All right, we've been doing this with a lot of classes and subclasses that tend not to be big favorites of the optimizers in the D&D community. But what about a class that many argue is the most powerful in all of 5.5?
The Sorcerer is a pure caster, and while it doesn't have as broad a spell list as the Wizard nor as much flexibility (notably, it lacks the killer Conjure Minor Elementals) it also has tools like Innate Sorcery and Metamagic that lets you boost those spells to greater power.
I'm not picking subclasses based on the purely highest damage output, so I'm going to choose the subclass I'd probably be most eager to try (though admittedly, maybe less if I got to play my OG Goo-lock in a campaign that went higher than level 1.)
Aberrant Sorcerers have a lot of cool tools, and they and the Clockwork sorcerer kind of became the basis for what you get with a new Sorcerer subclass. They're also appropriate for a horror-themed campaign (though the Shadow Sorcerer, getting a revamp in the new Ravenloft book in a few days, is also very much in that genre wheelhouse).
Working kind of backwards, by level 10, a Sorcerer has two levels of subclass features. Mainly, an Aberrant Sorcerer will have Telepathic Speech, Psionic Sorcery, and Psychic Defenses, none of which are likely to affect open combat against a Death Knight (weirdly, Death Knights don't have Fear as a spell).
There are some damage spells we could consider using here, and of course Spells are going to be at the core of what a Sorcerer is doing.
Stat-wise, we're obviously taking whatever background we can get that gives us a boost to Charisma, and then with Point Buy and that bonus starting off at 17. Our other stats are probably not super relevant for this.
Feats:
Generally, my go-to for any spellcaster is to get War Caster as soon as possible. Sorcerers are arguably less reliant on it thanks to their native Con save proficiency, but the two together make maintaining concentration all that much easier.
Spell Sniper is a possibility if we want to focus on attack-roll spells. Elemental Adept is probably better for a Draconic Sorcerer (unless it's redundant). I might go for Fey Touched just to get Misty Step taken care of (though grabbing Hex or Hunter's Mark is probably not as good as some other Sorcerer spells we might take instead).
I do think that pure casters are a little less Feat-dependent than martial characters. Inspiring Leader could be very good to help the party with survivability.
Still, even if not feat-dependent, there are enough good Charisma-boosting feats that we probably want to take another at level 8, meaning we'll have a 19 in Charisma at level 10, and thus a +4 to Charisma.
Metamagic:
Quickened Spell is probably our best option here, allowing us to get a free cantrip in each time we use it (either quickening the cantrip or whatever other spell). Empowered Spell can also boost our damage a bit, though if we're doing that and Quickened Spell, we'll burn through our Sorcery Points pretty quickly. Heightened Spell can help us get over the Death Knight's magic resistance, but it's also very costly. Seeking Spell works for us if we are focusing on attack-roll spells, and we only burn the SP if we miss.
We'll have four options at this level, so definitely Quickened Spell, and I guess we can say Empowered Spell, and then we could actually just pick both Seeking and Heightened to free up spell choices.
Spells:
This is the real core of it: what spells are we casting?
Generally, I think the usual plan for a spellcaster is to start up with some concentration spell at the start of combat that empowers them over the course of the rest of combat. So:
Concentration Spell:
Jumping to 5th level spells, Animate Objects, Bigby's Hand, and then from our subclass, potentially Summon Aberration might be a good option. Bigby's Hand has an advantage that it's Clenched Fist attacks have us making the attack roll, so we should have perpetual advantage thanks to Innate Sorcery. While Grasping Hand is arguably the better option most of the time, that's a saving throw that the DK could use Magic Resistance and Legendary Resistance to avoid. Bigby's Hand does 5d8 (22.5 average) damage on a hit. Animate Objects I believe has optimal damage with a two large objects and one medium object. And that winds up being two instances of 2d6+3+Cha (so 14 average) and then one instance of 1d4+3, (5.5 average), which totals up to 33.5, but we wouldn't get advantage because the objects are the ones doing the attacks.
Notably, both spells will require our bonus action to activate them each turn, which actually makes Quickened Spell less exciting.
By contrast, Summon Aberration is a fire-and-forget spell (well, we do need concentration, but it doesn't take up any of our action economy). If cast at 4th level (we could do 5th level, but that only adds 2 damage per turn, and I think we can do better) the options vary a bit: I think in pure potential terms, the Mind Flayer option gives us the most damage, as while its attacks hit for less than the Slaad, it also has its Whispering Aura, which can (on a failed save) deal an extra 7 psychic damage.
But in the real world in which AoE damage flies around, your best bet is probably the Beholderkin, who can fly off 150 feet away (which can out-range the Death Knight's Hellfire Orb) and plink away at a safe distance. So let's go with that, honestly: The Beholderkin will do 1d8+7 damage on its two hits, or 11.5 average (and thus 23 average, but without the advantage we'd get with Bigby's Hand) but also just do its thing and let us pack our turn full of spells.
So, if we have the Beholderkin firing its two beams each turn, we're looking at a hit on a 12 or higher, which is a 45% hit chance, and then a 5% crit chance. Hits land for 11.5 and crits add 4.5, so 11.5x45% is 5.175 and 4.5x5% is .225, giving each attack an average damage of 5.4, and then we double that to 10.8 for our total damage per turn.
Other Spells:
If we're using Quickened Spell, we can cast a cantrip with our bonus action each turn and sustain that for 5 turns (and then even potentially burn some lower-level slots to get some back, though dear lord the DK should be dead before that point).
Cantrips:
In terms of Cantrips, Mind Sliver could certainly help the party some, but its damage is somewhat low. That said, the Death Knight's Int save bonus is only +1, making this a pretty good saving throw to target. With +4 to Charisma, our save DC is 16, but we also bump it to 17 with Innate Sorcery, so the DK has to get a 16 or higher to save against it. That's a 75% chance to fail, though because of Magic Resistance, it actually becomes a 56.25% chance instead. Our damage is only 7 on average, so it's roughly 4 damage on average when adjusted for failure chance. Mind Sliver does have a great knock-on effect that could really help the party, but if we're trying to be the big damage dealer, we might look at some other options.
True Strike, now actually a good spell, is an option: we can use a Light Crossbow, and this will deal 1d8+1d6+4 at this level, or a total of 12 on average. Now, if our DM wants to be really nasty, you could argue that this doesn't technically involve a Spell Attack, as we're actually just making a weapon attack using Charisma. If we do allow Innate Sorcery to affect it, though, and assume we get advantage, let's figure out what it does, damage-wise.
We'd have a +8 to hit, which would require us to roll a 12 or higher to hit an AC of 20, so it's a 45% chance. But thanks to advantage, that actually becomes a 69.75% chance and a 9.75% chance to crit. A hit is 12 on average, and the bonus crit damage is 8, so we're looking at 8.37 plus .78 for a total average damage of 9.15.
Sorcerous Burst is, of course, the Sorcerer-exclusive cantrip, and the math here becomes a little crazy. Sorcerous Burst can take on many different damage types - we could pick Thunder or Acid or Psychic to be safe, though actually any but Poison would work against this particular target.
On a hit, Sorcerous Burst does 2d8 damage, but if any wind up rolling an 8, we get to roll an additional die - up to 4 extra (thanks to our +4 to Charisma).
So, let's start with the non-explosive damage. 2d8 is 9 on average, and because it's all just dice rolls, we can lump in the crit chance, so we add the 69.75 to the 9.75 for the hit and crit chances and get 79.5%, so our average damage before the explosive dice is 7.155.
Now, here's where my nightmare begins:
On a hit (that 69.75% chance) we have two dice that can each roll an 8. There's a roughly 23% chance that one of those two dice rolls an 8. There is a 1.6% chance that both of them roll an 8. I think (I think) the way to do this is to basically take the average damage of a d8 (4.5) and multiply it by 23% and also 69.75%, and then double it to account for the two chances. I think. No, hold on. That's wrong.
Ok, instead, in this 69.75% of the time scenario, each of the dice has a 1/8 chance (12.5%) to wind up an 8. So instead, we just find 4.5 (1d8) times 69.75% times 12.5%, which comes to about 8.7%, giving us .39 damage. Then, we double it because it's two dice, so that's really .78.
Now, in those 8.7% chances, there is then a 12.5% chance that those extra dice also roll 8s, exploding for another 1d8. Ok, so that's very close to 1% of the time, which is great, because that's just .05 average damage (.045 to be precise, but rounded off).
I'm going to make an executive decision: the chance that you explode on the extra dice from a crit is going to add so little damage on average that it's negligible. We'll just take that .05, double it to .1, and say that we're now doing an extra .79 because of the exploding dice and call it a day, which means our average damage is now 7.945.
And thus, I think we set Sorcerous Burst aside and just go True Strike - assuming, again, we get to use advantage with it even though it's technically not a spell attack. (SB might scale better at higher levels, but for now, True Strike is the way).
OK! So, we've got our Concentration spell. We're burning two Sorcery Points each turn to get a True Strike off as a bonus action. What are we then burning as our main action on turns 2 onward?
Leveled Non-Concentration Spell:
We've got some big AoE spells that probably do the most damage in general. Cone of Cold does an average of 36 damage on a failed save, but it's very hard to avoid hitting our friends with it (and we'd burn through SP if we do Careful Spell).
While spells of this ilk have the advantage of still doing half damage on a successful save, I'm tempted to look at Scorching Ray, which would benefit probably more from our Innate Sorcery than the single-point buff to our saving throws, and notably requires no management to avoid hitting allies. It also scales decently (though not as insanely as if we had Conjure Minor Elementals).
Given that we preserved our 5th level slots by casting Summon Aberration at 4th level, we'll have two of these to start with.
At 5th level, Scorching Ray does 6 beams, each of which hit for 2d6. Again, we have a 69.75% chance to hit and 9.75% chance to crit, and because it's all dice, we can just add that up together. 79.5% of 7 (the average damage for a single beam) is 5.565. Thus, a 5th-level Scorching Ray is going to do 33.39 damage.
To compare, a Death Knight has a +5 to Con saves, meaning they save on a roll of 12 or higher, so it's a 55% chance to fail, but with magic resistance, that becomes a 30.25% chance to fail. 36x30.25% is 10.89, though it's also a 69.75% (huh) chance to take 18 damage, so that adds in 12.555, meaning the average damage of a Cone of Cold is 23.445, so for sure we're sticking with Scorching Ray.
Bringing It Together:
Ok, so, beginning of turn 1, we pop Innate Sorcery. We cast Summon Aberration, and then we Quicken True Strike. True Strike deals 9.15 damage, and the Beholderkin deals 10.8, so on turn one we've done 19.95 average damage.
Then, turn two, both of those things happen again, but now we're adding 33.39 damage from Scorching Ray, for a total of 53.34 damage.
We can do this on turn 3 as well, burning our second 5th level spell.
At turn 4 (and by this point we've dealt a sizeable chunk of the DK's HP on our own) we have to downgrade to mere 4th level Scorching Rays, which reduces our damage per turn by 5.565, so we're doing a pathetic 47.775 damage for the next two turns before we need to downgrade to mere 3rd level Scorching Rays.
Conclusion:
Yeah, this blows the rest of my scenarios totally out of the water. Make no mistake, this is absolutely emptying the tank, but if you can come with all of these resources to a confrontation with a Death Knight at level 10, you can do this.
One other huge advantage to this is that you can do all of this from 80 feet away (the shortest range is the Light Crossbow). If your DM doesn't let you get advantage on your True Strike, Sorcerous Burst is going to be another option, or Fire Bolt, and I don't think it will affect the damage here by a huge amount. They'll also up your range to 120 feet - which will put you just within Hellfire Orb range, but if you can actually maintain that distance, you might draw fire away from your allies that way (also, Absorb Elements can help mitigate the damage somewhat.)
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