Class Articles: The Dragonfire Adept Part 1

"Yol...Tor Shool!"

For our first class, let's check out the Dragonfire Adept. This class is honestly one of my all-time favorites; it's pretty unique, it's got neat flavor, it's effective without being overpowered, and it's easy to just pick up and play. This base class is found in Dragon Magic, and is also found online for free at the official Wizards of the Coast website: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060912a&page=2

Section 1: The class in a nutshell

The Dragonfire Adept is a class that breathes fire at people. I think the designers sat down one day and thought, “You know what's cool as hell? Breath weapons. Now let's build a whole class around it.” So that's the Dragonfire Adept; a class where you breathe fire at people, all day every day. It also has a bunch of special abilities you can spam any number of times a day, in the form of Invocations. If you're familiar with the Warlock base class, the Dragonfire Adept is very similar. Some of the Invocations are different, and some of the minor class features are different, and you have a breath weapon rather than an Eldritch Blast, but the Warlock is the class most similar to the Dragonfire Adept mechanically.

As for how it functions in a party: the Dragonfire Adept fills the “5^th party member” slot extremely well. It's not a tank, though it's surprisingly tanky for what it does; it's not a DPS machine, though if you powerbuild one it can pull it off; it can't heal as efficiently as a Cleric, though it can use wands and healing items well; it has abilities that are very much like spells, but it can't compete with a Wizard in that field. It does, however, do the following things very well: debuffing, socializing, and general out of combat utility.

It's also very easy to pick up; it's not easy to build a crappy Dragonfire Adept, and its mechanics are simple to understand. At the same time, it's not overpowered the way some other classes are—you really have to powerbuild a Dragonfire Adept for one to break the game. It's an effective class, and an easy to learn class, but not a broken class.