Conjure Celestial: AKA Conjure Couatl

Usable By: Cleric

Spell Level: 7

School: Conjuration

Casting Time: 1 minute

Range: 90 feet

Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour

Components: V, S

You summon a celestial of challenge rating 4 or lower, which appears in an unoccupied space that you can see within range. The celestial disappears when it drops to 0 hit points or when the spell ends. The celestial is friendly to you and your companions for the duration. Roll initiative for the celestial, which has its own turns. It obeys any verbal commands that you issue to it (no action required by you), as long as they don’t violate its alignment. If you don’t issue any commands to the celestial, it defends itself from hostile creatures but otherwise takes no actions. The GM has the celestial’s statistics.

At Higher Levels: When you cast this spell using a 9th-level spell slot, you summon a Celestial of Challenge rating 5 or lower.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Conjure Celestial, or as it should be known, Conjure Couatl, exists as a means of getting a couatl or pegasus on your team. You can up-cast it to get a Unicorn as a 9th level spell which can be fine, but the unicorn and pegasus can’t compete with their CR 4 snake brother.

The majority of the time you’ll summon a winged serpent friend who breaks any semblance of game balance in half. This review could literally double as a review for the couatl. I can’t believe it has the same CR as an elephant; the next time you replace your cleric with a couatl, keep in mind that rules as written it is supposedly as challenging as Dumbo is without the ear wings.

Let’s start with just the spells a couatl comes with. It can at will cast Detect Evil and Good, Detect Magic, and Detect Thoughts, three times per summon cast Bless, Create Food and Water, Cure Wounds, Lesser Restoration, Protection from Poison, and Shield, and once per day cast Greater Restoration, Dream, and Scrying.

You are getting unlimited casts of detection spells and the equivalent of nine extra 1st level spell slots, six extra 2nd level spell slots, two extra 3rd level spell slots, and three extra 5th level spell slots. Sure, the spell list is narrow, but the quantity of options this opens up to you is ludicrous.

It has true sight stapled onto it, making it functionally act as 6th level spell for the duration, true sight. It speaks all languages (functionally Comprehend Languages at will), and can chat telepathically with anything within 120 feet of it. Most player characters don’t come with that level of magical prowess, and this is all for a single 7th level spell slot.

In combat, its bite can knock anything it damages unconscious for up to a full freaking day. If you’d rather have a restraining option, look no further than constrict which is a helpful little grapple that auto restrains on success!

If you started to worry about it dying, don’t! Couatls have immunity to non-magical bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, an AC of 19 (24 with shield), and a fat 97 HP that need to be chewed through to take it down. Short of a barrage of saves (which it has huge mods for in each anyway), the chances of your couatl being consistently hit and brought down are laughable.

At this point you might be thinking “Wow, that’s crazy broken! How can it possibly get better?” Let me introduce you to Change Shape. When you summon a couatl, you aren’t just getting access to a 13th level full character’s worth of spells, you aren’t just getting access to a 24 AC tank with damage immunities, you aren’t just getting access to a bite attack that can permanently remove threats every round from a fight. You are also getting access to every CR 4 or lower humanoid and beast at will. Weretigers and other lycanthropes stand out as excellent combatants, and sometimes you just need a killer whale in a pinch.

You have access to every sense, every kind of speed, and every size up to huge at your disposal, all of which can be swapped between as an action, all while still being on a creature with more spell options than is reasonably fair. An important rule for couatls is that spellcasting, even in monster stat blocks like priests and druids, is considered a class feature. This does gate the amount of spells your serpentine servant gets, but at this point do you really care?

The only time you should consider using a 9th level slot is if you want more ample healing and a three person short range teleport with some legendary actions, but for the trade-offs of basically worse everything else, you’re nearly always better off using a couatl. I find it wild that a couatl summoned at 7th level outpaces a 9th level summon, but hey, we all know challenge rating is a perfectly designed system with no glaring issues, right?

5e Spells

Conjure Celestial: AKA Conjure Couatl