This is not a guide about homebrew or a DM guide on giving people flame tongues. This is about how we, a proper wizard of arcane magnitude (and a bit of what clerics can do, too), can make martials worth having.

What not to do

We often do not want to over-focus on buffing the martial with our spell slots, especially in earlier tiers of play. Minor conjuration can of course provide them with minor conjured goodies, but if we have limited resources we should focus those on ourselves first.

Don’t concentrate on haste in a fight, it’s often less damage than just casting a fireball total, and dropping it might kill the person you’re using it on.

Don’t concentrate on flame arrows in a fight, the spell largely just is not worth casting. We will have some marginal use for it in the late game when we don’t need to concentrate on it.

Early Game Buffing

Minor illusion: a minor illusion can provide a 5ft cube of visual obscurement that our allies can see through, giving them advantage for quite possibly a whole fight. This is also a good strategy to use instead of doorway dodging.

Bless. Bless is a really good spell that increases martial accuracy as well as EBARB accuracy, and will also help buff our saves as a caster. The spell can target at least 3 people, so we should be able to get most of the party.

Minor Conjuration. Minor conjuration has a ton of defensive buffs available through it that I won’t get into detail on, find all the cool stuff you can do here.

Gift of Alacrity: going first is good, even for martials, this helps them hit higher initiative and go before enemies have the chance to down them.

Pass Without Trace: another buff that’s good for everyone, everyone should have stealth proficiency so they can surprise enemies.

Fly: Fly speed for the whole party can keep them out of a melee fight and trivialize encounters.

Polymorph: good to use on weaker martials or people low on health, but often not worth our concentration or spell picks.

Death ward: Death ward keeps martials alive for longer and keeps their damage going out for longer.

Late Game buffing

Firstly, most of this hinges on glyph of warding, since it removes the need for us to concentrate on buff spells. Do keep in mind this spell takes an entire hour to cast, so, we need some significant downtime to be casting these. In games with zero or super low downtime, this is going to be made harder to pull off. Luckily, we often have the means to find our own downtime once we have teleportation magic.

For our character sanity sake, I recommend making a simulacrum do all this work and then making a new one when that one is out of slots (or using another tech to get them their slots back)

Second, how do we apply so many buffs all at once? We can set the glyphs to trigger to whatever we wish. We will set a set of glyphs put together in a bundle to trigger when a certain password is said by an allied creature. “Buff Me 1” said in a rare language should be enough. Then “Buff me 2” for another set.

We can put these in a demiplane of buffs, to put down a buff spot in a fight, a bag of holding full of jars, with a batch of glyphs in them, neatly labeled. or have a buffing spot in our base of operations. I really recommend doing all 3 if we have the access to the bag of holding.

Holy weapon. Holy weapon isn’t necessarily a terrible thing to concentrate on, an extra 2d8 damage per weapon attack on 3 or 4 weapon attacks could be a lot of damage. Sadly, because this spell targets an object, we can not make it target the weapon of a martial with a glyph. We can mostly skip this one, unless we happen to be a cleric, in which case my condolences.

Hero’s feast is a good thing to use before the adventuring day

Greater invisibility: a defensive and offensive buff at once, better on casters but good for martials once we can put it in a glyph.

Glyph Jar: This is dubious if it works or not, but it likely should (if only for the sake of the martials). This allows us to put our martial ‘friends’ soul into something more useful in a fight. The best is often considered to be a planetaur, which has ‘angelic weapons’ that deal an extra 5d8 radiant damage per attack. This makes for a lot of damage on a high number of attacks. We can only use the planetaur if we either nystuls it or we true polymorph a sim into a planetaur, then true poly it again into a humanoid for the martial to then jar via our glyph, then drop concentration on the spell. We thankfully don’t need to do this all the time, only once per martial, especially if we double jar them (which we for sure should do).

Shadowblade: This spell sucks. This spell sucks a lot, and as a caster we usually get very little use out of using this ourself. However, if we have downtime and the slots, we can make a glyph of shadowblade. This actually is fairly useful for a martial to have, especially if they don’t have a decent magic weapon. with 2 7th level slots, we can make a 7th level shadowblade glyph, which deals 5d8 psychic damage. This is closer to a 4d8 buff, since weapons themselves do damage, and is even a bit less than that, since they could be using a +1 weapon. This being finesse might be relevant, but shouldn’t be if we’re using the glyphjar tech put above. We can use use two glyphs of shadowblade to allow the martial to dual wield them.

Tensers Transformation: 50 temp hit points, prevents you from casting spells, all attacks deal 2d12 extra force damage, all attacks have advantage. This sucks for casters since it prevents casting. It also comes with a con save at the end of 10 minutes verses exhaustion. Thankfully planetars are immune to exhaustion, and an extra 2d12 every attack, plus advantage on all of them, is going to do wonders for our martial.

Tashas otherwordly guise: Bonus of 2 AC, immunity to fire and poison or necrotic and radiant. impressive defensive buffs and it lasts for 10 minutes. not super important most of the time but when it is useful it can trivialize certain enemies.

Haste: Haste in a glyph negates the chance that it’ll end because of a casters concentration breaking, but does not end the chance of it being dispelled and the martial losing a turn, because of this, and it being only one attack, I still don’t reccomend using it. If we do use it, upcast it to a high level so it’s harder to dispel. This advice could be taken for the other spells mentioned here, but most of them are higher than what a normal dispel will get rid of.

Bless: Bless is still useful here now that we don’t need to concentrate on it ourselves and instead pay a rock to concentrate on it for us.

True seeing / Draconic transformation: these are situationally good. Giving the martial blind sight from draconic transformation is actually good for when we want a room obscured, and true seeing lets them see illusions and so fourth. The bonus action AOE could also situationally be good.

Mirror Image: Not especially useful, but is another layer of defense that, if you have the free time, is good to add. Keeping in mind most enemies at high level have some away around this anyway with truesight, we won’t want to prioritize this by any means.

Summary

there’s really 3 things here doing the majority of the work offensively speaking. Tensers transformation, shadowblade, glyphjar into planetar. if we only have 3-6 hours of set up time, use these. Alternatively, make a large number of ‘basic’ packages of sets of 3 or 4 (depending on if we plan on duel-wielding the shadow blades, I recommend it but it’s not a must) The others are nice to avoid damage or other downsides, but it’s not necessary for the martial to function.

With just those in place, attacks are dealing an average of 65 damage per hit. (not accounting for crits) Taking the fighter baseline from form of dread blogs, [Thanks Haen!] we can see that we beat the baseline with every attack, and should have advantage on all of them, making our to-hit chance very high. (91%, roughly) meaning we actually beat fighters baseline with a single attack.

A subclassless fighter action surging at 20th level with these spells in place is doing 9 attacks, or 532 damage (again not accounting for crits). An Echo knight could do 2 more on that turn and do 650 damage. if any of those 11 attacks with advantage happen to crit, the fighter can now one turn a tarrasque. assuming 1 action surge a fight, we multiply fighters baseline by 6.

With crits, we can assume subclassless fighter to be doing (roughly) 5.8 more damage per attack. with 5 attacks that’s 29, and with 9 attacks that’s 52.5, and with 11 attacks that’s 63.8 more damage. Interestingly, champ fighters ability to increase crit range makes each attack do roughly 16 more damage, which is 80 more damage on 5 attacks, and 144.5 more damage on 9 attacks.

A champ fighter novaing with this set up does just about 676 damage

The other buffs are mostly to ensure the fighter can actually land this damage, regen, death ward, mirror image making them harder to hit, glyphjar also adding obscene amounts of health, blindsight negating heavy obscurement (which we want to have in a fight versus a caster) ect ect.

If we took the buffs ourself as a caster we end up dealing 177 damage, and I think we would want to skip the tensers transformation as it turns our class off, so we end up with a “measly” 141 DPR, while a fighter without action surging is doing roughly 295.

We could also go the route of buffing elementals and having them deal our damage for us. We can’t make them into planetar’s, so a measly 5d8 + 2d12 will have to do. With 2 attacks (with duel wielding) an invisible stalker is dealing roughly 59 damage each. We would need about 9 invisible stalkers buffed in this way to hit the approximate damage of what a fighter does with an action surge, or 5 of them to hit what the fighter is doing without an action surge. The invisible stalkers are also somewhat squishy for where we are in the game, only having 104hp plus the 50 temps that tensers transformation gives them.

Could we get by without a fighter or a ranger or other martial of choice? Absolutely, but fights get longer, and longer fights aren’t good for us because they cost more of our current resources, and are, sadly less reliable. Of course, we can always have both if we have the downtime.