A complete breakdown of exactly how saving throws work when your party needs to save or enemies against your spells and attacks.
Including concentration saves with ways to boost your chances to succeed and increase your DC on spells against enemies.
Contents
Introduction
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Welcome to my guide on the important topic of saving throws. Understanding how to boost your saves or select the right spells and abilities on enemies must likely to fail them will help you in combat situations.
There is also a fully animated and voiced version of this guide below, if you prefer to watch rather than read:
Saving Throw Examples
In this example we have a Shadowheart being hit with the spell Hold Person. When we examine any spell, it will show what attribute is associated in helping to save against it.
With Hold Person it’s Wisdom, meaning our modifier, positive or negative will be included to our saving throw.
And we can see this in the combat log for the save. We have 18 Wisdom for a +4 modifier.
We can also see +3 Proficiency. Shadowheart being a Cleric also has a Proficiency in Wisdom saves. Providing +3 because she is level 5 here.
All classes have two attributes that they are proficient in for saving throws. For Clerics its Charisma and Wisdom. More on this later.
Breaking down the entire combat log now. The Saving throw is the dice we rolled, we got a 5. And we added a total of +7 for our proficiency and modifier in Wisdom.
The Difficulty class or “DC” was 15. We needed to roll an 8 or more to ignore the effects.
Let’s see how this DC of 15 came about, once again the combat log can help us here.
This first number of eight is the base difficulty class for all spells, not just hold person.
Any spell that is cast by you or against you, will start with a difficulty base of eight.
The +3 Wisdom is for the Redcap Sage having 17 Wisdom. Every caster has an attribute that scales with your spells. The modifier bonus will be included to make the DC harder to save against.
The +2 proficiency bonus is from the Sage being between level one and four.
The additional +2 comes from Tactician difficulty, where all enemies gain +2 DC on spells.
And this gives us our 15 that we need to match or beat. That Shadowheart with her Wisdom proficiency and modifier bonuses only needed to roll an 8 or more to pass the save. But if we run this example with Lae’zel, we are in much worse shape.
Her Wisdom modifier is zero, providing no bonuses and she has no Wisdom save Proficiency. This is why in the combat log we simply have a result from a D20, because we have had nothing to help us and must roll a flat 15 or higher to save.
When you cast a spell against enemies it works exactly the same. Here we are trying to apply Hold Person on a target.
Our base difficulty class is eight, as it is for all spells. We include our primary casting ability stat, in this case being a Sorcerer its Charisma for +3. And our Proficiency bonus of +3 because we are level 5.
Adding all that together means our enemies will need to match or beat 14 to save against the spell.
The two enemies here have different Wisdom modifier bonuses. Target 1 has no bonus and a 65% success chance for the spell. Target 2 has a +2 modifier and only 55% chance for our spell to succeed because of it.
Boosting your primary ability spellcasting stat will make it harder for enemies to save against your spells and increase your DC. In this example we have gone to 18 Charisma and a +4 modifier instead of +3. Providing an additional 5% success chance on each target.
Choosing targets that don’t have saving throw Proficiencies or good modifier bonuses against your selected spell, will also greatly improve the chances of it succeeding.
Weapon Action Example
Here we are using Piercing Strike on a target to apply Gaping Wounds. And we can see just like our spells, there is an attribute associated for the saving throw. Constitution.
The base Difficulty class for weapon actions is ten, instead of the eight on spells.
We then add either our Strength or Dexterity modifier depending on what the weapon scales with. In this case Dexterity with our short sword having Finesse.
Our Dexterity has a +4 modifier bonus, bringing the difficulty to 14.
Certain weapon attack actions also get bonus difficulty modifiers. For Piercing Strike it has a +2 making the difficulty total 16.
The only way to improve your DC is to increase the modifier bonus from your attributes.
But we can increase our success chances by choosing the right enemies, just like with our spells. A Barbarian with proficiency in Constitution saving throws and a high modifier bonus will be far harder to succeed against compared to a rogue or wizard type of enemy.
Concentration Saves
A very important type of save for your casters is a Concentration save. Certain spells require your caster to concentrate to maintain it. When taking damage, they must make a Concentration saving throw, if they fail the spell stops working.
The Difficulty Class of the saving throw is equal to half the damage you took with a minimum difficulty of 10. Meaning it will always be at least 10 but could be higher.
Each source of damage equates to a saving throw being rolled. The Goblin in this example dealt 14 damage on its attack but also an additional 2 damage. Because this counts as two sources of damage, we have two saves to make.
Concentration saves scale with Constitution and It is quite important for casters to be able to consistently pass these saves.
Items that increase constitution saving throws will help.
Proficiency in Constitution saving throws goes a long way also. And this will impact what starting class you select, because only the class you pick at level one will provide the saving throw Proficiencies for your character.
Multiclassing will not add any additional saving throw Proficiencies or change the ones you start with. And if you think you will be concentrating on a lot of spells, this can dictate that level one selection.
But keep in mind that other Proficiencies, not just saving throw ones can change depending if we take the character at level one or multiclass into it.
The Paladin Sorcerer is a perfect example. If you want Constitution saving throw proficiency it might be easy to just go level one into sorcerer before multiclassing into Paladin.
But… Paladins picked at level one gain heavy armour proficiency. If you multiclass into them, they only get medium armour. It is always wise to check what the difference is, as it can force you to take feats you didn’t think you needed to.
One way to gain Proficiency in a saving throw is with a feat called Resilient. This could be an option to help you when considering multiclassing and saving throw Proficiencies that you require.
The Warcaster feat provides advantage on Concentration saving throws, which is huge for consistency in maintaining spells. Advantage allows you to roll two D20 and select the higher number rolled.
But there is a balance, because if we are taking feats that are not boosting our primary casting stat, we are potentially hampering our difficulty class on the spells we cast.
Increasing Spell Success Chances
Some additional ways to increase the chance spells beat enemy saving throws can include:
Heightened Metamagic ability on Sorcerers to make the enemy saving throw roll with disadvantage. Where the target will roll two D20 and pick the lowest number.
The Wizard can take the Divination sub-class, making use of Portent Dice to change saving throws and ensure they are failed.
There are also items you will discover that will help either boost your difficulty class on spells or minus the enemies saves. But I will let you discover all the ways you can do this yourself.
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