D&D 5E High level Conjuration Wizard seems OP...

[faria]

So I'm joining a campaign this weekend. Starts at level 12, goes through 20. I wanted to build a Conjuration Wizard around the Focused Conjuration (can't lose concentration on conjuration spells) and Durable Summons features (+30 temp HP to each conjured creature). The various conjure creature spells usually allow for many creatures of a lower CR to be summoned, so they would benefit more from the temp HP.

Note that Conjuration Wizards don't get some of the conjure creature spells by default. But they can cast pretty much all of them via Wish at level 17. Note again that casting them via Wish means they're being cast with a 9th level slot--it just specifies that a spell of 8th level or lower be cast, which is pretty much every conjure creature spell.

The downside to this build is that the conjured creatures are up to the DM and that it says the words "or lower" when choosing a CR rating...

Still, if the DM is game, the potential is there for some serious damage. If I use Wish to cast Conjure Animals and pick CR 1/4 and the DM gives me 8 * 4 = 32 Giant Poisonous Snakes, I'd have summoned 32 * (11 HP + 30 tempHP) = 1312 HP worth of creatures that do an average of 6.5 piercing + 7.5 poison = 14 damage * 32 = 448 damage a round, and they all have +6 to hit mind you... And with Focused Conjuration, I can't lose concentration on them... I can kite and, if an enemy chases me, they take 32 attacks of opportunity... Anyway, I digress.

I'm assuming the DM will pick random animals, minor elementals, fey, woodland beings, and celestials, so I doubt I'll get so lucky. But even an army of 24 crappy pixies can wreak a hell of a lot of havoc, and they'd have 31x their standard HP lol. And of course, I'd always have Conjure Elemental available too. Not sure if it's worth it with the other conjuration options around, but at least the DM can't call the shot there.

I do have a question though: are there any ways to improve upon this build? Is there a non-concentration spell I'm not thinking of that would make an enemy take extra damage from all sources? Or maybe a class feature worth multiclassing into? With this many summoned creatures attacking an enemy, even an extra 1d4 damage from all sources would make a big difference.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Alternately, you could just create a bunch of skeletons and zombies (or mice from your local animal shelter, or any other creature) and turn them all into rhinos and dire wolves using Wish: Animal Shapes.

The long and the short of it is that summoning spells are terrific in 5E (moreso for druids than for wizards actually), and so are any kind of minion, whether those minions are generated via spells (e.g. Planar Binding, or Create Undead (wight) + Geas + Mass Suggestion) or conventional means (bribe the hobgoblins 1 gp/day each to abandon the BBEG and join the PC team). Downsides to minions include AoE (mitigated by minions with ranged weapons who spread out in skirmish formation), additional hassle for DM/players, having to deal with logistics (especially travel/transport), and the fact that it changes the focus of the game from RP and/or small unit tactics to logistics/wargaming (which, depending on your interests, may not count as a downside at all to you--but check with other players and the DM!).

RE: ways to improve upon this build with non-concentration spells, consider just specializing in Necromancy (because Animate Dead does not take concentration) and using spells like Web and Evard's Black Tentacles to grant advantage to all of your skeleton archers, thus almost doubling the damage of the other archers. You can also detail a few skeletons to through Nets on enemies, which accomplishes the same thing with no spell point/slot cost but may require more bonus action commands from you to get them to engage the right targets.

 

[CapnZapp]

All high level Wizards are OP.

And all your critters do jack crap against enemies immune to non-magical weapons.

I wouldn't worry about it. What I would worry about is instead this.

The real problem is how you're going to administer all those critters. It will be a nightmare to keep track of, assuming you are onboard to the basic social contract that you don't get to steal more than your share of the spotlight.

Unless you're ready to come very well prepared indeed, with all your critter stats printed out in advance, all special abilities memorized by heart, and with lots of note taking to help the DM, I would always choose the least amount of least complex creatures for your conjuration spells, to minimize the impact on playing time.

 

[TallIan]

Is it any worse than the 101 undead a necromancer can summon.

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[The Crimson Binome]

You can definitely get a lot of bodies onto the field, and due to the way scaling works under Bounded Accuracy, they won't die very easily. They also can't really do anything terribly useful.

I mean, your squad of thirty-two summoned snakes might be able to defeat a hundred orcs. Are you really going to be fighting a hundred orcs? Is this worth spending your highest-level spell slot? If you are, then great, that's your time to shine - against monsters that pose no threat to you.

More likely, by the time you're high enough level for this to be an option, the only things you'll need to worry about are things that your summons are useless against. Snakes are worthless against big dragons, for example, or anything else that can fly. They can't hurt empyreans at all, and each hit only does ~3 damage to an elemental. Against things that they can hit, you're going to run into the space limitation as they surround it.

And the trade-off for having this moderately-durable army that lasts for an entire hour (which is effectively one encounter, because you aren't going to find enemy armies to fight within an hour of travel from each other), and which doesn't vanish instantly when you take damage (unless that damage also stuns you or makes you fall unconscious), is that you can't cast Fly on the fighter or use any of the other concentration spells that might actually help you against the monsters you would want to fight at that level. It essentially amounts to a neat party trick that might save you once, if circumstances are favorable.

 

[Mephista]

If a discussion on being overpowered relies on the Wish spell, I'm going to go ahead and say that you're perfectly fine. The Wish spell itself is the overpowered one, not the Conjurer. Conjure spells are pretty powerful in 5e in the first place. That said? An army of snakes, even with 31 hp, are no match for a good Entangle spell, or other terrain features. Such as enclosed spaces inside a dungeon or otherwise not a featureless plain that let you see unocupied spaces around you. Even swarms of pixies that can fly are going to be rather difficult to guide.

As others have said, if you have to use a level 9 spell to summon up this hoard, its really only going to be useful against another hoard of low level monsters. But, in that case, why not just use Meteor Swarm? Same level, after all. Even a hoard of pixies are going to be relatively ineffective against a level appropriate antagonist - and, remember, temp hp doesn't grant you immunity from fear auras, which many high level antagonists have.

That said, I think you're really overly focused on stealing druid conjure spells here, and not on the heart of what makes a Conjurer actually tick. Planar Binding. You're starting off with level 6 spells at minimum. Get some downtime, and you can Conjure up an army of elementals that stick around for -days-. And you can just keep on doing this more and more as you grow in level. Elementals not only can be used in combat, but also they can be used as powerful explortion aides. Forget summoning a bunch of pxies with Wish. Learn Gate instead and bind some high level planar beings in. Having a socialite nearby can be handy.

 

[Argyle King]

All high level Wizards are OP.

And all your critters do jack crap against enemies immune to non-magical weapons.

I wouldn't worry about it. What I would worry about is instead this.

The real problem is how you're going to administer all those critters. It will be a nightmare to keep track of, assuming you are onboard to the basic social contract that you don't get to steal more than your share of the spotlight.

Unless you're ready to come very well prepared indeed, with all your critter stats printed out in advance, all special abilities memorized by heart, and with lots of note taking to help the DM, I would always choose the least amount of least complex creatures for your conjuration spells, to minimize the impact on playing time.

I can't speak behalf of his snakes on a material plane. However, I actually managed to do a bit more with a necromancer.

My character had the noble (knight) background. Since it was difficult in-game to control my horde of undead all at once, I would give groups of them commands such as "follow commands given by my squire." To make a long story short, I created what was essentially a military structure with squad leaders who gave orders to each squad of skeleton. This lead to being able to use fairly effective military tactics despite having soldiers who were only capable of understanding simple commands.

I kept track of my skeletons (and the occasional zombie) using an index card which contained their stats for and a piece of graph paper which I used to track them individually. One of my best zombies was a PC who had died. The player decided to make a new character, and I asked the group if they cared if I raised his body as an undead follower and kept. It was a pretty sweat score for my horde because he had a few magic items (including a weapon) on him which none of the other PCs wanted due to being races/classes/builds/whatever that didn't use those particular types of items.

After a while, I started to stylize my undead. Skeletons and zombies who had served me well and survived many combats were rewarded by my character in-game by being painted with cool designs or by being given hats and banners to carry. After all, what good was having a small army if people didn't know they belonged to me, and I certainly couldn't be represented by a bunch of raggedy looking undead.

Edit: How I still managed to share the spotlight is something I forgot to mention because I got carried away with telling the story. I would give commands to some of my undead to listen to the commands of another PC until I said otherwise. Sometimes, I would keep things simpler by giving commands such as "protect the ranger." It worked out pretty well. I did try to reign it in when it felt like I was going too far with it though. Had I really wanted to push the envelope, I likely could have had far more undead than I did. Most of the time, I tried to keep it under 10.

 

[jaelis]

Note again that casting them via Wish means they're being cast with a 9th level slot--it just specifies that a spell of 8th level or lower be cast, which is pretty much every conjure creature spell.

Just a minor thing, but by the book you can't use wish to duplicate the Conjure Animals spell with a level 9 slot. A Conjure Animals spell cast in a 9th level slot is a 9th level spell... PHB: "When a spellcaster casts a spell using a slot that is of a higher level than the spell, the spell assumes the higher level for that casting."

Since you can't use wish to duplicate a 9th level spell, you can't duplicate Conjure Animals at level 9. That cuts your summons by 3/4. (Of course, you are casting wish itself with a 9th level slot, but that is irrelevant to how Conjure Animals works.)

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Conjured critters are useful against mundane enemies, but not so helpful against fiends (the big exceptions are conjure celestial and casting conjure elemental at level 7 or higher to get an elemental myrmidon). I would make sure I had counterspell on hand, as divine word will banish all conjured critters (remember that the animals in conjure animal are really fey spirits) within 30 feet unless they conjured critters make a charisma save. Just making a quick look, I don't see a lot of good charisma scores in the beast and elemental categories (at least at the levels you can conjure).

If your DM is good with material from UA's, the Old Black Magic UA has some demon conjuring spells that are available for wizards and sorcerers.

 

[iserith]

When I DM and someone takes a character that will do any summoning or has minions, my major concern isn't how much damage they can put out, but how much their choices impact the pace of the game and the control of the spotlight. It's really easy to adjust for DPR. It's less easy to deal with how much slower the player makes the game or how much more spotlight he or she demands because of all the summoned creatures.

If a player has to control his or her character, plus X number of other "characters," that slows the game down a lot no matter how efficient the player is at managing things. This is especially true at higher levels because each player tends to take extra time at higher levels to complete their turn in my experience. To me, this is a problem because I really prefer a fast-paced game.

So in addition to getting advice on your build, I would strongly recommend you talk to your DM about what sort of impact all of these extra turns in the initiative is going to do for the pace of the game. You don't want a DM (or other players) unhappy with your character build. He or she may not know what kind of impact a summoner can have in this regard.

I have a necromancer in my current campaign. He asked me before creating the character what the general view of necromancy is in the campaign setting. I told him, in general, nobody is going to have a major issue with it until you start slowing down the game. So he sticks to two skeletons and two zombies and works hard to make sure his turns are completed in a manner that minimizes pacing and spotlight issues. We worked it out beforehand and I recommend you do the same.