Best Feats for Shadow Sorcerer 5e
by Prince Phantom
Having your soul bound to the infinite shadows and touched by the Shadowfell itself sounds both metal as heck, yet somehow also incredibly cringe at the same time, and the same bears true for the mechanics of this subclass. All the features we get are cool, but seem to have limiting factors that make them hard to get the most out off.
Casting Darkness and being able to see through it is great for you, though it can prove to make some things tougher for your friends as well as your enemies, especially in close quarters environments as the spell’s area is quite large. The Hound of Ill Omen is an incredibly cool and unique ability, but it only being able to effect a single creature and costing a massive 3 sorcerery points is severely limiting. Shadow Walk is neat but limited unless your party actually takes advantage of darkness and lighting rules. Umbral Form is a fantastic buff that sadly only lasts a minute and costs 6 points, yet again giving us a cool toy with a bunch of strings attached. Thankfully there are a few feats that can help with this.
Best Feats for Shadow Sorcerer 5e
War Caster (Lv 4): If you’re wanting to have Darkness be your primary strategy, you’ll need to protect your concentration. Yes, Sorcerers get proficiency in Constitution saving throws, but at low levels that’s not enough to ensure even a DC 10 check.
Metamagic Adept (Lv 4): Adding two extra points to our pool does a lot to alleviate the high costs of our subclass abilities. If you don’t take this here I’d definitely recommend looking at it again at level 8. For additional metamagics, take your favorites as none have any special synergies with this subclass.
Fey Touched (Lv 8): Yes, I know Shadow Touched would be much more fitting here, but Fey just provides a much better selection of spells. Misty Step and Silvery Barbs are both available to us normally, but with so few known spells available, freeing up two selections here is really nice, and getting a bonus to our Charisma is great too.
Alert (Lv 8): Casting Darkness or other control spells is best done at the start of combat and as early as possible. Alert gives us a much better chance of accomplishing this and comes with some other nice perks as well.
Inspiring Leader (Lv 12): Alright, time for you to come out of your emo phase and use that Charisma for something other than looking hot while brooding in the corner. This is a huge amount of extra durability for the entire team, adding potentially hundreds of HP for the enemy side to chew through. Of course temporary HP doesn’t stack so skip this if your team already has a good source of it.
Resilient Wisdom (Lv 12): Everyone worries about the Barbarian getting mind controlled, but a smart enemy will know to target the caster. Don’t let that happen to you, as the enemy has a ton of great subclass features that they can now use on your friends and drain all your sorcery points.
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