School of Evocation
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Hot take: the School of Evocation is the second worst wizard school, only being beaten out by the School of Necromancy. Most of the option’s power is tied to the 10th and 14th-level features. Up until that point, you’re getting mediocre features that add little to nothing to your sheet. I see Evokers given out eagerly to newer players, which I kind of get, as when you don’t get meaningful features to use from your subclass, you can focus more on your robust spell list. Fortunately, Wizard is good enough that even without a subclass until Level 10, you can still feel insanely powerful.
This school cares about Evocation spells; for reference, here’s a full list of Cantrip through 9th-level Wizard spells of this school and the non-wizard options for multiclass considerations.
Wizard Evocation Spells
Non-Wizard Evocation Spells
| Spell Level | Spells |
|---|---|
| Cantrip | Eldritch Blast, Sacred Flame, Word of Radiance |
| 1st | Chaos Bolt, Cure Wounds, Divine Favor, Faerie Fire, Guiding Bolt, Healing Word, Hellish Rebuke, Searing Smite, Thunderous Smite, Wrathful Smite |
| 2nd | Branding Smite, Flame Blade, Moonbeam, Prayer of Healing, Spiritual Weapon |
| 3rd | Aura of Vitality, Blinding Smite, Crusader’s Mantle, Mass Healing Word, Wind Wall |
| 4th | Staggering Smite |
| 5th | Destructive Wave, Flame Strike, Hallow, Holy Weapon, Maelstrom, Mass Cure Wounds, Wrath of Nature |
| 6th | Blade Barrier, Heal |
| 7th | Divine Word, Fire Storm |
| 8th | Earthquake |
| 9th | Mass Heal, Power Word Heal |
See Also: Best Feats for Evocation Wizard
2nd Level: Evocation Savant, Sculpt Spells
Evocation Savant provides the same passive benefit many tables opt to ignore entirely in its discount to adding spells to your spell book if they’re Evocation. If you’re tight on gold, this gives you the incentive to invest in Evocation spells you can find and copy, but realistically it's a ribbon most groups will immediately forget about. Most players tend to just use the spells they get for free on level-up, and those are more than enough.
Sculpt Spells reads better than it plays. In a world where you can pick exactly where all of your spells go, and there is no difference between being one foot or thirty feet away from the Fireball, most of the time you can position magical areas of damage in such a way that you’re hitting the majority or all of the creatures you want and none of the ones you don’t.
Some encounters will include creatures that dive the back line and threaten you and your cleric or rogue friend, and having a way to blow multiple of these diving enemies at once can be good. It's important to note, though, that Sculpt Spells can’t sculpt you out of damaging spells you cast, only other creatures, so even in that situation you’re still going to find it a bit awkward to position.
6th Level: Potent Cantrip
Potent Cantrip only buffs the spells you don’t want to be casting, which is wild to me. Evokers normally are taking Fire Bolt as their go-to damage cantrip, and by 6th level, aren’t casting it that much anymore. People don’t tend to run more than two or three encounters per long rest, and by 6th level you’ve got ten 1st-level or higher slots to use. If you do end up wanting to mix in cantrips, you need to be using specifically Create Bonfire or Mind Sliver to get any value from this, and that value is normally dealing 1d6 damage should your save get passed.
I struggle to think that in playtesting they saw this feature actually got used regularly on the archetype it's designed for. It's horrible.
10th Level: Empowered Evocation
Empowered Evocation is the first major meaningful improvement you get: all of your Evocation spells deal your Int mod extra damage. That does add up to quite a lot when you’re casting multiple Evocation spells per long rest, which is the entire point of this subclass. Because it applies to a single damage dice roll, when you roll one set of dice for the damage of a single spell, like a Fireball, all affected creatures take the bonus damage.
There’s a neat outlier with Empowered Evocation: Magic Missile. Technically, you make a single damage roll when casting it, and each Missile deals the rolled damage. That, then, would apply the +Int bonus to each missile, and because the missiles scale with up-cast, you can do silly amounts of guaranteed damage with this. If this is “rules as intended” is a bigger question. I’d talk with your DM prior about it if you want to use Magic Missile alongside Empowered Evocation.
The biggest issue with Empowered Evocation is it comes at 10th level after a lacking 2nd-level feature and a complete non-feature at 6th level.
14th Level: Overchannel
Overchannel ends the archetype with a nuts ability. Maximizing the damage dealt by a spell usually equates roughly to doubling its damage. When the first max is free, this is easy to get a ton of use out of.
The damage tradeoff to use it more is a really interesting push-your-luck mechanic that makes this feature a blast to use. Wizards get d6 hit dice; 2d12 equates to four levels worth of hit points for you with a 10 in Con. More than the other traditions, Evokers really want a high Con to leverage their hit point pool to maximize more areas of massive damage.
Once again, the only issue with this feature is you need to get to it. Most games never reach 14th level.
All Together
With where it currently stands, if you don’t know if you’re going to reach levels 10 through 14, I don’t think you should play the School of Evocation; any other subclass will give interesting and meaningful additions to your sheet that you can regularly find some amount of use for. Empowered Evocation is a reasonable upgrade, and Overchannel is a heck of a capstone, but Potent Cantrip and Sculpt Spells are bringing next to nothing to your average adventure.
A big element of why this is so bad is that the damage upgrades are kind of overkill. Most wizard traditions are going to take some evocation spells anyway because they do insane amounts of damage as is; you might as well get additional cool features you can use in the early in mid tiers, and still be happy with the crazy quantities of damage dice you’re rolling.
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