The Prickly Old Man: An Armor of Agathys Build for D&D 5e
Armor of Agathys is a decent spell for Warlocks. 5 temporary HP per spell level, plus retaliatory damage equal to that same number whenever we are hit by a melee attack. With no concentration and an hour duration, this is a spell that Warlocks can throw on to boost their durability and discourage enemies from attacking them. But what if we took this spell and saw how far we could run with it? What would a build that pushed it as far as possible look like? I present one potential way of accomplishing this, and it’s all thanks to the way a certain Wizard subclass interacts with temporary HP.
Race:
Our goal is to have as many Wizard levels as possible, preferably 19 to be exact, and this can be accomplished two ways.
Mark of Warding Dwarf
This is the preferred race for this character, but it is from the Eberron campaign setting. If that is not allowed at your table, I have a backup. Mark of Warding Dwarf gives us literally everything we could ever ask for. Armor of Agathys is added to the Wizard spell list for us, meaning we can pick it at our first Wizard level like any other Wizard spell, we get free castings of 3 abjuration spells which is very important down the line, poison resistance, and boosts to the perfect ability scores if your table doesn’t allow you to customize those.
Earth Genasi
If you can’t pick the marked dwarf, this is a great backup. We don’t get Armor of Agathys, but we do get Blade Ward as a bonus action a few times each day, which is amazing for our strategy. We also get Pass without Trace, potentially the best 2nd level spell in 5e.
Starting Stats (Point Buy):
Marked Dwarf: 8/13/15/15/12/8 (+1 to Dex, +2 to Int for a 14 and 17 respectively)
Earth Genasi: 8/13/14/15/8/13 (+1 to Dex, +2 to Int for a 14 and 17 respectively)
Level 1:
Artificer 1 (Marked Dwarf)
Hexblade Warlock 1 (Earth Genasi)
This is the only level where the different races make a meaningful difference. The Earth Genasi needs to pick up Armor of Agathys somehow, and 1 level of Warlock is the fastest way to do it. Both of these classes give us medium armor and shield proficiency, but Artificer gives us Constitution save proficiency, Cure Wounds for emergencies, and Thief’s Tools proficiency, while Warlock only gives us Hexblade’s Curse, which we will not be positioned to make much use out of.
Level 2-6 (Abjuration Wizard)
As you might have guessed, we will be going Abjuration Wizard for the remainder of this build. This biggest reason is the Arcane Ward feature. This gives us a defensive force field of hit points that aren’t temporary HP and also take damage for us before we take damage. This is important, as it still counts as us taking damage, meaning it triggers the retaliation damage, but doesn’t consume any of our temporary HP from the spell. This means we can get the retaliation damage to trigger more times before the spell runs out. Now, just being durable isn’t enough. We also need to incentivize enemies to actually attack us, and the best way to accomplish that is to concentrate on a very impactful spell. At each spell level we have good options for this, but to highlight a few standouts, Hideous Laughter, casting Web and standing right on the edge of the area, same for Sleet Storm, Hypnotic Pattern, and Fear are all perfect for this strategy.
Feat: War Caster
Maintaining concentration is crucial for this build. Once a monster has broken our concentration, it has no reason to continue killing itself by attacking us and is free to switch to a different target. We can also benefit from the spell opportunity attack by holding a dagger in our other hand and using Booming Blade to get some extra damage, and this is actually useful for us, because enemies will probably be running away from us often once they realize how much it hurts to touch us.
Basic Strategy:
Hopefully we can have Armor of Agathys pre-cast before the start of combat. If you do, cast your control spell of choice on round 1 and move to where you feel will be a position where you can get attacked, but preferably not by a ton of things. On turn two, cast Blade Ward to give us resistance if the enemy is dealing physical damage. If they are doing elemental damage, we have Absorb Elements for that. Once our Agathys HP runs out, switch to a more typical Wizard playstyle of staying away and casting Shield to avoid being damaged any further.
Levels 7-9
Sticking with Wizard, we get 4th level spells and Fire Shield fits perfectly into our build, dealing damage to those who hit us and even giving us flexible resistances of Fire and Cold. It doesn’t even require our concentration, but it does only last for 10 minutes. Due to the short duration, I’d either cast this right before I know a combat is about to break out, or during combat if we are fighting something that does exclusively fire or cold damage. We now have even more great concentration spells like Wall of Fire, Banishment, and Summon Greater Demon.
Feat: Eldritch Adept: Armor of Shadows
Our ward recharges its HP by casting abjuration spells. Armor of Shadows lets us cast an abjuration spell infinity times, letting us recharge our ward in a minute or so. This means it will be full at the start of basically every encounter. If you find that your group typically only does one encounter per day, congratulations, you probably don’t have to worry about dying in that campaign, and also you can take a feat like Telekinetic or Fey Touched instead.
Level 10-13
Our subclass now makes us really good at casting Counterspell and Dispel Magic, both of which help prevent enemy spellcasters from disrupting our strategy. Wall of Force gives us a very funny potential tactic. Trap a big melee enemy in the bubble with us, and now they are stuck with no one else to attack. This is mostly a meme, but it is very funny. Use it on an especially unintelligent foe and watch them kill themselves trying to make a dent in your wall of extra HP. Notably, we can now use Contingency to ensure that we have Armor of Agathys up whenever we need it. Just put the trigger as “whenever I am about to be hit by an attack”. This allows us to use our highest level slot setting up the armor on an off day, freeing us up to cast an actual high level spell instead. It also catches enemies off guard, so even intelligent enemies with knowledge of the spell won’t know to avoid touching you until it’s too late!
Feat: Telekinetic
Telekinetic gives us a bonus action to use on each of our turns that can be used to push enemies into our control spells or push allies away from grapples or even just give them a free disengage. It also lets us more easily get away from an enemy if they manage to break through our defenses. If you took Telekinetic at level 9, you can instead just increase your Intelligence to 20 at this level.
Level 14-17
You might be worried that our strategy isn’t as viable in these higher tiers of play, and that concern is valid. More enemies have access to ranged attacks and spellcasting now, and both of those circumvent our armor. Gee, what is a high level Wizard to do? Oh wait, we just cast the best spells in the game and become near gods with the myriad exploits and possibilities that spells like Planar Binding and Magic Jar provide. Our armor still isn’t useless either, it still provides us with a huge wall of extra HP that will make even a barbarian blush at this point.
Feat: Resilient Wisdom
Assuming we started as Artificer, we really should make our Wisdom saves much more reliable. At high level play, this is even more crucial as enemies can have such high DCs that it literally becomes impossible to make the save unless you have proficiency in them. If you started as a Warlock, take this for Constitution instead.
Level 18-20
We have 9th level spells. You don’t need my help anymore. Go crazy, throw out Meteor Swarms, create armies with True Polymorph, rewrite reality with Wish. This is the beauty of this character. We don’t have to worry about our strategy loosing its luster. We are a Wizard, we rule the late game by default.
Feat: Metamagic Adept
We will take Transmute Spell and your other favorite metamagic. One downside that we haven’t talked about with Armor of Agathys is that it deals cold damage. Cold damage isn’t the worst, but it’s far from the best damage type. Many late game threats are at least resistant to it, so I recommend using Transmute Spell to switch it to a damage type you know won’t be resisted by your enemies. If you are precasting and don’t know exactly what you will be fighting, Acid damage is typically a safe choice.
That’s the build! Our big idea is to make our enemy’s lives awful and dare them to do anything about it. Cast a big concentration spell, stand right in the middle of combat, and use spells like Blade Ward to squeeze as much milage out of our Armor of Agathys as possible. The build scales very linearly, gaining in power with each level and never having a tier where it genuinely struggles. There might be ways to push Armor of Agathys further, but in my opinion, this is the best method to do that while also keeping our character relevant at all levels.
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