Dungeons & Dragons is home to many quirky, extraordinary, and powerful magic items for player characters to acquire. While each magic item has something to offer on its own, things become even more interesting when we consider the implications of combining magic items together.
There are a handful of magic items whose effects happen to be even more devastating when put to use alongside another one of their contemporaries. In some cases, the resulting effects might not even have anything to do with either of the original items' intended purposes. Today, we'll take a look at some of the coolest combinations of magic items available in the game.
5 Wand Of Web + Wand Of Fireballs
This combination of magic items is as much a spell effect combo as it is a magic item one. In fact, you don't technically need either of these magic items in order to enact this combo. You just need access to the 2nd level spell Web and the 3rd level spell Fireball. However, having both wands makes the effect much more easily repeatable. Without them, you'll find yourself starved for spell slots very quickly.
This combo works thanks to the wording of the Web spell mentioning that any 5-foot cube of webs exposed to flame catches fire. The webs then burn away in 1 round, dealing 2d4 fire damage to any creature that starts its turn in them. Thanks to this wording, you can catch creatures in a Web spell, restrain them with the webbing, and then set it all ablaze with a well-placed fireball. Since it takes a full round for the webbing to disintegrate, creatures restrained by the flaming webs remain that way until your following turn. That's gotta burn.
4 Trident Of Fish Command + Ring Of Animal Influence
For any character interested in collecting a menagerie of animals, there are no better magic items than the Trident of Fish Command and Ring of Animal Influence. Using the Trident of Fish Command, you can cast Dominate Beast on any creature with an innate swimming speed. It should be noted that creatures actively hostile towards you are granted advantage on the save, so it's best to sneak up on fishy creatures you're looking to command if at all possible.
Once you have the beast properly under your command, you can then use the Ring of Animal Influence to deepen your relationship with the creature. While Speak with Animals works perfectly fine for trying to establish some common ground or arrange a sort of symbiotic relationship with the creature, beasts with an Intelligence score of 3 or lower won't even have a chance to refuse your offer thanks to the ring's ability to cast Animal Friendship. While you have the beast under the influence of Dominate Beast, you can cast Animal Friendship on the creature using the ring and force them to choose to fail the saving throw.
Consequently, even when the duration of Dominate Beast runs up at the end of one hour's time, the beast still remains charmed by you thanks to Animal Friendship. This provides you with another 24 hours of servitude from the animal, though the beast probably won't be as willing to give its life for you as it is when it's under the effects of Dominate Beast. You can rinse and repeat this process each day to maintain the service of a creature. If your DM is especially gracious, you might not even have to continue using spells on the beast after a certain amount of time spent with the creature.
3 Wand Of Paralysis + Flame Tongue
In case you didn't know, the paralyzed condition is one of the most devastating conditions you can inflict on your foes. Not only does paralysis take away the creature's next turn and provide attackers with advantage, it also makes it so that any melee attack that lands turns into an automatic critical hit. Ouch. The wand of paralysis allows its user to inflict this condition on any creature within 60 feet as long as they fail a DC 15 Constitution saving throw.
The best way to take advantage of free critical hits is by adding more dice to your damage rolls. This is because a critical hit doubles the amount of dice rolled for damage. As a result, the best easily available magic item to pair with paralyzing opponents is the Flame Tongue. This magic sword adds an extra 2d6 fire damage to each successful attack made with it after you use a bonus action to activate its flames. When attacking a paralyzed creature, these dice double to 4d6 fire on top of whatever other damage your attack normally deals.
2 Staff Of Power + Potion Or Ring Of Resistance (Force)
-by-Ralph-Horsley-Cropped.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5)
The Staff of Power is a very rare magic item sought after by any sorcerer, warlock, or wizard who knows of its existence. On top of providing its wielder with a +2 bonus to AC, saving throws, and spell attack rolls, the Staff of Power also provides access to many powerful spells. The list of spells is too long to type out here, which should provide you with a good idea of how useful it is. However, the Staff has one last property that's especially important for the purposes of this article: retributive strike. If you use an action to break the staff over your knee, the item explodes with the power of all of the spells currently inside it.
This explosion can deal 160 force damage in a single instance if the staff is fully charged. The only problem is that the staff's wielder takes twice as much damage as everyone else exposed to the explosion, though there is a 50% chance that you're transported to a random plane of existence and avoid the explosion. In case you aren't savvy on taking a coin flips chance of obliterating your character, you can pair the retributive strike with a potion or Ring of Force Resistance to reduce the amount of damage you take by half. It's also worth mentioning that preparing for the explosion by placing the Death Ward spell on your character will instead make it so that you survive the explosion with 1 hit point.
1 Bag Of Holding + Portable Hole / Heward's Handy Haversack
The best combination of magic items also seems to be the most widely known one, which only makes sense. The items above are all used in order to carry the large sums of treasure that adventures collect over the course of their journeys. However, if you place one of them inside the other, you will create a gate to the Astral Plane. This gate immediately sucks any creature within 10 feet of it through the portal, depositing all such creatures into a random location on the Astral Plane. Then, the gate closes. The portal provides a one-way trip, and there's no way to re-open it.
While this doesn't technically kill anyone who is sucked through the gate to the Astral Plane, chances are that they will not be coming back. The Astral Plane is full of powerful enemies including slaadi, mind flayers, githyanki, astral dreadnoughts, and more. Beyond that, finding a color pool you can use to escape back to the Material Plane requires traveling through the dangers of the plane for anywhere between 6 and 24 hours or more. For this method to even work at all though, you first have to know that you need to think about traveling to such a color pool. Consequently, this is a near surefire way to deal with any foe who is incapable of interplanar travel magic. Bye!