What is “Sickening Radiance”?

Sickening Radiance is a bladesinger build that has a super high at-will damage, augmenting themselves with spells to further this advantage.

What does “Sickening Radiance” do?

First and foremost, it does 11d8+8 damage per hit, plus another 3d8 on one of those, with a +15 and advantage.

Our DPR, resource free once we’ve made all of our gear ourselves, is 167.4 (roughly, assuming 19AC and advantage). We can improve this further with some questionable tactics.

So, how do we become this powerful?

Becoming a Solar

More true poly tech! There’s quite a few ways to get here Namely, we can make our simulacrum a gold dragon, then have ghosts age us til it’s a greatwyrm, then true poly it into a Solar, then into something we can jar, then end conc on that true poly.

We could go the route of procuring a solar’s corpse and possessing it with nystuls and us being a dybuk, but that trick isn’t really necessary here.

Being a Solar gives us 6d8 (or 27 average) radiant damage to attacks with any weapon we’re wielding.

Nystuls Wishbound Shadowblades

We can take a shadowblade, nystuls it into a celestial, then planar bind it with the wish spell. We do this for 7th level shadowblades, which can then be wielded whenever we please, no concentration needed.

Combined with being a solar, we now have weapon attacks that deal 11d8 (49.5) + 8 (57.5) damage per hit.

We can also have our shadow blades silvered for 100gp, making them eligible for use with booming blade.

Level Split and feats

Bladesinger 17, assassion rogue 3.

Why? because this gives us our solar form and an easy way to generate crits on an 11d8 weapon, maximizing our first round damage.

Feats: Feytouched: GoA, Alert, dual wielder.
Feytouched gift of alacrity gives us higher init, combined with alert for even higher, and then dual wielder gives us more damage on our off-hand attack. (honestly, not very necessary, but it does make the math easier).

Generating Surprise

We use chwingas to cast pass without trace, along with prof and +6 to dex, our minimum stealth roll is 23, and we can add a d4 to this with the help of another chwinga. We could also take expertise in it, for a minimum of 30.

Damage

With assassinate up, we deal roughly 334.08 damage on round 1, 3 crits for a little over 100 damage each, one of which includes booming blade. This is resourceless, as the chwingas are already bound and so are our swords.

Surprise never ends once it happens, so, every turn we can deal 334 damage because all attacks crit from us from here.

assuming your DM doesn’t go for that reading, on subsequent turns we deal 148.8 damage per round, assuming we don’t have advantage and that surprise has gone away

Extra Spells for more Damage

Using the lorehold background, we gain access to the spirit gaurdians spell. this spell. This would be an extra bit of radiant damage for us to enemies within the aura.

We can also use tensers transformation, preventing us from using spells in combat but adding 2d12 force to all of our attacks, which multiplies into 4d12 or 26 more damage per hit, bring our expected turn 1 damage to 381 (we lose out on a cast of booming blade). We’re immune to exhaustion, so we can just cast this spell before fights and not worry too hard about it beyond the no casting requirement.

Bless would increase our to-hit, but it is already so high that this does not make a big difference.

When we need AOE, there’s always standard wizard options to fall back on.

Conclusions

On their own, bladesinger has potential to become a massive damage powerhouse. Able to take down a Tarrasque in 2 rounds by themself.

This series of buffs would however work better on a martial frame, but they do not have access to these by themself.

Bladesinger as a solo build has a higher DPR than most anything can accomplish while also still being mostly wizard, able to provide help with various other aspects of the game and buffing their friends as well as themselves.

Ultimately the power level of this build is beneath things like “Ghost in the Machine“, and it is mainly to show that a bladesinger does have an option to be a really good damage dealer. It’s not the best in the game, especially with teamwork, but it is an option.

Of course, chronurgist is better at creating the pocket nuke that is a delayed blast nystuls wishbound delayed blast fireball, but this is an option for this build as well.

There is yet another challenger that has an even higher damage per round, which may be explored another time.

A challenger yet approaches