2024 DnD 5e Sorcerer Subclasses Guide

Introduction

Sorcerers are defined thematically by their subclass, and their subclass’s spells also greatly determine their play style. While any Sorcerer can fill any of the Sorcerer’s roles in the party by selecting appropriate spells, your subclass will provide you with options that might predispose you to one or more roles by giving you the tools to succeed with little further effort.

For legacy subclasses, see our 2014 Sorcerer Subclasses Guide.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

  • Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
  • Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
  • Green: Good options. Useful often.
  • Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Sorcerer Subclasses

Aberrant Sorcery (PHB)

The Sorcerer’s psionics-adjacent, aberration-themed option, Aberrant Sorcery offers psychic abilities, a taste of Warlock spellcasting, and little splash of body horror.

  1. Psionic Spells: Consistently good almost all the way through.
    1. Cantrip: Mind Sliver is fantastic. Easily my favorite offensive cantrip.
    2. Level 1: Arms of Hadar is passable as a panic option if you can’t cast Misty Step. Dissonant Whispers lets you force movement, allowing you to trigger Opportunity Attacks from your melee allies, and moving enemies away from you safely so that you never need to cast Arms of Hadar.
    3. Level 2: Two situationally useful spells. Detect Thoughts is difficult for spellcasters that aren’t Intelligence-based.
    4. Level 3: Hunger of Hadar is an absolutely fantastic AOE damage and area control option. Sending is neat but only situationally useful.
    5. Level 4: Evard’s Black Tentacles is a good spell, but it does less damage and has a smaller AOE than Hunger of Hadar, and also doesn’t scale with spell level, so there’s a lot of redundancy between the two. Summon Aberration is great, offering three very effective choices to suit your needs.
    6. Level 5: Two excellent utility options. Rary’s Telepathic Bond feels like a weird choice since you get Telepathic Speech at first level, but Telepathic Speech is extremely limited so Rary’s Telepathic Bond is a big upgrade.
  2. Telepathic Speech: A useful utility, but very limited compared to most forms of telepathy. You can communicate, but you still need to share a language, the duration is short, and you can only connect to one creature. That’s enough to send your party’s Scout off on their own with a way to remain in contact, but beyond stealth and subtlety there are few meaningful ways to use this.
  3. Psionic Sorcery: This saves you one or two Sorcery Points (depending on the spell level) when you spend Sorcery Points to get extra spell slots with Font of magic, you don’t need to spend the Bonus Action to convert Sorcery Points into spell slots, and you also get to cast the spell without verbal or somatic components (and some material components), so you get the benefits of Subtle Spell for free. If you’re getting a lot of use out of your subclass spells, this is very efficient.
  4. Psychic Defenses: Psychic damage is rare, but charm and fear effects are very common.
  5. Revelation in Flesh: For a single Sorcery Point, every one of these effects is excellent. Replicating any of these is at least a 2nd-level spell, so the effects aren’t just good, they’re also cost-efficient. Note that since the fly and swim speeds are based on your walking speed, it’s easy to boost your new movement speed with buffs like Longstrider or Haste.

    Personal note: Tyler finds the term “writhing sensory tendrils” upsetting.

  6. Warping Implosion: Great for setting up combos with Quicken Spell. Follow this with a quickened AOE damage spell like Meteor Swarm or area control spell like Force Cage and you can eliminate whole encounters in one turn even at this high level. The saving throw is Strength, though, and, with the exceptions of enemies who rely on magic in combat, many enemies will have high Strength saves.

Clockwork Sorcery (PHB)

Where Wild Magic Sorcery is chaos, randomness, rerolls, and wacky fun chaos, Clockwork Sorcery is order, no rerolls, numerical minimums, and straight order and efficiency. It offers tools to solve a variety of problems in orderly fashion, including spell options borrowed from the Cleric and Wizard. However, the Clockwork Soul leans heavily on its spell list, and the other subclass features are often only situationally useful, leaving the player to wait for these features to matter from time to time in between casting spells every turn.

  1. Clockwork Spells: Several excellent spells, including some cleric options like Aid and wizard options like Summon Construct and Wall of Force. Not everything on the list is a gem, of course.
    1. Level 1: Protection from Evil and Good is a staple buff at any level, covering a wide range of dangerous creatures. Alarm is useful as a ritual.
    2. Level 2: Two staple cleric options.
    3. Level 3: A staple utility option and an important defensive buff. Not glamorous or flashy, but hard to go without.
    4. Level 4: Freedom of Movement is situationally useful, but helpful against enemies which like to grapple. Summon Construct is a Wizard exclusive, and it’s a decent summon option if you need a pet Defender.
    5. Level 5: Greater Restoration isn’t as important as Lesser Restoration, but it’s still very important. The conditions which it fixes are miserable and in many cases borderline lethal. Wall of Force (another Wizard exclusive) is one of the best area control effects around, especially if you have another spellcaster in the party who can drop some ongoing area damage before you put your enemies inside the impenetrable hemisphere.
  2. Restore Balance: This solves a lot of problems. Creatures which have Advantage on saves against specific conditions are common, and a Sorcerer encountering those resistances can hinder you a great deal. Similarly, if your allies have Disadvantage on a save (such as because they are Restrained or Poisoned), you can help protect them. The usage pool is limited, so save this for when it really matters.
  3. Bastion of Law: This is similar in many ways to Temporary Hit Points (though you can notably apply this on top of THP). The duration is great, and allowing the target to choose when to use the ward allows you to take a little damage when you know that there’s a Short Rest coming so that you can spend some Hit Point Dice to manage your limited resources.

    Compare this to casting False Life. False Life is a 1st-level spell, so you can spend 2 Sorcery Points to get a spell slot with which to cast False Life. False Life lasts for grants 2d4+4 (average 9) THP. Each additional spell level adds 5 more THP. For those same 2 Sorcery points, you can give a creature a ward with 2 dice, which will prevent an average of 9 damage. Each additional Sorcery Points adds 4.5 more damage protection, compared to 1 or 2 Sorcery Points for 5 more temporary hit points from False Life. The two are roughly equivalent both in cost and effectiveness.

  4. Trance of Order: The Fundamental Math of DnD 5e assumes that players will succeed on attack rolls against a typical CR-appropriate AC if they roll an 8 or better (provided that your primary ability scores hits 16, 18, and 20 at levels 1, 4, and 8), giving players a 65% chance of hitting an attack against an average, CR-appropriate enemy. Giving you a minimum guaranteed roll of 10 on attacks, saves, and ability checks means that you’re mostly guaranteed to hit with attacks, pass on any saves in which you’re proficient and have a decent ability score, and pass any ability checks with skills in which you’re well-suited. With a 1-minute duration, this is enough to get through one combat or to perform a series of skill checks if you move quickly.

    This is a great ability on almost any other class, but on the Sorcerer its usefulness is extremely limited. Spells which require attack rolls (with the exception of cantrips) mostly vanished around 2nd-level spells unless you’re upcasting low-level spells like Scorching Ray. Sorcerers are proficient with Constitution saves so this helps with Concentration, so this helps a lot with that. Since Sorcerers are Charisma-based, most of your skills will be, too, and using Persuasion in combat doesn’t work particularly well. So the three best uses for this are cantrips, upcasting low-level spells like Scorching Ray, and Concentration. That’s underwhelming for an ability which costs 5 Sorcery Points to recharge.

  5. Clockwork Cavalcade: Even with three effects, this is still only situationally useful.
    • Heal: The 100 points of healing will be the most consistently useful option for adventurers, allowing you to get allies back on their feet and restore a nice chunk of hit points. But at this level, healing options like Mass Cure Wounds and Heal have been around for a while, and Clerics are casting Mass Heal to do the same thing with a pool of 700 points.
    • Repair: Neat, but rarely useful. This could be used to solve some puzzles, though: Picture the Rosetta Stone. Now picture the Rosetta Stone after a Clockwork Soul snaps their fingers and all the broken pieces that have been missing for millennia just reappear in place with complete text and all the wear and tear of time is undone.
    • Dispel: This outright ends spell effects without the ability checks required by Dispel Magic. But even then, it’s rare that you’ll face more than a small handful of enemies with magic effects on them, so in most cases you can just upcast Dispel Magic to level 6 to get the same effect if you don’t want to risk making the ability checks.

Draconic Sorcery (PHB)

The iconic Sorcerer, Draconic Sorcery perfectly complements the core of the class, providing tools to close gaps in the Sorcerer’s defenses and staple spells to address a wide variety of challenges. Elemental Affinity predisposes the Draconic Sorcerer to playing a blaster focused on a single element, but otherwise they enjoy the full breadth of the Sorcerer’s capabilities. You won’t excel in any one role compared to other Sorcerers, but Draconic Sorcery is hard to beat as a generalist.

Draconic Sorcery Sorcerer Subclass Guide

  1. Draconic Resilience: A fantastic improvement to your durability. Don’t go diving into melee, though.
  2. Draconic Spells: Almost everything on the spell list will be consistently useful, and many of the options are staple Sorcerer choices that I would recommend taking if they weren’t already on your subclass spell list.
    • Level 1: Command is a powerful crowd control option at any level. Chromatic Orb is good single-target damage.
    • Level 2: Alter Self is only situationally useful, but Dragon’s Breath can be a very efficient AOE damage option, especially if you cast it on a familiar that normally can’t do damage.
    • Level 3: A powerful crowd control option and a crucial utility.
    • Level 4: Arcane Eye is my favorite scouting option. Charm Monster is only situationally useful.
    • Level 5: Legend Lore is only useful if your DM feels like conducting a lore dump. Summon Dragon is great.
  3. Elemental Affinity: Powerful, but the choice is definitely stressful. If you pick a more common damage type like Fire, you’ll get more use offensively, but you’ll run into resistances more often. If you pick a less common damage type like Lightning, you’ll have very few spell options, but damage resistances will be less of an issue. Don’t pick poison. It’s commonly resisted and there are few good spells that deal poison damage.
  4. Dragon Wings: As powerful and effective as casting Fly on yourself, but it doesn’t require Concentration.
  5. Dragon Companion: Summon Dragon is a level 5 spell, and at level 18 when you have level 9 spell slots, a level 5 summon spell isn’t especially impressive unless you upcast it. The free summoning won’t be especially impressive in combat, but since you’re not using a spell slot, you can cast another spell with a spell slot on the same turn, such as casting Misty Step as a Bonus Action.

    Casting Summon Dragon without Concentration leaves room for you to do a lot of other cool stuff at the same time. Even if you’re repeatedly casting low-level versions of Summon Dragon as canon fodder, it can be a huge tactical advantage simply by flooding the battlefield with bodies for a few turns and wearing down enemies with the dragons’ breath weapons.

Wild Magic Sorcery (PHB)

Whimsical and fun, but not especially powerful, Wild Magic has some great features, but the inherent unpredictability of Wild Magic makes it unreliable. Wild Magic Sorcery is also the only Sorcery subclass in the 2024 PHB that does not have a spell list. Instead, you get Wild Magic. This is not a fair trade, and lacking the versatility provided by 10 additional prepared spells is a huge limitation compared to any other subclass.

Players coming from the 2014 rules should note that the Wild Magic effects table has changed significantly. Among other changes, the option to cast Fireball no longer forces you to center it on yourself.

  1. Wild Magic: A 1 in 20 chance to roll on the Wild Magic table isn’t significant. You don’t get 20 spell slots until you’re level 19, which means that you’re likely to go days at a time without triggering Wild Magic this way even if you try your hardest to do so.

    The effects of Wild Magic are mostly benign, but there are a few options like Polymorphing yourself into a goat. But since those options are in the minority, Wild Magic is usually safe.

  2. Tides of Chaos: Use this on any ability check or saving throw where the outcome matters more than a handful of hit points. Easy Advantage that you can recharge this easily is incredibly powerful.

    If you’re not expecting many fights on any given day, you can use level 1 spell slots to easily recharge this, then inexpensively replenish the slots with Font of Magic. This can be fantastic for social situations and for exploration, though Enhance Ability will be less expensive for numerous ability checks of the same type in quick succession.

  3. Bend Luck: When your allies fail a save against death by 1 or two, it’s heart-breaking. Spend the Sorcery Points and be everyone’s best friend. 2 Sorcery Points is expensive, but your allies’ lives are worth it.

    Conversely, if an enemy narrowly passes a save against a level 1+, spending 2 Sorcery Points to turn that into a failure is absolutely worth the cost. 2 Sorcery Points could get you a level 1 spell slot, but it will never recover the Action you spent to cast a spell unsuccessfully.

  4. Controlled Chaos: This considerably reduces the threat of the Wild Magic table and makes it more of a source of unpredictable buffs and comic relief.
  5. Tamed Surge: Many of the Wild Magic effects can be very beneficial if you can predict when they’ll occur. For example: Misty Step behind your enemies, make all creatures within 30 feet vulnerable to Piercing damage, then Dash and fly to safety. Unfortunately, you only get this once per Long Rest with no way to recharge it early.