Which Ritual Caster for investigations?

[Mr Adventurer]

Which of Ritual Caster (Wizard) and Ritual Caster (Cleric) had the best overall utility for investigations, and why? Especially of the sort you are likely to encounter in D&D where the thing you're looking for also has magic involved, from invisibility to shapechanging.

Or maybe I'm missing a trick and another class has the best selection of options!

[DrKerosene]

Can I suggest being a Knowledge Domain Cleric who has the Ritual Caster (Wizard) feat?

I think being able to conjure a bunch of Unseen Servants, or some Phantom Steeds, would be useful for remotely moving things, triggering traps, etc. Also, sending a Familiar to view something, or fit into a small area, would be handy for investigations too.


If you’re slapping one such feat onto a rogue or fighter, then I suppose Cleric would provide more ritual spells directly related to getting answer.

[Mr Adventurer]

Sadly not - in this case it's for an existing character!

[Chronos]

On the one hand, the wizard list as a whole contains more and better rituals than the cleric list as a whole.

On the other hand, the cleric ritual list includes Augury, Divination, and Commune, which are extremely valuable for information-gathering.

On the gripping hand, if you're getting the rituals via the feat (or, alternately, via warlock), you have to find the spells in written form somewhere. Every wizard you meet has a spellbook, which you can potentially get your hands on to copy from, but not every spellcaster has scrolls, so it's significantly harder to find non-wizard rituals than wizard rituals.

[Lunali]

Assuming you can get scrolls for them, cleric gets you detect poison and disease, augury, divination, and commune, wizard gets you find familiar, comprehend languages, identify, and contact other plane. Which is more useful depends on what sort of investigations you're planning.

If you can convince your DM to let you pick a tressym (SKT) as a familiar, detecting poison becomes less useful. Depending on the world, divine testimony may be inadmissible if this is a legal investigation. Comprehend languages can be replaced with a magic item in worlds where they're common enough to buy.

[Mr Adventurer]

Good points, thanks all. I'm leaning toward Wizard, partly for the more general utility, partly for the greater ease of access - though even that's only hypothetical and DM-dependent.

[Man_Over_Game]

Wizard is probably the way to go. Druid has some mention with its animal communication effects, but Wizard's Find Familiar is probably worth the feat by itself.