The Lingering Soul – D&D 5e Class Optimisation Guide

Cling to undeath with this ghostly 3rd party class created by Matt Mercer of Critical Role.

At a glance

Tactics

Before I dive into mechanics, it’s worth being aware that lingering souls are relatively weak and vulnerable by design. Their hit dice are low (d6), they have no armor proficiencies and they come back as a level lower than the character was before they died. Also, you’re undead so healing spells and resurrection spells don’t work on you either (unless the wish spell is used). This is pretty grueling on any character and sets you up as worse than a wizard in the durability department.

That’s not to say that they don’t have their own benefits, but this is not an easy class to handle, for player or DM. You’re going to need to be smart and preferably, experienced. I’d also say it’s not one for optimisers. And there’s no multiclassing allowed at all!

If you still want to go ahead with a Lingering Soul, then below are some tactics you can use.

Great scouts

Lingering Souls can build into dexterity quite easily (especially for poltergeists and wraiths). They can also grab stealth proficiency and, uniquely to them, can pass through walls and doors. This gives them a huge advantage as a scout. It also makes it easier for them to run away when things get tough.

Possession can also be a great stealth tactic. This allows you to watch from someone else’s body while they travel around places (and potentially secret places) or help you get into places you shouldn’t be. At level 5, you can also do this without it being known by the host.

At level 10, you become even better at scouting with flight and the ability to cast invisibility twice per day.

Great against physical attacks

Whether it’s non-magical attacks or grapples restraints and similar effects, lingering souls are great against these things with resistance or full on immunity. If there’s the choice, steer away from spellcasters and other magical beings and stick to tackling more physical entities.

At level 7, you’ll also get obfuscate which will half the damage you receive with a reaction which is a much needed resilience feature. Just remember you only get 1 reaction per round, so make it count.

Possession can be potent but complicated

You can possess creatures and choose who they attack and add your aspect modifier to the damage. Pretty good for getting enemies hurting each other. But it’s more complex than that. This creature still acts how it wants on its turn, your just getting one of its attacks against someone you want them to attack. Of course this is only a single attack and you’re reliant on where that creature chooses to go.

You can also move them with the dash action which could be useful for getting them away from the things you want them away from. And plenty of creatures have low charisma so actually possessing things shouldn’t be too challenging (just avoid possessing a bard or an archfey). The main thing to be careful of is that you take the damage the creature does (just half of it) so you may need to coordinate with allies on how you approach this.

Dead creatures make more reliable puppets

If a creature has been killed, you get full control of it’s faculties and can move it where you like (by level 5 at least). Your main problem is it still only gets 1 attack (no matter what it normally gets with the attack action) and it only has 1HP so is extremely susceptible to attacks. The best way to use this is to take out high damage physical attackers first, possess them and use their high damage attacks against your enemies.

Disrupt the possessed

While you can move your host around a decent bit at early levels, your influence on them is limited. By mid levels though, you can really start to disrupt their capabilities. Level 9 will let you disrupt their spellcasting while level 13 will let you impose disadvantage on an attack. Disrupting an attack is more reliable (it just works) but disrupting a spell is more potent (only one attack from the attack action is disrupted but you can stop a whole spell). Just beware that when you stop a spell, the possession ends making you suddenly more vulnerable. However, I’d also say that at this point, it does make possessing a spellcaster more worthwhile.

Poltergeists for ranged weapon attacks

If you want to be making weapon attacks, poltergeists quickly get 2 of these, and they can be made at range. This includes hurling a greatsword (your best option) up to 30ft for standard greatsword damage (which is better ranged damage than anything else, including firearms).

I did look to see if taking the fighting initiate feat would help increase damage output here but the wording for the different fighting styles isn’t really compatible with the way your making attacks here other than the thrown weapon fighting option, but this would only work with thrown weapons which diminishes your damage from using a greatsword anyway.

Making the most of phantasmic force

This is a poltergeist feature that needs a bit of consideration. It replaces your usual attack action so needs to beat 4d6 + x2 aspect modifier in damage (so on average, about 24 damage on 2 hits). To accomplish this, you’ll do the most damage with a 30ft hurl into another creature 30ft away. This will mean 3d8 damage each so 27 damage on average. Any shorter distances will be less than your attacks action.

There are a couple of extra benefits beyond damage though. Namely moving a creature where you want them and knocking them prone making this a bit more worthwhile, especially in coordination with allies.

You can also increase the damage by hurling them off heights as the distance will then increase by the height they fall. This will work best against lower strength opponents.

Gaining more resilience

As mentioned, you’re not that resilient so improving this is important. Increasing your dexterity and/or constitution will obviously help here. A friendly spellcaster could cast mage armor on you or you can grab this yourself with armor of shadows from the eldritch adept feat.

You could also take the poltergeist subclass. The process is slightly convoluted, but they can essentially use armor at level 6 meaning they can actually have a decent AC. Alternatively, being a wraith means you can drain life force from others, healing yourself while you attack.

Possessing allies

If you choose the spirit guardians subclass, you grant a load of benefits to allies by possessing them. This includes things like enhanced weapon attacks, healing your host and another target, increased AC as a reaction and an aura that slows movement and deals damage to enemies. If you reach level 15, this becomes really potent with protections against death and granting some of your benefits like damage and condition resistances, flight and incorporeal movement.

How good is the Lingering Soul?

When it comes to flavour, the Lingering Soul is excellent! The idea of coming back as a spectral form of yourself and continuing your mission is really unique and has great story implications. The different subclasses bring a lot of interesting themes with them too, drawing on different aspects of ghostly undead.

There are definite advantages to playing a lingering soul too. Scouting is great which gives them some strong utility and possession can be really interesting. However, if you’re looking for a class that can compete at a damage dealing level with other classes, then you’ll be disappointed.

On top of this, they lack resilience, but are also, often forced into harm’s way (it’s much harder to hang back and blast spells from range like a sorcerer might). And on that note, despite generally weak attacks, you also don’t have the spells that might normally compensate for that. The best damage you can expect per round is either the equivalent of a cantrip, or the use of a single attack from a possessed enemy (though a poltergeist can do a little better than that).

I think the best way to approach a lingering soul then, is either as a disruptor, or an enhancer (in the case of the spirit guardian). Even then, you’ll likely find that spells from classes like bards and clerics outperform your output in these areas (compare the relative disruption of a level 3 spell like hypnotic pattern to something like your possession which gradually gets more disruptive in levels to a single target).

So while the lingering soul is definitely useful and interesting, it is underpowered, and anyone taking it needs to go into this class, aware that this will be the case alongside more typical classes. If you’re OK with that, then I think you can have a lot of fun with this class doing unique things no other class can manage. And I will caveat my 2/5 for competence with a 5/5 for flavour and uniqueness.

2/5

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Optimising a lingering soul

This will be tricky for a few of reasons. The first is that lingering souls aren’t really built for optimisation, they’re built for flavour. Making a good build is still important for closing that power gap with other classes, but it does make it hard. Secondly, many of its features don’t interact well with some aspects of optimisation (like feats). Thirdly, each subclass varies considerably in its capabilities and even ability score options.

Still, I’ve tried to take all of this into consideration in my advice below.

Ability scores

Recommended options

• Dexterity: Probably your best option for an aspect ability score for poltergeists and wraiths as it can be used for weapon attacks, your AC and stealth.
• Constitution: You badly need more resilience and constitution will grant you extra HP, so I’d focus on this.
• Intelligence, wisdom or charisma: If you’re a spirit guardian, you’ll need wisdom or charisma as your aspect ability score. For either other subclass, you could choose one of these for your aspect ability score, but dexterity makes the most sense for this. If you want to play a charismatic character, then charisma could be useful, if you want more resilience to saving throws, then wisdom is best.

Options to avoid

• Strength: A poltergeist can use strength as their aspect ability score, but they’re the only one, and this has no benefit over dexterity which you can use for your attacks as well, but also allows you to increase your AC. You’re also immune to the types of things that normally trigger a strength saving throw, like being grappled or restrained.

Ability score	Point Buy	Standard Array
Strength	8	8
Dexterity	15	15
Constitution	15	14
Intelligence	8	10
Wisdom	14	13
Charisma	10	12

Skills

Recommended options

• Stealth: Probably your most useful skill alongside perception. If you want to take advantage of your ghostly powers, this is one of the best ways to do it.
• Perception: Your other most important skill. You’ll want to be able to spot danger as you scout about so it’s worth keeping this high.
• Investigation: Another potentially important one as you snoop around and try to discover things. This does mean your most important skills are spread across 3 different ability scores, but this doesn’t mean you have to invest heavily in all those ability scores.

Options to avoid

• Sleight of hand: It’s a little hard to use this when you can’t pick up objects so I’d avoid.

With variable aspect ability scores, it’s not hard to build into a knowledge character or a party face if needs be (potentially with some background, racial or feat support for more skills). This means that other skills can be useful if you want them to be.

If you are picking up skills from elsewhere, I’d be careful of acrobatics and athletics which are much less useful as these checks are less important for a character that can’t be grappled, can fly and doesn’t take fall damage.

Race

You’ll stick with the race from your previous character, but if you are able to plan ahead, the following are some considerations that a lingering soul may find useful:

• Toughen up: You’re not that resilient, but will also find yourself getting caught in dangerous situations. Any features that can toughen you up will be useful.
• Innate spellcasting: You don’t have a spellcasting feature of your own to repeat cast any spells, but it’s not hard to invest in a spellcasting ability as a lingering soul meaning you should at least be an effective spellcaster.
• Stealthiness: Anything that can enhance your stealthiness and dexterity can be helpful. At level 10, you can cast invisibility twice per day so be aware that this does become available for any races that also offer this.

Recommended options

• Autognome: A base AC that’s better than any light armor will make up for your lack of armor proficiency (as long as you have a high dexterity). Built for success is great for anyone and healing machine makes some form of healing possible (you just needs someone with the mending spell). It’s unclear how the healing spells aspect of this interacts with the undead nature of a lingering soul. My inclination is to say that RAI, this wouldn’t work, but RAW, it could. Tool proficiency is no good for you though and you’re already immune to the damage and conditions in here.
• Hill Dwarf: Constitution ability score increases works well for better durability and wisdom can be a decent option for a lingering soul. You also get extra HP to aid your durability.
• Human (variant): I’d grab the tough feat here for that extra resilience. You’re a good option for filling skills gaps with your variable ability score focus making the extra skill useful.
• Goblin: Extra damage on creatures larger than you is useful and a bonus action to disengage can be good for dodging in and out of combat when you get stuck in the front lines while not possessing.
• Goliath: You’re mainly here for the damage reduction which will help you last longer in combat. Cold resistance is useful here too.
• Orc: Survive a bit longer when knocked to 0HP (which is especially dangerous for you). Dash as a bonus action is interesting. I don’t think it can work with your possession version of dash though, but at least the temporary hit points are handy.
• Shifter: Regular temporary hit points and you can take beasthide for higher AC and even more temporary hit points. Wildhunt also makes you more durable by preventing advantage on attacks rolls.
• Simic Hybrid: Constitution increase plus another ability score increase of your choice will suit you well. I’d go for the carapace enhancement for extra AC.
• Tortle: Natural armor is your best option if you happen to go for a low dexterity build (and pretty good even for a high dexterity build). A skill and improved unarmed strikes could be useful for a class that can’t hold weapons at times.
• Warforged: +2 constitution and another ability score increase are great for a lingering soul. You also get +1 AC, some resistances and a skill and tool proficiency. The tool proficiency is no good (you can’t hold them) but this is one of the toughest race options you can grab.

Backgrounds

Again, your background is likely linked to the one you had in life. But if you can plan ahead, you’ll mainly want your background for some extra skills. You can already grab your most important skills through your class (stealth, perception and investigation). Anything else will depend on the skills gaps in the party you want to fill and your ability score focus. However, I’d avoid sleight of hand, athletics and acrobatics. There’s not much you’ll be doing with these.

Choosing your subclass

The Lingering Soul has a choice of 3 subclasses known as phantom callings. They all kick in at level 1. These include the weapon launching calling of the poltergeist, the life draining calling of the wraith and the protective calling of the spirit guardian.

Feats

Instead of taking an ability score improvement, you can opt to take a feat (if your DM allows it). A variant Human can also take a feat at first level and some DMs will grant these to characters at level 1.

I’d suggest the following feats for a Lingering Soul:

• Durable – Without healing spells available, you may want this for better constitution and healing on short rests.
• Eldritch adept – Grab this for armor of shadows so you can have constant mage armor to compensate for your lack of armor. Or combine magic initiate with agonising blast so you can grab eldritch blast, though this is best on high charisma builds.
• Fey-touched – Misty step is a great way of quickly getting out of danger and another spell is handy too.
• Lucky – Turn potential successes or failures in your favour with an extra d20 roll. Great option for any class.
• Magic initiate – Grab this if you want some ranged cantrips to use as attacks as you’re quite limited without weapons (for the most part).
• Mobile – Great for hit and run tactics if you don’t want to be left too vulnerable.
• Shadow-touched – You eventually get invisibility anyway, but this doesn’t kick in until level 10, and an extra use is handy. Plus you get another spell.
• Skilled – Take this to help fill party skill gaps
• Tough – You’ll need the extra hit points so this is worth grabbing.

Weapons

So you can’t actually handle weapons (or any objects). However, if you’ve taken the calling of the poltergeist, then you can hurl weapons at your enemies. You’ll want someone in the party with a supply of weapons you can use. Greatswords are going to be your best option as they have the highest damage and there’s not really any added bonus to having spare hands free for shields or using ranged or thrown weapons. Basically, the bigger the damage on the weapon, the better.

For everyone else, weapons are pointless.

Armor

Lingering Souls can’t wear armor unless you’re a poltergeist. In which case, your choice of armor depends on your dexterity. A high dexterity build should go for studded leather, if you have about 14 dexterity, medium armor like halfplate works well. If you’ve gone with a low dexterity build, then full plate is the way to go.

You might as well grab a shield here too as there’s no disadvantage to wielding a shield in terms of item juggling.

Other class guides

Not sure a Lingering Soul is for you. Not to worry. Why not check out one of our other class and subclass guides.