Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Handbook: DnD 5e Subclass Guide – RPGBOT

Introduction

In terms of raw spell damage output, it’s hard to match the Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer thanks to Elemental Affinity and Metamagic. The Evocation Wizard is comparable, but the ability to break the action economy with Metamagic allows the Draconic Sorcerer to produce much higher spikes of damage than even the Evocation Wizard can match.

Because Draconic Bloodline leans so heavily on elemental damage, the Elemental Adept feat is essentially required. Resistances will be a persistent problem which can negate your most exciting Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer features and render your favorite spells nearly useless. Transmuted Spell Metamagic is another tax so that you can fit more spells into your favorite element.

Draconic Bloodline is primarily a blaster focusing on damage via a single elemental damage type, and between its unusual durability and emphasis on direct damage, it’s very simple to play. This makes the Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer an excellent choice for new players.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Features
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Ability Scores
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Races
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Feats
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Weapons
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Armor
• Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Multiclassing
• Example Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Build – Dungeons and Several Dragons
  • Ability Scores
  • Race
  • Background
  • Skills and Tools
  • Feats
  • Levels

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.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Features

1. Dragon Ancestor: Your choice of ancestor only matters mechanically for the energy type, and it only affects the Elemental Affinity ability. That said, you want to pick an energy type which you can use frequently and which offers a large number of spell options which can apply Elemental Affinity.
   • Acid: Recent sourcebooks have gradually added new and powerful options for acid damage, including excellent spells like Tasha’s Caustic Brew. Acid damage from enemies is roughly as common as cold or lightning.
   • Cold: Roughly as many damage options as Acid or Lightning, but they’re less consistently good. Expect to rely on spell options like Ice Knife and Snilloc’s Snowball Swarm which may be slightly more challenging than comparable fire-based spells.
   • Fire: Of the available options, fire damage has the most available spells by far, but resistance and immunity to fire are common, so expect to take Elemental Adept. Enemies who deal fire damage are also common, so the resistance is frequently helpful.
   • Lightning: Nearly as common as Fire spells, and considerably fewer creatures resist it.
   • Poison: Poison resistance and immunity are extremely common, and since Elemental Adept doesn’t allow you to select Poison you will have trouble overcoming resistance. There also aren’t many good spells which deal poison damage. Poison damage from enemies is common, but if you’re worried about it you can play a dwarf.
1. Draconic Resilience: This helps offset your d6 hit points, and gives you the equivalent of permanent Mage Armor. You’ll still want a bit of Dexterity and Constitution, but this is very helpful. Note that the bonus hit points only apply to Sorcerer levels, but if you’re taking a Sorcerer dip the armor will continue to function.
6. Elemental Affinity: According to Sage Advice and the Errata, this effect (and similar effects) apply to a single damage roll per spell, so it’s much more effective on AOE spells like Fireball than on multiple-attack style spells like Scorching Ray. A boost of up to 5 damage per spell, especially with AOE spells, is a considerable boost, especially on low-level spells like Burning Hands, so your low-level spells can continue to be big damage dealers while consuming your less-powerful spell slots. You also have the ability to grant yourself energy resistance for an hour without the need to concentrate.
14. Dragon Wings: Flight is crucial at high levels, especially for spellcasters who need to stay out of reach of terrifying melee enemies. Spells like Fly require Concentration, which severely limits your options, so the ability to remain in flight and concentrate on other effects is a massive tactical advantage.
18. Draconic Presence: Cast Fear or cast Calm Emotions or something. This is rarely worth 5 Sorcery Points. The big advantage over other options is that the AOE follows you and creatures that enter the area after you activate Draconic Presence are affected. The best use case for this is when a mob of enemies are charging you and your allies, but those situations are rare and could easily be handled by Wall of Fire.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Ability Scores

No different from a typical sorcerer.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Races

No different from a typical sorcerer.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Feats

Little different from a typical sorcerer, though the emphasis on damage from a single element makes some feats unusually useful

• Elemental Adept^PHB: Ignoring resistance to your favorite damage type means that you can rely almost exclusively on that damage type, which becomes especially impactful when you pick up Elemental Affinity at level 6.
• Flames of Phlegethos^XGtE: The Charisma increase and damage rerolls are nice, but mathematically you’ll get more out of Elemental Adept.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Weapons

No different from a typical sorcerer.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Armor

No different from a typical sorcerer.

Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Multiclassing

This section briefly details some obvious and enticing multiclass options, but doesn’t fully explore the broad range of multiclassing combinations. For more on multiclassing, see our Practical Guide to Multiclassing.

• Alchemist: Alchemical Savant’s damage bonus stacks with Elemental Affinity, but it takes 5 levels to get and requires us to invest in a dump stat. You’ll get more out of putting those levels into Sorcerer.
• Wizard: Order of Scribes look tempting for the ability to swap damage types without spending Sorcery Points, but remember that it only applies to wizard spells. School of Evocation is tempting for Sculpt Spells, but you could also take the Careful Spell metamagic. You don’t want to put enough levels in to get the higher-level Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer features. If you did, you would be playing a Wizard.

Example Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Build – Dungeons and Several Dragons

Okay, what if we liked dragons? What if we really liked dragons, and we wanted to make that our whole deal? “Madness!” they would tell us. And we would respond “Yeah, probably,” and then breath fire on everything because dragons.

We’re going to lean hard into the content in Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. Should I have published this closer to the books release and included an affiliate link? Yeah, probably, but dragons have blindsight, not hindsight.

Ability Scores

This build will start from the ability scores suggested in our Sorcerer Handbook, but but we’ll dump Intelligence to get a base 15 Constitution, then put our +1 into Con and our +2 into Charisma.

	Base	Increased
Str	8	8
Dex	14	14
Con	15	16
Int	8	8
Wis	10	10
Cha	15	17

Race

Fizban’s Metalic Dragonborn (Silver). This gets us cold resistance and a cold damage breath weapon. We’ll take +2/+1 for our ability score increases. At level 5 we get Metallic Breath Weapon, which gives us a cool breath option once per day that nicely complements our spellcasting.

Background

Noble. We’re a fancy dragon person, after all. This get us proficiency in History and Persuasion. Honestly, any background will suffice here. Courtier could also be fun.

Skills and Tools

From our class skills we’ll take Insight and Intimidation. With History and Persuasion from our Background, we don’t have every Face skill, but we can survive without deceiving people.

Feats

At level 4 we’ll take Elemental Adept.

At level 8 we’ll take Gift of the Chromatic Dragon. We have permanent resistance to cold and we can get resistance to fire for 1 hour at a time, but sometimes we’ll be surprised or we’ll be hit by another element, so we want the additional protection without eating spell slots to cast Absorb Elements.

At level 12 we’ll take Gift of the Metallic Dragon. Cure Wounds is occasionally helpful, and the ability to protect ourselves and nearby allies from attacks can mitigate some incoming damage. However, since our AC likely won’t improve past 15, this may not be reliable. Consider taking Fey Touched or a +2 Charisma instead.

At level 16 we’ll take Gift of the Gem Dragon to raise our Charisma to 20 and to complete our dragon-themed feats. The retaliatory Reaction may prove more reliable than Gift of the Metallic Dragon.

At level 19 we’ll take Lucky because we’re out of dragon-themed feats and we don’t really need the Dragonborn race-specific feats.

Levels

Level	Feat(s) and Features	Notes and Tactics
1	Sorcerous Origin: Draconic Bloodline Dragon Ancestor Draconic Resilience Spellcasting Cantrips Known: – Acid Splash – Fire Bolt – Mage Hand – Prestidigitation Spells Known – Chromatic Orb – Shield	We’ll choose one of the fire elemental dragons as our ancestor. This eventually gets us resistance to temporary fire damage from Elemental Affinity. Paired with resistance to cold damage from our race, we’re in good shape. We also have 15 AC (13+Dex) from Draconic Resilience and a relatively impressive 10 hit points. By Sorcerer standards, we’re pretty sturdy. We’re starting with two offensive cantrips. Fire Bolt is our go-to, but Acid Splash works great if we catch two enemies adjacent to each other.
2	Font of Magic New Spells Known – Ice Knife	I basically never use Ice Knife. I don’t like that it has two points of failure. But it’s also a ranged AOE on a 1st-level spell, which is hard to find. When we pick up Elemental Affinity at level 6, this becomes an inexpensive way to deliver our ability score modifier as damage in a small area by transmutin Ice Knife to fire damage and applying the damage bonus to the splash damage. If you’re not into Ice Knife (or if you don’t want it right now), consider Magic Missile or Absorb Elements instead.
3	Metamagic – Heightened Spell – Transmuted Spell New Spells Known – Dragon’s Breath	There are three dragon-themed spells available to us at 2nd level: Dragon’s Breath, Nathair’s Mischief, and Raulothim’s Binding Ice. We’re going to start with Dragon’s Breath because it’s awesome, then we’ll pick up Raulothim’s Binding Ice beause it’s decent with Heightened Spell, then we’ll pretend that Nathair’s Mischief doesn’t exist because, yes, it is that bad and I do dislike it that much. We’re not taking Quickened Spell yet because we have a very limited pool of Sorcery Points and we don’t want to burn through resources too quickly by quickening spells every turn. Save that for when we’re higher level. If you don’t care for Heightened Spell, Twinned or Quickened are both great choices.
4	Feat: Elemental Adept New Cantrip Known: – Any New Spells Known – Raulothim’s Binding Ice	We’re leaning into fire damage, and that’s going to be a huge problem unless we have Elemental Adept. We’ll be slightly behind the Fundamental Math, but we’ll survive. We could rely on Transmute Spell and a different damage type, but the constant 1 SP tax on every transmuted Fireball will quickly drain our resources. Instead, we’ll use Transmuted Spell to get around immunity.
5	New Spells Known – Fireball	You know it, you love, and sometimes you transmute it into a different damage type to get around immunity. At this level we get Chromatic Breath from our race. It’s only once per long rest, but it still offers some interesting tactical options.
6	Elemental Affinity New Spells Known – Ashardalon’s Stride	Elemental Affinity is immediately a huge damage boost. +3 damage on all of our fire spells will add up quickly, especially on multi-target spells like Fireball or Acid Splash (which we can transmute to deal fire damage).
7	New Spells Known – Wall of Fire	Note that Elemental Affinity only applies to the initial damage from Wall of Fire. It’s still a fantastic spell.
8	Feat: Gift of the Chromatic Dragon (Cha 17 -> 18) New Spells Known – Raulothim’s Psychic Lance	Gift of the Chromatic Dragon provides the importants parts of Absorb Elements PB/day. Sadly, Raulothim’s Psychic Lance won’t benefit from Elemental Affinity, but it does let us incapacitate an enemy on an Intelligence save, and it’s named after a dragon. We like all of those things.
9	New Spells Known – Summon Draconic Spirit	We love dragons so much that we’re now going to summon one. If you haven’t already retrained Dragon’s Breath, now is a great time to retrain it into something else. Enhance Ability is a great choice.
10	Metamagic – Quickened Spell – Twinned Spell New Cantrip Known – Mind Sliver New Spells Known – Hold Monster	Quicken a leveled spell like Fireball, then twin Fire Bolt to hit two adjacent enemies. Massive damage against multiple targets in the space of one turn. You can also quicked Mind Sliver for a save debuff before hitting an enemy with a save-or-suck like Raulothim’s Binding Ice or Hold Monster. Add Heightened Spell, and you’re basically unstoppable.
11	New Spells Known – Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere	Transmute Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere to fire damage, then hand it to an ally. It still applies Elemental Affinity and it still benefits from Elemental Adept. If you can’t benefit from this tactic reliably, drop Freezing Sphere for something else. Fizban’s Platinum Shield is really neat, but instead of protecting an ally with a buff you can summon a dragon to stand in front of them, so we’re no taking it.
12	Feat: Gift of the Metallic Dragon (Cha 18 -> 19)	The Reaction defense is big on top of our extremely mediocre AC, and the ability to cast Cure Wounds is occasionally useful. Consider retraining Shield if you’d like an extra spell known since it will compete for our Reaction.
13	New Spells Known – Draconic Transformation	The wings will feel silly once we get them permanently from Dragon Wings at level 14, and most of the time I would rather cast Summon Draconic Spirit, but this still feels really awesome.
14	Dragon Wings	Permanent flight without Concentration!
15	New Spells Known – Dominate Monster	Heightened Dominate Monster is very powerful.
16	Feat: Gift of the Gem Dragon (Cha 19 -> 20)	We also finally max out our Charisma! Gift of the Gem Dragon gives us a cool retaliation when nearby enemies damage us.
17	New Spells Known – Wish	Sorcerers don’t get access to Illusory Dragon or True Polymorph.
18	Draconic Presence	Draconic Presence
19	Feat: Lucky	Sometimes you just need a reroll.
20	Sorcerous Restoration	Unimpressive.