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Nerdarchy > Dungeons & Dragons  > Inflict Wounds Build – D&D 5e Character Builds for Adventurers League
D&D 5e Character Builds

Inflict Wounds Build – D&D 5e Character Builds for Adventurers League

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Time to delve back into our Adventurers League legal D&D 5e Character Builds series. We will make a very nasty sorcerer with this build. One our Patreon supporters we do a character build based off of the mostly cleric spell inflict wounds. Below you will find the videon and transcription.

Inflict Wounds Build – D&D 5e Character Builds for Adventurers League Video

Inflict Wounds Build – D&D 5e Character Builds for Adventurers League Video Transcription


Ted: “Hey Dave, what’s going on?”

Dave: “Just scrolling through some of these messages here over on a patron.”

Ted: “Find anything good?”

Dave: “Find anything good. Well, this is kind of interesting. Someone wants us to do a character build based off inflict wounds.”

Ted: “That could work. There are a lot of different ways to use that spell.”

Dave: “Yeah, absolutely. So let’s bring the pain with this adventurers league legal D&D character build.”

Dave: “Welcome to Nerdarchy for nerds by nerds. I’m Nerdarchist Dave and as usual, I’m hanging out with this nerd.”

Ted: “Nerdarchist Ted.”D&D 5e Character Builds

Dave: “Hey, is this your first time visiting Ted’s basement If so, it’s a place where we’d like to talk about news views and homebrewers for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. Sometimes we even talking about other role-playing games.”

Ted: “So if you don’t want to miss a single video, then don’t forget to crit hit that subscribe button and attune to have that notification bell.”

Dave: “All right. Like we said on the patron, we had a suggestion for, you know, for a video, a character build based off of using inflict wounds. So as usual, we’re going to have a character sheet from D&D Beyond for you guys to check out as well as we will have the character build guide. You’ll get the links in the description so you can go check those out. I guess. You know, let’s get into it. Let’s start with the”

Ted: “First. Let’s look at that. The spell itself wouldn’t make a character who is going to be using inflict wounds as their primary method of attack. You kind of have to look at, you know what that spell is and you know what kind of person is going to get behind, something like that. All right, so let’s look at that. Spell it. It’s a, it’s a spell that does 3d10 and it’s pumpable. So you can do a lot with it, but if it’s inflicting wounds, you know, regardless of, you know, what kind of thing it is, you’re someone that, as you talked about in the beginning, this is someone who likes to inflict pain.”

Dave: “Yeah. Or at least they have the tolerance for it. At any rate, one of the first things I would say we have to look at is who can actually do this, right Who gets a spell, we know clerics can do it. Uh, we know that sorcerers of a certain persuasion can do it and I believe bards could possibly do it as well.“

Ted: “Absolutely.”

Dave: “That automatically excludes most sorcerers. Totally excludes wizards. No druid is going to be casting this spell. So it kind of limits what we can do.”

Ted: “That that is true. If we went cleric, you’d be able to get a variety of different things with it. If you went sorcerer, you’d get some interesting options.”

Dave: “Yes. I don’t think it would be completely interesting if our I don’t think it would need to be nearly as interesting if we have a cleric as our primary way of inflicting wounds. So I think we’re going to go divine soul from the sorcerer and we’re going to take the evil infinity. Now technically you don’t actually have to be evil to take that infinity. So if you are playing in adventurers league, you know, you can be whatever alignment you want to maybe your chaotic, neutral and just really weird in a dark way.”


Ted: “Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s looking at it as, you know, your heritage happens to come from something evil. You can be whatever you want, but you happen to get inflict wounds from your evil affinity.”

Dave: “So if you are playing in adventurers league, you know, you can be whatever alignment you want to maybe your chaotic, neutral and just really weird in a dark way. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s looking at it as, you know, your heritage happens to come from something evil. You can be whatever you want, but you happen to get inflict wounds from your evil affinity. Next, let’s look at our race and then our background and our ability scores. Since we already know we’re going to start with a sorcerer or a divine soul.”

Ted: “All right, well if we’re going to go with the sorcerer and then we really should be looking at something that’s going to offer us a nice charisma bonus.”

Dave: “Absolutely. And uh, you know, we have some ideas for things that we want to do with this character build. So for that, we’re going to also need some other stats that are a minimum of thirteens. So the more pluses we can get, the better”

Ted: “If You want more pluses, the best way to go about doing that. That’s going with the half-elf.”

Dave: “That’s true. There is literally only one other option that would give us more pluses, but it will also give us pluses where we don’t necessarily need them.”

Ted: “All right. So we’ve got half Elf and we’re obviously going to be focused very much on charisma and that’s going to be able to help us through skills when we get to that point as well.”

Dave: “Yeah, absolutely. We can talk about our skill choices for half-elf because we get two extras. In addition, we also get another language as well.”

Ted: “So you know, perhaps this, this character kind of started on a more positive bent or you know, maybe they went straight into, you know, the darker arts right away. So, for this particular one, we went with religion medicine as our skills for half Elf and our racial language. We went with Celestial. You want to say why?”

Dave: “Well, I, you know, because it’s the, we’re going divine soul. I think celestial really works and also their into the scripture there because of religion and medicine we took, cause maybe, you know, maybe they, they’re into, you know, examining how the body works and anatomy. Uh, maybe they took a wrong turn with one. Too many autopsies. I don’t know. But you know, that’s what we’re going to start with. You know, before we get to the background as a half-elf, if we get our plus two, the charisma and we get to floating plus ones, we’re actually going into putting them into intelligence and wisdom. This is going to be a very mental stat heavy character. We’ll get into why later with that. But speaking of background, we’re going to go with sage on it. And specifically, when you had these different specialties, we really felt that the discredited academic would work really well for this character.”

Ted: “So with, with that, we’re going to get access to two languages, which we took abyssal and infernal and you know, this is where this, there’s this character winds up getting discredited because he starts researching, you know, things that they really shouldn’t be. We also wind up, you know, going with, you know, the skills arcana and history. So, you know, what else has magical?”

Dave: “No Ted, tell me what else is magical.”

Ted: The Ultimate Bestiary. The dreaded Accursed for 5th Edition.

Dave: “Yeah. It just went up on, on Kickstarter by Nord Games. They put out an amazing, awesome kickstarters, huge fan of them. Their Ultimate Bestiary, revenge of the hoard is actually how we kind of came across them. We backed, it was a great monster book, but they’re not your typical traditional monster books. It’s not an a to z. Tons of monsters. No, they specifically, you know, focusing on one type of monster and really flesh them out”


Ted: “They flesh them out. They give you a whole bunch of new options and are looking at the Kickstarter page. I am really excited. Uh, I’ve always been a fan of werecreatures and they’ve got lycanthropes in there. So I’m eager to see what they’re going to do with that. But you know, there was also a lot of undead and you know, I’ve seen the skeletons and zombies before. I’ve seen liches and mummy’s before, but there’s a whole section on will O wisps and I think they’re an overlooked monster that is really great. So I’m, I’m eager to see what they wind up doing with that. ”

Dave: “I, I’ve got the Kickstarter upright on my phone right now and I was completely blown away by the very first image that you see”

Ted: “That cover art is sweet.”

Dave: “The cover art is frigging amazing. Uh, you know, you pointed out some of the monsters are going to be in there and there’s going to be so many more, but I’m looking at the stretch goals that they had that hadn’t been unlocked yet, but I’m sure in the long or short order they will be a ton of them that they already have planned mongrel folk, animated objects, dread beasts, more artwork, undead player options who aren’t going to want that and encounter tables, more artwork,  lair maps, monster hunter journals. So I hope they unlock them all. Plus if their last Kickstarter was any indication shouldn’t be a problem. I am excited about this book. There’s going to be so many cool things, especially if you want to run an undead based campaign or a creepy game or maybe you want to play darker characters, there’s going to be options for that.”

Ted: “Well, Nord Nord always knocks it out of the park with their books. So now you should definitely look into this one.”

Dave: “Yeah, go down to the description and there’s going to be a link for this Kickstarter. As always, this is a sponsored video from our sponsored nor games. We want to thank them and you can help out the channel by checking out that Kickstarter.”

Ted: “All right, so let’s, let’s get into it. We’ve talked about our race, we’ve talked about our background and we’ve said that we’re going to start with the sorcerer. What are we looking for Are starting stats and we do an array. We’re going to do a point by?”

Dave: “We’re going to do a point by, we’re actually going to do a point by on this one, we’re gonna go crazy. We’re going to put, you know, we’re going to put a 14 in our charisma, we are going to drop two twelves into our intelligence and wisdom. So right now we only have bonuses and then strength, we’re going to, that’s gonna be our dumps that with a 10 and then we’re going to double up on thirteens in our dex and constitution.”

Ted: “So we’re actually going to create, using a point by, and we’re going to start with four thirteens?”

Dave: “Yes.”

Ted: “You’re going crazy on me Dave.

Dave: “Yes we are for 13 and a 14 we have no negatives.”

Ted: “14. 14 becomes a 16 from the half-Elf.”

Dave: “It does. So yeah, when, when we do some of these builds, it’s a lot of fun to do something a little bit different and not just like completely always optimize our stats. Plus, you know, I think this guy needs to have a little bit of muscle mass to him, a little bit of strength cause I think he’s like moving around and carting around corpses and they ain’t light.”

Ted: “So then, this winds up giving us, you know, pluses or you know, straight across the board for, for 10 strength. So we’re not going to deal with any minuses, which, which has a little bit of fun. So this is an above average. You know, person.”

Dave: “It is absolutely they are exceptional in their own way. So with that, uh, at first level we are going to take sorcerer. We’re going, divine soul. As we mentioned, our infinity is going to be for evil because we want to inflict wounds.”

Ted: “Absolutely. So we’re going to wind up with favor of the gods, which you know, you get from the sorcerer, but we’re also going to have to choose our sorcerer skills.”

Dave: “Yes, we are. Good Point Ted.”

Ted: “Uh, so we’re going to wind up going with deception and intimidation. So this character has already proceeded past the point where they’ve been kicked out of the wizard school.”

Dave: “Academia.”


Ted: “Of academia because of the things that they’re bringing up, the things that they’re researching. And it is only through trial and error that they wind up unlocking their sorceress powers. And Lo and behold, there they’re kind of a little intimidating. They’re going to have to be, you know, personable and be able to lie when they need to to get into areas that they have to or you know, get away from people that they don’t want to get them.”

Dave: “I totally see this guy or gal passing themselves off as a physician and I definitely channeling a little bit of Jack The ripper on this one.”

Ted: “That’s a bit of an evil vibe but I mean when you look at it from possibly making an NPC later, it’s a great place to start.”

Dave: “Yeah, you were going to have to rein back a little bit. If you’re playing an adventurers league, you can just be creepy I suppose. So what we’re gonna do is we’re going to take our first four levels in a sorcerer.”

Ted: “This winds up getting us a bulk of things that we get to look at and we get to really focus heavily on getting access to our, our spell inflict wounds by bum rushing four levels, you know, we wind up getting access to our font of magic and meta magic abilities.”

Dave: “Yeah, we’re going to want to take twin and quicken for those.”

Ted: “We also get access to our first stat adjustment as well.”

Dave: “Which we’re going to do something we rarely do. We’re going to split it and we’re going to put them in dex and we’re going to also put it into constitution.”

Ted: “But wait a second Dave. I thought you said this, this character was very mental heavy. Now we’ve got a 14 and dex and con.”

Dave: “We do and to thirteens and uh, and a 16.”

Ted: “So it was the reason for, for that choice was, you know, to have them be a little bit more agile. Dex and con are great stats. Dave and I argue over over this all the time as a, which is the better stat. So getting more hit points and getting a better armor class. Definitely no brainer there.”

Dave: “Well, you know, he’s been hefting those bodies to the morgue at the morgue. I think it’s really paying off. You know, it’s making them healthier all the way around, bringing up that constitution and you know, staying one step ahead of the law has also helped with that dexterity.”

Ted: “So the, uh, you know, the sorceress abilities that they get, you know, you can spend those points. You’re, you’re sorcery points wisely. Whether you want to be able to, you know, build extra first level spell slots for your inflict wounds or use those abilities too, you know, quicken or twin.”

Dave: “Yeah. So I mean you can get the double the pleasure or pain as the case may be or you can get it off faster. We were really torn with taking distant, but for reasons we did not, which we’re going to get into actually really soon. So from here, I think we’re going to jump into cleric.”

Ted: “Cleric is a, a bit of a, you know, we, we know that this character is somewhat religious you know speaking Celestial has the religion skill. Uh, but what are we looking to take from cleric? We already said that we don’t want to inflict from there, what are we doing?”

Dave: “So we want that channel divinity from the grave domain. Obviously, it’s going to take us two levels that get there. But path to the grave is super, super fiercesome. As an action, you’re able to, you know, cause a creature to be vulnerable or to your next attack. Well, we’re doing 3 d10 with those inflict wounds 6d10 points of damage. That’s using it as a first level spell and that doesn’t incorporate if suppose, I dunno, you happened to crit or something. Yeah, that’s a lot of damage and also because we have quicken, we could do both in the same round if we wanted to.”

Ted: “That is pretty harsh there Dave.”

Dave: “Now. The other thing we’re going to get as an added benefit is access and proficiency in light armor, medium armor, and shields. That’s going to be huge for this character of survivability.”


Ted: “We don’t have access to any armor as a sorcerer and all told this character is not going to get a lot of weapons.”

Dave: “That is true, but you know it doesn’t need to. It’s just going to, it’s just going rock that bad touch.”

Ted: “All right, so fifth and six levels, we’re looking at taking cleric to, to get that ability. Are we going to go back to sorcerer for the seventh level Are we going somewhere else?”

Dave: “No, this actually lends itself to why we did not take that distance spell. We’re going to actually go to a wizard for two, two levels because we want the wizard tradition necromancy.”

Ted: “Well obviously because we just took path to the grave. Isn’t that, isn’t that where that leads to necromancer?”

Dave: “In this case It absolutely does. We’re going to get some really cool things. One, we’re going to be able to take the spell find familiar, so now we can have our familiar deliver. Our touch spells. If you go with an owl familiar, it has a flyby attack. If you go, you know, the more thematic would be like a raven or a crow, they’re probably going to get wasted a lot and you have to constantly resummon them.”

Ted: “You could ask your DM visually, could it look like a crow or a raven But can I use the owl’s statistics And most DMs I think you’re going to allow that.”

Dave: “Yeah. Or if you know, or even if you just color your owl as a black owl and it looks kind of evil anyway.”

Ted: “Red eyes glowing.”

Dave: “Yeah, you can work it out. But anyway, that is going to give you the ability to deliver touch spells. So now we’re going to have a, a really great range on that in inflict wounds, spell if we need it for whatever reason.”

Ted: “Absolutely.”

Dave: “That’s the only level one. Level two, we get our necromancy tradition and that’s what we’re looking for because we want grim harvest. What grim harvest is going to do is when you kill something using a spell, you get that spell level in hit points back. Now if it’s a necromancy spell, you get three times the level back. So that’s really sweet as a first level spell, you only got three hit points, but you can always bump it up, you know, second level six, nine quickly they start adding up and you’re doing a lot of damage, especially when you bumped the spell up. Try it and killing things with it. Not that hard. And especially if you hit them with that channel, divinity ability first.”

Ted: “Absolutely. So from here, you know, we, we’ve already said that you know, from the beginning that we were looking at a mental heavy. We went with those thirteens and intelligence wisdom. So that we would be able to meet the requirements for cleric and wizard, but we’re only planning to do those two level dips to get those specific abilities. After this, we’re going to bum rush sorcerer primarily because we want, you know, as many sorcery points as possible to get into those metal magic abilities and to be able to create more spell slots.”

Dave: “Yeah, absolutely. And we’re not going to go into like all of our spell spaces, stuff like that. Cause really we designed this character to do one thing,”

Ted: “Inflict wounds.”

Dave: “Inflict wounds and they’re going to do it in a plethora of different ways now.“

Ted: “All right, so from here, you know, as I said, we are going to go with just sorcerer for the rest, you know, primarily because we want those sorcery points, um, you know, and we want to be able to use them for our meta magic abilities or recreating spell slots.”

Dave: “Yeah, absolutely. At six levels of sorcery empowered healing, we really don’t care about that, that much. This guy is less about healing, more about damage, but it’s there in case you need it. Uh, way back when, when we took the grave domain, we also got spare that dying. We actually liked that one for this character because he’s a bit sadistic and uh, he doesn’t want you to expire too soon, you know So that comes in handy now at eighth level. That’s the next time we’re going to take something that’s going to actually really matter to this character.”

Ted: “What are we going to choose here?”

Dave: “This is our asi, but instead of taking a stat increase, we’re actually going to take a feat.”

Ted: “What feat do we want to take here Dave?”


Dave: “Oh, we won’t war caster because we’re already good at damaging people and using our spells. Well, it’s just in case we had happened to be concentrating on when we went to maintain that concentration, it’s going to help. But more importantly now, if you try and get away from us, we can use that attack of opportunity as a spell instead. It’s another opportunity for us to”

Ted: “Inflict.”

Dave: “Yes. To inflict more wounds.”

Ted: “All right. So, uh, you know, from here we get to 10th level and we have another, another choice for our meta magic abilities.”

Dave: “Yeah, we do. And this time we went subtle. Cause sometimes you want to inflict wounds but you know, you don’t want people to counter spelling you. You don’t want to be interrupted when you’re doing it. Or sometimes this guy can be a little sneaky and they wouldn’t get it off without being detected.”

Ted: “I see this as a character who at this point in time as this has progressed quite a lot in power and in there, you know, sadism. So you could really just be like, all right, I’m in town and I’m going to just cast the spell and just do as I’m walking by. I just brushed somebody and they could quiver in pain potentially dying. You know, if you’re doing it to commoners.”

Dave: “Yeah, absolutely. Or you know, hey buddy, what’s going on And their chest explode like a chest burster coming out, you know. But yeah, it’s a brutal spell and now we can be brutal and subtle at the same time.”

Ted: “Absolutely. So from here, you know, there’s not a whole lot built into sorcerer we’re not getting into spell choices cause we’ve already got our focus. So from here, we’re just going to bump up our charisma, getting it up to 20, you know, this is going to allow us to lie better, to have higher bonuses, to hit higher DCs for our spells. You know, and uh, you know, when we want to be intimidating, we got the charisma to make it happen.”

Dave: “Absolutely. So, uh, with that, what we like to do after we build the character build and you can follow along, as we said with the character sheet or check out the guide that is, look at how would we use this as the dungeon master, what kind of NPC would this be And I think you guys kind of get the vibe of where we’re going, right?”

Ted: “So we already made mention, you know, that this is a, you know, Jack The Ripper. So this is, this could easily be, you know, one of those, you know, adversaries that you set up early on and the players are doing an urban game. And you have to try and figure out what’s going on. You know, perhaps this guy, because they’ve got ranks and medicine, you know, it has lied his way into, you know, being the physician or being, you know, the person working behind the scenes that they’re talking to on a regular basis. You know, they’re communicating with and they’re like, oh I can’t tell you what happened here and this is clearly not done by you know, any kind of a weapon or a tool. You know, this has gotta be through magic and they’re just lying in their teeth off, you know, that they have no clue because they’re the ones doing it.”

Dave: “Then I can absolutely see them like going to the coroner and it’s this guy right in like he’s working in the coroner’s office is examining the bodies that are part of his physician duties. At the same time, he’s also the one dropping the bodies. I think it would be a lot of fun or you could play this character is more of almost like your traditional necromancer type character cause they are harnessing the powers of life and death. It’s just instead of using it to animate dead, which they could be doing an on some occasions, but they’re just using it to rip things apart. And maybe that’s part of what they’d like to do. They like to figure out how things work and that’s why they like to take apart bodies. And that’s kind of where it all went wrong for them.”

Ted: “So you, you could, you know, build this up into a larger thing depending upon how you, one of the scale, the NPC, you know. But it could be something where like there are flesh Golems zombies and skeletons, you know, that are lurking out of town as you slowly, you know, building up this, this army of, of undead and creatures so that at some point in time he can be like, you know, all right, this a academia that that kicked me out, I will have my revenge. And he brings the horde in on them, you know So you could have a lot of fun depending upon what aspect of this guy you wanted to focus on.”

Dave: “Yeah. So if you wanted to go with master urban necromancer that works, or if you want to go with this is just a serial killer and it’s going to be a mystery for the players to figure out. And depending on how powerful you want to make them, eh, maybe it really tough battle. Maybe they keep getting away, maybe they track them from city to city, maybe even better would be for them to have come from a previous city and in seeing this, this individual’s handiwork and now it’s starting to happen again and you know, so they start putting together the pieces and put together a nice murder mystery adventure.”

Ted: “Absolutely.”

Dave: “Hey, if you enjoy this video, I want to invite you to join the Nerdarchy adventuring party, over on patron. Hey Ted, what can they find her over there?”

Ted: “Every month we’re creating brand new products and you can be able to put in new your game both as a player and as a DM.”

Dave: “We also do monthly giveaways that we automatically enter our patrons.”

Ted: “But you know, while you’re right there Dave, that’s not all. We also do weekly hangouts with certain levels of the patron, and that’s just a small bit of what we’re doing over there. So why don’t you go check it out.”

Dave: “Until next time.”

Both: “Stay nerdy!”

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david friant

My name is Dave Friant I've been gaming off and on for over 27 years. But here is the thing it's always been a part of my life I've kept secret and hidden away. I've always been ashamed of the stigma that gaming and my other nerdy and geeky pursuits summon forth. Recently I decided screw it! This is who I am the world be damned. From now on I'm gonna be a geek, nerd, or however folks want to judge me and just enjoy life. Currently one of my greatest joys is introducing my 13 yr old son to table top RPG's.

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