Mercer's Exandria Unlimited Character Taps New Best Spellcaster Race

Matt Mercer is playing a Mountain Dwarf Divine Soul Sorcerer in Exandria Unlimited, the latest series from the folks at Critical Role. Having handed the DM's chair to Aabria Iyengar for this series, Matt finds himself in the player's chair with a very clever mechanical build.

The key tech to this build is the Mountain Dwarf. Matt is not shy about his feelings on the dwarf race:

Why Mountain Dwarf?

With the ASI-swapping and proficiency-swapping rules in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Mountain Dwarf took the lead as the best race for spellcasting classes.

Tasha's Tweaks

Specifically, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything released rules that allowed players to swap out a number of racial features. You can change ability score increases to a new score, and you can swap skill, armor, weapon, tool, and language proficiencies (with some limitations):

Dwarf

Dwarves always came with a solid kit, including +2 CON, darkvision, advantage vs. poison, stonecunning, and a handful of weapon, tool, and language proficiencies.

CON is a great stat for spellcasters, who are typically saddled with a frailer hit die and rely on Constitution to maintain concentration on spells. While the remaining features are mostly ribbons, the ability to swap weapon/tool proficiencies and languages offers a wide variety of customizability.

Mountain Dwarf

But, the buck doesn't stop there. Unlike any other subrace, only the Mountain Dwarf gets +2 to two different ability scores at character creation. While +2 STR is not likely to be useful to a spellcaster, Tasha's ASI-swapping means you can easily move that boost over to your spellcasting stat.

Mountain Dwarf also shores up the weakest defensive shortcoming of Wizards and Sorcerers by giving them light and medium armor proficiency. Typically, a sorcerer or wizard with no armor proficiencies can only increase their Armor Class by pumping Dexterity--a tertiary ability score for casters. With a higher armor class, a spellcaster's few hit points can be stretched a lot farther.

By mixing a Chain Shirt with 14 Dexterity, Mercer is able to achieve 15 Armor Class with his level 2 Sorcerer. And, there's no purpose to investing more Dexterity, since the Chain Shirt already caps the benefit at +2 DEX. Instead, raising your Armor Class costs a much less precious resource than ASIs: gold (to purchase Half Plate, Breastplate, or Scale Mail).

If you're building a spellcaster, you should know whether to take War Caster or Resilient (CON) or perhaps consider the benefits of the Gunner feat.