School of Conjuration
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
If I were to recommend an Arcane Tradition to a new player, it would be the School of Conjuration. Not only can conjuration spells provide a wide range of abilities that are useful in a variety of circumstances, but this specific subclass is also packed with fun, simple to read yet complex to use features that you can mess around with to get a feel for what D&D is all about.
There is more here for everyone, though; some of these abilities unlock a lot of potential with practice and experience, and in the hands of players thinking tactically, you can do some pretty nuts stuff as a Conjurer, specifically when it comes to summoning. This option got a lot better with the addition of the new summoning spells from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, which makes summoning more accessible and doesn’t leave it as something you play with just to push Conjure Minor Elementals to its limit.
This school cares about Conjuration 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 Conjuration Spells
Non-Wizard Conjuration Spells
| Spell Level | Spells |
|---|---|
| Cantrip | Produce Flame |
| 1st | Arms of Hadar, Ensnaring Strike, Entangle, Hail of Thorns |
| 2nd | Find Steed, Healing Spirit, Summon Beast |
| 3rd | Call Lightning, Conjure Animals, Conjure Barrage, Create Food and Water, Hunger of Hadar, Spirit Guardians |
| 4th | Conjure Woodland Beings, Find Greater Steed, Grasping Vine, Guardian of Faith |
| 5th | Conjure Volley, Insect Plague, Summon Celestial, Tree Stride |
| 6th | Conjure Fey, Heroes’ Feast, Planar Ally, Transport via Plants, Wall of Thorns, Word of Recall |
| 7th | Conjure Celestial, Temple of the Gods |
| 8th | Tsunami |
| 9th | Storm of Vengeance |
See Also: Best Feats for Conjuration Wizard
2nd Level: Conjuration Savant and Minor Conjuration
Conjuration 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 Conjuration. If you’re tight on gold, this gives you the incentive to invest in Conjuration 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.
Minor Conjuration comes alongside Conjuration Savant as a cantrip-like tool that reads like an insanely powerful, interesting ability, yet in practice, I have struggled to get use out of it. If you can think of a mundane object that fits the dimensions, this summons it. It still is just a mundane item, though. This is great at copying keys or signets and can be used in some fun ways to navigate heists, but you have to get really creative with it and play with it a ton to get a feel for how best to use it. Listing out useful items that fit the dimensions can majorly improve its utility. This feature is sweet; using it regularly meaningfully is harder than it looks.
6th Level: Benign Transportation
Benign Transportation would be one of my favorite features in the game if it took a bonus action to use instead of an action. The action cost makes its in-combat applications substantially worse. Outside of that, though, this is a sweet teleportation ability that can get you out of danger while putting a more threatening ally where they want to be. You can even pair this with a summoned ally to position them in a spot you want to get to using its abilities, all while not forgoing that much in combat, as your summoned ally is still going to be wreaking havoc after your turn.
I desperately wish each of the traditions that focused on a spell school had a recharge mechanic like this. Encouraging the use of Conjuration spells to fuel a conjuration-themed feature is incredible design, and because of how rich the pool is of excellent Conjuration spells, you can regularly get five or more uses out of this as soon as you get it.
10th Level: Focused Conjuration
Focused Conjuration is truly nuts. Like, completely and utterly nuts. One of the few ways in the game to counteract powerful summoning effects is by breaking the caster’s concentration, and that is near exclusively done with damage. Focused Conjuration takes the effects you already wanted to be concentrating on and makes them guaranteed to stick around in the vast majority of fights. As far as exciting passive defensive features go, this is by far the most exciting for its archetype in the game.
14th Level: Durable Summons
Durable Summons closes out the archetype with a bit of extra padding on all summoned creatures. In tandem with spells like Conjure Minor Elementals, this represents massive quantities of hit points, scaling with however many creatures you can summon at once. It provides a barrier on them as well that makes spells that once handled them easily, like Fireball, less effective, as now they have to chew through more than double most of these mass-summoned creatures' hit points.
All Together
School of Conjuration has some spicy abilities early that can be a blast to play with despite their middling utility, and some truly nuts upper-tier effects that empower some of the strongest spells in the game. Players newer to Wizard can take effects like Minor Conjuration and Benign Transportation and learn a lot about how wizard plays with them, and as you grow into Focused Conjuration and Durable Summons start doing real busted stuff just incidentally.
If you want to be the best conjurer in the game, and don’t want to play druid for Summon Beast, the School of Conjuration is where you want to be.
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