Every spellcaster in Dungeons & Dragons dreams of the day they can dominate the battlefield with their magic, but they’ll need to work their way up through the levels to get there. As a spellcaster gets stronger, so does the magic they perform. By the time they hit the fourth level spells, a class usually has some options that can really make them a legendary force in combat. However, the spellcaster can only tap into that power if they pick the right spells. Players inexperienced with using higher level characters may not know what their best options are, but there are a few fourth level spells they just shouldn’t pass up.
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Fourth level spells are bound to be hot commodities, and when players first gain them, they will usually only have one or two available slots. At the same time, fourth level spells are powerful enough that there can be a lot of bang for your buck, so they just might be one of the most important areas to optimize. The key comes in examining all the elements of a spell and balancing them against each other to decide the best option.
One of the most commonly available spells is Banishment, and it may be the first place players want to look. Banishment is what is known as a “save or suck” spell, meaning that its casting comes with the risk of a target succeeding their saving throw and the slot used to cast it being wasted. When it comes to running such a risk, you want to make sure that the successes really make a difference, and for Banishment, that means immediately removing a target from a fight. Against extraplanar creatures, it’s an almost immediate victory, but against any other monster (and most don’t have the Charisma to defend against the spell’s save) it keeps them out of the fight for up to a minute while the caster concentrates. That’s extremely high value at any level.
For a safer bet in combat, Wall of Flame stands out as one of the game’s best area control spells. The damage is extremely good, and the freedom to manipulate the spell’s shape makes it flexible. More than anything, it’s worth mentioning that the spell just looks cool. You can’t have a role-playing game without some role-play, and it’s hard to find anything that fulfills the fantasy of playing as a high level spellcaster quite like raising a giant wall of flame to trap your enemies.
More practically, there are indispensable utility options at fourth level that at least somebody in the party needs. Polymorph is applicable for a whole gamut of problems, with combat, scouting and navigating difficult environments being just a few. Arcane Eye is perhaps the best scouting option in the entire game, allowing casters to safely survey the dungeon ahead without any risk to the rest of their party. When it comes to actually passing through that dungeon it’s hard to beat Stone Shape, whose five cubic feet of space is applicable to any kind of stone and can be used creatively to close or open passageways. This can completely change a party’s approach to a dungeon crawl.
Those five spells alone fundamentally change how much of a threat various challenges pose to a party. Whereas environment and the difficulty of single monsters can dominate many encounters or puzzles early in the game, it’s with fourth level spells like Polymorph or Banishment that players start to really open up the possibilities of Dungeons & Dragons.
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