Best Feats for Illusion Wizard 5e
by Prince Phantom
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.
Need an adamantine wall between you and that army of demons? Easy peasy! Want to entrap a group of bandits in a steel cage, with no save? No sweat! Need a super expensive diamond for your cleric’s True Resurrection spell? Economy shmonomy. Yeah this ability is absolutely broken in half, but that begs the question; is it worth the subpar 13 levels to eventually attain unlimited power? Well, it depends.
First off, you need assurance that your campaign will actually last that long and quite a bit longer so you can actually get to use this ability more than once. Second, you probably want to ask how your DM handles illusion magic, as some DMs seem to have an unfounded hatred of the stuff, having all monsters automatically assume things are illusions and never letting you have fun. Don’t play this subclass (or even touch illusion magic at all) if you have a DM like that. As for feats, you’ll find that the standard Wizard picks work fine, but there are a couple of neat synergies, particularly with our 14th level ability.
Best Feats for Illusion Wizard 5e
War Caster (Lv 4): A lot of illusion spells require concentration, and even if you are sticking to the usual wizard picks for combat, you’ll still need concentration protection to be as effective of a caster as possible. Whether you find uses for the other bullet points of this feat will probably be up to your build, but honestly the concentration protection is worth the selection alone.
Eldritch Adept: Misty Visions (Lv 8): Grabbing this invocation gives us Silent Image at will, the perfect illusion to synergize with our various abilities, and turning our broken 14th level ability into a game destroying feature destined to make your DM tear their hair out. This is a must have selection for this subclass and I cannot imagine playing an illusionist without it.
Telekinetic (Lv 12): As always, this is a great feat that works really well with a Wizard’s main strategy of using large area control spells to heavily debilitate their enemies. The 5ft bonus action shove provided here lets us get more enemies into those areas and keep them there, while also supporting our allies by giving them free disengages and getting them out of grapples. We also get to improve our Mage Hand and Intelligence as well, making this a slam dunk pick.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 12): Pick this up here preferably, or at level 16 at least, as at high levels you will start to find that War Caster is not enough to protect your concentration. Notably, I’m 99% certain that to maintain an illusion made real by our 14th level ability, we still need to hold concentration on that illusion spell, assuming it requires concentration.
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