Hello adventurers of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the 20th episode of our feat series. Today we’re going to be taking a look at one of the coolest feats…hand-down found in 5e d&d when i read this i could not believe this is real i’ve never actually really played tieflings that much. But wowzy this is pretty good.
Today we’re gonna be taking a look at dnd 5e feat flames of phlegethos it is found in the xanathar’s guide to everything handbook and let me tell you this is aimed at a very particular kind of player and i will get that in the thoughts section of this article. That being said, let’s take a look at the description, so we actually know what we’re talking about.
Description
I kind of alluded to it earlier but there is a prerequisite for this and that is you’ve got to be a tiefling or a feral tiefling. Essentially if you’re not a full tiefling no advantage to this whatsoever just skip right over it, think about your poor life choices but you don’t get access to it. The description however reads as followed:
You learn to call on hellfire to serve your commands. You gain the following benefits: Increase your Intelligence or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20. When you roll fire damage for a spell you cast, you can reroll any roll of 1 on the fire damage dice, but you must use the new roll, even if it is another 1.
Whenever you cast a spell that deals fire damage, you can cause flames to wreathe you until the end of your next turn. The flames don’t harm you or your possessions, and they shed bright light out to 30 feet and dim light for an additional 30 feet. While the flames are present, any creature within 5 feet of you that hits you with a melee attack takes 1d4 fire damage.
Is that not the coolest feat you’ve ever heard up until this point for sure. It’s gotta be in my opinion it is hands down. Man this is amazing. Okay that being said, let’s take a look at the walkthrough so we can kind of get a better pictureof what we’re talking about.
Walkthrough
So the plus one to intelligence/charisma that’s pretty self-explanatory i’d honestly go with whatever closer or with whatever one was more likely to bump up your charisma modifier if they’re both at the same point. I’m just put it whatever one you use more often. If you’re a wizard intelligence for about everyone else charisma is gonna be the one you’re wanting it to be in.
The second part of this spell is flippin amazing so reason why i think this is so good, so you get to re-roll once. Why this is so good is because it really outshines another feat in a lot of ways. Of course i’m talking about magic adept or elemental adept rather. Now which we covered in a previous article.
But rerolling damage die is vastly superior to increasing the minimum role especially in elemental adepts case in which it’s only an increase of one. So this is a much stronger to pick for the higher damage potential if that makes sense the math checks out but it’s very cool!
Now let’s get into the third proponent and definitely the coolest thematically. You get drenched in flames……i think that’s crazy good. Reason being you get the advantage of bright light and dim light which isn’t of huge consequence to you because your tiefling so odds are you get dark vision but it’ll really helpful your party and i’ll really help you draw aggro as well.
And the plus are in the 1d4 damage to melee attacks is also super great that’s essentially thorns right but it’s fire damage and should you roll a one on that 1d4 which you know about a quarter of the time you get to re-roll it. How cool is that. I think that’s incredibly neat.
Hopefully that explains a little bit better. Now for my personal thoughts if you haven’t guessed already i love this a hundred percent i love this.
Thoughts
Thematically it’s a very cool, very interesting really plays out well for a lot of classes and it can really build it to a character’s backstory and fold in to make them a far more interesting character in the eyes of the world that they’re operating in.
In terms of who benefits most from it and why they benefit i gotta give this one you know depending on play style i gotta give this one to either yeah such a toss-up actually. So the paladin for sure would benefit from this a lot simply because of the ability to draw aggro from it and paladin’s contained through most things so it’s not a huge issue.
The obvious choice would be the eldritch knight because they can really combine it with green flame blade and the green flame blade still counts to get that fire effect so very very cool stuff there in terms of who else you know it kind of depends if you’re playing a hex blade warlock this would be very good for that.
I’m not too sure how it would work for a close melee rogue. I’m assuming it would still work fine but they’d have to be arcane trickster in order to really take advantage of the whole third proponent of being drenched in flames so. I don’t quite know how well that would work i suppose you could take magic initiate to back it up. But it’s kind of a long build strategy.
Conclusion
In any case rambling aside if you have any crazy ideas for flames of phlegethos please let me know down in the comment section, as well if you have any cool stories involving it i’ve never played a character with this, i’ve never played with a character who use this and i’ve never DM ed anyone who’s used is so.
Your stories are very very beneficial for me right now and everyone else loves reading them as well so if you wouldn’t mind doing that for me i really do appreciate it. Thank you so much guys, thank you for checking out this article have a good day and as always happy casting.