My absolute favorite thing to do in 5e is when I can find a niche spell that’s perfect for a situation the party finds itself in.
This naturally draws itself to the prepared casters and especially the deep spell list and ritual casting of the wizard, but unfortunately wizard is also a generally good class which means there’s usually someone looking to use it in a party, and while doubling up can be fun sometimes I like to have other options.
I’d like to ideally make something strong without any glaring weaknesses: I don’t want to minmax utility off a cliff.
My front runner has been an arcana cleric, which enables Wish eventually and adds a handful of common wizard spells to its list, but I’m not sure the other features of arcana are all that great, and not getting heavy armor makes me a little leery of closing to melee for cleric staples like Spirit Guardians.
Any other cool setups that enable a lot of flexibility and utility?
At least in my games, finding objects tend to be under as much a time crunch as combat. Especially since locate object has a 1000ft range so if you wait too long the thief/bad guy will get away. Divination and scrying seems more reliable to me. But I agree for other utility spells. The wizard does get many more spells known than they can actually prep, so choosing them is not as painful for a wizard as it is for spontaneous casters.
Sadly, there is not a good way, that I know of, for getting those circumstancial scrolls without DM buy-in. It does help later in the game when teleporting to major metropolitan areas is viable.
Yeah that’s valid, the case where we’ve suddenly lost an item or are trying to take it might come up very suddenly. I was thinking more of a situation where you know the maguffin is in an area but don’t know where, or are in the right house but need to find its hiding place: you often go into that with advance knowledge.
I chose Locate Object as my example spell because it’s on a lot of spell lists so is plausibly something that could be used no matter what class other people suggested, which actually kind of cuts into the concept of wizard supremacy. Arcane Gate, Modify Memory, Seeming, Guards and Wars, Fabricate*, Control Water, and Speak with Dead are all also good candidates for “I don’t know how often this would come up, but when it does boy howdy is it useful”
*Fabricate might be good enough to be learned by a spontaneous caster.