Prerequisite: 15th level
You can cast Arcane Eye at will, without expending a spell slot.
Visions of Distant Realms: Farsighted
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
The seer character archetype doesn’t have particularly robust tools in 5th edition to thrive. Visions of Distant Realms may be the best way to get a character to feel like the fall seer. Arcane Eye, while unremarkable for the spell slot, becomes far more interesting when it's free. This is exactly what Visions of Distant Realms gives you: an at will sensor you can place and move about to scout around you. It's like a familiar, but endlessly repeatable through death.
That being said, a familiar is way cheaper than this. Arcane Eye eats your concentration, requires you be 15th level to even have access to this, and isn’t that much better than just having a toad or frog go scouting for you. A lot of characters won’t ever need this, nor care about it. If you’ve got Pact of the Tome, you have access to Book of Ancient Secrets, which can give you Find Familiar. If you went with Pact of the Chain, you have access to familiars that can turn invisible, making this feel nearly obsolete.
If you went Talisman or Blade, though, this is a way to get a long distance espionage tool that won’t cost you spell slots to use. You can just always have an invisible scouting eye when you aren’t concentrating on things, and that’s useful. Is it 15th level prerequisite useful? Absolutely not! I’d expect this to be available by 9th-10th level, especially given that players can cast Arcane Eye starting at 7th level. If you do reach this tier, and are looking to open up your toolbox to be better at scouting, don’t have a familiar, and aren’t interested in acquiring one, Visions of Distant Realms can do some neat stuff. It wouldn’t ever be my first recommendation, but it can be a pretty fun tool to mess around with.
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