Daggerheart Wizard Class Guide

Introduction

The Wizard is a fantasy staple; a studious master of magic who brings powerful spells with weird names to solve problems and blast their foes. Daggerheart’s Wizard is no different, bringing a ton of magical power to bear using their incredible magical knowledge.

Unlike many other TTRPGs, the Daggerheart’s Wizard also has access to ample healing options via the Splendor Domain. I’m having some “get off my lawn” feelings since they get Splendor instead of Arcana, but I didn’t design the game, and 25+ years of DnD bias doesn’t make me right.

The Wizard’s capabilities offer a wonderful mix of powerful combat options, interesting magical utilities, and magical healing. The class can do a lot, especially since Codex Domain Cards often come with multiple spells on a single card.

Understanding RPGBOT’s Rating System

RPGBOT uses a 4-tier rating scheme 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.

Wizard’s Hope Feature

Not This Time: Very expensive, but you can use this to negate crits or unusually high damage rolls, allowing you to mitigate potentially huge amounts of damage to you and your allies.

Wizard’s Features

Prestidigitation: The listed example effects are useful, but the actual usefulness of Prestidigitation will vary wildly depending on what your GM lets you do with it.
Strange Patterns: Very inconsistent and heavily dependent on how often you’re rolling dice, which may be hard because Daggerheart discourages numerous dice rolls outside of combat. When you do roll dice, this is only a 1 in 12 chance.
I recommend picking 1 (2 if you’re a Halfling) to take some of the sting out of rolling terribly.

Wizard Subclasses

School of Knowledge

School of Knowledge cares about Experiences and about having more Domain Cards than anyone else. This places a lot of resource pressure on your Stress, so be sure to increase your Stress slots as much as possible to support your features.

Foundation Features
- Prepared: Starting at level 1 with an extra Domain Card is huge. That benefit becomes less impactful as you gain levels, especially once you hit 5 cards, but that will take several levels.
- Adept: This makes your Experiences extremely valuable, plus you get a second pool of resources with which to activate them. I strongly recommend increasing your Stress slots so that you can reserve Hope for other things.
Specialization Features
- Accomplished: Another Domain Card for the pile. By the time you could get this you’re high enough level that you’re putting cards into your Vault, so be mindful of the Stress cost to rotate cards into your Loadout.
  You get to select the Domain Card when you get this feature, so it may be useful to delay improving your subclass as long as possible so that you can get more high-level Domain Cards rather than rushing to take this and getting a card of level 5 or lower.
- Perfect Recall: Since you’re going to have more Domain Cards than anyone else, this is a great way to mitigate the Stress cost to change cards. Unfortunately, it’s only once per rest.
Mastery Features
- Brilliant:
  As with the Accomplished feature, uou get to select the Domain Card when you get this feature, so it may be useful to delay improving your subclass as long as possible so that you can get more high-level Domain Cards rather than rushing to take this and getting a card of level 8 or lower.
- Honed Expertise: A 1 in 3 chance to use an Experience for free. Unfortunately, it appears that you can’t use Adept and Honed Expertise together. If you use Adept, you’re spending Stress instead of Hope, so you don’t get to roll the die to avoid spending Hope.
  I hope that the designers intended for the two features to work together, but rules as written, that’s not how it works.

School of War

Foundation Features
- Battlemage: Very helpful on a class with 5 HP.
- Face Your Fear: Add 1d10 bonus damage a little less than half of the time that you attack. 1d10 is a lot of damage at low levels, and, even if you don’t improve your subclass, it will remain consistently useful for your whole career.
Specialization Features
- Conjure Shield: This makes spending Hope feel much more expensive, but a static, scaling bonus to your Evasion is a powerful defense. You can get a maximum Proficiency of 6 (barring temporary buffs), and a +6 bonus to Evasion is massive.
- Fueled by Fear: More damage when you succeed with Fear.
Mastery Features
- Thrive in Chaos: Easily worth the cost against important enemies or if you can take an enemy off the field.
- Have no Fear: 3d10 is a huge amount of damage.

Wizard Ancestries

Clank ^(CRB): Absolutely perfect for School of Knowledge. Improving an Experience will make the Adept feature more useful, then you can use Efficient to fully clear your Stress slots on a Short Rest, making it easier to use Adept and to swap cards in and our of your Vault.
Drakona ^(CRB): Scales provides nice way to mitigate incoming damage on a class with very few Hit Point slots, but adding another way to spend Stress can be a problem for School of Knowledge, so leave the Drakona for School of War.
Dwarf ^(CRB): The Dwarf’s traits both offer ways to spend other resources to mitigate incoming damage, but 2 Stress is too expensive for a Hit Point and you have Not This Time, which costs as much Hope as Increased Fortitude and has a similar defensive benefit.
Elf ^(CRB): Quick Reactions is occasionally useful and Celestial Trance is amazing.
Faerie ^(CRB): Luck Bender is expensive but very powerful. Flight is a great way to get out of range of scary melee enemies.
Faun ^(CRB): If you’re worried about obstacles that you could jump over, play a fairie. Wizards should rarely be in melee in a way that justifies using Kick.
Firbolg ^(CRB): Charge is a huge gamble for a class not built to be in melee, and Unshakeable is good but unreliable.
Fungril ^(CRB): Never a terrible choice, but nothing specifically helpful hear.
Galapa ^(CRB): The raised damage threshold may be helpful if you’re focused in increasing your Proficiency, and the ability to withdraw into your shell is great if you can use Domain Cards that don’t rely on your making Action rolls.
Giant ^(CRB): Reach is wasted on the Wizard.
Goblin ^(CRB): Surefooted is only situationally useful, but Danger Sense is arguably a better version of Not This Tim e since its resource cost is so much lower.
Halfling ^(CRB): A simple, reliable choice for any class, and welcome in any party. The ability to give everyone Hope gets more useful in larger parties, so Halflings are more appealing as your party grows in size.
Human ^(CRB): An additional Stress is helpful on any character, and the ability to reroll checks which use your Experiences means that you can reroll the rolls which matter most to your character.
Infernis ^(CRB): If you are worried about rolling with Fear, you could play a School of War Wizard and turn Fear into an asset. But maybe you want to save that for combat and use Fearless to avoid rolling with Fear outside of combat.
Katari ^(CRB): The Wizard doesn’t have a good way to make use of the Katari’s traits.
Orc ^(CRB): You don’t want to rely on Sturdy, and you won’t be able to use Tusks.
Ribbet ^(CRB): Only situationally useful.
Simiah ^(CRB): Natural climber is only situationally useful, but +1 Evasion is amazing.
Mixed Ancestry ^(CRB): Mixed Ancestry is an easy way to optimize, but you need to look for a mix of Ancestries that complement your build. The options below are not a comprehensive list, instead focusing on options relevant to the Wizard.
First feature:
- Clank: Purposeful Design ^(CRB): Useful or the School of Knowledge when combined with the Adept feature.
- Drakona: Scales ^(CRB): A nice way to mitigate incoming damage on a class with very few Hit Point slots.
Second feature:
- Clank: Efficient ^(CRB): Always fantastic, but especially useful on School of Knowledge since the subclass depends so heavily on Stress.
- Elf: Celestial Trance ^(CRB): A third Downtime Move means that you can more easily recover, making it easier to spend Stress to change your Loadout or to spend Hope to cast powerful spells.
- Faerie: Wings ^(CRB): Flight gets you out of melee range.
- Firbolg: Unshakeable ^(CRB): A 1 in 6 chance to not spend Stress feels very tempting, but it’s only worthwhile if you’re planning to max out Stress and spend a ton of it on things like pulling Domain Cards out of your Vault.
- Symiah: Nimble ^(CRB): +1 Evasion is always great.

Wizard Communities

Highborne ^(CRB): Wizards have very little that predisposes them to social interactions.
Loreborne ^(CRB): If anyone can benefit from this, it’s the Wizard.
Orderborne ^(CRB): Rolling a d20 for your Hope die is great. Save it for important rolls since you only get to do it once per rest.
Ridgeborne ^(CRB): Only useful in campaigns where you expect travel to be difficult.
Seaborne ^(CRB): Simple, reliable, and useful for literally any character. This synergizes nicely with School of War’s Face YOur Fear feature, giving you a lot of benefits when you roll with Fear.
Slyborne ^(CRB): Fine, but the Wizard doesn’t have anything that directly interacts with stealth.
Underborne ^(CRB): Only situationally useful, but a lot of adventuring happens in dark places.
Wanderborne ^(CRB): Very fun, but also heavily dependent on your GM giving you something good.
Wildborne ^(CRB): Stealth is an option, but it’s certainly not core to the Wizard’s capabilities.

Wizard Traits

The Wizard’s traits are incredibly simple: You need Knowledge, and literally nothing else matters to the class. You’re free to distribute your other Traits however you see fit.

	Agility	Strength	Finesse	Instinct	Presence	Knowledge
Guide Recommended	-1	0	0	1	1	2

Wizard Experiences

Experiences in Daggerheart are intentionally freeform, giving the player and the GM a lot of room to create so long as they can agree that they work. The guidance in the core rulebook says that Experiences should not be overly broad, nor should they be too mechanically-oriented. A sidebar accompanying the Experiences rules suggests one combat-focused Experience and one non-combat Experience, and I think that’s good advice.

We can’t rate or compare options because Experiences are so freeform and subject to GM interpretation. We recommend picking an Experience that supports how you plan to fight (ex: Eagle Eye for an archer) so that you can reliably use it in combat, then use your second Experience for something interesting.

Wizard Equipment

Wizard Weapons

There are very few Knowledge-based weapons, and most of them aren’t especially interesting. The Greatstaff is a go-to choice because its Powerful trait will insulate you against poor damage rolls.

Wizard Armor

If you’re coming from Dungeons and Dragons, you’re accustomed to wizards being unable to wear armor. That’s not the case in Daggerheart. If you want to stomp around in full plate, you absolutely can. The Wizard doesn’t get any abilities that interact with armor which would make armor more appealing, but also they don’t get anything that interacts with Agility, so you’re fine to wear very heavy armor. It comes down to preference between more Evasion and more Armor Slots.

If you can’t decide, use a one-handed weapon (likely a wand) and a shield to get extra Armor Slots, then wear lighter armor that doesn’t reduce your Evasion.

Wizard Multiclassing

Since the Wizard only relies on the Knowledge Trait, you have a lot of room to explore other classes and Domain Cards which might depend on specific Traits.

Bard ^(CRB): Combos very well with Disintegration Wave.

Wizard Domain Cards

The fact that the Wizard doesn’t get the Arcana domain strikes me as profoundly weird, but I’m also bringing more than two decades of DnD experience to the table, so my perspective on the subject is skewed.

Codex Domain by Level

Unique among the Domains in Daggerheart’s core rulebook, the Codex Domain’s cards provide more than one action. Many provide as many as three, making the Codex Domain a deep well of versatile tools. Anything with “Book of” in the name will come with multiple actions.

Codex Domain depends heavily on Spellcast Rolls, so it’s crucial that you improve your Spellcast Trait as you gain levels.

Book of Ava: Tova’s Armor is a great buff at any level, and Power Push gives you a powerful countermeasure when enemies get into melee with you.
- Power Push: The damage is good, and this gives you a great way to get out of melee if an enemy gets too close. There doesn’t appear to be a size limitation, so even the tiniest wizard can launch massive enemies to Far range.
- Tova’s Armor: Spend a Hope to mitigate one Hit Point worth of damage. Simple, efficient, effective. The effect lasts until your target rests or you cast this again, so you can re-cast it once the extra Armor slot has been marked.
- Ice Spike: Functionally similar to a weapon, but both of the Wizard’s Tier 1 weapon options (wand and greatstaff) are better, so there is no reason to use this unless you’re disarmed.
Book of Illiat: None of the options are bad, but they may not be consistently useful.
- Slumber: This lets you take an enemy out of a fight at least briefly. Your GM can spend Fear to remove the condition, but that’s Fear not spent to activate an antagonist or to do something else unpleasant. If your GM is out of Fear, you might hit the last enemy in a fight to end it early and potentially take your enemy captive.
  But if you roll with Fear, your GM might activate your target and immediately spend the generated Fear to clear the condition, in which case your turn was wasted. This is powerful, but it’s not an easy win by any means.
- Arcane Barrage: There are two benefits here: this automatically hits, and you can deal 6d6 damage right from level 1 by spending 6 Hope. The damage becomes negligible as you gain levels, but you also don’t risk rolling with Fear, so the spotlight doesn’t pass back to the GM after you do this, and any amount of damage will still deal Minor Damage, forcing enemies to mark and Armor slot or a Hit Point.
  When in combat, the spotlight doesn’t pass back to the GM until the GM spends Fear to interrupt the players or someone fails a roll or rolls with Fear. If you use Arcane Barrage, you don’t roll anything except damage. You could spend 1 Hope to deal 1d6 damage, forcing your target to mark a box. It’s not an especially efficient use of Hope, but it’s perfectly reliable. Then you can keep doing that until you run out of Hope or your GM spends Fear becuase they’re sick of your nonsense.
- Telepathy: A convenient utility, but not always impactful.
Book of Tyvar: A great mix of offense and utility.
- Wild Flame: This only works in melee range and the damage doesn’t scale, but at low levels 2d6 damage and a Stress is pretty good. Remember that if a creature has all of its Stress boxes marked, additional Stress instead marks Hit Points.
- Magic Hand: RAW you conjure a hand, and then you have conjured a hand. You’re not given any way to control the hand. I believe the intent here is that you can then use the hand to do normal hand stuff like poking things and picking up objects, but the text of the Domain Card is extremely vague.
- Mysterious Mist: A situationally useful way to protect yourself, to escape from enemies, and to control space.
Book of Sitil: Useful visual illusions and also Parallela, which clones an ally’s attack.
- Adjust Appearance: Sometimes useful in social situations. There is no explanation for how other creatures interact with the disguise, so it’s not clear if other creatures could notice your false appearance.
- Parallela: Expensive, but a great way to capitalize on your allies using powerful, expensive attacks, especially if they have usage limitations.
- Illusion: A great utility, but “no bigger than you” is an annoying limitation in a game where characters’ sizes generally don’t matter.
Book of Vagras: A trio of utilities. Runic Lock and Reveal aren’t predictably useful, but you can use Arcane Door to bypass a massive range of hazards and obstacles, as well as using it to teleport yourself or your allies to reach distant enemies.
- Runic Lock: Only situationally useful, and 1 hour to break the lock without a check means that this is only a staling tactic for creatures “with access to magic,” whatever that means.
- Arcane Door: It won’t get you out of melee, but teleportation is still amazingly useful for reaching distant enemies, bypassing obstacles, or otherwise solving problems.
- Reveal: Only situationally useful. It’s not clear what the Spellcast Roll is for since there’s no difficulty number and magically hidden things are automatically revealed.
  The fact that this is basically a roll made while you search for stuff means that you could, in theory, use the Spellcast Roll to grind for Hope outside of combat. That’s wildly outside the spirit of the game since you’re supposed to minimize roles specifically to avoid generating excessive Hope and Fear, but Reveal seems to actively encourage it.
Book of Korvax: Levitation and Rune Circle are both very powerful and allow you to cleverly reposition other creatures. Recant feels like a weird addition to this Domain Card, but it can be useful in some situations if you’re clever.
- Levitation: Lift a target and move them a short distance. There is no restriction on size, so you could lift absolutely massive objects this way. Targeting enemies will use their Difficulty, but it’s unclear what you need to roll to target an ally. I assume that the creatures is release (or, more accurately, “dropped”) when you finish your turn, so you can use this to lift enemies and drop them, to put them somewhere dangerous, or simply to get them away from you or your friends.
  If you simply lift the target into the air and drop them, falling from Close range deals 1d20+5 damage, which is pretty good in Tier 2.
- Recant: Only situationally useful, but a clever player could use this to great effect to collect information or to commit crimes.
- Rune Circle: Only affects enemies, no Spellcast Check or Reaction roll, it deals guaranteed damage, and it will push most melee enemies just far enough away that they can’t attack you (some will have better range on their melee attacks). This is good enough that you might dive into crowds of enemies just to get guaranteed damage on multiple targets. 2d12+4 isn’t amazing damage, especially as you gain levels, but, again, it’s guaranteed to work.
Book of Norai: Powerful, reliable offensive options. Use Mystic Tether for big single enemies and Fireball for crowds.
- Mystic Tether: Restrained targets can’t move, but otherwise can still act normally. Melee-only enemies or enemies with short range could be essentially taken out of a fight. The GM can spend Fear to clear the condition, but forcing the GM to spend Fear clearing conditions means that they’re not spending it to attack you. You also force the target to mark a Stress, so even if you roll with Fear and your GM immediately spends it to clear the condition, you still accomplished something useful.
- Fireball: Very Far range, area damage, and it deals d20+5 damage using your Proficiency. You still need to hit the primary target with your Spellcast Roll, so try to pick the lowest-difficulty target in any given crowd. Targets then also get a Reaction Roll, but Adversaries roll a straight d20 for those, so with a difficulty of 13 they have a 40% chance to succeed. Even if every enemy succeeds, inflicting even Minor Damage to a group of enemies could easily turn the tide of a fight.
Book of Exota:
- Repudiate: Only situationally useful, but potentially very powerful. For DnD players: this is Counterspell.
- Create Construct: Having a disposable extra body can be a great way to solve problems. Send them to trigger traps, distract enemies, retrieve things from dangerous places, or do chores for you. The construct sticks around until it’s destroyed or you try to make another one, so you could spend the Hope once and have a helpful little guy indefinitely. “If the spell doesn’t note an expiration, you choose when to end it, or it ends when the story changes in a way that would naturally stop the effect.” (CRB page 96)
  It’s not clear what happens if you move this card to your Vault, but as a GM I would cause the construct to fall apart.
Book of Grynn: Some great combat options, but this loses a lot of value once you’ve used Arcane Deflection, so you might rotate this into your vault once Arcane Deflection has been used.
- Arcane Deflection: Much more efficient than Not This Time, but also only works once per day. Use it for Severe Damage.
- Time Lock: Only situationally useful since this only affects objects. You could use this to halt things like doors or machines to prevent them from functioning.
- Wall of Flame: Two points withing Very Far range could be in opposite directions, allowing you to make an incredibly long wall. Use this to divide enemies while keeping all of your allies on one side of the wall, then use effects like Levitate and Rune Circle to force enemies through the wall to deal easy damage.
Manifest Wall: It’s not clear what the wall looks like or what could destroy it. Blocking off a bunch of enemies with no way for them to get around the wall except for a long walk will buy you a ton of time to deal with other enemies. Book of Grynn’s Wall of Fire can serve a similar function, but the wall is explicitly penetrable.
Teleport: A fantastic utility. Close range means that you can easily grab your whole party, potentially even while you’re in combat. The Difficulty of 16 is decently high, so add an Experience and ask a friend to Help you so that you don’t accidentally teleport somewhere odd.
Banish: Powerful, but complicated. Banish can only work successfully once per rest, so save it for strong enemies. You roll a pool of d20’s to set the Difficulty, using the highest die, so you want your Spellcast Trait to be as high as possible (of course, you already want that). Antagonists roll a straight d20 for Reaction Rolls, so you have a 50/50 chance to succeed with Banish if you have just +1 in your Spellcast Trait. Rolling more dice quickly tips the odds in your favor.
Once you successfully Banish a target, you start watching every roll that the players make. When a player rolls with Fear, the Difficulty is reduced by 1 and your banished target repeats the Reaction Roll. The reduced Difficulty is cumulative, so your target will eventually succeed, and the duration is unpredictable. Even so, this is great.

There is no rules definition of what it means to be banished. I think the designers are drawing on shared understanding of what it means to be magically banished (you were here, then you’re magically sequestered somewhere). Discuss it with your GM.

Banish is one of just two Domain Cards in the Codex Domain with a Recall Cost of 0.
Sigil of Retribution: Great for Solo enemies who frequently last a long time and take concentrated effort to defeat. Remember that you can gain dice, use and clear them, then regain dice, and repeat that loop indefinitely until you defeat the target. Use this early to maximize the value.
Book of Homet: Two very powerful abilities for getting from one place to another. You’ll probably never use these in combat, but they’re gret utilities outside combat.
- Pass Through: Extremely useful for bypassing obstacles in a variety of situations. Just remember that it’s only once per rest, so you may find yourself on the unpleasant side of a wall with no way back.
  Remember that it’s “all creatures touching you,” so no daisy chains.
- Plane Gate: Very powerful, but you need to pick a place that you have been to before. You’ll need your GM to get you there somehow the first time before you can Plane Gate back.
Codex-Touched: The ability to add your Proficiency to Spellcast Roll is comparable to spending Hope to add an Experience. For high-stakes rolls, you might choose to do both, making it all but certain that you’ll succeed. Codex Domain’s Recall Costs are almost all at least 2, so the second feature’s ability to trade this for a different card for free once per rest is a great way to keep your options wide open.
Book of Vyola: Two very powerful utilities.
- Memoery Delve: This works on targets out to Far range and doesn’t explicitly let them know that you’re poking around in their memories, allowing you to use this to gather a ton of information from your target without alerting them.
- Shared Clarity: This allows the two targets to share their Stress pools, allowing your party to distribute resource costs. If you have an ally that uses Stress rarely and an ally who uses it frequently, this can allow the low-Stress ally to effectively donate their Stress pool to the other.
Safe Haven: A perfectly place safe to rest, provided that you have the resources to cast it. The hardest part is that you probably won’t keep this in your Loadout and the Recall Cost is 3, so you need enough Stress and/or Hit Points to cast it (remember that additional Stress marks Hit Points once all your Stress boxes are checked). Once inside, it appears there is no duration, so your party could rest here as long as you need.
Note that the additional Downtime Move is only for you; your party members don’t get that benefit. You can use this additional move to generate Hope, allowing you to replenish the Hope spent to cast this.
Book of Ronin: Eternal Enervation is amazing against big enemies, but you might struggle to make Transform consistently useful unless you’re very creative. Strongly consider putting this into your Vault once you’ve used Eternal Eternal Enervation.
- Transform: Turn yourself into all manner of useful things. Tools, bridges, weapons, whatever. You can make yourself something tiny and have allies carry you around, or you can make yourself huge to block space. The effect is broken if you take damage, so you can’t block enemies happy to try to dig through you, but you might convince them to try another route.
- Eternal Enervation: You only get to attempt this once per Long Rest, so make it count. This is especially useful against named antagonists who you might face repeatedly.
Disintegration Wave: Difficulty 18 includes everything below Tier 4 and roughly 1 in 4 enemies in Tier 4, including several Solo antagonists like the Ashen Tyrant. The Difficulty 18 Spellcast Roll is very hard, giving you just 50/50 odds if you increased your Spellcast Trait at every opportunity. Spend Hope to apply an Experience, ask an ally to Help you for +1d6, do whatever you need to make this work, then nuke the room. It won’t win every fight, but automatically wiping every Tier 4 Minion and many other Tier 4 enemies will trivialize many encounters. Sure, it’s only once per Long Rest, but that is plenty.
You can combine this with the Bard’s Hope Feature, Make a Scene. Make a Scene reduces a target’s Difficulty by 2. The highest Difficulty in the Daggerheart Core Rulebook is 20, so you can make anything in the game a valid target for Disintegration Wave.
Book of Yarrow: Incredible.
- Timejammer: You can do a ton of stuff without taking an Action Roll that affects another creature. Summon walls to encircle your enemies, create hazards of some kind, etc.
- Magic Immunity: A very powerful defense, but remember that this also affects helpful spells like healing.
Transcendant Union: Very powerful, but the Hope cost is massive. Accumulating 5 Hope can be very difficult, so you might go long periods of time without having enough resources to use this.

Splendor Domain by Level

Splendor provides a lot of options for clearing Hit Points and Stress, as well as some useful utilities and support options. But it is incredibly dependent on spending Hope until you get to level 8 and suddenly start spending Stress instead.

Because Splendor Domain consumes Hope so heavily, it will be hard to use it alongside the Wizard’s Hope Feature, which costs 3 Hope to use. It may be best to rely on cards which use little or no Hope and rely on Not This Time to mitigate incoming damage rather than spending Hope to try to heal your allies.

Bolt Beacon: A great, reliable attack option with good damage. This will remain useful for your whole career.
Mending Touch: Expensive, inefficient, and you can’t use it in combat. The sole appeal is that this is one of very few ways to heal allies available at low levels. But if you have time outside of combat to use this, why not take a Short Rest instead?
Reassurance: Simple, reliable, effective, and 0 Recall cost.
Final Words: An incredible useful utility. The Difficult of 13 is reasonably easy since 2d12 averages to 13, and then you add your Spellcast Trait to the roll. If you plan to use this frequently, be sure to increase your Spellcast Trait as you gain levels.
Healing Hands: Convert your Stress into healing or Stress removal for your target. Unfortunately, it’s only once per day per target.
Second Wind: This is a huge amount of Stress removal. It’s only once per rest, so rotate it into your Vault once you’ve used it an pull it out at your next rest.
Voice of Reason: Advantage on some social rolls can be helpful, but it’s not a guarantee unless you’re frequently working to talk your way out of fights. The bonus to your Proficiency for damage rolls is very tempting, but remember that marking all of your Stress boxes makes your Vulnerable, so it’s a high risk, high reward choice.
Divination: Potentially very powerful, but it’s only once per day, the Hope cost is high, and you need to really make that yes/no question useful. The Hope cost will prevent you from taking a few days off of to use this repeatedly, so you’ll need to fit this into regular adveturing. Since it’s only usable once per Long Rest, be sure to rotate it out of your Loadout once you’ve used it.
Life Ward: Excellent protection. If you can keep 3 Hope handy, you can use this again immediately after an existing Life Ward expires, so you can rely on this repeatedly to protect your allies.
Shape Material: Extremely versatile. The usefulness of this feature is only limited by your creativity, what your GM will permit, and the range limitation. The Hope cost is surprisingly reasonable compared to Splendor Domain’s other options, too.
Smite: Potentially a huge amount of damage, but the Hope cost is very high and it can only be used once per rest.
Restoration: A reasonably deep well of reliable healing.
The ability to remove the Vulnerable condition has an interesting interaction with Voice of Reason. You can clear the condition, then continue to function normally with all of your Stress boxes marked.
Zone of Protection: At once per rest and with a Difficulty of 16 to use this, it’s too unreliable, and the effect is too limited. The damage reduction is small by this point in the game, so there’s a pretty low chance that it will reduce an attack’s damage enough to drop it into a lower Damage Threshold.
It’s not clear how this works with anything that affects multiple targets, so the GM will need to interpret it. One option: pick the order in which your allies reduce incoming damage and increment the d6 each time. Another option: everyone reduces the incoming damage by the same amount, then you increment the d6 once.
Healing Strike: A good, reliable source of healing, but the 2 Hope cost means that you can’t use this constantly. You’ll roll with Hope just slightly more than half of the time (crits count as rolling with Hope), so you can use this at most every two turns.
Splendor-Touched: This will make you more durable, but only by turning your other resources into Hit Points. Splendor Domain rarely consumes Stress, so using it for Hit Points isn’t awful, thought some of the level 8-10 Domain Cards do consume Stress instead of Hope. Spending Hope feels counterintuitive, but it’s a more efficient way to mitigate damage than trying to heal yourself by spending Hope, which often costs 2 or more Hope and sometimes requires a Spellcast Roll.
Shield Aura: This could be good damage mitigation, but remember that it only applies when the target also marks an Armor Slot. If they take Severe Damage, they can mark an Armor Slot, then Shield Aura reduces that to Minor Damage and the effect continues. If you take Major Damage, they can mark an Armor Slot, then Shield Aura negates the damage entirely and the effect ends. Spending 1 Stress to prevent at least 1 Hit Point is a fine trade.
Stunning Sunlight: Powerful, but expensive. The damage is great and could easily get into Major Damage even for creatures that succeed on the Reaction Roll. If this didn’t cost a Hope for each target, it would be amazing.
Overwhelming Aura: You want to use this as early in the day as possible to maximize the value. This will make you more effective in social situations since it raises your Presence, plus the Stress cost to attack you is a fantastic defense. Consuming enemies’ Stress will lock them out of some of their more powerful abilities and potentially eat into their Hit Points once they’re out of Stress. Enemies might decide not to attack you as a result, and that seems fine to me. The Wizard is not here to tank.
The effect remains in place until your next Long Rest, so use this before your first Short Rest, then rotate it into your Vault.
Salvation Beam: This allows you to directly convert Stress into healing one a one-to-one basis, but it also requires a decently hard Spellcast Roll with a Difficulty of 6. You’re Tier 4 at this point, so your Spellcast Trait may be as high as +5, which gives you a 68.75% chance to succeed (slightly more than 2 in 3). That’s good, but not a guarantee, and you’re not actually expanding your party’s ability to endure and recover from problems like you do with Restoration or Healing Strike. The biggest draw for this is the long range and the potentially high maximum amount healed, provided that you increased your Stress capacity as you gained levels.
Also, line AOEs are a pain since it’s so hard to get more than two targets in a straight line, but your allies are more likely to politely line up than enemies are.
Invigoration: Oh, god, I’m going to have to pull out the Year Zero Engine math. This can be very powerful, but it’s also unpredictable. Rolling a 6 on a d6 is hard, and it takes a stupidly large number of d6’s before you’re reasonably sure that this will work. Even worse, you’re limited by the maximum of 6 Hope, assuming that you don’t have any Scars which reduce your Hope maximum.
A single d6 has a 17% chance to roll a 6. 2 is 31%, 3 is 42%, 4 is 52%, 5 is 60%, and 6 dice is 67%. You could max out your Hope, spend it all, and still only have a 2/3 chance for this to work. That’s too unreliable to justify such as an incredibly high cost.
Resurrection: This one is hard. You might get exactly one level 10 Domain Card, and you might get to use this one once ever. This is the only thing in the game that can bring back a dead character without DM fiat, so there’s no question that it’s powerful, but it’s a huge sacrifice.

Example Wizard Build – The Stress Case

Imagine that you’re a wizard. A classically educated, highly skilled, well-read academic who has unlocked incredible magical power. Then one day you’re dragged out of your comfortable academic setting and thrown into a party with a bunch of murderous lunatics who can barely read and pitted against the greatest and most lethal threats that the world can place before you.

Yeah, it’s a bit stressful.

So we’re leaning into being stressed all the time because that is the reality of being a wizard in an adventuring party. We’re going to be Stressed, we’re going to be a Voice of Reason, and we’re going to learn to manage our emotions by venting our frustrations against our enemies.

Starting around level 5 this build can exceed Severe Damage with attacks very consistently. Strongly consider asking your GM to use the Massive Damage optional rule on page 91 of the Core Rulebook so that there’s some benefit to critting and/or rolling really well.

Traits

Max Knowledge, then pick whatever you like.

Agility	Strength	Finesse	Instinct	Presence	Knowledge
0	-1	0	+1	+1	+2

Ancestry

Human. The extra Stress slot works perfectly for us, plus the ability to reroll a failed roll which uses one of our Experiences can save failed Spellcast rolls.

Community

Seaborne. We’re going to get a lot of value out of rolling with Fear.

Experiences

“Thrive Among Disaster”: You are at your best when things are at their worst. You are fine when everything around you isn’t.

“Relax With a Good Book”: You read a lot. Like, a lot, a lot.

Advancement

Level	Advancements and Cards	Notes
1	– Codex: Book of Ava – Splendor Domain: Bolt Beacon	For your starting equipment, we’ll select a wand as our primary weapon, a round shield as our secondary weapon, and gambeson armor. We’re going for a mix of Evason and Armor slots to defend ourselves, plus we’re going to lean into Rosewild Armor starting at Tier 2. The wand’s 1d6+1 damage isn’t amazing, but it’s one-handed so we can use a shield. We’ll select Battlemage as our subclass, which gets us an additional Hit Point slot and Face Your Fear, which adds +1d10 damage to our successful attacks when we roll with Fear. Remember that we also took Seaborn, so rolling with Fear is pretty great for us, especially if it’s on an attack. We’ll take Book of Ava primarily as a defensive option and Bolt Beacon as an offensive option. Book of Ava’s Tova’s Armor will further increase our Armor (or we can put it on an ally if we’re feeling generous), and Power Push gives us a way to repel enemies dumb enough to get into melee with us. Unfortunately, Face Your Fear doesn’t apply. Be cautious with Bolt Beacon since it consumes Hope, but definitely consider it if you have 4 or more Hope.
2	– Healing Hands – +1 Knowledge, +1 Presence – +1 Evasion	As we enter Tier 2, we upgrade our weapon to an Improved Wand for the additional +3 damage, upgrade our shield to an Improved Round Shield, and upgrade our armor to Rosewild Armor. That gets us a total of 7 Armor slots (not counting Tova’s Armor), which we can use in place of Hope to fuel abilities like Bolt Beacon, Not This Time, and Tova’s Armor. Healing Hands gives us a reliable pool of recovery for our whole party. We have 7 Stress boxes, which will cover most parties. Our Evasion is now 12.
3	– Second Wind – +1 Hit Points – +1 Hit Points	Second Wind is great. On a success with Hope, we heal ourselves and an ally. On a success with Fear, we get bonus damage from our Subclass and a token for Seaborn. Use the Stress recovery option, then spend that Stress with Healing Hands. This is the only time in our entire build that we’ll increase our Hit Points.
4	– Book of Grynn – +1 Stress – +1 Stress	Book of Grynn is incredibly useful. We don’t have a lot of Hit Points and we’re using our Armor slots as an expanded Hope pool, so the ability to negate an incoming source of damage does a ton to make us more durable even if it’s only once per day. We can share it with our friends, too, but we’re a bit of a glass canon, so it may be most useful on ourselves. Wall of Fire can separate groups of enemies, then you can use Book of Ava’s Power Push to launch enemies through the wall, damaging them twice in a single turn, plus potentially damaging them again if they decide to walk through the wall willingly to get bck into the fight. With Tier 3 weapons coming soon, we want extra Stress capacity.
5	– Teleport – Improve Subclass – +Knowledge, +1 any other	As we enter Tier 3 we make some changes in our tactics. For our primary weapon, we have several choices. The Advanced Wand is the easy choice. Far range, passable damage, no fun features. The Widogast Charm uses d10 damage dice, which is a significant damage boost, and lets us pick our target after rolling an attack, but only has Short range. But we’re leaning into a high-Stress lifestyle, so we’re going for the Runes of Ruination for the d20+5 damage. With 4 proficiency, our attacks deal an impressive 4d20+5 damage avg. 47), though it’s at Very Close range and costs a Stress. Remember: “You can’t use a move that requires you to mark Stress if you don’t have slots to mark” (core rulebook, page 92, under “Stress from Moves”). This is why we took Second Wind at level 3: to help use recover Stress. If you’re running low on Stress, we have plenty of Domain Cards that will wrok fine. I considered including Smite in this build, but the damage is so high that we’ll already routinely deal Severe Damage. For our secondary weapon, upgrade to an Advanced Round Shield. We won’t upgrade our armor at Tier 3. Rosewind Armor works really well for us. If you didn’t go for Rosewind Armor, or if it’s not working for you, go for Advanced Gambeson. We add Teleport as a powerful utility option. It only works once per day, biut that’s plenty. If a fight even goes poorly, round up your allies and Teleport away. We now have 6 Domain Cards, so something needs to go into our Vault. I recommend Teleport, then keep 2 Stress unmarked and rotate Teleport into your Loadout when you need it. With our subclass’s new Conjure Shield feature and increasing our Evasion, our Evasion jumps from 12 to 15.
6	– Sigil of Retribution – +1 Proficiency	Sigil of Retribution is great for big single enemies, especially if they’re damaging multiple allies at a time. Between this and our already excelent damage, we should be dealing Severe Damage almost constantly. Our Evasion also increases to 16 thanks to Conjure Shield and our improved Proficiency.
7	– Book of Homet – +1 Evasion – +1 Stress	Boo kof Homet offers some great utilities, and it has a Recall Cost of 0, so it’s easy to rotate into your Loadout when you need it. I considered Codex-Touched here, but this build benefits a lot from having one or two Splendor Domain Cards available, so restricting ourselves to 4 cards from Codex Domain wasn’t realistic. Our Evasion increases to 17.
8	– Stunning Sunlight – Upgrade Subclass – +Knowledge, +1 any other	We won’t upgrade our primary weapon at tier 4. Runes of Ruination are that good. I considered a few ways to improve our Proficiency (Meidas Scythe, Voice of Reason, etc.), but the average damage still can’t keep up with Runes of Ruination. For our secondary weapon, we’ll take the Primer Shard. Automatically succeeding on an attack means that you don’t need to roll, which means that you can’t fail the roll or roll with Fear, so the spotlight doesn’t automatically pass back to the GM. It’s effectively a free turn. We still need to mark a Stress to use our Runes of Ruination, unfortunately. Rosewind Armor is no longer sufficiently protective, which is absolutely an issue, biut the ability to spend Armor in place of Hope is just too good for our build to give up. Evasion, Arcane Deflection, and Not This Time will need to be enough to keep us alive. Stunning Sunlight since you still have a deep well of Hope to spend to power it. Be sure to spend Hope to add an Experience to the Spellcast Roll with Sunning Sunlight so that you can stun as many enemies as possible in order to eat through the GM’ds Fear pool. Starting an encounter by emptying the Fear pool puts your party in a great position. Our subclass’s new Thrive in Chaos feature feels very on brand for us. Things are chaotic, so we slap our enemies for Severe Damage, then spend extra Stress to force them to mark a total of 4 Hit Points. Sure, that costs us 2 Stress in total, but the attrition rate is very much in our favor, and we still have healing Strike to recover a bunch of Stress. Our Evasion increases to 18 since our Proficiency increases.
9	– Salvation Beam – +1 Proficiency	We have 10 Stress slots. We could, in theory, turn all of those into Hit Points for our party using Salvation Beam. Rapidly healing your entire party is a pretty great move, but we don’t want to make that a habit because it’s very resource-intensive. I recommend keeping Salvation Beam in your Vault, then pull it out as a panic option. With a Proficiency of 6, our average damage of 67 almost hits the highest Damage Thresholds in the game, which are only 70. When we roll with Fear, we add another 3d10 damage from Have No Fear, so we’re dealing Severe Damage very consistently. Sure, it costs a Stress every time, but it is absolutely worth that cost. We also have Rune of Retribution, and spending just one of the d8’s raises our average damage to 71.5, so we’ll deal Severe Damage more than half of the time. If you’re accumulating dice quickly, spend more of them to tip the odds even further in your favor. Our Evasion increases to 18 since our Proficiency increases.
10	– Book of Yarrow – +1 Evasion – +1 Stress slot	Book of Yarrow is amazing. If you’re facing an enemy that relies on magic damage, you an use Rosewind Armor to spend a bunch of armor to become immune to magic damage, then go solo whatever you’re fighting. If you’re facing anything else, stop time, get a Wall of Fire and Rune of Retribution in place, then pick a victim to slap with your runes. We max our Evasion at 20. The highest attack bonus of any adversary in the Core Rulebook is +10, but most Tier 4 enemies are more like +8.