Ok, Fine. Necromancer vs. Wyvern

 Yeah, I've got Necromancers on the mind. For one thing, I've been playing such a sweet and innocent Wizard for several years (though he does use Summon Undead as one of his frequent concentration spells) that I'd like to make a dark and sinister character. I went... pretty extensively into how I might approach one in a recent post.

But here we're going to narrow down to a battle plan. Wizard, it should be said, are a class that can do a massive number of different things. But I assume if we're going with the Necromancer subclass, we're going to try to command an army of the undead to face our foes.

So, to narrow this down, we'll look at feats, a concentration spell, and other spells we'll be using.

But let's start by addressing the elephant in the room:

Animate Dead doesn't have a hard limit on how many minions you can create/retain control over beyond how many 3rd or higher level spell slots you've got. While we do get a free casting of this once a day, meaning we should ideally be able to have three minions (from this spell) at any given time. Bu we can spend more spell slots on it to get more.

Let's assume for the sake of this model that we A: do get to have some undead minions that the DM hasn't contrived to get rid of (do talk with a DM before making a Necromancer. It's reasonable for the DM to limit how many minions a single player is controlling, but also, DMs, if you are going to let your player play a Necromancer, don't take away the thing their character concept is built around) and B: we're not going to spend all of our spell slots on it.

As these are done at level 10, we're going to have two 5th level spell slots. I think we'll be casting Animate Dead for free at 3rd level (which gets effectively upcast at 4th level from our Undead Thralls feature) and then again at 5th level (which gets upcast to 6th automatically). That means that we'll have a total of 10 from these two castings of the spell.

We will grab Skeletons - while Zombies to have their place, they got a little nerfed in terms of HP in 5.5, and didn't really get any compensation, while Skeletons now have a pretty healthy +5 to hit and can also attack at range (we'll assume that they've got, like, "bone bows," or screw it, maybe we just carry around a bunch of shortbows for them).

So, 10 Skeletons. But we also get a skeleton via our Find Familiar. We'll have to see if it's worth using our action to get this eleventh attack (I suspect no because of the lower hit chance).

We will need to use a bonus action to command our Animate Dead skeletons, but this command can be an ongoing directive like "kill wyverns you see." The DM might argue that this doesn't let you pick the targets, so you might be spreading your damage. But I'm going to guess that these guys are going to be dealing a lot of damage in total.

Ok, next, a concentration spell. And the one I want to use is... Danse Macabre. This is kind of a souped-up Animate Dead, but it's shorter term, takes concentration, and does also require that "general command" as a bonus action. I think we'll want to prioritize the Danse Macabre minions, even if they're going to be only have as many, because they will both hit harder and more accurately.

By turn two, though, we should have our action left over. If we want to conserve spell slots, we could just shoot a cantrip, and perhaps just Fire Bolt (while I like my Necromancers cold like the grave, we might get a little more "hellfire" theming here). Certainly we could cast other, more powerful spells, but again, Wizards are so versatile that we can just assume that we're doing things like fireballing groups of minions or helping friends out with Vortex Warps, Dispel Magics, and the like.

Ok, now: feats.

I mean, we really ought to grab War Caster. The question then, though, is if we want to just cap Intelligence at level 8, or grab another feat. There are a lot of quite-good feats in Arcana Unleashed. Here's a bit of a nutso option:

Healing spells now work on undead and constructs, even when they didn't in 5.0. If we grab Abjuration Savant, we can cast Mass Cure Wounds, potentially hitting a bunch of our minions. Undead Thralls doesn't grant Temp HP, but actually raises the HP of our minions (I had initially thought it was the other way around,) which gives them more of an opportunity to survive some damage and get healed up.

We'll assume we have a 19 Int by level 10, so a +4. Skeletons have 13 HP, but the ones we get via Animate Dead and Danse Macabre will get 9 extra (our familiar doesn't, as it's created via a Conjuration rather than Necromancy spell). So, 22 HP per skeletons, which means they... might survive long enough to benefit from healing (at 14 we can buff them with temp HP as well).

Ok, so, let's figure out damage:

Skeletons have a +5 to hit with both their shortswords and shortbows, and deal 1d6+3 with either by default. Each deals an additional 4 necrotic damage thanks to Undead Thralls, so the Animate Dead ones (of which there are 10) will have a +5 to hit and hit for 1d6+7 each.

The Danse Macabre ones, though, get additional bonuses from the spell itself, adding our Int mod (+4) to attack and damage rolls. This should stack with Undead Thralls, so these will get a +9 to hit and deal 1d6+11 on a hit. There are 5 of these.

Again, I suspect that, especially because of the better hit chance, we'll favor Danse Macabre minions first, but we'll do the math for each, of course. But we'll start with Danse.

Ok, so, against an AC of 14, we hit on a 5 or more, so that's an 80% hit chance. On a hit, we're doing 1d6+11, or 14.5, and then an extra 3.5 on a crit. So, 80%x14.5 is 11.6 and 3.5x5% is .175, so that's 11.775 on each of 5 attacks. Multiplying it together, we're getting 58.875 damage.

That's... a freaking lot.

Well damn, ok. Let's get the Animate Dead guys in.

These guys only have a +5 to hit, so they need to roll a 9 or higher to hit (60% hit chance). On a hit, they do 1d6+7, or 10.5 damage average, with that same crit damage of .175. 10.5x60% is 6.3, so we'll be getting 6.475. And then... well, there are ten of them. So... that's 64.75 damage. (Ok, I guess we actually command the Animate Dead ones first).

And I mean... do we even freaking care about what we're doing with our action on subsequent turns?

I mean, Fire Bolt with a +8 to hit is doing like 8.8 extra damage.

So, by turn two, our 15 minions are doing a total of 123.625 damage.

We're... yeah. We're good.

Bringing Out the Dead: Conceptualizing and Building a Necromancer Wizard

 As readers of this blog will know, while my aesthetic has always been a bit more 1990s slacker (an aesthetic that I have maintained since the actual 1990s, a decade in which I just barely made it into teenagehood with like six months to spare) I have a secret spooky goth underneath it all. When I started playing World of Warcraft... dear lord, 20 years ago (like, as of this month,) and encountered the Undead Scourge, I became particularly enamored of the undead specifically when it comes to spooky monsters.

I don't actually love gore as an aesthetic, but dusty crypts and skeletal warriors are totally my jam.

Anywho, the Necromancer is one of the great classic "evil wizard" archetypes, and in particular in D&D, among whose most iconic monsters are the Lich (I'd argue it's the single most wide-reaching contribution to the fantasy genre the game has made, such that it's sort of a surprise that the concept or at least the term "Lich" to mean that, as far as I can tell, didn't exist before D&D,) Necromancers are a very solid choice for a major villain.

Death, of course, carries with it countless taboos. Reckoning with death is a universal human experience (and I suspect it would be of any sapient species that isn't somehow immortal,) and the idea of reanimated corpses triggers a ton of different fear responses. We're hard-wired to find dead bodies, especially those that have undergone decay, repulsive, because that fear protected our ancestors from dangerous bacteria and fungi that might grow in a dead body and spread to the living. And then, on another, more intellectual level, there's something deeply unsettling about the idea of a corpse that is moving: not just in an uncanny valley way, but also as a reminder that one day, we too will be pallid corpses (though probably not shambling ones).

D&D characters need not be good or heroic figures - the concept of the game initially was that people of widely varying motivations and methods would band together to plumb the depths of dangerous dungeons. But I think in modern times, the tendency is for D&D parties to generally do heroics for their own sake - gold and treasure is more of a means to the end of being capable of taking on graver threats, rather than the inverse. (As the folks at MCDM have pointed out, especially in the design of their new game, Crows, D&D originally made gold and XP the same thing - the more gold you hauled out of a dungeon, the faster you leveled up your characters, a mechanic that Crows brings back).

Still, I think it's a good rule, especially if you're not just playing an old-school dungeon crawling campaign, to try at least to build a character who can play well with others and perhaps exist in society (they don't need to be popular.)

Necromancers have a huge advantage as a subclass, which is that they're Wizards, and Wizards are amazingly useful to have in any D&D party, providing a lot of utility to the group. That level of capability and expertise can also justify why your party is willing to tolerate the kind of messed-up stuff you do.

I think we're going to be building this to really conform to the archetype of the Necromancer. We may not be evil, but this is the Wizard who delves into forbidden knowledge and practices that might make them shunned by polite society.

Note that I think you can do similar things with a couple other classes and subclasses. Undead Warlocks and Reanimator Artificers are probably living in a very similar space, and nearly any of the subclasses out of Ravenloft: Horrors Within can exist in similar spaces.

But if we're really going into the notion of someone specifically delving into dark and hidden knowledge, this is really the ultimate subclass for that (though I'd argue Reanimators vie for that position as well, it's just that Reanimators are doing experimental research while Necromancers are perhaps more theoretical).

So, first question: is our Necromancer's research sanctioned or no?

It's a funny thing: in D&D, Necromancy is understood as one of the eight schools of magic, despite the fact that you could argue a lot of its abilities could be described using other schools: like, isn't raising the dead kind of Transmutation? Technically a corpse is an object that you could target with Animate Objects, after all.

But does this recognition of Necromancy as its whole own type of magic mean that magical institutions need to sanction its study and practice? Perhaps it's known, yes, that this eighth school exists, but it's the one you're not supposed to actually use.

I like the idea of a scholar who has been cast out of whatever institution they were a part of because of their pursuit of forbidden knowledge. You often need a reason why someone set aside their civilian life to pursue an adventuring career, and having your former career come crashing down around you is a pretty good reason.

So, I think our Necromancer was once basically a magical professor. Maybe they taught at some institute of arcane learning, a prestigious place. Professors generally have two tasks, teaching and research (with a lot of them far preferring the latter and teaching only because their college or university requires it,) but perhaps we give our character a somewhat more sympathetic characterization: they actually love the teaching side of it, and had some really meaningful connections with their students.

If this institution was one that banned the study of necromancy, what might have driven them to it, then?

Well, Necromancy, at least as practiced by Wizards, can't bring someone back to true life, but a Wizard might not be aware of that particular nuance. Let's suppose that our good professor had a favorite student. I'm going to say just to avoid any real ickiness we're going to say that the relationship was platonic, but it was the kind of relationship between a professor and student where they'll probably wind up lifelong friends and colleagues once the student earns their degree (my dad's closest friends are mostly his former PhD advisees from the 70s and 80s).

But tragedy strikes, and the student dies in some violent manner - it's not a natural cause, but maybe a magical experiment gone wrong or a random act of criminal violence. Our good professor feels somehow responsible - maybe they encouraged said experiment, or perhaps they sent the student on a task that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The point is, their entry into Necromancy as a practice begins with noble intentions: to give life back to someone who lost it too soon.

But things don't go very well: first off, the attempt to bring their student back instead brings them back as an undead creature: here, the student actually becomes our undead familiar through the Necromancy Spellbook feature.

Someone at the university discovers the paper trail of banned books and finds the good professor's secret ritual space. They're not just fired - the school calls the authorities to have them arrested, and potentially executed for these crimes.

But our good professor A: doesn't want to die and B: still wants to figure out a way to bring their student back from the dead, so they go on the run.

If they want to accomplish their goal, setting things right and restoring their student to true life, they'll need to protect themselves and learn more. That means finding deeper, more forbidden lore and having the means to fend off the well-meaning but dogmatic forces trying to bring them to heel.

And thus, an adventurer is born.

Now, let's talk mechanics:

I think our pretty clear background here (class and subclass is obviously already spoken for) is probably Sage. While you might think Magic Initiate: Wizard on a Wizard is redundant, it mainly translates to an extra spell per day and some bonus preparations. Shield is a great option here (one of those spells you take on any character who can get it) given that Find Familiar comes with our subclass. For cantrips, I think any spellcaster is going to want to have one really solid damage cantrip, though this broadens our options a bit to allow a second one (we can also swap cantrips on a long rest now as a Wizard, so the one from this feat should be one we really always want to have). I might grab a utility cantrip with the feat like Mage Hand, as we're probably never going to want to swap that out.

But what about that main damage cantrip? There are only two necromancy cantrips in the 5.0 PHB for Wizards. Chill Touch is now, appropriately, a touch-range spell, which makes more sense with the name (though it still does necrotic rather than cold damage) but makes it less, you know, good as a primary damage option. Toll the Dead is actually not a bad choice - as a saving throw cantrip, it's equally effective in melee as it is at range, and it's also the highest-damage-potential cantrip if the target has taken any damage (which will be the case the vast majority of the time). Saving throw cantrips can't crit, though, and monster saving throw bonuses scale better than their AC, so it's not always going to be the best option, but it's a solid choice. If we want to go off-theme, I of course think that the new True Strike is fantastic, though it's not a classic Wizard aesthetic. Perhaps because of Warcraft, I often think of necromancers as using a lot of cold magic, so I think something like Ray of Frost would actually be a pretty on-theme choice even if it's an evocation spell. Oh, actually, Poison Spray is a necromancy cantrip, and it's certainly a lot better than it was in 5.0 (it's now a ranged spell attack with a 30 foot range,) but it does do Poison damage, which is great unless you're fighting undead, fiends, elementals, constructs, maybe celestials, some monstrosities... it's the least reliable damage type in the game.

Now, Wizards get a lot of spells, and you can even get plenty of spells for your spellbook in the course of your campaign depending on how easy your DM makes it for you to find more spells.

You're going to want to take a lot of the classics, especially any good utility ritual spells.

But to narrow our focus, let's talk about what we want to take every other level via our Necromancy Savant feature.

Note that we don't have to take a spell of our highest level spell slot with this feature, and perhaps as choices narrow at high levels, we might decide to grab some we had skipped earlier. But I'm going to assume that it's not impossible for us to find spell in the world, and so we'll go for the greatest efficiency in taking high-level spells and saving on gold and time copying.

So, what are the best Necromancy spells for us to take at each spell level?

At 1st level, our only choices are False Life and Ray of Sickness - though I'll note that when we get this feature, we can actually get two second level Necromancy spells. Of the two, I'm inclined to like False Life a little more, for similar reasons that I'm avoiding Poison Spray. But we'll only grab it if we can't find two second-level spells we want.

At 2nd level, Gentle Repose and Ray of Enfeeblement are our PHB options, but expanding outward, we also have Wither and Bloom and Death Armor. Gentle Repose can be very helpful if we don't have access to resurrection magic yet, so we can keep someone in the Revivify window long enough to get them to a healer. I'd then say perhaps Wither and Bloom is another option if we want a bit of light AoE (it's less damage than Shatter, but avoid friendly fire and can allow for a little quasi-healing (friends have to expend hit dice to get the healing,) which could honestly be pretty clutch.

For 3rd level spells, obviously we'll skip over Animate Dead given that we get it at Wizard level 6 automatically. We actually have a fair number of options here: Bestow Curse, Feign Death, Speak with Dead, Summon Undead, and Vampiric Touch are all in the PHB. Life Transference is in Xanathar's, and we have Spirit Shroud from Tasha's. If we want to go all in on summoning undead, I think Summon Undead is a pretty solid option. Spirit Shroud can act as a poor man's Conjure Minor Elementals if we want to go supernova with Scorching Ray. Bestow Curse can have some nasty effects, though we need to get in touch range to do it. That said, with our familiar, we can potentially send our poor old student we're trying to help to go do it (we might choose to flavor the familiar differently - maybe we just started studying necromancy to figure out how to raise our friend, but we didn't actually get a chance to try it on them yet). I think if we want to go all in on an army of undead minions, Summon Undead comes with some really powerful utility, like inflicting fear on a hit, or if we're a bit lucky, paralyzing on hit. Indeed, if we do pick up Ray of Sickness, we can potentially poison a target with our own action and then have a Putrid Spirit paralyze them with a hit, which can be a truly nasty combo assuming the target can be poisoned and paralyzed. Summon Undead and Animate Dead occupy similar conceptual niches, but they're actually compatible with one another, just as long as your fellow players don't get frustrated when you're commanding a ton of different creatures each turn.

For 4th level spells, skip Blight, as it doesn't do nearly enough damage for a single-target spell, which is rough because it's the only 4th level necromancy spell in the 5.5 PHB. Looking elsewhere, our only other option here is Festering Blast from Arcana Unleashed, which is a line spell that does necrotic damage initially and can poison, with the poison doing poison damage over time. Again, sucks if our foes are immune to poison, but this could actually be a great option to inflict poison on a bunch of targets and then paralyze them with a putrid spirit from Summon Undead. Festering Blast only does 4d10 damage initially (though it's a 10-foot line rather than a 5-foot one) but I think it's at least much better than Blight. Though honestly, we might dip back and grab a 3rd level spell when we hit level 7 because the options are so limited here.

For 5th level, there's not a single Wizard necromancy spell in the PHB at this level. But we have some good options elsewhere. In Arcana Unleashed, we have a bevy of options, with Enervation, Grave Ground, Negative Energy Flood, Spirit Lantern, and Waves of Exhaustion. From Xanathar's, we have Danse Macabre (and older version of some of the ones from Xanathar's). Now, I actually love Danse Macabre, especially with the buffed Skeleton stat block in 5.5. This lets you raise five undead minions, who use the zombie or skeleton stat block, but crucially, they get to add your spellcasting ability modifier to attack and damage rolls. A skeleton with a +5 to hit is going to start struggling when you start fighting creatures with 20 AC or higher, but if that becomes +10 to hit, and each hit doing 1d6+8 (5 times,) this starts to mean a lot of damage. (Actually, thanks to our Undead Thralls feature, make that 1d6+13!) If you have the raw materials (aka, a bunch of bone piles) this spell actually puts out an insane amount of single-target damage. Unlike Animate Dead, it only lasts for an hour, takes concentration, and also eats up your bonus action to command your minions, but I just have to advocate for this profoundly on-brand spell. (Also, the rule is that the verbal component is the entire Vincent Price "rap" from Thriller, which you must say in its entirety at the table the first time you cast this.)

Ahem. Again, I think this is a very good option, but if your DM is stingy about providing you corpses to reanimate, let's look at other options. I'm skeptical about Waves of Exhaustion: while you can potentially debuff foes to up to a -8 for all their d20 tests, doing so takes several turns. Spirit Lantern is conceptually cool, but works best if you're in a target-rich environment, when you might want to be casting Fireballs or the like. I actually really like Grave Ground conceptually and aesthetically, though I think it's more likely to serve as good battlefield control rather than a source of damage (which might be what you want it for). Particularly good in fights with bottlenecks you can block off. Negative Energy Flood does ok damage for a single-target spell, but can be a bit versatile as a way to heal up an undead minion (likely only your Summon Undead spirit is worth it, if that). I'd really go Danse Macabre or Grave Ground as a backup if you can't use 5.0 only content.

(Oh, one problem: Animate Dead also requires a bonus action to command our minions. The minions from Danse Macabre will hit much harder and more accutrately, so it's still potentially worth using anyway. Likewise, our commands can potentially carry over between turns, if we tell them to "attack that creature," they should continue to until it's dead, and I guess even afterward. So, while there might be an action economy pile-up, we could in theory get both the minions from Animate Dead and from Danse Macabre to work in tandem, but with a turn of ramp-up.)

At 6th level, we have a few options. From the PHB, we've got Circle of Death, Create Undead, Eyebite, and Magic Jar. I... think Soul Cage from Xanathar's is the rough equivalent of Magic Jar (checking... actually not really!) So, right off the bat, I think we'll skip Circle of Death, which is basically the same damage as Fireball but on a wider area. I don't know that that utility is really that useful given how huge a Fireball typically is, and it's hard to avoid friendly fire with Circle of Death, on top of the damage being low for a 6th level spell.

The math on Create Undead is interesting: naturally, we'll be able to raise more creatures with Animate Dead, especially with our Animate Dead feature. At this level spell level, Animate Dead can give us 9 skeletons/zombies, compared to just 3 ghouls with Create Undead. If we don't have the corpses to do 9 with animate dead, obviously we'd grab the ghouls. But with only a +4 to hit and slightly higher damage than skeletons, for pure damage, Animate is better. However! Ghouls can paralyze a target on a hit (there is a Con save involved, and it doesn't work on undead or elves,) and while the save DC is quite low, that can be massive utility. I think the larger army of skeletons or even zombies (though I'd say go for skeletons any time you can) is probably the better call, given how the damage bonus from our Undead Thralls feature will scale really well with the size of our army.

The other spells (other than Circle of Death) are weird utility and debuff spells. Eyebite can put out various quite nasty debuffs, though it takes our concentration and action each turn. Soul Cage is a weird one that does require a humanoid soul to trap, so it might be tough depending on the kind of campaign you're in. Magic Jar is maybe the weirdest of the bunch, which lets you separate your soul from your body so you can go and possess another humanoid. The use cases here are... profoundly varied. If you can figure out a great way to use this, by all means go for it. I think I'd go with Eyebite or Create Undead as more straightforward options.

Onto 7th level! Finger of Death is our only PHB option here. And it actually, genuinely, might be the only 7th level Necromancy spell for Wizards, as I just looked through Heroes of Faerun, Arcana Unleashed, Xanathar's, and Tasha's (I realize I'm leaving out a few scattered other sources). So pick that, I guess. Finger of Death isn't bad - it does less damage than Disintegrate, but it's a save-for-half spell and can potentially get you yet another permanent undead minion.

Now, 8th level: In the PHB, we've got Clone. Our only other option is Abi-Dazim's Horrid Wilting from Xanathar's. These are very different spells for very different purposes. Horrid Wilting does 12d8 necrotic damage in a 30-foot cube, with a Con save for half. A 30-foot cube is actually a little smaller than a Fireball. And 12d8 is an average of 54 damage, whereas an 8th level Fireball would do 45.5, so it is a step up in terms of damage.

Clone is a super weird one. It basically lets you avoid death, but it takes a long time (120 days) for the clone to reach a point where it can work. Then, you're also going to wake up without any of your gear, which has been left behind with your original body. You can use something like Drawmij's Instant Summons (though make sure you do so right away, as if the people who killed you pick up your gear, Instant Summons will just tell you where your stuff is, which you already know, presumably). Clone is very cool, but I think it's more useful as a kind of "campaign epilogue" spell, where you might go on to live for thousands of years by just slipping into your cloned body after you die of old age.

Finally, 9th level spells: Bizarrely, Astral Projection is actually considered Necromancy, and is the only one in the PHB. But Arcana Unleashed gives us Wail of the Banshee.

I love Astral Projection, but it's possibly a bit redundant given that you could have already gotten Plane Shift, and while it makes it safer to traverse the Astral Sea (unless you fight things that can cut the thread, which, like, most monsters in the Astral Sea can) I don't know that it's super practical. (Again, we can just Wish a Plane Shift if we lack the correct tuning rod).

Wail of the Banshee... is interesting. It can instant-kill any creatures of your choice within 60 feet who hear it if they have 50 HP or fewer. At tier 4, that's really marginal for most monsters you'll face. In the far more likely case that they have over 50 HP, though, they make a Con save, taking 12d10 psychic damage on a failure and being deafened, or half as much on a success without the condition.

I... I love the flavor here, and the fact that you can avoid friendly fire is genuinely a real selling point. But any 9th level AoE damage spell (and this is effectively that - even the instant kill function is effectively a flat 50 damage) is going to need to compare to Meteor Swarm, which does a whopping 140 damage on average. You know what would auto-kill a bunch of monsters with less than 50 hit points? A Meteor Swarm that does 70 damage even if they succeed on their saving throw.

    Phew! That was a lot!

So, how do we play this?

Well, one of the joys of playing a Wizard is that you have so many options on how to approach each challenge, whether they be combat encounters or other things. But if we want to really lean into the subclass fantasy, we're primarily going to act as a battlefield commander for a legion of undead troops.

Talk with your DM extensively about how practical it will be for you to command a bunch of undead. While Summon Undead and Danse Macabre make temporary undead minions, remember that Animate Dead and Create Undead create undead monsters that don't die when the spell ends - they're just no longer under your control. This means you effectively need to re-cast the spell on the same minions to keep them leashed, perhaps supplementing fallen minions with new remains (though again, talk with your DM about whether a dead zombie is now a humanoid corpse that could be reanimated with such a spell).

It's also a really important thing for you to hash out with your DM what you have to do with your undead minions when you, say, go to town. Is this a setting where people understand that you're "one of the good guys," and thus your marching force of undead minions are allowed to come into the general store with you? Or, more likely, would people run screaming if they saw you at the head of an undead host?

The main reason I think DMs will "railroad" or "shut down" players' ideas is more about keeping the campaign manageable. If you're going to play this subclass, see if they're willing to make ample corpses available for reanimation in the game's world, and maybe if they don't, see if they'll agree to letting you endlessly "recycle" fallen undead.

One of the biggest challenges to a minion-commanding character in a TTRPG is that your turns might go on forever. While the Berserker Barbarian resolves their entire turn in like, a minute, rolling two attacks and then moving, if you've got a dozen minions that are all moving and attacking, on top of whatever spell choices you're making for your turn, it could get out of hand.

Consider whether some limitations might be helpful to keep the flow of the game going. Maybe, for example, you can only maintain a number of minions from Animate Dead that you'd be able to get from a single cast. As written, a 10th level Necromancer could blow all 3 3rd, 4th, and both 5th level spell slots to raise (er, 3x3 plus 3x5 plus 2x7, so that's...) 38 minions. That could be hilariously funny (and even with only a +3 or +5 to hit, that's going to wind up being an insane amount of single target damage per turn) but it makes the combat encounter the Necromancer show.

Limiting it to just one Animate Dead's worth of minions means just 7, which is still a lot but more manageable. Alternatively, we could look at Draw Steel for inspiration on how to handle minions.

The Draw Steel Summoner is entirely built around having a bunch of minions on the board, and groups these minions into squads that have essentially a shared health pool, with thresholds where individuals are killed and reduce the overall damage they do.

I'd be tempted to go a step further and make them move together as well. Here's an idea I'd propose:

Every time you get a square number of minions, you group them into a squad. So, say we cast Animate Dead at 5th level. We have 4 in a squad and then the remaining 3 act individually. This is only if they're the same creature choice.

If we have four skeletons, we group them into a Large Swarm of Medium Undead. They make a single attack together, pooling the damage they'd normally do so that it would be 4d6+12 (and then an additional 4x our Int modifier for Undead Thralls' necrotic damage). We likewise pool their HP and Temp HP, multiplying the usual totals by 4. Now, the math actually makes them a little tougher, but what we do is that when their HP drops to thresholds equal to the skeletons' individual max HP (so, we have 52 total, but at 39, 26, and 13) the swarm is diminished, subtracting one minion's damage from the total.

Again, the math makes them a little tougher because the monsters have to chew through all four minions' temp HP before any start going down, but I think that's fair. We might even nerf their damage by forcing them to take the average damage even on crits (which would also speed up combat).

Alternatively, to keep your fellow players engaged, try relinquishing control. Maybe you divide your undead minions and allow your friends to control them.

It's common wisdom in D&D that putting more bodies on the board is often very powerful, and Necromancers can put a lot of bodies on the board.

Again, I've been playing a Wizard for I think almost 5 years now, and so I'm eager to try other classes in some new campaign. I still haven't played a 5.5 Monk, and I'd love to get my hands on the new Artifcer as well.

But I've got to say, I would not hate playing a Necromancer.

Conjuring with the Conjurer

 The Conjurer Wizard has a special place for me because my best friend in the first D&D game I ran (years before I ever got to play as a PC) made a High Elf School of Conjuration Wizard. It's a character I'd love him to bring back in a future campaign, and I think we'd both be happy with him updating to this new 5.5 version.

A lot of classes have what I'd consider the "quintessential" subclass - your Berserker Barbarians, your Devotion Paladins, your Open Fist Monks. Wizards, though... I don't know that they really have one. However, if you forced me to pick one, yeah, I might say Evoker, but Conjurers, even if they didn't show up in the new PHB, feel kind of like the classic Wizard archetype. After all, isn't it a fantasy trope for the king to have a "Court Conjurer?"

One of the funny things about Conjuration magic is that it focuses on two conceptually related but still very distinct things: one is teleportation magic, and the other is summoning magic.

Again, conceptually, I get that summoning things is like teleporting them (perhaps across planes,) so it does kind of fit together.

As far as I can tell, there weren't a ton of changes between the last UA with the revised arcane subclasses and the final version out of Arcana Unleashed, so I'm not really going to go in deep on every feature. I'm also... a little burned out on all my hypothetical "vs. Wyvern" calculations.

But I figure we can talk about this subclass a bit. I'm not going to give it a "tier ranking" but I did figure we could look at what you can do with it.

First off, Benign Transposition remains your main low-level feature. From 3-5, it is now basically a better Misty Step you can do Int times per day. While you can easily get Misty Step, especially with Conjuration Savant, there's actually a decent argument to not even grab it on level-ups, because you'll have access to this.

Here are the ways in which it's better to use this over Misty Step: First off, it's not a spell that costs a spell slot, so you can do this even if you took an action to cast a spell with a spell slot. Second, it can swap you with an ally. This is especially good if a monster broke off from a melee character to attack you - you can get away from the monster and then get your Barbarian friend in its face immediately.

Finally, at level 6, the range increases to 60 feet, making it twice the distance of Misty Step. Also, at 6 you can recharge its uses with 3rd or higher level spell slots. Now, Misty Step is only a 2nd level spell, so you've got to ask yourself if the extra distance, ability to swap with a friend, and the fact that it's not a spell (can't be countered, for example) is worth a higher level slot.

That being said, while Misty Step can be absolutely clutch when needed, I don't often cast it more than once or maybe twice a day. So I honestly don't think we will need to really worry about the spell slot cost to recharge.

But it's at 6 that the thematic focus of the subclass starts to shift over from the teleportation stuff to the summoning stuff.

Durable Summons is good. Quite good. Let's pick a Summon spell. We'll say Summon Fey, which is one of the better ones (Summon Undead, interestingly, will not work with this feature, as it's the only "Summon X" spell that is from the Necromancy rather than Conjuration school). While I'd generally advise always casting these spells at even levels, given that we get this feature at level 6, we'll look at it cast at base level.

Our Fey spirit would have 30 HP. With Durable Summons, they get 12 Temp HP, which is 40% more. Already pretty good. But that 12 THP also confers resistance to everything except Force, Necrotic, Psychic, and Radiant damage. That's admittedly a wide spread of damage types, but especially if you know what kind of threats you're likely to face, you can pick foes that are unlikely to do any of those.

An interesting rules question, though: does all the damage happen as a single instance, or do we only halve it up to the point that there's Temp HP? In other words, let's say a monster hits this thing for a crushing 30 bludgeoning damage.

Does that fully get halved to 15 total, meaning our Fey Spirit now has 27 HP? Or do we say that 24 of that damage gets halved by the Temp HP and then the remaining 6 carry over without resistance to lower the Spirit to 24 HP?

I think I'd be inclined to rule it more simply: that even if it breaks through the Temp HP, it's still all halved, and it's just subsequent hits that will no longer be reduced by resistance.

The point of this, though, is that while the Temp HP is only half our Wizard level, because it's also granting resistance, it's really (in most situations) effectively more like 4 times our Wizard level. That's quite good scaling - by level 20, our summons could take an extra 80 damage.

Indeed, I think that the main big risk of any sort of summoning spell is that there are multiple ways for foes to end it early: they can break your concentration, they can kill the summon, or they can dispel it. This one really helps you avoid or at least delay scenario number 2.

Then, at level 10, problem number 1 is more or less solved. Very simply, you can't lose concentration from taking damage.

Now, we can take feats and such to make it far harder to lose concentration. War Caster paired with Resilient: Constitution (or getting Con save proficiency some other way) is great in the majority of cases, but if you get hit with a dragon's breath at high levels that does something like 90 damage, there is no way you're ever going to make the Concentration save (though Absorb Elements can certainly help). But here, as long as they don't fully knock you out, or stun/incapacitate you, that spell isn't going anywhere.

(Note that this will help with any Conjuration spell, so if you're in "empty the tank" mode combining Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray, this will make that much safer to do so.)

Finally, at level 14, there's Split Summons. Here, when you cast a Summon spell (or any Conjuration spell that creates a creature that has a stat block in the spell - very specific here, so we're excluding things like Summon Greater Demon from Xanathar's) you can instead summon two creatures, but they each have half their usual Hit Points.

Here's the fun trick, though: they should each gain the Temp HP from Durable Summons.

So, let's say you cast Summon Fiend at 6th level, getting a pair of yugoloths (while Summon spells give you three options for what kind of thing you're summoning, I think the specification that they be the "same kind" here means you can't mix, say, a Demon and a Yugoloth).

Yugoloths created with Summon Fiend have 60 HP (the highest of the three options). That means two of them will each have 30 HP. But at level 14, we're going to be giving each 28 Temp HP. That means even before we take resistances into account, we're nearly at the same number of points of damage that the conjured creatures can take (and if we had chosen Demons, they'd only have 25 HP a piece, or if they were Devils, only 20, so they'd actually have higher HP+THP than they'd typically have without any of these subclass features). Obviously, with the resistance from Durable Summons, they wind up being significantly more resilient than a single one would be summoned by anyone else.

And then, you know, effectively double the damage of the spell.

Indeed, if we look at double Yugoloths vs. a Wyvern, assuming a +10 spell attack modifier, we're looking at hitting on a 4 or higher (85% hit chance). Each Yugoloth is making three attacks, and each is hitting for 1d8+9 (13.5 on a hit, 4.5 extra on a crit). That's 11.7 per attack and six attacks, so we're looking at 70.2 damage per turn.

Now, of course, we shouldn't compare this with our other "vs Wyvern" things because this would be four levels later, but it's clear that this feature can give us a real bombardment of attacks (the Yugoloth is one of the lighter-hitting summons, even).

    Now, how you flavor a Conjurer could come in a whole lot of different varieties. Indeed, are you more excited about traveling to other planes or across great distances? Perhaps you're a bright-eyed explorer, and your summons are more about the fantastical creatures you've seen.

Alternatively, I think you can play this subclass in a more antiheroic manner. Indeed, I think when many of us think of Warlocks, we think of a practitioner of dark magic, who might conjure forth demons and other foul beings to do their bidding. Frankly, I think that the Conjurer is a better fit for that "Demonologist" or "Diabolist" archetype (it's why I thought that I might actually make my World of Warcraft Warlock a Wizard in D&D terms). While I hate to lend credibility to the Satanic Panic, doesn't it feel like we need some lower-level fiend-summoning spells in 5E?

Of course, summoning creatures need not be dark and antiheroic. Wizards get access to most of the Summon spells, and I think Fey, Constructs, Elementals, and Dragons all make for perfectly morally neutral summoning options, while Aberrations and Fiends (and Shadowspawn if we're going into 5.0 spells) give you a darker edge (and again, Undead, though that's a Necromancy spell).

Conjurers can still make ample use of the Conjure spells (though only two in the PHB are available to Wizards - Conjure Minor Elementals and Conjure Elemental,) but this subclass does really seem built around the "put a new creature on the board" options.

The new Battle Familiar spell could work ok with this subclass, but with some odd caveates: If you already have a familiar, you might not actually get the benefits of Durable Summons, as this triggers when you "summon or create" a creature with a Conjuration spell that costs a spell slot. If your DM is really  strict, they might argue that because you're altering your familiar rather than conjuring them anew, they wouldn't benefit.

Also, the strict wording on how Battle Familiar interacts with Split Summons is interesting: first off, the subclass feature says you can use it when you cast a spell that summons a spirit that is included in the stat block. It does specify "spirit," which is how all the Summon spells describe their conjured creatures, even if it's not in an obvious creature type line (they're all instead titled "Aberrant Spirit" or "Elemental Spirit.") So, I think the intent is for you to use this only with "Summon" spells.

But if we are allowed to use this with Battle Familiar, we run into another interesting rules question: Battle Familiar stipulates a "one familiar at a time" rule, which means you can't cast the spell over and over to have a bunch of concentration-free familiar pets. Specifically, it says that "if you cast this spell while you already have a familiar from this spell, that familiar is replaced with the new one," and then goes on to explain how it temporarily buffs and alters an existing familiar from the Find Familiar spell.

But in theory, if we could apply Split Summons, we could cast Battle Familiar while we have zero familiar, and then immediately get two. Neither is being conjured by a new spell when we already have a Familiar.

Honestly, though, I think the specificity that Split Summons only works on spells that summon Spirits means we probably can't use it on Battle Familiar anyway. It's still a spell worth considering, as we could have yet another body on the field doing a few attacks.

    Overall, though, I think that the subclass seems like a lot of fun, and one I'd be tempted to play if I hadn't spent the last four or five years (and still going) playing a Wizard already.

How Practical Can the Necromancer Be?

 So, I don't have Arcana Unleashed yet, but we've gotten pretty extensive previews from the YouTube world - I'll be referring to the Dungeon Dudes' recent subclass ranking video (basically everything is awesome except maybe Enchanters and Transmuters, which are just fine.)

The Necromancer is a class fantasy that is kind of a tough nut to crack in TTRPGs. While in video games, you can often summon a ton of different monsters and let the computer automate their behavior (the Diablo Necromancer and WoW's Unholy Death Knight, as well as a similar vibe with its Demonology Warlock, each do this sort of thing) there's a real risk in a TTRPG space of struggling with managing such a large group of creatures.

Draw Steel, notably, released its first supplementary new class with the Summoner, which gave us a class entirely built around summoning lots of additional creatures, with subclasses that gave you the Necromancer, Demonologist, and also a Fey summoner and Elemental summoner. This class is intended for advanced players, though, and they warn new players off from trying to class as their first because of the complexity of controlling a lot of minions on the board (I imagine it might be easiest for players who have played as Director first to try their hand at it).

So, the question then is this: how well can we make a Necromancer work in D&D? Arcana Unleashed gives us the Necromancer Wizard, a revision of the School of Necromancy Wizard from the 2014 PHB.

I had assumed that one of the major changes would be building the class around Summon Undead rather than Animate Dead, as these Summon spells really streamline the whole "adding a creature to the battlefield" kind of gameplay. But evidently, instead, WotC has chosen to stick to Animate Dead, which uses the Monster Manual stats for Skeletons and Zombies, and is a concentration-free way to raise or maintain control over a group of undead.

Let's talk about a couple things first.

Skeletons in 5.5 have a +5 to hit, which is actually what we expect player characters to have at level 1, but will fall behind as you gain levels. Zombies only have a +3 to hit. So, how does controlling a lot of them at higher levels work and how does it feel?

In large numbers, even if they do fairly low damage (a zombie hits for 1d8+1, a Skeleton for 1d6+3,) if you can get enough of them, that damage starts to add up. Hit chance, of course, is also a big consideration. Against an AC of 16, which feels like something you could encounter at low and high levels, a Skeleton has a 50% hit chance and a Zombie has a 40% hit chance.

So, it's a numbers game - the more minions we can control, the better off we'll be. Remember that Animate Dead is concentration-free, though we'll need to spend a spell slot every day to maintain it (lest our undead minions turn on us or innocent NPCs nearby).

Off the bat, even before we can cast Animate Dead, Necromancers automatically get Find Familiar and get to use a Skeleton or Zombie as familiar options, and can make their familiar Undead (they can use other familiar forms and make them undead if they wish). Notably, there are new feats that empower familiars in various ways that a Necromancer might want to look into, such as Battle Familiar, which basically temporarily turns a familiar into something more like the Summon spells. But at this point, the familiar can also make attacks instead of you when you take the attack action (using its reaction). At this level, a Skeleton's Shortsword or Shortbow attack is pretty close to par with our use of True Strike (slightly less if we're using a light crossbow, greatclub, or two-handing a quarterstaff or spear), and is a bit better than Fire Bolt, so it's worth considering.

I really like this because it means we get to feel like a Necromancer right when we get the subclass. And that's minion number 1 who should be by our side at all times (unless it gets killed).

Now, at level 6, we automatically get Animate Dead (hey, take Summon Undead to tide you over at level 5). When we cast it, it's automatically upcast by 1 level. This is actually really great, especially at this level, because Animate Dead is the rare spell that actually upcasts far better than its base version: at its base 3rd level, you just get one minion, but every spell level beyond it adds two, so at this point, you can have a total of four skeletons on your side - one from Find Familiar and three from Animate Dead.

Actually, the math here is interesting. If we were level 11, say, and wanted to maximize the number of minions we could get via the spells regained from Arcane Recovery, do we want a 5th level spell or two 3rd level spells? Because they're upcast, we'd be getting 7 minions from a 5th level slot and 3 from each 3rd level slot. So it's actually more efficient to use the higher-level slot.

Anyway, we get one free cast of Animate Dead per day, which also benefits from this auto-upcasting. Now, the other really great thing is the following:

Each undead we create with a spell (not just Necromancy spells, so our undead familiar will benefit) gets additional max HP equal to our Int plus half our Wizard level. If we assume a +4 to Int at this level, that's 7 extra HP, which is a roughly 50% increase for both Zombies and Skeletons. By level 20, we should expect 15 extra HP, which about doubles it (and notably makes it possible that they'll withstand a Fireball, though a Skeleton with this bonus will be right at the average damage of one).

They'll also get to add your Intelligence modifier on a hit with their attacks. Again, that's something that scales a lot with numbers. At higher levels, you can grant undead creatures you create temporary HP equal to your Wizard level once per day, which will make them more resilient.

Ok, again, let's talk practicalities:

First off, your minions are a bit more resilient, but what do you do if they die?

Well, here's one weird thing that you'll certainly want to check with your DM about: is a dead zombie now just a corpse? And is a dead skeleton now a pile of bones? In other words, can you re-animate a re-killed undead creature?

See, one of the things that the Necromancer always has to worry about in a way that the Conjurer doesn't is that, typically, you need materials to raise if you're a necromancer. That's not always the case - sometimes you summon them forth from the underworld/Shadowfell/wherever (my Wizard has Summon Undead and I always flavor it as if they're coming through a portal to the Shadowfell, usually taking on some idiosyncratic personality).

I think a good thing to discuss with your DM is how available materials should be for you - and I'd advise DMs to make it reasonable for a player to use this central mechanical concept to their character. There can, though, still be some social consequences to having a bunch of undead minions around you all the time, but I'd generally try to find a way to let them have their cool thing.

Now, I think it's possible that you'd want to use Zombies, but generally speaking I think the Skeletons are the superior option unless dealing with foes who do bludgeoning damage.

I'm not going to do a full "vs Wyvern" damage calculation, in part because I want to have the book to really build something out with tons of feats and such, but practically speaking, let's figure out what we could do with a barrage of skeletal archers shooting at a target.

At level 10, we have 5th level spells. Assuming we want to invest in our undead army but not use up all of our spell slots, let's say that we've cast Animate Dead at 5th, 4th, and 3rd level to build our army. That's 3 from the 3rd level slot, 5 from the 4th level, and 7 from the 5th level slot, which means we have 15 skeletons. We have a 16th from our Find Familiar spell. Each has a +5 to hit (with either attack, but it's obviously better for them to stay at range and fire their shortbows - preferably spread out quite wide).

If we have +4 to Int at this level (we might want to pick up some general feats at 4 and 8, so we'd be at 19 probably) then each of these skeletons is going to hit for 1d6+7, or 10.5 on average.

If we're attacking a Wyvern (just to be consistent,) that means we hit on a 9 or higher with our +5 to hit, so that's a 60% hit chance. 10.5x60% is 6.3 damage. And then we add 3.5 5% of the time, giving us an extra .175, so we're looking at 6.475 per attack.

With 15 such attacks, that's 97.125 damage. It's heavy spell slot investment, but it's non-concentration, and unless our foes blow them all up with AoE (which isn't impossible,) that's pretty nutso, given that we won't, I believe, need to spend much if any of our own action economy on it.

But let's consider the downsides:

This is going to be rough on your table. It's going to take a long time to position all of your minions, and rolling every attack and all your damage rolls is going to take a long time. So, let's talk best practices:

First off, we're not rolling damage anymore. Using the average damage options for the stat blocks, we'll say that a hit does a flat 6 before we add the Necrotic damage. We can say that a crit will do a flat 10 (the average damage in the stat block rounds down, but 2d6+3 is straight up 10 on average). This way, we're only rolling d20s and cutting down the rolling and counting.

Next, DMs, tell the player what AC they need to hit. Yes, sometimes it's fun to make a guessing game out of just what you need to hit the target, but this way, a player can simply know what they need to roll and quickly roll 15 d20s and say "ok, that's 8 hits and one crit" and quickly figure out that that's 94 damage.

If we want to go to a real extreme, we could also just have a single attack roll for the entire undead horde. This will make things swingy, to be clear: it becomes all or nothing, but you're looking at a monster either taking zero or like 150 damage (or 210 if it's a crit).

Basically, don't play this class if you're the sort of player who isn't thinking constantly about what you're going to do before the DM gets to your turn. I have some players - whom I love, to be clear - who will take several minutes to decide what they want to do on their turn, usually because they've been distracted and not paying attention to what happened since their previous turn, and some who will have a plan and then if circumstances change (like a monster behaving differently than they expected) will take a long time to adapt.

If you want to play this style of character, you need to be on the ball, and even risk some suboptimal choices in the interest of alacrity. D&D combat can go very slow, especially with a lot of spellcasters in the party. Try not to be the reason that three-round combat took over 5 hours to finish.

UA: Imaskarcanist Wizard

 The third and final of the new Underdark UA's subclass options, we're once again dealing with the culture of Deep Imskara and their magical "Unlight." Like the other two, this subclass has a flavor table to roll on, here detailing how you learned this magic (which seems to assume you're not from Deep Imskara).

As always, Wizards are such a powerful class because of their unparalleled spell list, so your subclass often adds just a bit of gravy on top, but let's see how we feel about this particular gravy.

Level 3:

Unlight Adept:

When you cast a spell that deals Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder damage, you can change that damage to Radiant. Additionally, dim light created by your spells creates bright light instead.

    The latter part is not super important, though if your DM actually remembers that dim light gives disadvantage on perception checks to see (remember that even people with Darkvision might have a need for some form of light) it could be marginally helpful. The damage type switch, though, is quite good: radiant is among the most reliable damage types in the game, and being able to swap all the regular elemental damage types into that means that anything from Fireball to Lightning Bolt to Tasha's Caustic Brew can be swapped to a different type if you are worried about resistances or immunities. (As a Scribes Wizard, I often plan around having certain "good damage types" at each spell level, but here you just have this feature and are basically covered).

Unlight Invigoration:

As a bonus action, you can choose a willing creature within 30 feet of you that you can see and roll one or two of your hit dice (er... hit point dice. That's a 5.5ism that I haven't gotten used to). You expend the dice and the target gains Temp HP equal to the roll's total plus your Intelligence modifier, and until they have no Temp HP, they have advantage on Strength checks and shed bright light in a 10-foot radius.

    I don't totally understand the reasoning behind the Strength advantage, but this is kind of interesting: if you think about it, you've probably got higher Int than Con, so if you just spend one die, it might be more effective than healing up on a short rest with that hit die. It's less hit-point-die efficient if you roll 2, but if you quickly need a bit of THP, this can help out. The advantage on Strength could be good to throw on a Fighter or Paladin (or Barbarian who doesn't want to use up all their Rages,) which could actually be great when in exploration mode because as long as they don't take damage, they'll keep that advantage basically until they finish a long rest.

Level 6:

Unlight Restoration:

As a bonus action, choose a creature you can see within 30 feet and roll one or two of your hit point dice, expending them. The target regains HP equal to the total rolled and sheds bright light in a 10-foot radius until the end of their next turn.

If you expended two dice, you can choose to end either the Blinded, Deafened, Paralyzed, or Poisoned condition instead of healing them.

    So, this is interesting. Arguably, the healing is a worse choice than the temp HP from Unlight Invigoration unless they're already unconscious (or at higher levels, if you're trying to top people up to protect them from things like Power Word Kill) because it's slightly lower in total than the Temp HP. But again, this can pop friends up from unconsciousness, and while you're tapping into your own potential healing on short rests, the fact that you have a number of d6s equal to your level could actually mean that this keeps your party going quite a while. Wizards rarely get the ability to heal at all.

Level 10:

Secrets of Deep Imaskar:

You gain the following:

Imaskarcana Lore: You can attune yourself to a magic item as a Magic action once per long rest.

    This is fun, but very marginal. It just lets you pretty much start using an attunement item the moment you find it, but after that point, but this is not something you'll be doing every day.

Piercing Unlight: Your spells ignore resistance to radiant damage.

    While this is cool given that you can make nearly all of your spells do radiant damage, it's also pretty rare, I think, that you encounter monsters with radiant resistance (which is part of what makes that Unlight Adept feature good).

Imaskar Seals: You always have Glyph of Warding prepared and can cast it once per long rest without a spell slot. When you cast it this way, you don't need material components, and you cast the spell as if you were using a spell slot equal to the highest Wizard spell slot you have. Any previous glyph created htis way is broken and that spell is ended without triggering.

    This, actually, is pretty nutso. While Glyph of Warding isn't the easiest spell to use offensively, let's just bear in mind that this can eventually give you a second 9th level spell every day. I'm assuming the intent is that even if you multiclass with a pure caster, this is really meant to be cast at the highest level of Wizard spell you can learn (so if you were, say, 13/7 Wizard/Psion, you'd have a 9th level slot but would only be able to learn up to 7th level spells, so I'd assume this would be the level you could cast the free glyph at, but I could be wrong).

Level 14:

Doom of Unlight:

When a creature takes Radiant damage from a spell you cast, you can use a reaction to curse the creature with Unlight. The creature makes a Con save against your spell save DC, and is cursed on a failure. Until the curse ends, they suffer the following:

The target emits bright light out to 20 feet.

Attack rolls against the target hav advantage.

At the start of each of the target's turns, they take radiant damage equal to your character level.

The target has advantage on Strength checks and melee attack rolls.

If the target hits another creature with a melee attack, they can repeate the Con save, ending the curse on a success.

If the target is reduced to 0 hp, it explodes. Roll d8s equal to half your character level, and each creature in a 10-foot emanation around the target takes radiant damage equal to the total rolled.

Once you attempt to curse a creature this way, you can't do so again until you finish a long rest or expend a 6th level spell slot (expending taking no action).

    Boy, this is crazy. So, first off, there's no range on this. I don't know if we could know that a creature took this from our Glyph of Warding, but that seems ideal. The thing that's so strange about this curse is that it creates, sure, big problems for the creature (taking our character level - not wizard level, so if we put those last 6 levels into something else, it should still do 20 - damage every turn will be enough to melt a lot of creatures if they can't get uncursed,) but the curse also buffs them with advantage on their attacks, so it's a real gamble.

    I'm a little skeptical here: 5E subclasses typically don't come with downsides to their abilities (the exception being the Wild Magic Sorcerer, though that became, I believe, less risky in 5.5), and the game is balanced around assuming that the dangers come more from monsters and environments. I think all in all this is probably going to be worse for your foe than it is for the party, but the fact that there's even a question that that might not be the case makes this run counter to established design conventions.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think that, of the three subclasses presented here, this one feels the most likely to actually see play. Not knowing much about the lore being related here (and possibly established; I don't know if Deep Imskara is a new thing or not) I can't really get a feel for the "vibe" of this or the Barbarian subclass.

    Using hit point dice as a resource is a cool idea, though one we saw in one of the Dark Sun playtest options as well. I believe Grim Hollow also had some Blood Magic spells that work this way, but that's third party.

    Anyway, that's it for subclasses. Last we just have the Path of Ceremorphosis feats.

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.

(EDIT: It occurred to me re-reading this post that, technically, given that we can get the Attack Action as one of our hasted actions, we might be able to "replace" that one attack with a use of Booming Blade - essentially, this attack action would be an "Extra Attack" of 1. That's up for DMs to maybe rule on. This would bump the damage to an extra 2d8+5 rather than 1d8+5, so it comes to an average of 14. This still doesn't beat CME, though, because across two attacks, we're still getting nearly, but not quite, twice as much damage.)

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.

My Wizard vs. Death Knight

 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.

Building an Alucard for Ravenloft's Strahd von Zarovich

 A couple years ago, my friend ran The House of Lament, the starter adventure in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. As a joke, initially, the character I came up with for it was Alexander von Zarovich, a dhampir rogue who was the son of infamous Darklord Strahd von Zarovich. His backstory was that he had been initially born as a means for Strahd to escape the Domains of Dread (back during Strahd's collaborations with Azalin) by essentially creating a suitable vessel to transfer his soul into while leaving his soulless body behind to remain trapped as Darklord. The experiment failed, and so Strahd transformed his son into an assassin, sent to terrorize his enemies. When Alexander accidentally killed the current incarnation of Tatyana, Strahd cast him out, banishing him to the Mists. Finding himself in Lamordia, he lived as an orphan but was taken in by a kindly adult who helped rehabilitate and de-program him, allowing him to grow into a (relatively) well-adjusted adult.

While the idea of a dhampir son of Strahd was the kind of one-shot joke character, I actually realized the concept had legs (hence the extensive backstory). I haven't had an opportunity to play this character in a larger campaign, but I could see myself doing so.

Naturally, there's some precedent from the Castlevania series, with the character of Alucard, aka Adrian Tepes, the son of Dracula and his human wife Lisa. As a Dhampir, Alucard heroically opposes his monstrous father while also being a bit of an edgelord himself.

Initially, my idea for Xander would be as a Rogue - that's how I played him in the House of Lament - but while I like that conceptually, I think A: a little frustration with the Rogue as a class and B: a desire for a more effective melee fighter has led me to consider an alternative.

Initially I thought maybe a fighter, probably a Dexterity-based one using a Rapier or perhaps dual-wielding. And then it struck me:

Bladesinger.

While I tend to prefer my Battlemages heavily armored, the Bladesinger does satisfy that definition of being a character who can use both spells and weapons (I know that "Battlemage" means other things to different people - to me I think it's kind of the less IP-specific "Gish" idea, which is best embodied in D&D with the Eldritch Knight Fighter subclass).

Not only is the Bladesinger a cool and powerful subclass, but it also, I think, fits well with the aesthetic of a vampiric warrior - vampires are rarely seen wearing armor, for example. They also tend to have magic powers, and we're going to be looking at a lot of the spells I'd choose to fit in with these themes (which also happen to go together for the most part).

I've got a build here that goes to level 10.

The 5.5 Bladesinger, from Heroes of Faerun, makes them a little less dependent on having high Dexterity, because you can now use Intelligence to attack while in your Bladesong. I do think you'll still want at least decent Dex, as it still raises your AC, initiative bonus, and of course helps with Dex saves. Potentially you could go with 15s in Int, Dex, and Con, though I tend to prefer starting with a 17 in my top stat at level 1 in 5.5 so that I can put it to 18 at level 4 with a General Feat.

Naturally, we'll be grabbing War Caster at level 4, which A: is basically what every spellcaster should take at level 4, but B: also really good given that we'll be mixing it up in melee and being able to Booming Blade as an opportunity attack.

Given the desire to have some feats in tier 3 to boost Dex and/or Con, I'm going to actually say we just push Int to 20 at level 8, rather than taking another Int-based General feat. Shadow Touched would certainly be thematic here, and there are some other Int-based feats to consider, but I have an OCD thing about capping stats.

For weapon choice, there are lots of options, because you're basically going to get a d8 weapon at best - even if you fight with a longsword, you can't use its versatile property without ending Bladesong, and given that you don't get weapon masteries, it's really just a choice of damage types. Thematically, I really feel like we've got to go with the Rapier, which just feels like the elegant vampiric weapon to pick. I could see a Whip also working, which sacrifices 2 damage on average for extra reach. That reach could be very helpful as a (somewhat) squishy Wizard, but I'm going to say let's risk it.

Now, spells:

For cantrips, the must-haves are Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade. The former is particularly good as an opportunity attack with War Caster (unless your DM is an insane stickler and says that the spell targets the weapon, rather than the target of the attack). We can start off with True Strike if we're beginning at level 1 in order to be able to attack with a weapon before we get our subclass, but we might want to just stick to the back until then. We might consider having a ranged cantrip (Mind Sliver feels on-theme and is also good) but these are going to be our bread-and-butter. Blade Ward is also a decent choice, as once we get to level 6 and get our special Extra Attack, we can pop this up to effectively increase our AC by 1d4 on each hit (though it does eat up our concentration, so this might be better if we're in a big dungeon crawl with a lot of smaller fights where we don't want to blow a high-level spell slot on something).

First level, we want to grab Shield and Mage Armor. We cannot wear armor in the Bladesong (a change from the old version) so this will be our best option for armor unless we can get something like a Robe of the Archmagi or something far later on. Remember that Bladesong doesn't change the math of how we determine our armor - it just adds our Int modifier to AC, so if we have a +2 to Dex, Mage Armor, and +3 to Int at level 3, that's a healthy 18 AC, which will be better than even heavy-armor wearers unless they have a shield or somehow snagged plate this early. I'd also take Absorb Elements, another staple. Staples like Find Familiar (feels like it should be a bat) and Identify/Detect Magic are also good - we will still be a Wizard, and people will rely on us for stuff like that. I also like Jump here, which helps with our mobility as a melee wizard and again, feels very much like a vampire thing to do.

Second level, another spell I'd take on any character, Misty Step feels particularly good for our vampire theme (doesn't Alucard have an ability in Symphony of the Night where he turns into mist to go through barred barriers?) This is such a staple spell that I have zero hesitation putting it in there. It'll also potentially help us get to foes faster. Invisibility is another good utility spell that, again, lends itself to our spooky vibes.

Third level, there are a few standard choices (I'll never not take Fireball on a Wizard,) and Fear is a really good and again, thematic choice for our big Crowd Control spell. However, we now have an interesting question: Do we take Spirit Shroud? I made a post last fall comparing this spell to Conjure Minor Elementals. The short story: Spirit Shroud is more convenient, but doesn't scale as well. Each adds damage to attacks you make if the target is within a relatively close emanation, which is really powerful when you can make lots of attacks (it pairs well with Scorching Ray,) and given that our Bladesinger can regularly make two attacks per turn starting at level 6, we can often benefit from this. Spirit Shroud is less damage, but I do think it's way more thematically on-point than CME. It also only requires a bonus action to cast it, so we can start attacking on the same turn. That said, we also need our bonus action to activate Bladesong, so we probably won't be casting it until turn 2 in combat. Now, that's not really a downside given that if we have CME, we'll probably be activating Bladesong and then casting that on turn 1 and not attacking until turn 2 anyway - with Spirit Shroud we can at least attack in a non-augmented way on turn 1. So, it really depends on A: how long your combat lasts and B: how much you can upcast your spells. While I took CME on my D&D Beyond build of the character, I might actually argue that you should go Spirit Shroud if for no other reason than it feels way more on-theme. For other 3rd level spells, I like Summon Undead - all the Summon spells are pretty good, and both add a body to the field and do pretty decent damage (Summon Undead also has great utility, as the Ghost can automatically frighten anyone they hit, and the Putrid spirit requires some set-up and for monsters that aren't immune to being poisoned, but can paralyze things).

Fourth level, Polymorph is a key one - being able to turn into a Wolf or a Bat (talk with your DM about re-skinning higher-CR beasts so you can stay on-theme) is another big vampire trope. Conjure Minor Elementals is less thematic but still great for any Wizard who makes attack rolls. Greater Invisibility can be a really strong spell for both attack and defense if you can spare the concentration.

Rounding things out at 5th level, I think we've got to take Steel Wind Strike, which is a weird sort of pseudo-AOE spell that works very well with the idea of a weapon-wielding Wizard. It plays well with Spirit Shroud/CME, and while it's limited to 5 targets, how often do you get 5 targets in a Fireball? I also grabbed Danse Macabre, which is mostly just fun but I also think not all that bad - considering that Skeletons in 5.5 now have a base attack bonus of +5, if your Int is maxed out, they'll have a +10 to hit and deal 1d6+8 damage on each attack. With five skeletons shooting bows, that's 5d6+40 damage. Against an AC of 18, that's 38.25 average damage per turn. It is dependent on how many skeletons you have access to.

In terms of gameplay, there are some arguments that even a Bladesinger should mostly play like a standard Wizard most of the time, holding back from the fray. But to that, I say: why don't you want to have fun? Truly, by level 10, we're going to be pretty resilient - with +5 to Int, Mage Armor, and still just +2 to Dex, we're going to have an AC of 20 during Bladesong that can then be bumped to 25 if we get hit thanks to the Shield spell. If we get Bracers of Defense, raise those by 2. We might even consider starting with a +3 in Dex, though I generally think a Wizard should favor Con more than Dex, as not all damage requires them to hit you with an attack, and you still only have a d6 hit die. At level 10, we can expend spell slots as a reaction to reduce incoming damage by 5 times the spell's level. I think judicious use of that feature is an important challenge for the Wizard using it - reducing the damage of a dragon's breath, for example, could make it possible for you to maintain concentration on a spell.

One of the fun things about playing this as a Dhampir is that you could, in theory, have a fight along walls and ceilings, which does feel like a fun idea for a rapier-wielding warrior. Being based in Con, and with very few ways to increase the damage, I don't think you'll be using the bite attack all that much, but that's kind of true for all dhampirs.

We will be getting an update to the Dhampir in Ravenloft: Horrors Within, though I don't know how much is likely to change (I suspect not a ton, though they seem to be presenting the Gothic Lineages as more just full-on species in their own right, so we might have some changes to Ancestral Legacy).

At level 10, we get 5 Bladesongs per long rest, so we can probably expect to have it active every fight unless we're in serious dungeon-crawl mode. If we do run out, I think we just hurl spells from afar or focus on buffing allies.

When we want to bring our A-game, we spend the first turn activating Bladesong and then going in for the attack (if we're close enough - we should have a 45-foot movement speed) with a Booming Blade on single targets or Green-Flame Blade if we can hit a secondary target. On turn two, we'll want to activate Spirit Shroud at 5th level (we always want to cast it at odd levels, given how it scales) and then attack again, now dealing 2d8 extra damage (our choice of radiant, necrotic, or cold - radiant's probably the most reliable, but thematically we might go necrotic more often than not) per hit. Again, if we are using CME instead (also at 5th level, this now adding 3d8 to our attacks - I feel like Fire damage would be the thematically appropriate one, though Cold also works. Just pick the right one for the monsters you're fighting), we'll spend our first turn setting up, getting Bladesong and CME running, and then turn two we'll use our action to either attack or if we have a target-rich environment, we can do Steel Wind Strike, hitting each foe for both the spell's 6d10 and the bonus d8s. Note that this will blow both our 5th level slots, so we should only burn both of these spells if we want to burn a lot of gas.

If we want to be a little more conservative, casting either Spirit Shroud or CME at base level is an option. Greater Invisibility is also a decent choice (assuming your foes don't have Blindsight/Truesight).

Again, we are a Wizard, so we have tons of alternatives given the situation. Fear, for example, can seriously thin the ranks if we're facing a massive horde of foes.

When facing a hard-hitting foe, we can run in, attack, and then Misty Step to avoid their strikes if we're not sure Shield will be enough to keep us safe. Also, if you want to play it extra-safe and conservative, consider Blade Ward as your concentration spell, which you can cast on turn 1 after Spirit Shrouding with your Extra Attack. This feels ideal for minor fights in a dungeon room - I'm thinking specifically the vineyard in Curse of Strahd that is overrun with Blights - each fight is trivial, but there are so many little fights there that they can chip away at your HP and resources.

Anyway, I think this could be a very fun archetype - while the Bladesinger can work in any campaign, I do think that it's a strong choice for a lithe, elegant dhampir warrior in a very gothic campaign.