My absolute favorite thing to do in 5e is when I can find a niche spell that’s perfect for a situation the party finds itself in.
This naturally draws itself to the prepared casters and especially the deep spell list and ritual casting of the wizard, but unfortunately wizard is also a generally good class which means there’s usually someone looking to use it in a party, and while doubling up can be fun sometimes I like to have other options.
I’d like to ideally make something strong without any glaring weaknesses: I don’t want to minmax utility off a cliff.
My front runner has been an arcana cleric, which enables Wish eventually and adds a handful of common wizard spells to its list, but I’m not sure the other features of arcana are all that great, and not getting heavy armor makes me a little leery of closing to melee for cleric staples like Spirit Guardians.
Any other cool setups that enable a lot of flexibility and utility?
Bards, most of their spells will help in some way shape or form.
However, I’ve had a wizard and a paladin in a party at mid level and the paladin was the one that constantly had a silver bullet for any given adventure.
But it’s really just best to look at a given class / subclass and look at what kind of utility they provide wholistically (abilities, etc). Because you won’t beat a wizard at casting spells. It’s the whole point of the class.
The problem I have with bard (and in general spontaneous casters) is that they can’t change out spells except on leveling, and they have very few spells known.
So that’s great if you want something like Enhance Ability that’s going to be useful in a lot of situations, but it’d be very hard to take a spell like Locate Object, because it’s a significant chunk of your spells known and you’d probably use it 3 or 4 times across an entire campaign.
But if you’re a prepared caster, if it’s looking like a situation where you’d want Locate Object, you can just prepare it that day, use it as needed, and then swap it back out for something more generally useful. That kind of approach is what I’m trying to build on.
The problem with that is that in practice, you’ll often not have the spell prepared when you find out that you need it, and you won’t have the luxury of waiting to the next day to prepare it. Buying it as a scroll will usually be quicker than waiting a day and preparing it, assuming it’s in your spell book at all.
I think in a lot of situations, particularly non-combat, there’s plenty of time to handle things the next day. Combat tends to be very time-pressured while non-combat situations tend to not have meaningful time pressure.
The comment about the scroll is a good one: if I’m going to need Locate Object 3 times in the campaign as a wizard, and I’m certainly not taking it as one of my leveled spells, I’ll have to obtain at least one scroll of Locate Object to have it as an option at all. How confident am I I’ll only be able to find one, versus just finding 3?
This does only apply to the Wizard though, and might be a point against the Wizard doing this best. A Cleric is never more than 24 hours from having Locate Object available.
Any particular tricks to making scroll stockpiling easy? I guess it’s really just up to the DM making them accessible and having income to use them.
At least in my games, finding objects tend to be under as much a time crunch as combat. Especially since locate object has a 1000ft range so if you wait too long the thief/bad guy will get away. Divination and scrying seems more reliable to me. But I agree for other utility spells. The wizard does get many more spells known than they can actually prep, so choosing them is not as painful for a wizard as it is for spontaneous casters.
Sadly, there is not a good way, that I know of, for getting those circumstancial scrolls without DM buy-in. It does help later in the game when teleporting to major metropolitan areas is viable.
Yeah that’s valid, the case where we’ve suddenly lost an item or are trying to take it might come up very suddenly. I was thinking more of a situation where you know the maguffin is in an area but don’t know where, or are in the right house but need to find its hiding place: you often go into that with advance knowledge.
I chose Locate Object as my example spell because it’s on a lot of spell lists so is plausibly something that could be used no matter what class other people suggested, which actually kind of cuts into the concept of wizard supremacy. Arcane Gate, Modify Memory, Seeming, Guards and Wars, Fabricate*, Control Water, and Speak with Dead are all also good candidates for “I don’t know how often this would come up, but when it does boy howdy is it useful”
*Fabricate might be good enough to be learned by a spontaneous caster.