As the head of an undead army, your feat selection will be slightly different from a normal Wizard, though many of the old standbys are still great.

The Illusionist is a strange subclass. Your early game features amount to nice quality of life improvements to your illusion spells, probably the least powerful early game of all Wizards, and then at 14th level we become gods among men, able to create literally any inanimate object whose size is small enough to fit inside one of our illusion spells.

Graviturgy isn’t reaching near those heights, but that’s probably for the best as this leaves us with a very cool and unique subclass with a fairly distinct playstyle and cool abilities that a creative player can get a lot of mileage out of. Changing the weight of an object or creature is definitely one of those player-dependent abilities

Probably the most popular of all the schools of magic, evocation is damage, damage, and more damage, with features that all either make damaging spells easier to use or do more damage outright. None of the features here are worthless, and our 10th level feature has a neat synergy with Magic Missile

Enchanters get Split Enchantment at level 10, essentially a free Twin Spell for any enchantment spell that only targets one creature. No doubt, that is an incredibly potent ability. The list of spells that work with this is long, but here are some highlights:

This leaves us with a Wizard who has a couple of really cool moments every once in awhile, but is otherwise a very standard Wizard. That’s honestly fine, Wizards are the strongest class in the game after all, it’s just not the overpowered master of fate that some of the community believes it is.

Let’s just get this out of the way now, Minor Conjuration is an absolutely busted ability that anyone can take full advantage of if they just stop to think about it for more than 5 seconds, and it’s the reason that this is my favorite Wizard subclass.

Coming in as the strongest subclass of the strongest class, Chronurgy realistically shows that time manipulation is the strongest form of magic imaginable. If you are unfamiliar and just reading this subclass for the first time recently, that sentence may surprise you.

Granted, defense is really all this subclass offers, but the base Wizard is already so good that I don’t mind one bit. Feat selection will be pretty standard with a few notable exceptions.

Clockwork provides us a swappable expanded spell list much like Aberrant, but with much better options for spells to swap into. Abjuration and Transmutation cover a huge range of fantastic control and utility options and are a much better selection pool than Enchantment and Divination, and our existing spell list isn’t slacking either.

Not only do we get 10 spells more than your average Sorcerer, we get to swap those spells every level for any Enchantment or Divination spell from the Wizard, Sorcerer, or Warlock lists. This provides incredible versatility and allows us to craft our spell list to exactly what we want for our character.

The actual subclass abilities are both confusing to juggle and not that strong, as discounting one sorcery point from certain spells is much less powerful than you would think, 14th level is really underwhelming on all fronts, and 18th level isn’t much better.

This might just  be the most transformative of all subclasses in 5e. We get access to the entire Cleric list, no strings attached. Yes, the Sorcerer list is much better than the Cleric’s, but Cleric fills a lot of holes in our existing list.

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.

We could have had the perfect specialist blaster build, really rewarding for building for specific types of damage. Instead we have this weird mix of defensive and offensive features, compounded by the fact that the only damage type that has enough spells to build around it is fire, and fire damage has its own set of problems.

With support for both cantrip and weapon use and a channel divinity that would make a Paladin blush, this Cleric isn’t in the market for mercy. This makes feat selection pretty straightforward. We want damage increases and we want them now. Let’s see what we can come up with.

This is easily the most infamous subclass in the entire game, and it has earned its reputation. The risk of Fireballing your whole party at level 1 is low, but never zero, and that alone is enough to keep this subclass off of many tables.

A lot of the abilities gained here are good on paper. We get a free disengage whenever we cast a spell at level 1, resistance and eventually immunity to two damage types, AoE damage when we cast certain spells, and retributive damage when we are hit, and all of these abilities would be really cool… on anyone other than a Sorcerer.

This is it, the edgiest class in all of 5e. So edgy in fact that you have to ask your DM for permission to play it, and while the power level of this subclass is high, I don’t think any DMs needs to be worried about this breaking their game, so you shouldn’t have much trouble getting the okay for this.

The Oath of Conquest is built around one thing and one thing only: fear. Imposing the frightened condition is critical to this subclasses playstyle, and we get a ton of benefits if we do.