Tether Essence: 7th-level necromancy
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S, M (a spool of platinum cord worth at least 250 gp, which the spell consumes)
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
Tether Essence: Two creatures you can see within range must make a Constitution saving throw, with disadvantage if they are within 30 feet of each other. Either creature can willingly fail the save. If either save succeeds, the spell has no effect. If both saves fail, the creatures are magically linked for the duration, regardless of the distance between them. When damage is dealt to one of them, the same damage is dealt to the other one. If hit points are restored to one of them, the same number of hit points are restored to the other one. However, if either of the tethered creatures is reduced to 0 hit points, the spell ends on both. If the spell ends on one creature, it ends on both.
Spell Lists. Chronurgy Wizard, Graviturgy Wizard
Tether Essence Pro’s
- Double Healing
- No Distance Limit
- Can Willingly fail
Double Healing
The chronurgist wizard gets a lot of spells in 5e, one less talked about is the spell tether essence.
Now, you might be like me when you read this spell and have questions.
I know I did.
But I was able to find some uses for this that do seem useful.
As a result, let’s go over the pro’s for Tether Essence.
The first notable pro in tether essence is healing.
You can stack healing on each other.
So, if you have a cleric who stays in the back you can do this to your cleric and barbarian.
When you do this the Cleric who normally won’t take damage can heal himself which will heal the barbarian from a safe distance.
This allows you to do safe healing from afar, or double the healing if both of you are injured after a fight.
No Distance Limit
The second benefit of tether essence is there is no distance limit.
Meaning if you were to be teleported away from someone (by force or willingly), you can still heal the party member being affected.
This, while niche, can be useful in certain situations such as 1v1 fights, or other ways of supporting the party when you are not there
Can Willingly Fail
Finally, we have the pro that you can willingly fail.
As talked about in my article on Temporal Shunt, having the ability to willingly fail a save is great in certain situations.
The reason why is there are several harmful spells that have beneficial uses in the right scenario.
By having the ability to fail on purpose, it allows you to not have to worry about an ally passing the save and wasting the spell slot.
This can be crucial on higher-level spells like temporal shunt and tether essence as it increases the ability of usefulness in a spell.
This can also be useful if you, target someone who willingly wants to fail and someone who doesn’t.
Forcing only one saving throw instead of two.
Tether Essence: Con’s
- Constitution Saving Throw
- Concentration
- Expensive
Constitution Saving Throw
Okay, I am not going to sugarcoat it, in my opinion, this is a trash spell.
For instance, the time it took me to write the pro’s took me three times as long as the cons section.
So, let’s go over them.
If you do decide to use this on an enemy, you are going to force them to make a constitution saving throw.
On average a constitution saving throw will be successful 50.5% of the time.
However, These kinds of spells are usually targeting enemies with a large hitpool which usually means they have a high constitution.
Second of all, this spell is going to be negated with a legendary resistance if you cast it.
Wasting your spell slot unless you wait for 2-3 turns to cast.
Which at this point, most of the high-powered attacks will be used.
So, while having a 50.5% chance the average monster will fail your DC, its actual effectiveness is quite diminished.
Concentration
Second of all, let’s say you did not want to use it for offensive capabilities.
Instead, you use it for healing capabilities like mentioned in the pro’s.
Even then you can only have it affect up to two people as it requires concentration.
Meaning, you use a seventh-level spell slot to heal 2 people instead of one per spell slot.
Now, if you could choose more targets, this would be an okay spell.
But, at seventh level, you have spells like simulacrum, force cage, or even finger of death.
A wizard at this level should not be focused on improving healing capabilities when even warlocks can do healing better than wizards.
Expensive
Finally, it is expensive.
It costs 250gp to cast this spell once, which it consumes.
This hurts this the most out of any of the other downsides, as there can be key moments where you might actually want this spell cast.
Be it comedic or beneficial reasons.
But, this means you need to keep a 250gp platinum cord on you at all times, which is not only expensive but irrelevant until the 1% of the time you will need to cast this spell.
As a result, this puts the final nail in the coffin for me and many other players that don’t see the uses for this spell.
However, if you are one of those that want to make it as best as you can, let me help you out with some uses I discovered.
Applications
- Healing
- 1v1 Fights
- Chicken
Healing
The most practical use of the spell is to double up on the healing efficiency.
By using the ability to double up healings you can increase the effectiveness of the healing.
Moreover, do note that if you can twincast a healing spell or do an AOE healing spell, they will proc twice.
As each of them will heal, which will then heal the other person.
This makes spells like prayer of healing, or abilities like song of rest, much more powerful than they already are.
1v1 Fights
We have all been there, be it an arena fight, a battle over pride, or even just knocked over the wrong person’s beer.
In those situations, it’s usually a 1v1 fight.
Where no one is supposed to be able to assist.
However, parties often have their party members back, and this spell is great for that.
Cast it on yourself and the one participating in the fight and heal them whenever they get injured.
You could be out shopping not even there and next thing you know pop a heal and make your fighter look invincible.
Chicken
This is my favorite use of the spell. Basically, you are playing chicken with the spell.
You target yourself (or another willing creature) and target an enemy.
You now need to see which of you can take the most hits.
There are a few ways to do this.
One, have the most hitpoints.
After all, you are both taking the same amount of damage so if they take more they go down first.
The second way is to heal yourself with temporary hitpoints.
Temporary hitpoints are a separate thing from hitpoints as discussed in the Player’s Handbook.
Therefore classes like warlocks with armor of agathys, or Twilight clerics with twilight sanctuary, will be able to stay up much longer in those fights.
Basically healing themselves but not healing the enemy.
These two options both have benefits, as they force only one save from the enemy, and have ways to make them untouchable by the boss.
As dealing damage to them only hurts the boss as well.
Therefore, besides healing, this is the best combat use for the spell.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Tether Essence is not that good of a spell.
It has a high casting cost, requires concentration, is expensive, and a few other negative traits that really make this spell not that great.
But for those looking for some fun uses of tether essence, there can be some really fun shenanigans with it.
Which, if you are looking for some other good shenanigan spells.
I highly recommend my guide to 1st level wizard spells.
There are some really unique ones in there with a ton of versatility and fun in them.
Well, that is all for this article.
Have a wonderful day!