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.

I’m very intrigued by artificer, and I think you’re absolutely right: it has utility reminiscent of bard, but gets a prepared list that swaps like a cleric/druid (no having to worry about getting access to the spell), and a bunch of other utility through infusions. Filling your hideout with sentient plant spies through replicating Pots of Awakening is exactly the kind of stuff I’m looking for. The spell list is a little shallow to me, definitely not the same depth as the wizard list especially since it cuts off at 5th, but there are a decent number of niche tools there.

If there ends up being a good niche for a Defender or Scout, Armorer is on my shortlist, especially because it can plausibly fill both roles with the same build.

That’s definitely some powerful utility, you basically get to cherrypick the best stuff from the entire game.

But it’s more “Bard does a few (granted, quite a few) things amazingly well” versus a wizard or druid getting to do anything on their spell list.

That being said, between this and your comment about scrolls I think I at least have to spec out a Creation bard and see how well it would approximate what I’m trying to do.

I’m certainly not denying Bard’s utility power, it’s just not quite hitting the “oh there’s a spell for that” feel I wanted out of this character.

If you’re a bard you should honestly make your character last because it’s less flexible once done (spell known), but can fit any niche in construction.

I think we’re kind of on the same page with this: bard can fill any role it wants very well, what I’m trying to do is fill a hundred weird niche scenarios. A bard can be a great skill monkey, blaster, controller, striker… whatever. you want.

But it can’t really solve “we need to fortify this keep against a zombie horde that will arrive in a week”, because the spells that would do that well aren’t spells you can take for the other 99% of situations. A Druid preps Wall of Stone, Stone Shape, Plant Growth, Druid Grove, Move Earth, and Transmute Rock, and goes to town. A Bard might have one or two of those since some of them are actually pretty good for general use, but he won’t be able to access all of them. And if for some reason he does, he won’t have the toolkit for the next weird scenario that pops up.

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.

I’ve got a Mountain Dwarf Aberrant Mind Sorcerer that I’m really proud of: there’s a decent chance I’ll get to run it at some point, but it’ll be behind a wizard if I have the option.

The basic mechanical concept is that you can replace the Psionic Sorcery spells with any sorcerer/warlock/wizard spell on the enchantment or divination list, which means that you can put Silvery Barbs on your list. That means you can Silvery Barbs for 1 sorcery point as many times as you want without any components, allowing control of probabilities that a Divination Wizard can only dream of. And because Silvery Barbs is such a selective tool that you can use only when it’d make a difference, it’s great to have the deep sorcery point pool fueling the uses.

You also get a scattering of general-purpose spells like Arcane Eye and Synaptic Static in the Psionic Sorcery kit that let you efficiently convert spare spell slots into reliable tools, at no efficiency loss since Psionic Sorcery spells are 1 point per spell level, exactly what you spend to generate sorcery points.

The rest of the spell repertoire are general purpose, flexible spells like Invisibility, Eyebite, Bigby’s Hand, Enhance Ability, and Fireball: I went a little heavy on the concentration spells because if I’ve got too many spell slots I can just convert them into more Silvery Barbs. I also went heavy on save-or-suck spells since Silvery Barbs can efficiently impose disadvantage.

It’s fairly tanky with medium armor and plenty of ASI space for CON since once you get 14 DEX you just need to max out CHA and then you’re done.

Flavorwise, my concept is that a stereotypical dwarf miner got taken over by a mind-controlling tentacley creature, who’s polite and eloquent, and that creature is the actual player. Odd-couple effect between the crude and angry dwarf and the calm well-mannered creature, built into a single character.

It has more to do with the American war strategy in general: air supremacy is just the plan, and America has a lot of tools to root out AA and destroy enemy air forces. Compare to someone like Russia who is explicitly choosing not to dominate the airspace and relying on artillery for its fire support, and as a result has different focuses.

It doesn’t have zero defense against AA- as a commenter upthread pointed out, this picture is literally showing it launching flares against heat-seeking missiles- but it’s not something that’s designed to work only when fighting non-peer forces, it’s essentially capitalizing on the air supremacy that other components of American forces will be creating.

Good eye!

Ha ha! You think this is my REAL head?

These are all excellent points.

I think druid suffers a little from being so concentration-dependent, but in a campaign with an appropriate number of encounters that’s not really a big deal, you just want to ride one or two concentration spells for most of an encounter. And even in a too-few-combat-encounters situation, druid isn’t bad, they just won’t be quite as overpowered as everyone else.

Stars has always been a front-runner for me: I don’t like that its special form conflicts with Wild Shape utility, but with only a short rest to recharge them it’s pretty easy to get back up and running if you need a scout form. And it gives you a lot of flexibility both in and out of combat.

It’s interesting because you don’t want the level 13 end concept, so the question becomes how the power level compares to normal progression? Obviously the first level is the same since you can’t multiclass, but at some point this is going to drop way off. I’m not sure at what point.

I think the biggest problem is that you’ll have to be incredibly mediocre in all your abilities: even with +3 ASIs from race, point buy can only get you straight 13s, and while you could theoretically delay some abilities through ASIs, you pay extra in point buy past 13 (versus ASIs which are all equivalent).

You could probably set up an Eldritch Blast character with a bunch of utility cantrips, but making attacks with a +1 bonus is going to be agonizing, unlike your damage since you can’t take Agonizing Blast. You’ll scale with level but it’ll drop off pretty quick, since one level in lock keeps you behind on damage and you’ll never get the splashier spells more focused characters will.

As others have said, Sunlight Sensitivity is probably the gamechanger here. If you’re getting reliable advantage, that’s huge, and if you aren’t then you don’t really get much from Volo’s.

If you’re locked to Scout, I think this provides a strong argument for Volo’s kobold. The level 17 ability is very powerful, but locks down your build in a couple ways:

• Because you need to attack two different targets to get full Sneak Attack damage, you will almost always want to be building for ranged. This means that the sorcerer cantrip you get from Mordenkainen’s kobold is just utility: you won’t be able to use Booming Blade well, and Fire Bolt won’t be as good as just taking a shot. It also means that Draconic Cry isn’t very good, as you’d need to be within 10 feet of your enemies to use it.
• Because it takes up your bonus action, that means you’re missing a reliable way to get Sneak Attack. Steady Aim would be fine on other ranged rogues, but it also uses your bonus action. Pack Tactics provides this quite easily off your frontliner, who will generally be within 5 feet of two enemies.

If you’re planning a more melee-focused rogue, you probably want a different subclass.

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.

Note that while Augury has a costly material component, the component isn’t consumed.

I think you covered everything that’s relevant. It’s a neat item in that it strongly incentivizes you to throw out divination spells as much as you can. Great for information gathering, but not a lot of combat relevance, and I’d expect the wizard to use it for a few days/weeks to get a bunch of information about the current plot and then attune to something else as he gets more magic items and more gold that makes just paying the price for new required divinations more reasonable.

Fortune’s Favor doesn’t seem wildly impactful to me, compared to some of the other 5th level spells you could be throwing around: you could have one reroll for each party member, or you could have a Transmute Rock or Wall of Stone that completely reshapes the encounter.
I think the one place it is pretty nice is on a Divination Wizard where you’re not paying the spell slot cost, you’re just paying whatever the difference between a 5th and a 4th level slot would be.

I also think that’s the only real benefit of Expert Divination here: it’s a tough sell casting Legend Lore at the start of a combat day even without the gold cost, it’s better to make that the last spell of the day if you didn’t need all your slots, or better yet just doing it on a downtime day. Especially since it’d cost you a preparation slot as well.

Optimizing this is probably just “Divination Wizard, cast Fortune’s Favor once a day for every combat day, cast free Divination/Legend Lore every downtime day”. If you consider that the effect of the item (trade a 5th level for a 4th and the whole party gets one reroll) that looks pretty good if not amazing.

Hmm, fair point, especially with some of the other weapon types they mentioned where it becomes more obvious that no one could look at a single-bladed axe and go “yep definitely a double axe”

I think it’s the same reason so many people want to become streamers, or actors,

Live service is a winner-take-all market, where if you hit it big you get SUPER big, and because the biggest names dominate the landscape you see them more and it’s easy to forget that for every Fortnite there are hundreds of The Cycle: Frontier.

But when you’re starting out it’s easy to convince yourself you’re going to be the next Fortnite, so you rush down that road rather than more reliable-but-boring ones like “I’m going to make the next Baba is You”.

Feels like an isolated demand for rigor: it’s pretty standard to just take a bunch of medieval weapon names and haphazardly slap them on the different models in the game.

I don’t know that that’s that big a deal: you certainly don’t go to a Diablo game for any sort of realism, and the names are based off real-life words that don’t really have a match in most fantasy worlds.

“Claymore” is just derived from the Scottish for “great sword”. Scotland isn’t part of Sanctuary, so we’ve already lost the thread, the word is essentially meaningless in Diablo’s setting.

And if we try to resolve this with something like “the word isn’t actually ‘claymore’, it’s some word in the language of Sanctuary humans that translates to ‘claymore’”, well, that also means it basically just translates to “great sword”, and now we’ve got a great sword named “great sword”, which seems to work fine.

There’s something sad about all these games just essentially disappearing off the face of the planet after a tiny blip of existence: 4 years from early access to dead. Lots of old games stick around and can be something people experience years later, but these are at best going to be memories and stories. What was the point of making it when it’s not going to last?

I accept that the design of this game made it difficult to keep in existence without centralized funding, but that’s also a decision the developers made when they made the game.