduction to only 74% of the time, but I could be wrong. I also think it'll be nearly negligible.) So, we're going to 2nd level Searing Smite 74%x96% of the time, or about 71% of the time. Our Searing Smite will do 14 damage total (2d6 now and 2d6 later, and never a crit because then we'd be Divine Smiting) so 14x71% is 9.94, or rounded to 9.9.

So, on turn three, we have the same 56.4 damage we did on turn two, but now we add both of these (notably, their percentage likelihoods add up to 97%, which is pretty close to our 96% hit chance, so I think I'm more or less ok). That means, in total, we're doing 71 damage per turn.

Phew! That's better than anything I've tried so far, and by a lot!

Big caveat here is that if we do lose concentration on Haste, we're in big trouble.

Titan Druid (v2) vs Wyvern

 Well, like we did with the Hollow Warden while it was still in UA, we're going to try out the subclass from the most recent UA that I'd be most excited to play. Bringing back the idea of Wild Shape using Templates from the One D&D playtest, the Circle of Titans provides, I'd think, a more consistent shape-shifting druid experience. And on top of that, you can eventually become Gargantuan.

Of all Druid subclasses, this is the one that I think I'd be most excited to play in a real game, especially thanks to the fixes in the recent UA. But how do they do, damage-wise? Well, now that we've designated a Wyvern as our default monster to attack (rather than a Death Knight, which is too unusual of a monster for these purposes) we can try it out.

So, how do we build this?

    Stats and Feats

Naturally, we'll want to maximize our Wisdom, because it will increase our AC, our attack bonus, our Rend damage, not to mention our spell modifiers. Thus, we'll aim to start with a Wisdom of 17. The question, then, is whether we want to try to just cap it at level 8 or pick up general feats.

As a Druid, we are still a full spellcaster, so we'll have plenty we can do when we're not transformed, and that might encourage us to take feats that aid in spellcasting or allow additional spells. Fey Touched is a classic choice, letting us get a free Misty Step and then have it prepared, along with other spells (though I don't think we'll need Hunter's Mark, at least by level 10).

Given that our Titan Forms are pretty solidly "SAD" (single-ability-dependent,) I'm inclined to say that we can slow-play our Wisdom in order to cram as many General Feats in there as possible. At level 4, as always, we grab War Caster, but for level 8, we have a few options. Inspiring Leader is a very solid feat that works great on both Charisma and Wisdom characters in 5.5, though you won't benefit as much from the Temp HP.

While we will be primarily a melee combatant, none of the melee feats are likely to do much for us given that we're using natural weapons. We might get something like Sentinel later on, but probably not until we cap Wisdom. So, we'll assume we've got a 19 Wisdom by level 10, and thus a +4.

As for our other stats, I think basically we want to get a decent Con more than anything. We'll want decent Dex as well, both for Initiative and for our AC while out of combat. That said, I'm going to suggest going Magician rather than Warden for our Primal Order, because the bonuses from the latter stop being relevant when we Wild Shape. It does leave us pretty squishy when we aren't shifted, and unlike a Moon Druid, we can only be shifted for 10 minutes at a time, so we need to really make sure we save our spell slots to refresh Wild Shape if we run out of charges. Luckily, any spell slot will do, and for sure taking on our Titan Form is going to be the best use of a 1st level spell slot.

    As a side note: if we want a magic item to boost our Rend attacks, in theory a Wand of the War Mage could help, but it's a matter of interpretation. Technically you get the bonus to spell attack rolls "while holding the wand." And thus, does it actually raise your spell attack bonus or is it a bonus to the spells you cast while holding it? As a DM, I'd for sure interpret it in the former way, as otherwise there'd be no way for you to increase your attack bonus in this form (this is a big problem I have with the Moon Druid). If you're attuned, I'd say you get the bonus.

But we're not taking magic items into account here.

    Spells:

So, we have a lot of spells and spell-like effects from our Titan Forms.

We can only cast our Circle Spells while shifted, but if we spend our first turn casting a good concentration spell, we can keep that up.

Naturally, Druids are one of the two classes that gets Conjure Minor Elementals, so it's going to be hard to consider any other. We can upcast it to 5th level to get 3d8 extra damage on each attack. While we only get two attacks, that's still pretty significant damage, even if it's not like what we'd do with Scorching Ray. Note that we will really want to do our best to protect our Concentration. We might even spend our level 8 feat on Resilient Con and just worry about getting Wisdom capped later on. War Caster will help, but even if we have a +3 to Con, that still makes it somewhat easy to drop concentration.

So, if CME is adding potentially 6d8 damage per turn for us (27 average,) are there other options? We could do Summon Fey. Cast at 4th level (saving us some higher-level spell slots and only having two less damage than a 5th level version) it'd hit twice for 2d6+7. That's actually 28 average if they both hit. Now, CME will do more on a crit, so the truth is that CME is probably doing more damage overall. And the Fey is endangered both by our losing concentration as well as just taking too much damage. That said, it also has some utility.

I would say both are very worthy concentration spells, but for the sake of simplicity, we'll assume we're going CME. CME lasts 10 minutes while Summon Fey lasts an hour, which means both could plausibly be cast before combat starts, but I'm also going to just assume combat is something of a surprise, so we'll need our action on turn 1 to cast it.

    Titan Form:

I actually think our form doesn't really change our damage output much, but the Insectoid form will have Flyby at this level, meaning we can go in and out and potentially avoid getting hit. That said, it's only a 40-foot fly speed, so even if we fly in and out, we're probably only 20 feet away, and a Wyvern at least has 80 feet of fly speed, so unless we have a friend locking them down, they can still come after us.

I think the best damage ability for a form is the Behemoth's, giving them that Godzilla breath weapon, so I'd probably default to that unless we need the Insectoid's healing (Leviathan is going to probably only be useful if we need to fight in the water).

That said, for single target situations, we probably want to save our spell slots - if we needed to really burn something down, the breath weapon is great, but we'll be doing tons with our Rends anyway.

    Game Plan:

All right, so, when combat begins, we're going to start off by casting Conjure Minor Elementals at 5th level. This will add 3d8 damage to our Rend Attacks if the target is within 15 feet (and our Rends have a 10-foot reach, so that should be fine). We then go into our chosen Titan Form.

This gives us an AC of 17, and our Rend attacks will have a +8 to hit. At this level, they'll do 2d8+4 damage on their own, but CME adds 3d8, meaning each of our two hits will impact for 5d8+4. We can't attack yet this turn. We can be Huge sized by level 10. If we're worried about getting hit, we can expend a spell slot to get bigger. It's most efficient to use an odd-numbered spell slot - a 1st will get us to AC 18, a 3rd will get us to AC 19, and if we burn our other 5th level slot, we'll get AC 20. I think this is dubiously helpful - maybe if we're drowning in 1st levels we can get that little bump.

Next, we'll use 20 or more movement to activate Shock Wave. If we're running to our target, that's easy, but if we're already within melee range, we'll want to run around them (if there are multiple foes, this can be tough, as circling a target will probably draw an opportunity attack from one of its friends). If we can manage this, we can send our shockwave to knock the target prone. (Great if we're fighting non-hovering flying enemies like a Wyvern). Our saving throw DC will be 16 at this point, and a Wyvern has a +3, meaning that they fall on a roll of 12 or lower, or 60% of the time.

On turn two, we'll be able to attack. However, given that the Wyvern probably stood up on their turn, we'll need to run around them again to try to do Shock Wave.

With a +8 to hit, we'll hit on a 6 or higher, meaning a 75% hit chance. But we'll have advantage 60% of the time.

So, without advantage (40% of the time0 we'll hit for 5d8+4, or 26.5, and crit for 22.5 extra. Thus, 26.5x75% is 19.875 and 22.5x5% is 1.125, so this is 21 on average. Happening 40% of the time, that gives us 8.4.

With advantage, we have a 93.75% chance to hit, and the usual 9.75% chance to crit. 93.75%x26.5 is about 24.8, and 9.75%x22.5 is about 2.2, so we get about 27 here. Happening 60% of the time, that's 16.2.

Thus, each hit is going to do an average of 24.6. Across two hits, that's 49.2 damage per round.

That's pretty good, if not staggeringly so. But it's certainly very solid and comparable to a lot of other builds we've done. There are fewer moving parts, like our somewhat complex Eldritch Knight Booming-Blade-Push build.

Just out of curiosity, if we were willing to empty the tank, I'm wondering what the Behemoth's breath attack would do. If we spend a 5th level spell slot, it does 10d10 radiant damage and half as much on a success. Our DC is 16, and the Wyvern has a +0 to Dex (ok, this is one area where they may be atypical). So, if they roll a 15 or lower (75% of the time) we do full damage (55) and if they succeed, it's half (27.5). So, 55x75% is 41.25 and 27.5x25% is 6.875, so we'd be doing 48.125. That's less than we'd do with our attacks and CME.

However, there are some caveats: we get to do this on turn one, for one thing. So, if we imagine averaged out across a 3-round encounter, our CME version does 49.2 on turns two and three, but nothing on turn 1, so it's really more like 32.8. At this level we can't do three 5th-level breath weapons, but if we drop the third one to a 4th level spell slot, it just means it'll do 80% of the others, so that becomes 38.5. Thus, our average damage over three rounds is about 44.9 damage.

The other caveat is this: if we can hit more than one target with that breath, the overall damage we do becomes insane. While AoE doesn't kill any one target faster (though evidently it might if we're willing to burn out all our spell slots) it does wind up doing far more damage overall, and in a fight to the death, that's all relevant, even if, for your own safety, it's better to knock down monsters one at a time if you can do it faster.

Truly, given that it scales better than Lightning Bolt, I'm actually expecting that the breath weapon will get nerfed at some point, but I think this subclass, played pretty straightforwardly, will do just fine.

Hollow Warden Heavy Weapon Build (vs Wyvern)

 So, the Hollow Warden Ranger is the big subclass that is getting people to actually consider playing a Ranger again. The subclass' redesign after some criticisms of it in the UA brought to light a new bit of "tech" for Ranger subclasses, which is to use Favored Enemy as a resource akin to Wild Shape charges or Channel Divinity. It's more limited than that, as there's no way to trade spell slots for more uses and no refreshing it on a short rest.

Still, it does allow for a really cool new potential with Rangers, to perhaps wean them off of the Hunter's Mark spell - something that the 5.5 redesign emphasized in ways that the 5.0 version, for all of its flaws, didn't. I still think we might need another "alternate class features" update to fix it like we got in Tasha's for 5.0.

And let's also be clear: I think we're grading on a curve here.

Now, I'm going to do something a bit unconventional: Rangers differ from their d10 brethren by not getting training in Heavy Armor. I think the general assumption, even if you're going with a melee build, is that you'll be focusing on Dexterity as your primary stat. Hollow Wardens are nearly obligated to go melee. But while the Dual Wielder feat enables you decently when it comes to dexterity-focused melee builds (coupled with the Nick mastery, you start getting four attacks per turn by level 5) I still think, generally, that going Great Weapon Master with a Greatsword (or Glaive, if we also get Polearm Master as well) winds up being a bit better damage.

The one trick here is that we will still need at least a 14 in Dexterity, because otherwise we won't get the full benefit of Medium Armor.

Generally, on a thematic level, I'd probably go for a Dex build anyway, even if the damage is a bit lower, simply because there's so much benefit to having high dexterity.

But the fact that Hollow Wardens can get a reaction attack increases the value of hitting with the hardest possible weapon, and unless you have an Antimatter Rifle or other modern/futuristic firearms, that's the Maul and Greatsword. The Maul is probably more interesting with its Topple Mastery, but my math tends to show that Graze is pretty much always the best mastery for damage-dealing (except when fighting extremely low-AC targets).

Now, the only Ranger I ever played was actually a Strength-based dual-wielder (this was pre-Tasha's, and I wanted to play a Minotaur, who got bonuses to Strength and Constitution). He actually did ok in the landscape-traversal part of Tomb of Annihilation, though we didn't really get beyond level 5 (I intended to multiclass into Fighter for the remainder of the adventure, as he was meant to be a kind of 80s action hero-style commando). It does require spreading yourself pretty thin to get decent ability scores. If we start with a 17 in Strength, we're probably not getting more than a +2 to Dex, Con, and Wisdom, and basically have to dump Int and Charisma.

So, let's talk feats and such:

We're of course, taking Great Weapon Master at level 4 (if you're getting sick of this feat, perhaps I'll err on the side of ignoring it for future builds). At level 8, though, I'm tempted to just cap Strength because we probably want to be able to boost Wisdom or Con at levels 12 and 16.

For our weapon, again, we're going Greatsword.

For our fighting style, Great Weapon Fighting is kind of crap, so I'd probably go with something like Defensive (to make up for the fact we're stuck with Medium Armor) or Blindsight (kind of cool on a thematic level). Interception could be good, but we want our reaction free for Prowling Retribution.

As far as spells go, we're only going to have up to 3rd level spell slots. Elemental Weapon is kind of interesting - it adds a d4 of elemental damage and a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls, which actually out-damages Hunter's Mark (the bonus damage is 1d4+1, compared to 1d6, which are both equal to 3.5, but we're also hitting a little more often). It is an action to cast (downside) but lasts an hour, so it's plausible to have it running before we fight our foe. It is a 3rd level spell, so somewhat more precious (we might want to save those for something like Conjure Barrage, which is now a very good spell) but for single-target damage, it's decent. Summon Fey could be great here, but our Wisdom is kind of crap.

If we figure, across 3 attacks, we're getting 3d4+3, that's like 10.5 extra damage if they all hit (which is also more likely if we cast this) while our Fey will hit only once admittedly for like 13. But the Fey will probably have a +6 to hit, while our own attacks with Elemental Weapon would have a +10 to hit.

Well, if we want to be thorough, we can fully calculate both, but I think we're going to stick to Elemental Weapon here.

So:

We'll hope we've pre-cast Elemental Weapon. Thus, our attack bonus is +10 to hit and we deal 2d6+1d4+6 on a hit. That becomes 2d6+1d4+10 if it's part of our attack action. We hit on a 4 or higher, so that's an 85% hit chance.

The only real damage bonus we get from our subclass here, then, is Prowling Retribution from our Wrath of the Wild. Ideally, we'll get this once a turn if we crowd in on our Wyvern target.

So, turn one (again assuming we have Elemental Weapon up already) we activate Wrath of the Wild and then make two Greatsword attacks.

As usual, we'll separate out the guaranteed Strength modifier damage here, so we get two attacks that add 2d6+1d4+5, or 14.5 on a hit, and an additional 2d6+1d4, or 9.5 on a crit. 14.5x85% is 12.325, and 9.5x5% is .475, giving us 12.8 average damage on each of these attacks. Then, we add back in the 5 guaranteed Strength damage from Graze, bringing those to 17.8 each, so we're looking at 35.6 damage. That's promising, honestly, because we're not finished.

On turn 2 onward, if we crit on either attack, we can make a bonus action attack. There's a 9.75% chance of that (the same as rolling a nat 20 with advantage). The damage here is a little lower, as we don't get the proficiency bonus. So, we're talking 2d6+1d4+6, though we save the 5 from Strength to add in later, meaning that a hit "adds" 2d6+1d4+1 to our damage, which is 10.5 on average. 10.5x85% is 8.925, and then the crit bonus is just as much as before, or .475, so if we get our Hew, that's 9.4, but we then add the Strength back in, giving us 14.4. However, this only happens if we got that crit (or if we downed another foe, but we're imagining this as pure single-target situations) so it's 14.4x9.75%, or about 1.4 damage on average. This brings us up to 37 damage per round.

Now, the last piece of the puzzle is our Prowling Retribution, which allows us to make a weapon attack as a reaction if we or a nearby ally is dealt damage by our target. That's not guaranteed - the Wyvern might miss with both of its attacks. With Half Plate, the Defensive Fighting Style, and Wrath of Nature, we'll have an AC of 19 at this point. A Wyvern has a +7 to hit. So, they need to roll a 12 or higher, meaning a 45% chance to hit. But across its two attacks, they'll get at least one hit roughly 70% of the time. We can use that as the chance we get to use this reaction attack.

Then, it's actually just like our Hew attack - it should do an average of 14.4 damage. That can happen 70% of the time, so it adds roughly 10.1 damage per round.

Thus, we're now looking at 47.1 damage per round, which looks pretty good to me.

That being said, getting hit is going to make it very likely we'll lose concentration. Thanks to Hungering Might, we get to add Wisdom to our Con saves (meaning we might aim to get a +3 to Wisdom, though this might wind up dropping our Con modifier by 1, which would even these out). We probably only have a +4 to Con saves, which will often help against the Bite attack, but the Sting is going to make it a lot harder to concentrate.

Some adjustments to consider:

We calculated this against a Death Knight with a dual-wield build (which is honestly more likely what I'd actually play). We would probably consider going Hunter's Mark rather than Elemental Weapon. While we only really have to make a single Nick weapon attack (once we weave in a Scimitar or Dagger for our "light weapon property" attack, that will let us attack with our Shortsword for our bonus action attack, because we did actually make an attack as part of the action with a different weapon in a different hand). Though, now that I think of it, while we wouldn't be able to boost the damage on the Nice weapon, we'd get overall more damage from the spell because we're still making four attacks with the Shortsword per round compared with three with the Greatsword. But I think Hunter's Mark still might be the right call, because I don't think +1 to hit with 4/5 attacks will give us more than an extra d6 of damage we'd be getting by boosting the damage of our Scimitar.

I still don't think the dual-wield build will do as well, because we'd be losing 8 damage from the hits of our Attack damage, as well as the little bit of extra damage from our Hew attacks. But it probably does decently.

For the record, if we had a 3rd level Summon Fey, they would have a +6 to hit (or +7 if we got Wisdom to +3 ). They deal 2d6+6 Force damage on a hit. So, if we do have a +7 to hit, they're hitting on a 7 or higher, so 70% of the time. It's 14 damage on a hit and 7 more on a crit. 14x70% is 9.8 and 5%x7 is .35, so it's an average of 10.15 extra damage, or 10.2 rounded off.

But then we need to adjust our own damage.

We now only have a +9 to hit with our own attacks, so we hit 80% of the time. Our attacks deal 5 guaranteed damage and then add 2d6+4 on a hit and 2d6 on a crit, so 11 and 7. 11x80% is 8.8, and 7x5% is .35, so we're looking at 9.15, then adding that guaranteed 5 for 14.15 per attack, or 28.3 with both attacks.

Now, our Hew attack will be 5 guaranteed, and then 2d6 on a hit and an extra 2d6 on a crit, so we can combine our probabilities for 85% of 7, or 5.95, giving us 10.95 damage per hew attack. That's 9.75% of the time, so we've got basically 1 extra damage per round.

Then, 70% of the time, we get our reaction attack, also doing 10.95 on average, so about 7.7.

Thus, if we go Summon Fey, we get 10.2+28.3+1+7.7, or 47.2.

Wow. That's actually slightly better - literally by 0.1 - than the Elemental Weapon version. Actually, given that the Fey has some additional utility (and can soak damage for us) I might prefer it.

Getting Six Feet Deep into the Path to the Grave

 The Grave Domain is maybe the Cleric subclass I'm most familiar with. One of my most consistent players in my 6-years-running Ravnica campaign is a Grave Cleric (he was Orzhov but has broken with the guild over the efforts by the guild leadership to maintain their hold on power through undeath - actually, by this point in the campaign, the Obzedat have all been banished to true death in Agryem, and there are a lot of internal reforms), but on top of that, when I did (most of) Curse of Strahd, our Cleric was also a Grave Cleric.

The new version of this subclass sparked a lot of debate because of the perception that it had been nerfed. I want to investigate that.

Now, several features changed. Sentinel at Death's Door is more effective now when it's used, but you can only use it when a target is Bloodied, meaning that you can't save a friend from a big crit at the start of combat. It's basically a trickier judgment call now - typically I see it just automatically used if the Cleric has a reaction open to negate any critical hit.

But the much biggest controversy is over Path to the Grave.

The Xanathar's version of this had you use your Channel Divinity to set up a monster, giving them vulnerability to the next attack that hit them. Ideally, you get someone like a Paladin to hit them and then expend a high-level Divine Smite, or have a Rogue land a Sneak Attack. It required careful planning, though the Cleric can opt to Ready this action to ensure that the right character is about to attack (I'm not sure if I'd let you declare this after you see an ally crit, though if you're waiting for them to crit and they never do, it'd be a wasted action... might be ok).

Anyway, the new version works very differently:

Now, you curse the target (no save) as a bonus action (you do need to be within 30 feet). This lasts until the start of your next turn. The curse imposes Disadvantage on Attack Rolls and Saving Throws. Then, when you or an ally lands an attack on the target, you can end the curse (no action required) to cause the attack to deal Radiant or Necrotic damage equal to your Cleric level.

Let's unpack things a little:

First off, the disadvantage that the curse imposes is entirely new. That aspect, at least, is a full buff.

But what about the damage?

Well, you're doing 3-20 damage, depending on your level. What's interesting about this is that it really doesn't matter who hits or how hard. An off-hand dagger attack is going to benefit from this just as much as a Paladin smiting on a crit. It's flat damage, and the only thing you need to deliver it is for someone to hit the target before your next turn. This can even be you, as this only takes your bonus action to activate.

Now, vulnerability did double all damage, effectively (if they were resistant, you'd negate that, which still doubles the damage they would have done. It doesn't help with immunity, but that's just doubling zero). So, basically, it's a question of whether the ally whose attack you're boosting was dealing damage with a single attack higher than your level.

I do think there's a good chance they were. Even a dual-wielding fighter is going to probably be doing something like 1d6+3 damage on a hit when you first get this, which is obviously more than the 3 you're adding.

But at higher levels, what kind of damage are we looking at? A Paladin hitting with a +3 Greatsword and with Great Weapon Master and capped Strength at level 17 is going to hit for 2d6+1d8+14, which is 25.5. So, yeah, vulnerability would be better.

But a level 20 Monk might still only be hitting on an individual attack for 1d12+10 (if they have +3 Wraps of Unarmed Prowess and had capped their Dex before hitting level 20,) meaning that Path to the Grave would actually be more damage for them than the old version (well, if they crit the vulnerability would be better).

    Look: I think in a vacuum, this does look like a nerf. It's certainly not going to enable insane burst damage the way the old version worked.

But the disadvantage imposed by the curse can potentially be really helpful, making it harder for them to resist things like grapples and stuns, or just full on damage from something like your own Spirit Guardians.

I maintain that if we had not previously had the old Grave Domain Cleric, people would actually be pretty excited about the one out of Horrors Within. Really, only the Phantom Rogue, to me, missed the mark (it could be so much better if you got the Spirit Trinkets earlier).

War Cleric vs Wyvern

 You'll notice that a lot of my builds have been for martial character, usually half casters, third casters, or not casters at all. Pure spellcasters aside from the Warlock will often present so many possibilities for what we can do that it's really more likely you'll be playing sort of reactively, figuring out what makes the most sense in the moment. Now, sure, my Wizard can do his Conjure Minor Elementals/Scorching Ray combo to do insane damage (though not very sustainably) but I certainly don't do that every combat.

Still, even if you don't have that particular combo of spells, I wanted to get a sense of what other casters might consider using.

Clerics are most classically the healers of D&D. But there are two ways in which that doesn't really do them justice - first of all, basically no character should or even can just spend every turn in combat healing (ok, maybe when you get to higher levels you might find yourself doing that). Second, there's plenty that a Cleric can do as an offensive combatant.

I'd considered looking at the Grave Cleric, updated in Horrors Within (and one that has generally gotten disappointed reviews - my take was that if we didn't already have the Xanathar's version, it would be well-received. Part of the reason you sometimes need to just break and do a new edition is that people won't play a nerfed version of an older option if that older option is still available). But I decided to set that aside because I think the War Cleric might give us some more interesting decisions.

More than any other Cleric, War Clerics really favor going the Protector route, which gives you heavy armor training and martial weapon proficiency. To be honest, I think that the former is probably not worth it - sticking to medium armor will get you just one AC shy of the highest type of heavy armor, and with less of an ability score investment (you get slowed if you have less than 15 Strength in Splint or Plate, whereas 14 Dexterity will ensure you're getting the maximum AC out of medium armor).

On basically any other cleric, I'd prefer the extra cantrip and the ability to add Wisdom to Arcana and Religion checks (more or less making them Wisdom skills if you take a 10 in Int). But because this is a class that gives us (limited) additional attacks, I'm tempted to push for more of a martial vibe.

Now: we probably need to be wary of just treating this like it's a Martial class. Without Extra Attack, we get less value out of a feat like Great Weapon Master. We also don't get Weapon Masteries, which make something like Dual Wielder useful. Polearm Master can work great for us, but the bonus action Pole Strike attack we get is slightly redundant with our War Priest feature.

The big question, I think, is whether we want to pour everything into Strength or Wisdom.

Naturally, Wisdom is usually the top stat for a Cleric, as it affects our spells. It also gives us more uses of our War Priest feature.

But we also want to have decent Strength if we are choosing to fight with a big martial weapon.

Now, we can solve this issue, to an extent at least: if we take Magic Initiate: Wizard, we can pick up True Strike as a cantrip. This would let us make our regular attack with Wisdom, and even do an extra d6 of damage at level 10.

Alternatively, if we grabbed Magic Initiate: Druid, we could take Shillelagh, which would transform a Club or Quarterstaff into, at this level, a d10 weapon. The benefit here is that we could use this with both the Attack action and a War Priest bonus action - however, we need to spend our first bonus action on casting Shillelagh, as it only lasts a minute.

Here's what I think we're going to do:

We'll aim to start off at level 1 with a 17 in Wisdom and a 15 in Strength. At level 4, we take Great Weapon Master, making our Strength 16, and then at level 8, we take War Caster, giving us an 18 in Wisdom. By starting off with 15 in Strength, if we're willing to dump Dex, Int, and Cha, we could manage to get Con up to 16 (assuming we have a background that can boost both Wis and Con).

The Sage background gives us these as well as Magic Initiate Wizard, so we can grab True Strike and then pick up probably Shield as our 1st level spell (or Find Familiar, though I never actually wind up using my Familiar in combat, so I'd err toward Shield).

Now, how often will we actually use True Strike? Maybe not all the time, but it's nice to have.

Now, for a weapon, I would go with a Maul - without Weapon Masteries, it's sort of arbitrary whether you grab a Maul or Greatsword, and I actually prefer Mauls on an aesthetic level (especially if they're unrealistic massive sledgehammers with a head as big as your torso). It's pretty flexible - as long as it's a heavy melee weapon, you'll get the benefit of your feat from it - though note that heavy ranged weapons will suffer from our low dex).

Ok, next, let's talk spells.

For our big concentration spell, Spirit Guardians are usually a great call, especially if there are a lot of melee monsters. In single-target situations, you're still going to be getting a fair amount of damage each turn (if upcast to 5th level, you're looking at 5d8 damage, which is 22.5 damage on average for a failed save, or 11.25 damage on a success. Hit more than one target and it's for sure paying for itself.

But there are other possibilities. Crusader's Mantle won't give us a ton of damage, but if we have a lot of allies who make lots of attacks, it could add up. The spell doesn't upcast, though, so in order to hit the 22.5 damage mark, we'd need our party within the emanation to hit 9 times per round (against a single target). That seems tough to do unless we're specifically fighting alongside a Monk and a Fighter.

Summon Celestial is another option here, hitting for 12 damage on average twice per turn. Indeed, in a pure single-target situation, it likely would out-damage Spirit Guardians. But if there's anyone else you might hit, good old reliable SG will do it for you.

Now, thanks to War God's Blessing, we can cast Spiritual Weapon without concentration. That being said, that will cast it at its base level, which means only hitting for 1d8+4 once a turn. Our War Priest bonus action attack will be hitting for 2d6+3, which means 8.5 versus 10. Now, sure, the Spiritual Weapon will hit a bit more often, but I suspect that it won't make up for it.

In other words, we might hold off on Spiritual Weapon until we're out of War Priest attacks.

We might also want to cast Fire Shield before combat if we can, as it will dole out punish damage to melee attackers, but I won't be making this part of our calculation (Fire Shield is non-concentration).

But after turn 1, getting Spirit Guardians running, what do we do with our action on subsequent turns? The truth is that, as a Cleric, it's good to not have a necessary action here, as we'll be able to respond to the battlefield situation. But we'll calculate this as if we're just casting True Strike each turn (after the 1st).

We can sustain our War Priest attacks for four rounds, which will hopefully be long enough for combat to be over.

Finally, how often are we using Guided Strike? While we can get some good hits in with it ourselves, I'd assume someone else in the party, like a Rogue, Barbarian, or Paladin, is actually hitting harder with their attacks, and so we'd rather use this to help them land their strikes. That being said, when we use it on ourselves, we don't need to use a reaction. At this level, we have 3 Channel Divinity uses. Actually, I say that others are hitting harder than we are, but...

Oh, I just realized something:

GWM only buffs our damage if we are taking the Attack Action. So, no True Strike.

I will say, the True Strike damage bonus will outpace GWM, I think. At level 10, it's just 3.5 more on average compared with GWM's 4, but next level it goes up to 7, which is already outpacing GWM at its best. (This wouldn't be true if we had extra attack, but going pure Cleric means we won't.)

So let's rejigger this:

We start off with a 15 in Con and 17 Wis. Now, Sage doesn't boost Strength, which is a bit of an issue, but if our DM lets us use a custom background, we can get the same bonuses and feat. We'll just start off with a 16 Strength if we can this way. Then, we'll take War Caster at level 4 and Resilient: Con at level 8, getting us back to our same stats as before.

Ok, now we're just getting that True Strike damage.

So, gameplan:

Turn one, we cast Spirit Guardians at 5th level and close in with our target. As a bonus action, we make an attack with our Maul using the War Priest feature. We're going to save Guided Strike for our allies or for when we make a True Strike attack.

Turn two, we cast True Strike, and then again do a bonus action War Priest attack. And so on.

Let's figure out our damage:

First off, Spirit Guardians. This damage happens on the enemy's turn. They do have an 80-foot fly speed, so even in the spell's difficult terrain, they could get away if they aren't stopped. But we'll assume they're standing and fighting.

This deals, as mentioned above, 22.5 damage on a failed save, and 11.25 on a success. The Wyvern has a Wisdom save bonus of +1. Our saving throw DC is 16. So, the Wyvern saves on a roll of 15 or higher, meaning that they fail 70% of the time. 22.5x70% is 15.75 and 11.25x30% is 3.375, so the total damage each turn we get from this spell (assuming that the wyvern remains within it and we maintain concentration) is 19.125 (we'll shorten that to 19.1).

Next, we have our War Priest attack. With only +3 to Strength (and that's if we're willing to dump three stats to -1. More likely we have a +2) we have a +7 to hit. The Wyvern's AC is 14, so we'll hit on a 7 or higher, or 70% of the time. Our hits land for 2d6+3, or 10 average, and we add 7 for crits. 10x70% is, obviously, 7. 7x5% is .35, so the average damage for this is 7.35 (rounded to 7.4).

So, turn 1, we do 26.5 damage (well, round 1, as the Spirit Guardians damage doesn't happen until their turn).

Turn two, we are really just adding our True Strike damage to that. With this, we have a +8 to hit, meaning we land 75% of the time. This also hits for 3d6+4 damage, or 14.5, with an extra 10.5 on a crit. 14.5x75% is 10.875, and 10.5x5% is .525, so we do 11.4.

Thus, on round 2, we're getting 37.9 damage.

Ah, but what of Guided Strike?

Well, honestly, it feels a little silly to use it on a Wyvern. For our True Strike, we would only benefit from it if we rolled a natural 2-5, meaning that we're actually only getting at most the equivalent of a +4 from it.

But on this round, we'd essentially turn our hit chance into a 95% chance, which means we'd get 13.775 (rounded to 13.8) from our hits (crits don't change), adding 2.4 damage per round.

Ok, now, if we ran out of War Priest attacks (maybe this isn't our first fight since our last short rest) we can use War God's Blessing to cast Spiritual Weapon. Note that this shares the resource with Guided Strike, though that's not having an enormous impact.

This would have the same hit chance as our True Strike, and takes the bonus action place of our War Priest attacks. 1d8+4 is 8.5 on average, with 4.5 extra on a crit, so it's 8.5x75%, or 6.375, with an extra .225 on a crit, for 6.6 damage per turn.

Thus, it's about .8 less damage than our War Priest maul attacks, meaning we're going down to 37.1 - not too bad.

    There are some nuances here, of course:

The biggest is that if we do catch more than one target in our Spirit Guardians, our damage per round skyrockets. Just a second equivalent foe in the area gives us an extra 19.1 damage, which would put us at 57 damage per round. A third would mean 76.1.

That being said, if we get hit hard enough and lose concentration (hopefully unlikely thanks to War Caster and Resilient Con) we'd be in trouble. If we didn't need the actions for healing, I might just re-cast Spirit Guardians each time.

How likely is it that we lose concentration? Well, it depends a little on what armor we have. But if we assume by level 10 we have mundane plate, our AC is now 18 (we've got a Maul, so no shield). A Wyvern has a +7 to hit, so a 50% hit chance against us.

Their bite does 13 damage on a hit, and an extra 9 on a crit. We'll abstract this to say that 50% of the time, we get hit for 13, and 5% of the time, we get hit for 22. With +3 to Con, Resilient Con, and War Caster, we have a +7 to Con saves and advantage on them. Thus, on a hit, we need to just hit a 10, requiring us to only hit a natural 3 or higher with advantage (90% success). On a crit, we need to hit an 11, and so we need to get a natural 4 or higher with advantage (85% success).

So, in the 45% of the time we're hit but not crit, we have only a 1% chance to fail. And then, in the 5% of the time we're crit, we have a 2.25% chance to fail. So, if we get attacked with the bite, that's 1%x50%, or .5%, and then 2.25%x5%, or .1% (rounded). Basically, there's a .6% chance we lose concentration if we're attacked with a bite.

However, the Sting is a lot nastier. It has the same hit chance, but it deals a ton more damage: 35 on a hit (mix of piercing and poison) and 66 on a crit.

So, if we're hit, we have to beat a 17 con save for concentration, meaning we have a 55% chance to do so. If we're crit, we need to beat a DC 33, which is just not possible without a ton of stacking buffs or a Mind Sharpener from an Artificer. So, for our chance to fail, we've got basically 45%x50%, or 22.5%, and then 100%x5%, which is obviously 5%.

Therefore, if we're targeted by the Sting, we have a 27.5% chance to lose concentration.

Inverting those again, we can figure out the chance that we maintain concentration through a full assault by a Wyvern - 99.4% of the time we succeed against the bite. But only 72.5% of the time do we succeed (I should say succeed or don't need to make the save in the first place) against the Sting. So, that means we have pretty close to a 72% chance to maintain concentration. It's still more likely than not, but we shouldn't be shocked if Spirit Guardians drops.

Elements Grappler Monk vs Wyvern

 Yeah, I'll do new builds here, but I wanted to update some of the ones that I had had against a Death Knight.

The Warrior of Elements Monk has the potential to be an insane grappler, because in theory, they can grapple a target while it's out of melee range, acting as a pretty powerful crowd control, while they are still fully able to pummel the target.

As before, the plan was to just pick up the Grappler feat at level 4 and then probably do ASIs for 8 (and 12 and 16 if we were going to higher levels) because we'd really like to be able to cap out Dexterity and start working on other stats later on.

As a note, as long as we're a Medium creature, we should be able to grapple a Large Wyvern. The actual character I'd want to play would be a Cloud Goliath, so he'd be able to get bigger and potentially grapple Huge creatures, but this should work for anyone who isn't Small, as you can grapple creatures that are up to one size larger than you.

By level 10, our Unarmed Strikes are just as good as any weapon a Monk can use with Martial Arts, so unless we have a Vicious/Flametongue Weapon, we'll be fine to just stick to unarmed attacks (and hopefully our DM will have given us +X Wraps of Unarmed Prowess - if you're a DM who has a Monk and don't give those to them in the course of a long campaign, you need to ask yourself whether you think you're a good person).

Before, we basically ignored the ability to grapple simply because Death Knights have legendary resistance, but in this case, we really need to take it into account. I don't even think we really found out a good DPR because we were focused more on how quickly we could burn through a Death Knight's resistances.

One really nice thing is that Monks actually get a power boost at level 10 (unlike Fighters, Paladins, or Warlocks, who wait until level 11). Mainly, that's that our Flurry of Blows upgrades to doing three attacks rather than two. So, by level 10, we can often put out five attacks a round. With 10 Focus Points at this level, we can likely be fairly liberal with them, and given that a typical combat lasts like 3-4 rounds, I'm going to more or less just assume we'll be using Flurry of Blows every turn.

The real question, though, is grappling.

The Grappler feat gives us three benefits: the first is that we can attempt to Grapple a target when we hit them with the damage version of an unarmed strike once per turn. Note that we do have to hit them, so they're only making that saving throw if we land the hit. The second is that we have advantage attacks against the target we're grappling. The last part simply lets us move normally while dragging a grappled target. There's for sure some shenanigans to be had by dragging foes off of cliffs and using Slow Fall to survive, but we'll ignore that for these purposes.

Another note is that grappling a flying creature that doesn't have Hover means that they'll fall when their speed is reduced to zero. For our purposes, though, we'll assume the Wyvern has landed and not take that fall damage into account.

Now, here's where our "white room" scenario butts up against actual realistic conditions. Because I think we have two options:

One is to simply try to grapple the target the first time we hit, and then just make more punches (or really elemental blasts). The other is to keep attempting grapples on subsequent attacks, sacrificing damage for control.

Truly, in an actual game scenario, the latter might be the better call. But I think both because it will be simpler to calculate and also because we want to see how much damage we can do, we're going to go with the former option. It will still be plenty fiddly.

Now, I usually ignore Origin Feats. The character I'd play with this build would be a Sailor (specifically an airship sailor) and thus get the Tavern Brawler origin feat. There's some redundancy with being a Monk here, but there are a couple benefits - at this level, our d8 Martial Arts die would go from an average of 4.5 damage to 4.9375, and we'd be able to push targets 5 feet away from us once per turn when we hit. But we do generally ignore origin feats on these, and also 4.5 is going to give us much rounder numbers, so we'll just set that aside and note that we'll do slightly higher damage with Tavern Brawler.

If you want a 17 in Dex to start off, you won't be able to get 16s in both Wisdom and Constitution (unless you roll stats and get lucky). I'll assume, though, that we go Wisdom for the better AC and Focus Save DC. (The Sailor Background also can provide Wisdom but not Constitution.) So we'll assume a Wisdom of 16.

Ok, so here's the game plan:

At the start of our first turn, we activate Elemental Attunement, giving our unarmed strikes a 15-foot reach. We don't really care about the damage types for Wyverns, though if we want to use the push/pull aspect, we'll need it to be one of the elemental types. I'll default to Thunder (which is only rarely resisted).

Then, we'll just do unarmed strikes. It's arbitrary whether we do our Flurry of Blows first or our Attack Action. We spend 2 FP this turn, and then we'll spend 1 each turn beyond this, unless we want to do other things.

Now, truthfully, we should probably try Stunning Strike. Indeed, because they'll automatically fail the save against being grappled if they're stunned, we really should go for this. It does mean spending 2 FP per turn, but we can sustain that for 4 turns if we're willing to empty the tank.

Another interesting question: if we stun the target with a Stunning Strike, can we use the free Grappler grapple after they've been stunned? There's not a clear order of operations here. I'd check with your DM, and I think there are reasonable interpretations on both sides, but I'm going to say you can choose in what order to apply these effects.

So, the first hit we land, we'll first try Stunning Strike. If they fail that save, we automatically grapple them. Otherwise, we force them to make a save against being grappled. If they still aren't grappled, we'll just make regular attacks.

Thus, what we'll need is the math for that first attack's damage, then to figure out how likely we are to get them grappled, and then the math for subsequent attacks made at either advantage or not (the latter being the same damage as the first attack).

If we miss on our first attack, though, we push that whole "first attack" process to the second attack, and so on and so forth.

    Thus:

Our first attack (and any future attacks made without advantage):

We have a +9 to hit (because we capped Dex at level 8) and each attack deals 1d8+5 thunder damage, or 9.5, with an extra 4.5 damage on a crit. Thus, we hit on a roll of 5 or higher, meaning that we have an 80% hit chance.

9.5x80% is 7.6, and 4.5x5% is .225, so these attacks will do an average of 7.825.

Now, if we land this, we make a Stunning Strike and then a grapple attempt. Our DC for this is 15. The Wyvern has a +3 to Con saves, so it fails on a roll of 11 or lower, or 55% of the time. If it gets stunned, it auto-fails the save against the grapple, but if it isn't stunned, it will probably use Strength to resist it. Our DC, however, is higher because it's based on our Dexterity, so it's a 17, meaning that with +4 to Strength saves, the Wyvern now fails on a 12 or lower, or 60% of the time.

Thus, the chance that it beats both saving throws is 45%x40%, or 18% of the time. And therefore, we'll expect advantage on our next attack 82% of the time.

Now, things start to get more complicated, because there are several potential further scenarios:

First is that everything goes great - we hit our target, stunned them, grappled them. The second is that we hit them, and thus tried Stunning Strike, but they beat their save, but then we did manage to grapple them. The third is that we hit them, but they beat both saving throws. And the last is that we fully missed them, and will try to use Stunning Strike and Fast Grapple on this attack.

Now, the good news is that in scenarios one and two, the math is the same, because we get advantage on them as long as they're grappled. We actually also get advantage on them in scenario three, because Stunning Strike still gives us advantage on the next attack we make even if they succeed on their save.

So: actually, before we get in the weeds here, let's just quickly establish what our attacks do on average if we have advantage - then we'll just figure out the relative proportions for each of our 5 attacks.

At advantage, with a base 80% hit chance, our hit chance goes up to 96% and our crit chance becomes 9.75%. 9.5x96% is 9.12 and 4.5x9.75% is roughly .44 (it's really .43875, but I've got to start rounding these off more). Therefore, we should be dealing 9.56 damage per attack when we have advantage.

Rounding both to the first decimal place, our damage-per-attack is:

7.8 without advantage.

9.6 with advantage.

Now, how often do we have advantage on our second attack? In this case, as long as we hit, we will, because of Stunning Strike. So, 80% of the time, we'll have advantage, and 20% of the time we won't. 9.6x80% is 7.68 and 7.8x20% is 1.56, so our average damage here becomes about 9.2. (total damage up to this point is 17)

For our first Flurry of Blows attack, we go fully into the weeds: If we hit on our first attack (80%) and the target is either stunned and grappled or at least grappled, we have advantage. So, within that 80%, there's an 82% chance we lined up that advantage. So, that is about 66%. Then, in the 20% chance we missed on the first attack, we'll try these things on attack 2. Thus, within that 20%, in the 80% chance we hit with the second attack, we'll apply Stunning Strike and guarantee advantage. So, 16% of the time we're getting advantage thanks to the second attack. Thus, we add them up and get an 82% chance to have had advantage on this attack. 9.6x82% is about 7.9, and 7.8x18% is about 1.4, so we're looking at an average damage of 9.3 (bring our total damage up to 26.3)

You know what, I'm genuinely starting to lose track of how to even approach this. There are so many branching possibilities - like, did we miss on the first attack, hit on the second, but fail to get them grappled, but still have advantage on the third attack because of Stunning Strike.

If I had more mental energy for this math, I'd try to be more precise, but considering that (if I did this right) the average damage of the third attack was only 0.1 more than the second attack, I think I'm willing to believe that there will be if anything even more negligible differences for attacks 4 and 5. Thus, we'll just assume that the subsequent attacks are doing 9.3 as well.

That means that our total damage (on this first turn at least) is 44.9. It'll be a little better on the next turn, as we're likely to have the Wyvern grappled already (especially if we stunned them - but the Wyvern is no more likely to break out of our grapple than they were to resist it in the first place even if they do use an action to escape).

And it's a bit heartening to see the Monk doing pretty decent damage. It's comparable to the Staff-and-Board Eldritch Knight (though without the reactive strike) and this can provide really powerful battlefield control. Now, I'm sure that a Great Weapon Master EK build would do even better (I'm tempted to run that soon, though I feel like I should branch out) but this does seem like it could be quite potent and fun.

Simulating the GOO-Lock with a More Forgiving Target

 So, I'm at a crossroads here:

After a series of "vs Death Knight" simulations, I realized that while it's a cool boss monsters, it's also a very unusual target for a 10th level character. In my post about my Staff-and-Board Eldritch Knight build, I instead used a Wyvern, which simplifies things by being a non-legendary creature with no damage resistance or immunities and also has an AC closer to the average monster that you'd be fighting at level 10.

But it bugs me that its AC is 14, rather than 15. Is that insane? It doesn't have to be a really clean number (15 being a multiple of 5) but my OCD brain wonders if we should instead use a "target dummy" with a 15 AC and +3 to all saves.

Given that I'm revisiting a build here but figuring out its best damage output against a more reasonable target, I want to make sure I'm using the most reasonable target, in part so that I can compare this with other builds in the future.

But maybe a Wyvern is fine.

Hey, we've already done one that uses a Wyvern.

Ok.

I think what we can expect here is that the build will do significantly better because of the lower AC. We focused primarily on Eldritch Blast and Summon Aberration, though there are some questions as to what concentration spell might be a better choice. While Warlocks get the most Summon spells after Wizards (I think they don't get Summon Construct, which I believe is just Wizard and Artificer) one frustrating thing is that, because of the scaling of Pact Magic, we're never casting them at an ideal spell level - upcasting from 4th to 5th level only winds up adding a total of two damage if both attacks hit, so on any other class, you'd basically never want to cast these at odd levels unless you were desperate for their utility.

A GOO-Lock isn't obligated to cast Summon Aberration over other Summon spells, at least until Create Thrall comes at level 14. But given that these spells have expensive material components and you get this one anyway, I'd assume that Great Old One Warlocks are going to tend toward the Aberration.

There are interesting questions as to which aberration is the ideal one to summon. Beholderkin are probably the safest, given that they use a ranged attack and can also fly to stay outside of foes' melee ranges (though a Wyvern could go after them). However, Slaadi do slightly more damage (it's Slashing, but that's less of a problem in 5.5 than it was in 5.0) and have a health-regeneration effect that makes them basically fresh if they survive a combat and you have another one within the hour. Unlike the Skeletal Spirit from Summon Undead, Beholderkin aren't penalized in HP, though. Finally, the Mind Flayer (formerly Star Spawn) actually have the highest damage potential because of Whispering Aura.

Now, against a Death Knight, I'd generally thought that we'd be too scared that our Mind Flayer would just be smacked down immediately. But against a Wyvern, they might last a little longer. For a summoned creature to get swatted down by an enemy is arguably also good for the party, because it means those attacks didn't come for you or your allies - it just means that our damage output goes down.

Cast at 5th level, our Mind Flayer would have 50 Hp and an AC of 16. A Wyvern has a +7 to hit and across its two attacks does 48 damage. So, yeah, two hits could potentially take our guy out, though the chance of hitting twice on a single turn is only 36%, meaning that it's more likely than not that the Mind Flayer can survive a turn with a Wyvern focusing it down (though not much more than that).

So, how much damage are we getting from Whispering Aura? Notably, we need to position our minion at least 10 feet away from our allies to avoid catching them in it (it's not an optional pulse of damage), though we could also hit a rider with it. If we assume we're taking General Feats at 4 and 8, we'll only have a 19 to Charisma, so our DC is 16. A Wyvern will fail on a 14 or lower, so that's 70% of the time. The aura does 7 damage on average, so it's 4.9 average damage per turn. That's not insignificant, actually.

If we do a Beholderkin, the damage of its attacks are the same, but we don't get that 4.9 per turn. The Slaad hits a little harder.

Ok, we've got to do this whole thing:

Beholder and Mind Flayer attacks each do 1d8+3+spell's level, which means 1d8+8, or 12.5 on average per hit. With a +8 to hit, they'll hit a Wyvern on a 6 or higher, so 75% of the time. So, 12.5x75% is 9.375, and 4.5x5% is .225, so we get 9.6 damage per attack, and with two attacks, that's 19.2 damage.

Thus, the Beholderkin gives us 19.2 damage per turn and the Mind Flayer gives us 24.1.

The Slaad does 1d10+3+spell's level, or 13.5 average, with 5.5 more on a crit. 13.5x75% is 10.125, 5.5x5% is .275, so we get 10.4 per attack and thus 20.8 per turn.

Clearly the Mind Flayer wins, but only if we can keep it alive.

    As a note: my Great Old One Warlock, the very first character I came up with for D&D, has a patron who's less gooey tentacles and slime, and more akin to The Board from Control (though I came up with the concept before I played that game). It is a massive stone tower that is constantly crumbling and collapsing, but never actually falls - the Shattering Tower of Oedom-Het - and seems to occupy some strange place either in the Far Realm or on the Astral Plane. The point, though, is that I'd flavor each of these aberrations as more like inorganic (think stone or concrete) forms that have strange spatial anomalies as part of their anatomy. The Mind Flayer, I think, would be a vaguely humanoid form made of grey stone with a head that seems like a 4th-dimensional vortex projected into 3rd dimensional space, constantly shuddering and convulsing and projecting a cacophonous noise into the heads of those around them. Nothing about this creature seems organic, except for the smooth way that the vaguely humanoid body moves.

Again, we'll need to work to keep this thing alive, but we can actually calculate what the damage output would be with each of the options now.

Now, we're going to focus on Eldritch Blast as our primary source of damage (well, from us). At this level it's just two beams.

Real quick, though: I just wanted to see how True Strike compares. If we were to put our various invocations (including Agonizing Blast) on True Strike rather than Eldritch Blast, and we used a Light Crossbow (probably the most reasonable weapon for someone who only gets Simple Weapon proficiency if we're not going Pact of the Blade), at this level True Strike would hit for 1d8+1d6+4+4 (we're double-dipping on Charisma because True Strike already gets it). I think we can already tell that Eldritch Blast would do better, though, because if we combine both beams, that's 1d10+4+1d10+4.

So yeah, we're good.

Now, we need to consider Clairvoyant Combatant.

I skipped this on the Death Knight because it seemed very unlikely we could get it. But against a Wyvern, who has no legendary resistances, I think it's not unreasonable that we'd get this pretty useful feature to work.

We do need to get within 30 feet to activate it, but if it does work, we can open up as far as 4 miles (unlikely we will). However, we get just one free use per rest, after which we need to expend a Pact Slot to try again. I think this means we should probably assume we won't be trying it again if it fails - we'd rather keep the other slot in case we need to re-summon our minion or try something else.

It's a Wisdom save, so like the Mind Flayer's Whispering Aura, there's a 70% chance that it'll work, giving us advantage on our attacks. (The Mind Flayer won't benefit from this, so we don't need to change the math above).

Thus, we have advantage on our attacks 70% of the time, and not on 30% of the time.

Without advantage, we have a 75% chance to hit (just like our minion). Our hits will be 1d10+4, or 9.5 on average, with an extra 5.5 on a crit. 9.5x75% is 7.125, and (as we figured out earlier with the Slaad) 5.5x5% is .275, so that's 7.4 per Eldritch Blast, or 14.8 total at this level. However, the no-advantage roll is only 30% of the time, so that's really 4.44.

With advantage, that hit chance becomes 93.75%, and the crit chance is 9.75%. So, 9.5x93.75% is about 8.9, and 5.5x9.75% is about .54, so this is about 9.4 per EB and thus 18.8 total. This happens 70% of the time, so it's really 13.16.

Thus, our Eldritch Blasts do an average of 17.6 damage per round.

If we get our Aberration out before initiative is rolled, that will let us get that full damage each round, but I would guess that we'd typically have to wait a round.

So, we have three potential projections of damage-per-round based on our aberration choice.

With a Beholderkin, we do 36.8 damage per round (after the first if we didn't pre-cast).

With a Slaad, we do 38.4.

With a Mind Flayer, we do 41.7.

    So, there are fewer moving parts here than there are in my Eldritch Knight build, which did quite a lot more (especially if we assumed we could get their reaction strike), and I wonder if there are areas where I could tune up the build.

    Level 10 is a bit of a rough breakpoint for a Warlock, as they get a giant boost at level 11 with the progression of Eldritch Blast and the potential to pick up a more powerful spell (Summon Fiend, for example, will out-damage any of these 5th level Summon Aberration spells). In AoE situations, there's a good chance that Hunger of Hadar might be a better use of our spell slots and concentration, depending on how many targets it can get to.

But I'm not sure really how to boost the damage output here without using A: magic items or B: some weird multiclass build where we're not even sure we're a Warlock anymore (though Aberrant Sorcery is a pretty thematic thing to combine with this, even if there's a little overlap - but quickening Eldritch Blast can be pretty powerful). Apart from needing to close in for Clairvoyant Combatant, the lower damage of a pure-ranged strategy (using the Beholderkin) will allow us to stay a lot safer in combat.

Also, there are some fight-specific shenanigans we can get up to - if the wyverns have riders, maybe we can Repelling Blast them off their mounts?

We could get a fair amount of near-guaranteed damage by using Repelling Blast to shove them into a Hunger of Hadar - the Cold damage that the spell deals has no saving throw, so I'd put its upcasting scaling into that rather than the Acid. A Wyvern has a fly speed of 80 feet, though, so it might be hard to keep them in there, but against melee combatants with the standard 30 foot walking speed will have a harder time. Using Devil's Sight should, I think, let you see into it.

(Actually, unexpected rules nuance here: Darkvision doesn't actually prohibit seeing in magical darkness - it's the Darkness spell that says that. Hunger of Hadar explicitly says that no light inside the darkness can illuminate it, and that creatures fully within it are blinded, but technically nothing says that someone with Darkvision can't see into it from the outside. Devil's Sight, notably, is not Darkvision, but it does say you can see normally in darkness that is nonmagical or magical, so either should work here).

Allies in the Mist: The Weathermay-Foxgrove Twins

 One of the really cool things in Ravenloft: Horrors Within is that, in addition to the stat blocks for Darklords, we also get bespoke stat blocks for a number of potential allies in our travels across the Mists. While we don't have Alanik Ray and Arthur Sedgwick, and we may or may not have the appropriate stat block for Firan Zal'honen (depending on what you think the version of that character the party might meet is, we get a few of the Mist Wanderers.

While Ravenloft is a setting that operates on full nightmare logic, it's not without its own friendly faces. The PCs might take it upon themselves to face the terrors of the Mists, but they're not the only ones fighting back.

In most D&D campaigns, you have a number of friendly NPCs who can help the party out - often they simply serve as quest-givers or as people who have some knowledge that can help the party out. But sometimes, they can accompany a party and aid them as, essentially, NPC party members. And I think that's where these stat blocks becomes really useful.

Gennifer and Laurie Weathermay-Foxgrove are the twin apprentices of Rudolph Van Richten's. They hail from Mordent, and are relatively young but established monster-hunters.

Gennifer has a sort of Druid/Cleric set of abilities, with a little bit of healing and radiant damage she can dish out. At CR 3, Gennifer is a formidable ally to a tier 1 party, and the extra healing and damage she can deal can be a real asset.

However, Gennifer comes with a major downside: unbeknownst to everyone, she is actually already cursed with a werewolf bite. Thus, if she ever drops to 0 HP, she will transform into a werewolf.

I believe that, rules as written, that means she is permanently changed and also becomes chaotic evil. DMs can choose to be a little less bleak and allow the party to subdue her and even maybe cure her with a Remove Curse spell.

But I will say, if you're willing to go dark (and this is Ravenloft,) you might make the transformation truly permanent, and force the party to either kill her, imprison her, or risk her stalking the party for the rest of the adventure.

Gennifer has been suppressing her curse, so she seems to be aware of it, but I think it's implied that she's keeping this a secret, even from her sister. If a party member learns of this through insight, or perhaps investigation or even medicine checks, you might have her play the trope of "don't tell my sister - I don't want to upset her." Indeed, learning of her affliction before she gets transformed will lend to the tension that builds with her - it forces the party to do whatever they can to prevent her from going to 0 HP, an extra challenge that can make combat more difficult and really raise the stakes of any encounter that involves her.

Even if the party convinces her to step back from her monster-hunting activities, two things will happen: first, the party is down a character who can heal and do some pretty potent magical effects and spells. Second, just because she is sitting back at home in Mordent doesn't mean that she's safe - what even is a "safe" place in Ravenloft?

This transformation will be especially upsetting because her twin sister, Laurie, is likely to be there with her when it happens.

Laurie is also CR 3, and ultimately has a bit of a simpler stat block. She's basically a straightforward fighter-like character, though she has a reaction that can protect either herself or a nearby ally. This does mean that if the twins stick together, Gennifer will be a little safer thanks to this.

There's plenty of human drama to mine from the secret Gennifer keeps from Laurie, and I'd lean into that, as horror often works best when you get into the specifics of the characters.

Bringing two CR 3 character to aid the party could potentially balance combat quite a bit in the party's favor. Gennifer can be a liability, of course, but until she goes down, she's going to have a lot of powerful stuff she can do to help.

There's no strict guidance on adding NPCs to a combat encounter - my simple rule is just to add the NPCs' XP amounts to the total encounter budget. The twins might help the party face down a monster they'd normally not be ready to face, but this can start to warp the balance - even if the XP balances out, a Strigoi is still going to insta-kill lower-level characters. Thus, I'd instead err on the side of more monsters of the CR that the party was already going to face.

I'd also err on keeping these NPCs in supporting roles. Consider letting the players direct how the characters will act on the adventure - asking them to do things like Investigation or Religion checks (maybe phrased more like, in-character, asking them "What do you think of this symbol?") In combat, I might even recommend handing over control of the NPCs to the players, though if the Suppressed Lycanthropy element of Gennifer isn't common knowledge, you might instead just run both of them.

Allied NPCs can be a lot of fun, but I'd also generally not run them with the party for an entire campaign. Sure, there's precedence for this (Balnor from NADDPOD comes to mind, as well as Essek for the latter part of Critical Role's Mighty Nein campagin) but without a lot of engineering on your part, the twins won't scale up as the party levels up.

In tier 1, the twins will be very formidable allies, but by the time the party gets into tier 2, the PCs will start to outstrip the Twins as powerful monster hunters, so you might have them settle back into Support NPCs by then.

Demonic Sorcery (v2)

 Sorcerous powers can come from all sorts of places. If you get your power from the Abyss, you're... in for a rough ride (unless, I guess, you're into that, which makes sense for a Villainous subclass).

Let's check it out.

Demonic Spells:

1st: Bane, Dissonant Whispers

2nd: Spike Growth, Web

3rd: Bestow Curse, Dispel Magic

4th: Giant Insect, Hallucinatory Terrain

5th: Contact Other Plane, Modify Memory

    Some really powerful 2nd level spells here - if you can get some forced movement, Spike Growth can do a ton of damage, and of course Web is a classic.

Level 3:

When you use Innate Sorcery, you create a rupture into the Abyss, which fills a 10-foot radius sphere centered on a point within 30 feet of you. When you activate Innate Sorcery and as a bonus action while IS is active, you can choose one of the following options. Also, you can move the center of the sphere to a point within 30 feet of yourself at the start of each of your turns.

    Real quick: I think this means we could use it twice on the turn we activate Innate Sorcery. Not sure if that's intended. Also, nice that no matter how fast you go, you can always put the sphere need you (though less great if you want it farther away from you).

Demonic Lash: Make a melee spell attack against a target within 5 feet of the rupture. On a hit, the target takes 1d8 slashing damage and if it's Large or smaller, you can pull it up to 10 feet toward the center of the sphere.

    This pairs nicely with Spike Growth, and can also yoink monsters attacking you away from you.

Terrifying Screams: Each creature within the rupture must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage.

    That's a pretty tiny amount of damage. Honestly, not sure we need a saving throw against it. Maybe it should be just "equal to your Cha modifier." I think that Demonic Lash would be the one I use most of the time.

Level 6:

Abyssal Realm:

When you spend at least 1 Sorcery Point as part of a Magic Action or Bonus Action on your turn, you can pull influence from the Abyss. You create a 10-foot emanation around you or fill your Abyssal Rupture sphere with magic, taking magic from one of three layers of the Abyss.

    Sorcerer do love spending SP, so you'll probably get these effects quite often.

Gaping Maw's Frenzy: Designate a direction horizontal to you. Each creature in the area that fails a Charisma saving throw must use as much of its movement as possible to move in that direction at the start of its next turn, taking the safest route.

    This will never be a huge area, but again, it can potentially get attackers to run away from you.

Maze of Azzatar: Each creature in the area makes an Intelligence saving throw. On a failure, you gain the Invisible condition against the target until the start of your next turn.

    This is cool, though thanks to Innate Sorcery, we'll already have advantage on our attacks. Still, this can keep them from targeting us with spells and makes it harder for them to attack us - certainly useful. (And Int saves are often a good one to target).

Slime Pits' Haze: Each creature in the area makes a Con save. On a failed save, they have the Charmed or Poisoned condition until the start of your next turn.

    Con is a harder thing to target, typically, than Charisma or Intelligence, but these conditions can be quite powerful, and more broadly useful.

Level 14:

Abyssal Conduit:

You gain the following:

Rupture Expansion: The size of your Abyssal Rupture is now a 30-foot radius sphere, and it's difficult terrain for you enemies.

    A 30-foot sphere is gigantic, and will cover a huge swath of the battlefield. This is going to let you potentially hit far more targets with its effects, and the difficult terrain can really give you more control over the battlefield.

Fiendish Servant: You always have the Summon Fiend spell prepared. When you cast the spell, you can modify it to not require Concentration, but its spell duration becomes 1 minute for that casting, and you must use the Demon form for the summoned fiend. Additionally, the Fiend has advantage on attack rolls while within your Abyssal Rupture.

    Well, the rupture's enormous now, so it will probably get that pretty easily. Notably, I think you can still summon a Yugoloth or Devil if you cast this normally, which is nice if you want a ranged or at least more mobile minion. I also think the advantage should apply to it regardless of its form. Also, you could cast multiple Summon Fiends this way (there's no "it ends if you cast the spell again" rider). That's going to take a lot of high-level spell slots, but you could theoretically have one at 6th level and another at 8th, giving you 7 fiend attacks per turn, likely all at advantage.

Level 18:

Abyssal Explosion:

As a magic action, you fill a 30-foot radius sphere with an explosion of Abyssal energy. Each creature in the sphere makes a Con save. On a failure, if the creature is not a fiend, they take 8d6 force damage and are incapacitated until the start of your next turn. You can use this once per long rest, or you can spend 7 SP to restore your use of it.

    I think it must be an error that it doesn't say where you can place the sphere. I doubt this is intended to allow you to drop this in a secret fortress in Pandemonium while you're having tea in Waterdeep. This is a save for none ability, but the effect of a failure is quite powerful. The damage is fine, though low for the equivalent of a 7th level spell, but the main benefit is the incapacitation effect, which I think is well worth it.

Overall Thoughts:

    The only real challenge for this subclass is that you'll be managing a lot of pieces. The Abyssal Rupture, a Summoned Fiend, and yourself. But I think you can do some cool stuff here. It is very reliant on Innate Sorcery, but by level 7, you'll have Sorcery Incarnate, which means you'll probably not find yourself running out of uses of IS very often.

    The Abyssal Rupture is going to be small and require a lot of management until level 14, but at least it's fairly easy to orient.

That's it for the subclasses in this UA. We will, though, get some new feats to look at.