Top 5 Most Broken Low Level Spells In D&D 

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Tie a conjure animals spell into a glyph of warding meant to summon as many bears as possible, and you’ve got yourself a bear trap.

In one of my D&D groups, a friend I had introduced to the group played a druid whose main tactic was to upcast Conjure Animals to summon like a billion snakes at once. If you're thinking, "wow, that sounds like it would slow initiative to a crawl," don't worry, it gets worse. The campaign in question was also a PvP campaign where both parties had about 8 players, so the sessions where the two parties fought each other could already take an ungodly long time to get through a round *without* the snakes! It ended up getting so bad in the two parties' final showdown that once the next campaign started out DM made a house rule limiting the number of summons once player could have at one time. Anyway, during that next campaign our DM made a homebrew class called the Officer which had a ton of NPC summons as its main mechanic and one of the evil party played one up until the two parties' final battle. I love our DM and he's certainly a talented homebrew designer, but dude, did you learn nothing from the snakes? XD

*19* *minutes?!* More like DnD LONGS am I right, fellas?

0:50 - glyph of warding 3:19 - suggestion 7:29 - conjure animals - Dru Rang 10:45 - silvery barbs 14:30 - magic mouth 15:13 - find familiar

I haven’t had anyone use conjure animals in my games, but I’d personally rule that the animal summoned is based on your location. Such as if you’re in the desert, you’ll probably summon jackels, scorpions, vultures, etc.

I love the synergy between glyph of warding and suggestion Glyph lets you go super saiyan... at the cost of massive amounts of gold per battle. While suggestion lets you accrue massive amount of gold.

So, fun story about Conjure Animals... Group of dwarves managed to make a large pitfall trap that caught the party. They fell in, the dwarves sealed the top so the party couldn't climb out and they began to pack up and leave. They knew they couldn't beat the party in a fight but were hired to kill them... so this was their plan. Anyways, the wizard summoned 8 giant badgers, dug their way out, and the dwarves were demolished...

A shadow-touched chain warlock with Voice of the Chain Master and Inflict Wounds would be one of the best assassins in d&d. Make a Spider familiar, send it crawling towards the enemy. Pretty much any magical security measure, be it an alarm or glyph of warding, can be easily bypassed because those things basically need to ignore insects or else they'd be going off all the time. And it's a spider so even if it's spotted, absolute worst case scenario is they kill it and you have to make a new one but nobody will suspect it was an assassin. Then, once the spider reaches the target, it hides in the folds of their clothing and you cast inflict wounds a couple of times through the familiar. I can totally see this being an NPC assassin in a dnd campaign. People are found in their beds with unexplained internal injuries and no signs of forced entry into their rooms.

Anybody going to talk about how fantastic this man's thumbnail edits have become over time? This guy for sure has passion in his work, you can tell just by his thumbnail arts/edits. It's some seriously awesome stuff.

We came upon the glyph of warding concentration stack last year. We call it "The Good Hole". Conversely, the trap completely full of multiple damaging glyphs is called "The Bad Hole".

My players used suggestion to stop a guard from warning the rest of the ship while they put them munitions to the flame. Best explosion of the campaign.

Magic Mouth Internet has to be one of the most brilliant exploits in D&D history and not enough people talk about it

These are my five picks as the most exploitable and breakable low level spells in D&D! Did I miss something juicy? Let me know your favourite busted spells!

14:20 Another good version of Silvery Barbs: It works as usual, but enemies that are attuned to magic will notice the ripple in the weave, the change in probability. The target of the spell will also notice a sting in their head, as if they were just distracted by that caster over there. Since this player just spent their reaction, they can no longer use the shield spell. The player is vulnerable and the BBEG has their eye on the player now.

7:30 My game, Conjure Animals has a limit of four summons, not eight, then pick six creature types you'd want to have, then roll randomly to see which one you get. Summoned creatures do not roll initiative; they all act directly after your turn in the initiative count. As DM, I know their attack and damage bonuses; you just roll the dice. You may only issue one simple command to all your summons. Example simple commands: protect me, attack THAT enemy, charge the nearest enemy, scout around, etc You can ask your summon to cast a spell of any sort, but the summon decides how that spell plays out. Do NOT summon pixies who WILL play pranks on your party.

the rapid-fire bird meme in the background has my dying. These videos are so high-quality

Lot of Find Familiar combos require 3 levels in Warlock for pact of the chain(which turns it into much bigger investment then just Magic initiate). Most regular familiar options aren't as strong or breakable. When it dies, summoning a new one isn't just spending gold. It requires materials worth 10 gold. That means you have to remember to carry these materials in case your familiar dies. And it will die often if you use it offensively.

Our group likes the Druid's Conjure Animals. They've covered our retreat at least once. But while 8 wolves is fantastic, what our DM REALLY hates is the two Giant Octopods that can be summoned. Grappling never felt so good.

no door can stop the caster with a familier and misty step (unless there's an anti-magic field in play) (credit to pack tactics for this. you can banish your familier to a pocket dimension as an action and as another action re-summon it to any unoccupied space withing 30 feet (not any unoccupied space you can see ANY unoccupied space), you can then see through your familier's eyes to see the other side of the door thus meeting the requirements to misty step_

The editting in the second half of this got so many chuckles out of me, you did good! The giant punch + pat-pat was funny, and the owl spinning in and sounding like a dropped tool made me pause the video to finish laughing. Thank you!

My players learned first-hand how powerful Suggestion can be. A party member failed their save and swapped sides since there's nothing directly harmful about helping the enemy in a fight you were already participating in. Definitely threw a wrench in their plans.

When I was playing my Druid and I used Conjure Animals, I would always just summon about 4 bears. And then on their turn, my DM would have me just roll for all of them at once and then calculate damage after to reduce the time needed.

You didn’t even mention how Magic Mouth can make you crazy detection objects such as; An object that pings whenever it comes within 30 feet of a concealed entrance. An object that pings whenever you point directly towards a concealed entrance. An object that pings to the sound of footsteps with nobody visibly making them. (Just put it in a Bag of Holding if you plan to do some invisible sneaking yourself.) A reusable alarm that wakes you up if someone with a weapon drawn approaches you while asleep. Anti-pickpocketing security that lets you know if someone is taking grabbing something of yours. How about making several objects that you scatter around during a fight and make it so that whenever someone tries to attack you, they all taunt and jeer at them in your voice saying that they are fighting a clone/illusion? Even if it doesn’t actually cause any penalties to your enemy, it just seems like a lot of fun can be had at their expense. Just ask Rick Prime. Nudity is optional but not recommended. And if your DM rules that it isn’t affected by illusions (since it doesn’t have eyes), then it can be used to warn you of encountering creatures such as Hags and Rakshasas.

i love find familiar - you can channel touch based spells through them...healing spells are touch based, which gives my clerics some interesting options

oh man the Magic Mouth computer is amazing! Might not let my players do this, but I'm sure as hell giving my BBEG a tech advantage. Might even give the party a quest like "the enemy army seem able to get messages across the battlefield instantly, but our scouts report no magic users or magic items of any kind. If you can figure out how they're doing this, you'll be handsomely rewarded."

His notes about Silvery Barbs are only made more valid by my experience with the spell: In the last campaign I played in, I was a Drow Bard. I took Silvery Barbs to primarily keep our Barbarian alive (shared backstories), but of course used it for other purposes. Along the way, we saved an ancient silver dragon, and they bestowed a legendary boon on each of us. I looked through the list and saw one that allows you to cast one first level spell without using a spell slot as long as it isn't upcast. Because of that, I could cast Silvery Barbs AS MANY TIMES AS I WANTED. Once per turn, I could ruin any critical hits or successful saving throws our DM did. So, yeah, that made an already broken spell even more broken.

I like the immovable object through familiar combo you mentionned some time ago, and used it extensively in a one shot. For this one shot, dm prepared, among other things, two god paladins that were basically PCs but with a 30 in every stat and 600 hp each. Also a haste and flying potion chugged in each of them coz they weren't strong enough i guess lol. Kinda felt like none of my save based spells were gonna do anything so i just stopped their weapons in place with my owl. DM revealed they had crowns that could be transformed into weapons. Had to stop those in place too. This vastly turned the odds in our favor when all they were doing was rushing after my owl that was dashing away or just going after me while i was tping everywhere. Allowed for my 2 teammates to pin one down, eventually finishing them off. Wasn't particularly difficult because of how broken the combo is, just very frustrating for both me and the DM lol

Another point I like about Silvery Barbs is that it specifically is NOT applying disadvantage to the roll, but instead just making them roll again. The word disadvantage is never used, which means that using RAW, this effect can be stacked on top of pre-existing disadvantage, making the enemy roll a third time if disadvantage wasn't enough to force a fail. Glorious.

Glyph of Warding is a reason why i thought together with one of my players that we rules it that personal demiplanes, like Bag of Holding, do move relative to the obejct it is tied to. Way to dangerous otherwise.

I haven't played D&D since 3.5 ed., but I recall thinking that the level 0 Cleric spells Create Water and Purify Food & Drink (and to a lesser degree, Mending) were all more powerful than people gave them credit for. Just because they don't have much obvious combat significance doesn't mean they aren't incredibly useful. They have such massive day to day utility, which one can spin into fortune or favor with NPCs.

You're doing god's work here . Love your vids man

Glyph of Warding, holding a Revivify spell, targeting you (the caster specifically), in a secured area, that's triggered when you die in that spot... Now you can, in theory, make any pact/agreement that ends with your death, commit seppuku, and then get instantly revived on death, thereby circumventing the contract by adhering to the letter of the contract/deal. Depending on the DM, if they don't railroad you, this may allow you to break almost any contract that expires when your PC dies. I've used this trick a time or two before, and it's quite handy.

However, if you take Abhorrent Dragonmark Mark Feat, you can pick up Silvery Barbs there too, and you get some added bonus to use it. Plus +1 to your con.

A Circle of the Shepherd Druid conjuring animals can summon 8 swarms of rats. Each swarm has increased AC and HP thanks to circle feature, but are also resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. INCREDIBLY cool and thematic way to play. Loved being a grimy "rat-o-mancer". For bonus fun, wildshape into a swarm of rats next turn. And yes, both RAW and RAI you can summon swarms of creatures if the CR is appropriate (triple checked before building this character).

Warding Bond is a very good lv 2 spell. It gives the target resistance to all damage, +1 to AC and saves, but you take the same damage that the target. But the target is taking half of everything so the final damage is nlt that bad and you can heal it in your turn if necessary

Man, your edits really have been cracking me up lately. Had me wheezing at that 'Seahorses'

Funny story about conjure anirimals, in my group's first campaign together(we were almost all first timers to the game) we had a druid who picked up and misread conjure animals. He said that he could summon 32 wolves at level 3(since he misread the upcasting effect) and none of us knew better including the dm. You can ONLY IMAGINE the shitstorm the commenced every single time he used the damn spell lmao

I had so much fun with Suggestion in the past, from suggesting to one drow that a change in leadership would be appropriate to suggesting to a dragon to turn against the cult it was working with, to say nothing of the smaller shennenigans I just love it

in one of my previous campaigns, we managed to set up our own mining operation that we would collect from during down time me and another player had come up with a non-cannon prank ending for the BBEG fight we were going to end on, and it involved A LOT of exploding glyphs knowing our GM, and with the glyphs set to trigger all at once, we knew that he'd likely make it one save and apply all the damage at once we planned to exploit this and our half-orc's once a LR relentless endurance to insta-nuke the BBEG to death alas, we didnt have enough down time to pull it off, as we ended up defeating the BBEG 1 or 2 sessions after we had just come up with the plan the GM had a good laugh when we told him after the campaign had ended though

On Find Familiar: A level 2 artificer, using the Replicate Magic Item infusion, can create one level one spellwrought tattoo every day since it’s a common item. RAW, this can be any spell, meaning an artificer can give any party member a familiar (or revive said familiar), with no material component, once per day.

Battlesmith artificers can also concentrate on 2 spells at once, but one of them has to be a level 1 or 2 spell with a casting time of one action

Correction about the part in the video where he says "the dm decides the form of your animals for conjure animals" the spell never says that at all in its description additionally it has the same wording as polymorph and everyone rules that as the player choosing the creature so if you wanted to enforce that the dm chooses the creature's you'd also have to enforce the dm choosing to turn the enemy into a dragon instead of a harmless rabbit like the player wanted and I don't think anyone wants that

your videos are some of the most helpful out there for DMs. You save me so much time by pointing out the broken aspects of the game. It ends up preventing issues during actual gameplay. I honestly cant remember all of these broken things but i know i can come back to your videos for reference

My sister's favorite use of glyph of warding is the explosive tome technique it requires a lot of time and money because basically you take a 200 page book and cast glyph of warding on every single page with the command "when someone else opens this book." Effectively it's the ultimate insurance policy because whomever opens the book is going to have a very bad time.

Conjure animals is negatively broken when fighting, outside of a fight its great. Scouting and area, tracking someone down, trying to block a horde that is after you... If used as a tool rather than a weapon its really good. At one point I had to hide from a group of people that were after us and everyone were in different rooms, I casted conjure animals to summon 8 cows and wild shaped into a cow. When the chasers entered the room they saw 9 cows mooing in unisen and dancing which confused them and attracted the other people that were looking for the rest of the party. In their befuddlement we slowly exited the room and made our escape before they tried to attack the cows

I’m pretty certain, last time I checked, rules as written was vague on who chose what animals were picked on conjure animals. This goes with polymorph and a couple others as well. However the rules as intended was that the player who cast the spell was the one who got to pick whichever it was and it applies to those spells. At least as far as polymorph and conjure animals goes. Unless I misread it, rules as intended says it is player’s choice.

our party’s paladin used suggestion so that the orcs surrounding the lodge we were in destroyed the only means to enter (a bridge) with the owner, worked like a ‘charm’

Important mathematic correction. Once you use silvery barbs to force an enemy to reroll their critical hit, the reroll has a 1 in 20 chance of rolling a critical hit, not 1 in 400. Keep in mind you only cast the spell after the fact, so the odds are not cumulative.

My favorite reason to take glyph of warding, is scalability! The spell level you can store is only limited by however high you upcast glyph of warding, again going full duration without concentration. Imagine setting up hallow as a divine boobytrap, or plane shift as an automatic panic button, or true polymorph to cripple over any invader. Suggestion exemplifies the fundamental, the more vague or open ended it is, the more exploitable it becomes! A sidenote fix I find works fairly well for multisummon spells, is treat them like a hoard/mob, only 1 new entry to the initiative with stages of how many attacks it gets based on health; so simple I'm surprised wotc didn't consider it. Silvery barbs is very breakable with arcane trickster rogues (moreso if they take the magic initiate feat for it), free sneak attack everytime an enemy would hit you. Oh yeah I agree it should've been a 2nd level spell, maybe 3rd given it can apply to any saving throw regardless if it's from a mundane or magical effect.

I am playing a Shepard druid themed around Bears, so i made a deal with the DM to only summon Bears (2 with the spell) and it already is well worthy it. 8 probably slow the game to a crawl. On our party we got no tank so the bears kinda hold the baddies at bay from me and the wizard for a couple rounds.

As if the videos weren't good enough, the ad portion always are a work of art in and of themselves. I love it.

Currently one of my favorite low level spell is vortex warp. Vortex warp has a 90 ft range from your character that can send your ally (or enemy if you think they will fail the save) in an area 90 ft from you. This means you can send someone up to 180 ft with one spell. It also has an interesting upcast where the range increases by 30 ft, making the maximum distance increase by 60 ft. Have a barbarian that started too far away? Teleport them next to the squishy enemy. Have an ally surrounded and in danger? Teleport them off of the map. I used this to save someone who fell off a boat to pop back right next to a spell caster and it was glorious. It's not super flashy, but the casting and effect range is so ridiculously long.

I would like to mention resurrected skeletons spawn in with a short bow and sword meaning that each one spawns in with 50 gold worth of equipment which can RAW be sold for half price. This means that a aspiring necromancer in need of some funds can kill a nest of goblins strip them of their gear and their flesh resurrect them to take their gear and kill them a second time or if your like me you just continue to resurrect one poor guy who pissed you off.

Summon Undead is a whole different category. For the price of 300 gp you can get your own personal wight to deal with the enemies for you.

Note to DM's have players FIND Glyphs of "warding" with buff spells but the triggering conditions are very specific such as saying a pass phrase. This is a great way to reward players for exploration. These glyphs can also be used for: - Teleportation Circle to some place unknown - Reverse Gravity for certain puzzle rooms - Remove Curse / Dispel Magic / Lesser Restoration as a quest objective for players afflicted by disease/cure/etc - Find Familiar to gain a familiar even if you couldn't cast the spell - Instantly create a Leomund's Tiny Hut. You can also have Glyphs be offensive against players in creative ways - Disguise Self to forcibly make a player appear like the enemy - Feign Death to seemingly kill a player but PLOT TWIST, they're alive. (combine with Invisibility + Levitate glyphs to make them seemingly disappear) - Gaseuous Form even on unwilling creatures. - Enlarge/reduce an unwilling creature - Reverse Gravity for some really devious traps - Fog Cloud can affect a massive area, a 3rd level spell affecting a 120ft wide sphere. - Summon Lesser/Greater demons to have combat encounters in tombs that have been sealed for centuries

I convinced my DM to allow a couple of changes to glyph of warding first I could move the objects far as I wanted. Second the cost was changed to I could sacrifice any creature to cast but I couldn't have anyone else find out (I was playing the final BBEG of the story) and to my group I was a money hungry spell theif. They thought I just had a weird habit of wandering off to kill pests. (Like rats and what not) at the end of the final fight (of course despite everything I was loosing the team was ruthless) I simply opened a box with alot of wooden tablets stained with blood and well magic missile and fireball are a bitch when it's dozens of them afterwords I got give my monolog. That group never trusted me again not even a little bit no matter my character it was met with suspicion.

Love the 'Big Blue' track from F Zero in the background when the ad comes up.

So I play a Circle of the Shepherd druid and have used this spell in combat. You are correct in the fact that it can complicate combat adding 8 extra creatures to a fight. However, the way my group has played it is that the druid (me) is in charge of keeping track of my own summons. They are my creatures, I command them, I track HP. Second, I issue simple commands so that I can roll for 8 creatures very quickly. I only take up a few extra minutes on my turn so that I do not slow the combat too much. However, I LOVE the idea of sharing the control of the creatures around the group. I think that makes for a very interesting dynamic and allows players that might be a bit shy or not as involved, the chance to really play a bigger role in combat.

Imp familiars with the warlock bit that gives you planar range with them are amazing. You can be a fly, erm, raven on the wall of any room.

Note on Silvery barbs - Silvery barbs is a single target Enchantment spell, which means that when a School of Enchantment wizard hits level 10, they can target one additional creature with it, potentially forcing 2 enemies to reroll saves against that Fireball/Minute Meteors/Sleet Storm/up casted Hold (creature)/your choice of spell. Pair it with Aberrant Soul Sorcerer, and you have something ridiculous.

11:17 I can now envision a tarrask doing the Saigon parry against like the party fighter and that shit is hilarious to me

Watched this video to see if they were in BG3. The first and last ones were. But glyph of warding is limited in BG3, but doesn't cost gold. The last one, find familiar, is fantastic if it can turn invisible since that will give you a surprise round if they attack someone.

A note about conjure animals, it actually doesn't specify who gets to select the animals. It simply states to pick the challenge rating, and that the DM knows the stats for the creatures. Nothing about who picks what the creatures themselves are.

I love glyph of warding. I put a lot of buffs in a Demiplane. Shadow blade upcasted, haste, greater invisibility, spirit shroud upcasted. Loads of damage in a single hit. Then concentrate of blade of disaster.

8:52 HA! Using that Jujutsu Kaisen clip is a hilarious example!

I only discovered your channel through browsing youtube shorts but i really like this stuff.

Hey man, I noticed you're offering to show patreon vids to people who aren't on your patreon if they DM you and honestly that's really nice of you. I probably won't personally simply because my watchlist is expanding faster than I can actually watch them as is but It really does make you stand out Thanks man, keep up the cool content!

Your ads are the only ones I watch because they're actually good and funny

At my tables, I have reworked silvery barbs as such: As a first level spell slot, you can pick one of the two rerolls, either advantage or disadvantage, not both. You also get a +1/-1 of your choice on the roll. Technically you can give advantage and a -1 if you wanted to, but at least you have the option. As a 2nd level spell, you get both, you can't pick, and it upgrades to +2/-2 At third level and so on it upgrades with the +/- accordingly, and it can target an additional creature with either effect beyond the 2nd level. As a 5th level spell, you can pick 4 allies with advantage on a check/attack...etc they'd like to roll, but you have to force an enemy to have disadvantage. or vice versa, picking one ally mandatory for advantage and 4 enemies with disadvantage No save, no check it just happens, but it allows the spell to scale accordingly, but requires the player to think... is 1 additional disadvantage or advantage worth a fireball. Or 3 worth a dominate person... etc. Certain encounters, yes! Other encounters, no!

My favorite "suggestion" has been "Go home". I have gotten passed guards, gotten control of a shop and other shenanigans with this spell.

In our homebrewed Epic 5e campaign, the Paladin-Sorcerer-Warlock Archfey uses Wish for everything, if he can. He has multiple Demiplanes with at least 50 Glyphs of Warding placed over centuries to use as Killboxes if he shoves something through the door.

Man i love these edits and soundeffects

ive recently been trying out a fix to silvery barbs thats pretty interesting. i changed 2 things about it. 1) its a level 2 spell now. this makes it simply reflects in the cost that it does 2 things, a debuff and a buff as a reaction. 2) cant use it to force save rerolls. thats where the spell is fully broken so nope. and rerolling a crit into a miss is still bonkers good, and it still supports martial classes that get a good boost from the rerolling their attacks buff, and being able to jiggery pokery skill checks is still really powerful

Omg dude you are straight up legendary with that wormwood ad. Gold, just..... Gold my dude. Clitoral Hole come on, l take my hat off to you good sir.

I know the suggestion spell description includes the give-warhorse-to-beggar example. But that just tells us that WotC doesn't playtest, or even critically review, their own crap. Under no circumstances is give-warhorse-to-beggar a "reasonable" suggestion. That Yootoobers and players read that spell description and say to themselves, "yeah, that could be reasonable," even without being in the same universe as the character casting the suggestion spell, may indicate that 5e magic can penetrate the fourth wall.

Glyph of Warding During one campaign, we created 10 glyphs, set in a line down a passageway that led from our base of operations down to the underdark. Worried about anjother incursion by the denizens we were err..., upsetting down there, we set these up. Coming from the underdark, the LAST glyph in the row was triggered to go off (fireball, IIRC) when someone who was not wearing our spiffy amulets (non-magical ones we created). Each other glyph in turn, also casting fireball, went off 2 seconds after the one previous to it went off. (Note, this was a 2e campaign) Army of whatever coming up the passage. No problem (or at least, a considerably weakened problem, depending on what it was) The downside is that after all the money, and time involved, NOTHING else came up the passage.

Okay that sponsorship segment was hilarious, you win 😂😂😂

I do the glyph trick with my SorLock (Clockwork Soul/Hexblade) I make the diamond dust using charcoal + fabricate. Use my action to search up a rock (We call it a hyperglyph, as GoW has no specification about how large the glyph must be, so each rock gets a ton of glyphs stuck on it.), then start reciting the names of the spells that we want. It is obscenely powerful. Using the glyph I was able to cast wall of force in a dome around myself, then throw 10 GP into the air as an item interaction and quicken spell animate objects on it. I have a gem dragon-touched focus, so doing so caused me to teleport 15 ft - which was outside of the WoF. So now they're stuck getting pummelled by animate objects for the forseeable future. Really wish I could get heat metal on this build, as that would be an insane amount of damage on any armored target.

16:11 Cue 'Tubthumping' by Chumbawumba playing in the background

When first playing AD&D in about 1980 I realized you could basically build logic circuits with magic mouth. But you need a permanency of some sort for it to be anything but a one shot effect. Still just using leftover spells at the end of the day it doesn’t take long till every item in the mages possession screams when stolen. But the counter is one dispel magic or any king of anti magic field.

I love the names for these builds. Skeleton hand grenade had me in tears

I actually have something like this!~ I did use this race, and in this plane I had crafted a metal book, with twenty pages. I stored a total of 40 Guiding Bolts, Magic Missiles, and Spirit Guardians in this book. This book is still hidden safely away- until its needed. Seemingly forgotten.

Can confirm, arcane trickster in strixhaven is pretty cracked with silvery barbs. Whole party with some sort of casting ability including rogue just keeps using silvery barbs to give rogue sneak attack and avoid damage

As soon as you said "concentration spells last their full duration", I knew precisely where you were headed.

Important note for curbing suggestion, the Verbal spell component is different from the suggestion, so first of all if you fail, yes people are going to suggest you hypnotized them and that you are an evil witch. Secondly, OTHER witnesses can absolutely tell that you magiced them and may go tell on you to the teacher. Now if you become sorcerer with subtle spell...

"I prepared explosive runes this morning." ~Vaarsuvius from the Order of the Stick.

One use of Conjure animals that is hilarious, doesn't bog down combat and is extremely useful, is to summon 8- 1/4 monsters (usually COWS) at a empty place you can see 60ft up in the air over each enemy, and let gravity nuke your enemies. You're dealing 5d6 bludgeoning fall damage to both the summoned creature and the enemy it's landing on. The damage is usually enough to kill the creature, while at the same time killing or at least dealing some nice damage to a group of enemies.. Though generally when my shepherd druid uses this spell, I'm usually summoning two brown bears or two dire wolves for crowd control on the ground. Very effective and doesn't bog things down too much.

Suggestion is a fav. My favorite command is 'obey my every word to the best of your ability'

One of the most game-breaking I have ever encountered was in 1st/2nd edition, and it might be in later editions, but I never played them. Squaring the Circle, a meta-magic spell that alters the area of effect of whatever spell you cast after it. Combining it with Fireball let my Wizard snipe sentries off of walls from FAR beyond maximum range for even a siege weapon, using a 1/4 inch by 1/4 inch by over a mile long cylinder of fire. Combining it with a spell that lets you pick the color of your spells allows the beam of fire to even be stealthy - for example, using very dark blue flames at night.

Other game breaking low level spells: 1. Unseen Servant Certainly, a familiar has special senses to help you with, can go indefinitely far away and requires no recasting if it stays alive. But Unseen Servant is another ritual spell that can do all those item handling things and also interact with traps. The upside? It's neither a creature nor an object, so pretty much nothing in the game can actually attack, let alone damage, an Unseen Servant. Also available through Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster. 2. Shield Just because a spell is incredibly basic doesn't mean it's not absurdly strong. For a very low level spell, you get a heavy boost to your AC for not just the attack you use it against, but also the rest of the round. Casters can usually dip one class level (or Hobgoblins/Bards taking Moderately Armored) to already get a substantial amount of AC out of the gate, which with the combination of Shield will make spellcasters immensely durable. 3. Web In the theme of the above, a simple spell can also be heavily potent. All targets in a sizable area must make a Dexterity Save or be stuck to the ground. The vast majority of monsters is primarily or exclusively focused on melee attacks, so having them unable to approach is basically an automatic win. You know how spells like Hold Person allow repeat saves at the end of each turn? Web kind of does, but not only do creatures have to burn an action to try and get out, it's a raw Strength check - no help from save proficiency, magic resistance, bless or anything. It's difficult terrain even for those making the save. 4./5. Rope Trick/Tiny Hut These spells are similar in functionality in ensuring a safe short or long rest respectively in most places. Camping around the place and trying to disrupt the party is deceptively difficult without the ability to dispel it, as any of the caster's allies can shoot at the interlopers with impunity. Rope Trick is also a one action spell - while it's unlikely to win a combat by itself (since you can't pursue a retreating enemy from there), it will definitely lead to easy stalemates. Tiny Hut is far easier to hop in and out of for allies, meaning that Arcane Abeyance from the Chronurgist can turn it into a really unfair impervious bunker you can drop mid-combat.

With suggestion being a 2nd level spell and having that "sentence or two" distinction I take it as full genie logic. They will pursue the course of action you specify, but that does not stop them from doing other reasonable things in the process. Such as screaming for help while they stand still and watch you hoist an anvil over their head

I still remember the best suggestion I got. On the lieutenant of the BBEG: "It's four against one, go home to your family, pretend you haven't seen us", while sneaking into the BBEG base.

Also a if you make it to lvl 14, you can choose someone to restrain the Shepherd Druid against their will causing Faithful Summons to activate, release them, and have them command their four Giant Constrictor Snakes, while freeing them up to cast any other Concentration spell they want.

A great way to handle conjure animals, or any other mass summon effect in D&D, is to mechanically treat the group of creatures as one entity. Instead of 8 wolves with different initiatives, have the pack act on one initiative roll.

The way I run Suggestion is that it's a way to remove random variables from planning. You can use it guarantee that someone does something they otherwise only _might_ do. Like ensuring that a guard takes a bathroom break at a certain time, or making someone take their whole family for a visit to the neighbours to ensure their house is empty.

16:55 Don't forget that Disintegrate also breaks Wall of Force!

You forgot something for Find familiar combo, use the invocation of Gift of the Ever-Living Ones, which makes all heals max.

Conjour Animals is amazing. My Firbolg Druid used to cast that all the time. I would often summon Giant Spiders for their web effect.

A potential video: Ring of Spell Storing let's you hand out Find Familiar to anyone, as a level 1 wizard. If you have the money, you can give every citizen of a town Familiars. The town now has extra help for work, extra sentries to protect alert for ambush attacks, plus it would be cool. Imagine a society that owns a communal ring of spell storing, and trains a couple low level wizards around town, and at age ten you get your own Familiar. A cultural cornerstone of the city