While I love the school of conjuration, I've always been a little miffed that the features that actually improve conjuration spells don't come until 10th level. Since a lot of my campaigns have never reached this point, I've never actually gotten to feel like a cool unshakable summoner.
The goal of this revision is to make the conjuration wizard less back-loaded with its major features. I have tried to revise the class so that it has a signature feature (transposition) similar to portent and arcane ward, as well as features that can potentially improve any conjuration spell cast, rather than just summons. In regards to summoning, I tried to make it so this subclass fills the “one large summon” niche to differentiate it from the shepherd druid and necromancer (and to make it actually a subclass a player would choose for summoning like it was intended) by scaling Durable Summons and placing it earlier in the level progression.
Any feedback on balancing or whatnot would be appreciated.
(Forgive any formatting errors or modifiers I missed. I don't actually use DND Beyond for my games, this was copied over from a homebrewery pdf I made for the unearthedarcana subreddit for feedback)
Hey there. I get your frustrations with some of the ways the wizard subclasses are structured and lack that sense of specialisation. This is always a little tricky to balance cause... Well wizards get so much from their base class. Either how.
Minor Transposition.
So this is basically Benign Transposition moved down. Since being tied to an action means it has a substantial opportunity cost, I don't see much of an issue with it.
Enhanced Conjuration.
So I like this feature. It gives you that specialisation vibe and I do think the resource limitation is neat as it forces you to really pick and choose which of these effects you want and when. I'm not a huge fan of allowing multiple enhancements per turn. Especially when these effects are so powerful individually. That steps on the sorcerer's toes quite a bit.
Focused Conjuration is pretty cool. One thing to keep in mind is that this stacks with feats and first level artificer dips, so even though your concentration can now be broken (unlike the original conjuration school at 10th), keep in mind that you're making this quite difficult in the earlier tiers.
Mobile Conjuration lets you cast 2 levelled spells in one turn. This opens up a whole lot of shenanigans at any level. I do like the idea of adding some mobility, but I'm not sure how to balance it.
Potent Conjuration. This raises your DC by ~3.5, which is the same as raising your intelligence by 6-8. This is pretty major by itself, but when you consider spells like Web and Evard's Black Tentacles which require checks to break free from rather than saves, that's some very potent lockdown here. I think that's erring on the gamebreaking side of things and should probably spend the night with a nerf bat.
Robust Conjuration. This is neat and plays into the summoning aspect of conjuration. Adding 10 HP at level 6 isn't going to break your encounters, but do consider that you can cast multiple summon spells per day and that this HP bonus stacks up. Even when the extra HP per summon starts to fall off (monster HP scales differently) your increased number of spell slots does give you a lot of tankiness to throw around over the course of a day. Playtest this with great care at different levels. Even if the extra HP can't match the shepherd druid's mighty summoner feature, you can teleport as an action and your spell list is quite a bit better.
Major Transposition.
So there's a lot of abuse cases here. The most obvious example being that jumping off a cliff can make this a save or die. Just pack feather fall if they make the save, meaning at worst you wasted a first level spell slot. On the other hand: having 2 willing allies swap places is really cool, though.
Split Conjuration
A friend of mine who really dislikes how 5e handles concentration would love this feature. However, you have no shortage of powerful combinations. From restraining spells to summons to DPR. For the cost of one extra round of set-up, you basically fill the role of 2 casters in one combat. That's an extremely favourable trade. The disadvantage on concentration saves is only a problem if you are forced to roll these saves (which by now you're probably pretty darn good at with focused conjuration and likely either warcaster or resilient con.)
Any solution to dual concentration is going to require rigorous playtesting, but I suggest looking at increasing the cost significantly.
Either how, hope that helps. Good luck with development!
Thanks for your input! I'm well aware these features are mostly overtuned, hence the need for feedback lol. Let me get my responses out to your points.
Enhanced Conjuration
Ok, I wasn't sure about allowing multiple effects at once, I added that in for V2. You make good arguments about the strength of a lot of the effects, and I think limiting to one per spell would be a good step in limiting their strength. I would argue that with that limitation in place, a lot of the abusability is lessened due to at max using this feature on 5 spells a day.
Focused Conjuration: I get your point, I was viewing this as a weaker version of the War Wizard's second level ability. I think limiting the feature to one effect per spell will provide sufficient cost to balance the effect.
Mobile Conjuration: Because this effect can only apply with teleportation spells (and 90% of the time Misty Step due to the bonus action requirement), I don't think it can be too abusable with one effect per spell in place.
Potent Conjuration: This originally granted advantage, but since that was identical to (and cheaper than) metamagic I changed it to a die roll. I agree it should be nerfed, I just chose 1d6 sort of arbitrarily, but I'm just not sure how to nerf it without removing it entirely. (Maybe change it to a flat +1-2 to DC? That'd be really strong in Tier 2 but not as crazy later on)
Robust Conjuration: This is pretty much just a scaled version of Durable Summons that doesn't additively apply to every creature summoned by a single spell, with the intent to incentivize summoning single creatures instead where the additional HP isn't as powerful. Wizard lvl*2 + INT might be too much HP for a 6th level ability, I'm thinking of changing it to just Wizard lvl + INT, which is not a whole lot in the later tiers.
Major Transposition
Yeah it's too abusable. I'm definitely enamored with the idea of being a battlefield controller via teleportation, and being able to move enemies around seems super cool. But wizards get Scatter now, which fills the "reposition enemies" role, so maybe nerfing this to only apply to willing targets is for the best. With the 60ft range it makes it worthwhile to spend an action, where with Benign Transposition it just wasn't useful a lot of the time when Misty Step is available.
Split Conjuration
Here's the scary one for sure. I'm not sure how to increase the cost more without it just straight up causing self-damage on use. I will argue though in regards to the disadvantage that at the tier of play this comes online, enemies are doing enough damage that even high bonuses to concentration saves aren't going to help a whole lot. Actually, that might be an ok nerf: have concentration saves use the full damage of the attack rather than half damage while using the feature. The alternative is to replace this whole feature with Potent Conjuration from the 6th level feature. Rather than granting with the other options at 6th level, it becomes an option at 14th level, and is fixed at 1d6. It would be much more balanced in tier 4 than tier 2.
Mobile Conjuration helps with stuff like touch spells, cone spells, etcetera. The ability to hit and run with those is a pretty sizeable buff. You get the extra move, partial ability to ignore terrain and a disengage in one. Or it allows you to escape a grapple or such and then cast a spell so the grapple didn't take any of your turns away. It is an expensive ability early on, but I wouldn't underestimate its versatility. It is up to you how to handle it, of course.
Potent Conjuration I like the solution of moving it up. I enjoy lockdown playstyles a lot, mind you, but things get a lot less exciting for the martials in my party when nothing hits them back ;p At 14th level, having it affect a single target per turn feels more fair.
Major Transposition I think it is plenty tactical without moving the enemy. For a fun example: the barbarian now has the same movement as your owl familiar (60 ft flying). It is good as is.
Split Conjuration. There's different ways to think about cost. There's a straight up resource depletion like HP penalties, sure, but you could also consider things like it costing you your action, disabling your ability to cast levelled spells, reducing or nullifying movement speed, lowering the effective range of such spells, etcetera. Or some combination thereof. If you need your action to maintain your concentration for example, that means those 2 effects you're concentrating on better do their job because you're not doing anything else that turn and might give you incentive to drop it if say, too many enemies escape your crowd control. Of course this comes with its tradeoffs of making subsequent turns less interesting and mistakes more punishing, but there's really no perfect solutions here as, for the better or worse, 5e is designed around concentration.
All good points once again. Thank you for being more helpful than reddit lol. The balancing point I'm intending to aim for is to match or at most slightly exceed the strength of Abjuration/Divination, which are the two subclasses I see powergamers constantly using, and the current version I have now is wayyyyy too much for a wizard subclass.
Mobile Conjuration: I fell into the tunnel vision trap, I rarely use touch and cone spells on wizards (ironically because they're too much in the line of fire, which this would cleanly solve) so I didn't really have a good idea of the impact this would have. At minimum, I'll change it to only apply after casting a bonus action teleport, and take away the ability to cast Misty Step after the spell. But honestly after a day's thought, with minor and major transposition being their own features the teleportation side of conjuration is already well represented, so axing this effect wouldn't be a huge loss. The whole point of Enhanced Conjuration was to make a feature that incentivized playing all aspects of conjuration, and having 3 separate teleportation focused features kinda specializes the subclass too much.
Major Transposition: Totally agree.
Potent Conjuration/Split Conjuration: I agree with moving Potent Conjuration to be the 14th level feature. It's strong, it incentivizes using conjuration spells, coming late doesn't step on the Sorcerer's toes as much, and it doesn't break the concentration balance of the game. Trying to get Split Conjuration to work would take way more playtesting than I'm capable of at this point, while Potent Conjuration sounds much closer to the other subclasses' 14th level features: a strong ability limited by a cost related to the school that doesn't quite match other classes' equivalent abilities. The question now is just how to implement the penalty. Since Robust Conjuration scales already, it functionally provides as much HP to one creature as Durable Summons does at 14th level, so it almost counts as a second capstone ability already (though halving the HP would alleviate that). Same with Focused Conjuration, since it scales too. 1d6 might be too good a bonus even at 14th level, even though for context bards would be close to getting a d12 at the same point.
Be careful about what you're trying to balance against. Official material is not created equal. Portent's ability to go "Hey fighter guess what, its action surge 'o clock!" after force-failing a creature's hold monster save is something that's in a class of its own. Eloquence bard is the only bard that gets to destroy saving throws (mind sliver notwithstanding), but Eloquence is also far and away the best bard subclass and the way it handles BI is the exact reason why. Mind Sliver into Unsettling Words into another caster's turn is potentially bonkers.
And it is hard in general to get proper feedback on homebrew creations. Part of it is because of the stigma. Lets just namedrop dand wiki and you'll know what I'm talking about. Everyone has ideas, but not everybody has the time and knowledge to review them (ie, more people want feedback than there are people offering feedback). I wouldn't be too harsh on reddit.
Enhanced Conjuration: Removed ability to add multiple effects, removed Potent Conjuration and Mobile Conjuration
Robust Conjuration -> Arcane Summons. Halved the temporary HP granted and made the attacks of the summoned creatures magical (this was meant to be in the original version but I forgot to copy it over). The intent is to make the conjurer's appeal as a summoning class be the magic attacks rather than HP or damage.
Major Transposition: Removed ability to affect unwilling creatures.
Split Conjuration -> Conjurer's Conflux. Gain the first half of the Mobile Conjuration feature once per short rest. I went back on my previous sentiment of too much teleportation and just leaned into it instead. Potent Conjuration just isn't in the spirit of the subclass since making spells more effective is the realm of evocation wizards and sorcerers. The conjurer is about versatility. Conflux gives a similar benefit to Split Conjuration (two leveled spells in the same turn), but greatly limits the combinations and puts the focus more on the points brought up previously with hit and run tactics, which the conjurer can do better than any other wizard. I think having this feature work at most once per encounter (with a generous DM who gives short rests after every fight) is decently balanced for a school capstone, but having other opinions would be nice.
When I first came up with this homebrew I wanted to keep summoning as the main draw of the class, but I guess we're here now! Teleportation features for days!
As always, thanks for your input. I'm both a rookie player and rookie homebrewer, so getting advice from people who know how to push mechanics to their limits is very helpful.
While I love the school of conjuration, I've always been a little miffed that the features that actually improve conjuration spells don't come until 10th level. Since a lot of my campaigns have never reached this point, I've never actually gotten to feel like a cool unshakable summoner.
The goal of this revision is to make the conjuration wizard less back-loaded with its major features. I have tried to revise the class so that it has a signature feature (transposition) similar to portent and arcane ward, as well as features that can potentially improve any conjuration spell cast, rather than just summons. In regards to summoning, I tried to make it so this subclass fills the “one large summon” niche to differentiate it from the shepherd druid and necromancer (and to make it actually a subclass a player would choose for summoning like it was intended) by scaling Durable Summons and placing it earlier in the level progression.
Any feedback on balancing or whatnot would be appreciated.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subclasses/961601-school-of-conjuration-revised
(Forgive any formatting errors or modifiers I missed. I don't actually use DND Beyond for my games, this was copied over from a homebrewery pdf I made for the unearthedarcana subreddit for feedback)
Hey there. I get your frustrations with some of the ways the wizard subclasses are structured and lack that sense of specialisation. This is always a little tricky to balance cause... Well wizards get so much from their base class. Either how.
Minor Transposition.
So this is basically Benign Transposition moved down. Since being tied to an action means it has a substantial opportunity cost, I don't see much of an issue with it.
Enhanced Conjuration.
So I like this feature. It gives you that specialisation vibe and I do think the resource limitation is neat as it forces you to really pick and choose which of these effects you want and when. I'm not a huge fan of allowing multiple enhancements per turn. Especially when these effects are so powerful individually. That steps on the sorcerer's toes quite a bit.
Major Transposition.
So there's a lot of abuse cases here. The most obvious example being that jumping off a cliff can make this a save or die. Just pack feather fall if they make the save, meaning at worst you wasted a first level spell slot. On the other hand: having 2 willing allies swap places is really cool, though.
Split Conjuration
A friend of mine who really dislikes how 5e handles concentration would love this feature. However, you have no shortage of powerful combinations. From restraining spells to summons to DPR. For the cost of one extra round of set-up, you basically fill the role of 2 casters in one combat. That's an extremely favourable trade. The disadvantage on concentration saves is only a problem if you are forced to roll these saves (which by now you're probably pretty darn good at with focused conjuration and likely either warcaster or resilient con.)
Any solution to dual concentration is going to require rigorous playtesting, but I suggest looking at increasing the cost significantly.
Either how, hope that helps. Good luck with development!
Homebrew creations:
Path of the Feral Trance Barbarian Class | Thread
Wyrmforge Artificer Class | Thread
Thanks for your input! I'm well aware these features are mostly overtuned, hence the need for feedback lol. Let me get my responses out to your points.
Enhanced Conjuration
Ok, I wasn't sure about allowing multiple effects at once, I added that in for V2. You make good arguments about the strength of a lot of the effects, and I think limiting to one per spell would be a good step in limiting their strength. I would argue that with that limitation in place, a lot of the abusability is lessened due to at max using this feature on 5 spells a day.
Major Transposition
Yeah it's too abusable. I'm definitely enamored with the idea of being a battlefield controller via teleportation, and being able to move enemies around seems super cool. But wizards get Scatter now, which fills the "reposition enemies" role, so maybe nerfing this to only apply to willing targets is for the best. With the 60ft range it makes it worthwhile to spend an action, where with Benign Transposition it just wasn't useful a lot of the time when Misty Step is available.
Split Conjuration
Here's the scary one for sure. I'm not sure how to increase the cost more without it just straight up causing self-damage on use. I will argue though in regards to the disadvantage that at the tier of play this comes online, enemies are doing enough damage that even high bonuses to concentration saves aren't going to help a whole lot. Actually, that might be an ok nerf: have concentration saves use the full damage of the attack rather than half damage while using the feature. The alternative is to replace this whole feature with Potent Conjuration from the 6th level feature. Rather than granting with the other options at 6th level, it becomes an option at 14th level, and is fixed at 1d6. It would be much more balanced in tier 4 than tier 2.
Mobile Conjuration helps with stuff like touch spells, cone spells, etcetera. The ability to hit and run with those is a pretty sizeable buff. You get the extra move, partial ability to ignore terrain and a disengage in one. Or it allows you to escape a grapple or such and then cast a spell so the grapple didn't take any of your turns away. It is an expensive ability early on, but I wouldn't underestimate its versatility. It is up to you how to handle it, of course.
Potent Conjuration I like the solution of moving it up. I enjoy lockdown playstyles a lot, mind you, but things get a lot less exciting for the martials in my party when nothing hits them back ;p At 14th level, having it affect a single target per turn feels more fair.
Major Transposition I think it is plenty tactical without moving the enemy. For a fun example: the barbarian now has the same movement as your owl familiar (60 ft flying). It is good as is.
Split Conjuration. There's different ways to think about cost. There's a straight up resource depletion like HP penalties, sure, but you could also consider things like it costing you your action, disabling your ability to cast levelled spells, reducing or nullifying movement speed, lowering the effective range of such spells, etcetera. Or some combination thereof. If you need your action to maintain your concentration for example, that means those 2 effects you're concentrating on better do their job because you're not doing anything else that turn and might give you incentive to drop it if say, too many enemies escape your crowd control. Of course this comes with its tradeoffs of making subsequent turns less interesting and mistakes more punishing, but there's really no perfect solutions here as, for the better or worse, 5e is designed around concentration.
Homebrew creations:
Path of the Feral Trance Barbarian Class | Thread
Wyrmforge Artificer Class | Thread
All good points once again. Thank you for being more helpful than reddit lol. The balancing point I'm intending to aim for is to match or at most slightly exceed the strength of Abjuration/Divination, which are the two subclasses I see powergamers constantly using, and the current version I have now is wayyyyy too much for a wizard subclass.
Mobile Conjuration: I fell into the tunnel vision trap, I rarely use touch and cone spells on wizards (ironically because they're too much in the line of fire, which this would cleanly solve) so I didn't really have a good idea of the impact this would have. At minimum, I'll change it to only apply after casting a bonus action teleport, and take away the ability to cast Misty Step after the spell. But honestly after a day's thought, with minor and major transposition being their own features the teleportation side of conjuration is already well represented, so axing this effect wouldn't be a huge loss. The whole point of Enhanced Conjuration was to make a feature that incentivized playing all aspects of conjuration, and having 3 separate teleportation focused features kinda specializes the subclass too much.
Major Transposition: Totally agree.
Potent Conjuration/Split Conjuration: I agree with moving Potent Conjuration to be the 14th level feature. It's strong, it incentivizes using conjuration spells, coming late doesn't step on the Sorcerer's toes as much, and it doesn't break the concentration balance of the game. Trying to get Split Conjuration to work would take way more playtesting than I'm capable of at this point, while Potent Conjuration sounds much closer to the other subclasses' 14th level features: a strong ability limited by a cost related to the school that doesn't quite match other classes' equivalent abilities. The question now is just how to implement the penalty. Since Robust Conjuration scales already, it functionally provides as much HP to one creature as Durable Summons does at 14th level, so it almost counts as a second capstone ability already (though halving the HP would alleviate that). Same with Focused Conjuration, since it scales too. 1d6 might be too good a bonus even at 14th level, even though for context bards would be close to getting a d12 at the same point.
Oh well, gotta keep brainstorming.
Be careful about what you're trying to balance against. Official material is not created equal. Portent's ability to go "Hey fighter guess what, its action surge 'o clock!" after force-failing a creature's hold monster save is something that's in a class of its own. Eloquence bard is the only bard that gets to destroy saving throws (mind sliver notwithstanding), but Eloquence is also far and away the best bard subclass and the way it handles BI is the exact reason why. Mind Sliver into Unsettling Words into another caster's turn is potentially bonkers.
And it is hard in general to get proper feedback on homebrew creations. Part of it is because of the stigma. Lets just namedrop dand wiki and you'll know what I'm talking about. Everyone has ideas, but not everybody has the time and knowledge to review them (ie, more people want feedback than there are people offering feedback). I wouldn't be too harsh on reddit.
Homebrew creations:
Path of the Feral Trance Barbarian Class | Thread
Wyrmforge Artificer Class | Thread
Fair enough. I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds and all that.
In other news I have made a new version of the homebrew. https://www.dndbeyond.com/subclasses/963789-revised-school-of-conjuration
Major Changes:
When I first came up with this homebrew I wanted to keep summoning as the main draw of the class, but I guess we're here now! Teleportation features for days!
As always, thanks for your input. I'm both a rookie player and rookie homebrewer, so getting advice from people who know how to push mechanics to their limits is very helpful.
Oh, good call on Arcane Summons' magical attacks. I completely glossed over that. I think the solution of Conflux is neat also.
Homebrew creations:
Path of the Feral Trance Barbarian Class | Thread
Wyrmforge Artificer Class | Thread