So, I've been doing all these builds at a hypothetical campaign- or at least tier-boss fight against a Death Knight. At CR 17, these monsters would be a serious challenge for a level 10 party of an average size, but within the realm of encounter-building guidance in the DMG (a high-difficulty encounter).
It just so happens that my Wizard is, in fact, also at that threshold at the end of tier 2 (and given the campaign has been going for like four and a half years, it's about time!)
Now, I've talked a lot about hypothetical builds, with feats and all that stuff. But let me talk about my own actual character and use the spells I have available.
This is going to be simple - much quicker and easier than our previous builds. It's going to revolve around well-documented and busted spell combo, Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray.
With a bit more energy and space to get into it, let's talk about how we use these spells and how my subclass, the Order of Scribes, affects it:
Conjure Minor Elementals is a 4th level spell that creates a 15-foot emanation around you. The area is difficult terrain for your enemies, but more importantly, whenever you land an attack (spell or weapon) on a target that is inside that emanation, you add 2d8 damage from your choice of Acid, Cold, Fire, or Lightning damage (though as a Scribe, that's even less restrictive).
This spell, notably, had to be nerfed with errata after the PHB came out, because it used to scale up by 2d8 with each level up upcasting. That was nerfed to just 1d8, but this scaling is still incredibly good if we can manage to make lots of attacks.
That is where Scorching Ray comes in. This spell is a 2nd level spell that shoots 3 rays of fire at our target. Each ray does 2d6 Fire damage on a hit. When upcast, rather than increasing the damage of each ray, it instead adds additional rays.
At level 10, we have two 5th level spell slots, 3 4th, 3rd, and 2nd level spell slots, and four 1st level slots. The latter won't factor into this - we'll save them for Shield and Absorb Elements if needed.
Now, there are a couple things that benefit us as a Scribes Wizard:
First, we can always swap one damage type from a spell with that of another spell of the same level that we have in our spellbook. For example, Bigby's Hand can do Force Damage, so if we cast a 5th level spell, we can change any of its damage types to Force (though if it does multiple types in a single instance, like Destructive Wave doing thunder and... fire, I think?, you can only choose one of those to swap).
Second, we can also use Manifest Mind, which gives us a little incorporeal buddy (it can only be destroyed with a spell like Dispel Magic) that we can move around as a bonus action on our turn, and a few times per day, we can cast spells as if we were in its space instead of our own.
This should work with Conjure Minor Elementals - once cast through the Manifested Mind, the emanation will radiate out from it, rather than from us.
But let's talk pitfalls:
Against a Death Knight specifically, we're in trouble: the DK can cast Dispel Magic twice a day. This can apply both to the Manifest Mind and the Conjure Minor Elementals spell. Arguably, having it waste an entire action to do so might be worth it, but it will require us to re-cast the spell and start our rotation over again.
Another thing is that Death Knights have Lunge as a legendary action. While this only allows them to move up to half their speed, and we're also putting them in difficult terrain with our emanation, they can use Lunge three times per round, meaning that they could potentially get up to 75 feet of movement, which would easily be enough to get out of our 15-foot emanation and even beyond our ability to catch up with them.
Manifest Mind can only move 30 feet on a turn, and given its vulnerability to Dispel Magic, we might have to skip it. Thus, it'll be us and our squishiness that we need to employ within 15 feet of our target.
If the Death Knight flees (rather than just trying to attack us to break concentration - which we'll get to) we could use Phantom Steed to give ourselves a speedy 100-foot mounted speed. The Death Knight also has this spell, though. Also, Phantom Steeds are not resilient in combat - any damage dispels them.
But let's say that the Death Knight is boxed in - maybe we have allies with Sentinel (not in my current party) or just terrain that prevents them from getting away.
The Death Knight deals an average of 25 damage on a hit. That's serious damage that could take me down in just a few attacks. But assuming I have the healing to survive an assault like this, my chance to maintain concentration is thus: I have a +3 to Con saves. We have two Paladins in the party, and so especially if I'm standing relatively close to the Death Knight, I'm probably within their auras, meaning an additional +3. So, against 25 damage, it's a DC 12 Con save, and I also have Warcaster. Even if the Paladins can't use Interception to reduce the damage, I'd still save on a roll of 6 or higher, meaning only a 25% chance to fail, and with War Caster, that becomes only a 6.25% chance. Not nothing, but pretty good (I also have the Coat of the Crest, which has three charges and can give me resistance to the Death Knight's slashing damage for a round as a reaction if I get hit, which would make the damage closer to 19).
I do have Counterspell, which I've never actually used. While Dispel Magic would automatically work against Manifest Mind, I'm planning on casting CME at 5th level, so the Death Knight would have to roll an 11 or higher to successfully dispel it. If I saved my reaction for Counterspell (dubiously safe given that they're probably also coming after me with their legendary actions even if they're using Dispel Magic) my DC is 17, so with a +5 to Con, they'd have to roll a 12 or higher to save. They do have advantage, so the 55% chance to successfully prevent the spell is reduced to 30.25%.
In other words, against this monster in particular, this strategy would have a lot of potential problems. It might be diluted a bit if the rest of the party were causing other problems the Death Knight needed to be able to deal with, for sure, but given the power of this spell combo, I would probably make myself a priority target.
But let's just imagine a world in which this all works.
Very simply, turn one, I cast Conjure Minor Elementals. Any damage it does is fine. We cast it at 5th level, so we now add 3d8 in addition to whatever our attacks do.
Turn one is just that - no damage done, which isn't amazing, but we start to make up for it quickly.
On turn two, we want to save a 5th level slot in case we lose CME for whatever reason, so we'll cast Scorching Ray at 4th level instead.
That's 5 rays. Each does 2d6+3d8 damage (again, the Fire works fine, but we can actually swap it with any of the damage types from CME because we're a Scribes Wizard and it's being cast at 4th level).
The damage on average per ray is 20.5 on a hit. Because it's all dice, we can roll in the crit chance to the hit chance to get our average damage per attack. With a +9 to hit (I rolled stats and got an 18 Intelligence at level 1, so I was able to get 20 Int with War Caster and Keen Mind - the latter maybe not being the most powerful feat, but very in-character) I'm hitting on an 11 or higher, which is 50% of the time. Add in the 5% chance for a crit and we get 20.5x55% for each ray, or 11.275 on average per ray.
On turn 2, we're doing five rays, so we get 56.375 damage. We do this again on rounds 3 and 4. At this point, we alone would have done 75% of the Death Knight's HP, so we can probably assume that the combat is over by this point. Frankly, I think 3 rounds is more likely, and we'll calculate based on that.
Because of the round of set-up we need, this does significantly reduce our overall damage per round. Over three rounds, we're looking at 37.58 (roughly).
This falls behind the Aberrant Sorcerer build, but we also didn't average that out with the set-up round. The Sorcerer does still get to do some damage on that round, and I also think the Sorcerer is in much better shape to actually maintain its spells, but looking back on that post, they do 19.95 damage on round one and 53.34 damage on rounds two and three, so their average beats us pretty handily with 42.21.
What I will say is that ours is going to scale better at higher levels, probably.
While this would be a terrible idea against the Tarrasque (which is both immune to spells that have attack rolls and also fire damage, the latter of which we can deal with as a Scribes wizard, but not the former,) if we fought that Death Knight again in tier 4 (not impossible, though he'd need a lot of minions to be a serious threat to 17th level characters, and thus we might focus more on AoE spells,) and were willing to burn a 9th level slot for CME and go down the line with all the high-level slots for Scorching Ray, we'd be shooting 9 rays with an 8th level Scorching Ray, and each would be dealing 2d6+7d8 damage on a hit, which is 38.5 damage per hit. If we somehow still don't have anything to boost our spell attacks, we'd still have a +11 to hit, so a 60% chance to hit. 65%x38.5 is 25.025, and with nine rays, that's 225.225, meaning that in theory, we'd nuke that Death Knight in one turn if we didn't lose the spell after our first turn.
Probably not what we'd actually do with our spells, though - I think using Shapechange or True Polymorph to turn into, like an Adult Gold Dragon or something might have greater utility.
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