Before my Triton Wizard overtook him, my longest-played D&D character was an Eldritch Knight Fighter. The campaign sadly fell apart when one of our players had to step away (for happy reasons, though: he became a dad!) and our DM had built much of the plot to hinge on his character.
It's a character I really loved to play, and even though I know I really ought to try some new subclasses and concepts, the changes to Fighters and Eldritch Knights, and even Dragonborn, in the 2024 rules have all made me really eager to play an updated version of the character.
But how much of an update?
My default character in an RPG is a heavily-armored character with access to spellcasting. While this often means playing something like a Paladin, the Eldritch Knight gets about as close as one can to my ideal "Battlemage" archetype as I've seen in any game.
My character, Jax (which I didn't realize was an actual name at the time, and figured it was a cool and draconic-sounding fantasy name) was built kind of around the following concept: having the highest AC possible. Our one-shot adventure that turned into a campaign saw us finding a +1 Shield that Jax received, so on top of his Defensive fighting style and eventually getting his hands on some Adamantine Plate, he ultimately had an AC of 22, which could be pushed to 27 with the Shield spell, which was the main thing he cast with his spell slots.
Now, I've done some math on what a heavy-armor-wearer's AC does for damage reduction compared with what you can get with the lower AC of a Barbarian but who gets the damage reduction from raging, and generally it's actually not nearly as good as the damage resistance. I might run such simulations on the assumption that the Fighter also has the Shield spell and see what it looks like, because basically I was almost never actually hit unless I was crit (which gave me, in retrospect, a sense that I was cursed with getting crit more frequently. Might have just been confirmation bias).
Still, at a very basic level, using a shield is a sacrifice of damage for a martial character. I wasn't dual-wielding or using a big two-handed weapon. The question, though, is how much of a sacrifice it was.
See, I've suspected that if I were to return to this character, I might change the way that I had built him to be lighter on defense and heavier on offense. Even without any shield or the defensive fighting style (though given how crap Great Weapon Fighting is, I might still take defensive,) Plate armor plus the Shield spell means pushing your AC to 23, which is pretty good. And, of course, if our damage is significantly higher, we might embrace the penalty to our un-hittableness because enemies that are dead can't hit us anyway.
So, I wanted to go reconstruct Jax's build a bit in both ways, and see how much more powerful a GWM build would be.
Jax was 12 level when the campaign sputtered to an end, meaning he had three attacks per Attack action. The buff to War Magic (allowing us to replace an attack with one of our cantrips rather than letting us make a single bonus action attack after we cast a cantrip) might actually wind up smoothing out some of our damage differences a little.
We will also be continuing to use Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade, because there's no really decent replacement for them in the 2024 rules (I'm honestly a little bummed they didn't make them it into the new PHB, as they're so ideal for this subclass).
Now, let's talk about the basics:
Jax is a Blue Dragonborn. His species means that he will get a Breath Weapon he can use PB times per day - in his case 4. The Breath Weapon can replace one of his attacks (kind of perfect for a Fighter, who has so many) and does 3d10 lightning damage to any creature in a 30-foot line or a 15-foot cone (he now gets to choose, and boy will it be nice to have the cone option). The DC is going to be based on his Con, but this is a save-for-half feature, so it's guaranteed damage.
He has the Sage background, which is actually a problem if we're using the new Sage, because this fails to boost his Strength in any way. Ideally, we'd be able to use the old version of the background and just pick up the Magic Initiate: Wizard feat to go with it. Jax had actually not rolled any stat above a 14, but used his Dragonborn ability bonuses to get that to 16 at level 1, and just pumped up Strength and Con with ASIs until he took Tough at level 12.
Given the way General Feats work now, I'd probably do things a bit differently. If we just went to Point Buy, I'd probably go for a 15 in Strength and get +2 to that from the Background, and then shoot for at least a 14 in Con. I had overestimated the need for a good Intelligence modifier when I first built him, so he actually started off with a +2 to Int and only a +1 to Con. At the very least I'd flip that, though I also always intended to find him a Headband of Intellect (in years of playing, he never had any attunement magic items).
Thanks to how many feats he can get as he levels up, if I could start him off with a 17 Strength, I'd probably then just pick up a General feat at 4, 6, 8, and 12, three of which would be Strength-based ones, and the other being War Caster (Booming Blade as an Opportunity Attack feels really nasty, but it also solves the issue of having to drop your weapon if you need to cast Shield - something that the GWM build is not as worried about because they only need both hands on their weapon when they're attacking with it).
For cantrips, we're obviously using Green-Flame Blade and Booming Blade - the former just when we have a secondary target to hit and the latter in all other situations.
Now, weapon choice of course depends on whether we're going for the Sword-and-Board build or GWM. In terms of aesthetic, I love a Battlemage with a Maul, and perhaps because it's so optimal, I'd almost hope that my DM wouldn't give me a magic Greatsword. But in terms of figuring out the actual damage potential, it's pretty clear that Graze is just by far the most powerful damage mastery for any Great Weapon, so we're going to assume we have that.
For our sword-and-board build, it's a more open question. We basically want to ensure we're using a one-handed d8 weapon, which means picking between Battleaxes, Flails, Longswords, Morningstars, Rapiers, Tridents, Warhammers, and War Picks. Just as a special note, Tridents are actually kind of ideal for an Eldritch Knight because they're the only d8 weapon with the Thrown property (can we get to d10 if we throw it two-handed?) and thanks to Weapon Bond, we can get it back with a bonus action after throwing it - it's fitting that the official Eldritch Knight art depicts one with a Trident). What this really comes down to is the Topple, Sap, Vex, and Push masteries. However, because we by this level have Tactical Master, effectively every weapon we use already has the Push, Sap, and Slow masteries. Thus, we're sort of leaving some options on the table if we don't pick up one that has either Topple or Vex. So, we'll want to grab a Battleaxe, Rapier, or Trident.
I imagine that in terms of damage potential, the Rapier, which has Vex, is almost certainly the right choice. Topple can potentially also give us advantage on attacks, but requires a creature to fail a Con save. So, perhaps this is ignoring a significant bit of damage potential, but I'm going to say we're going with a Trident for this build and furthermore, we're actually going to ignore the Topple Mastery, making an assumption that the monsters we're fighting at level 12 have beefy Con (though boy does the Trident having the Thrown property and also Topple make it feel awesome for downing flying enemies). I'm tempted to, in the interest of fairness, ignore Graze when calculating the damage potential of a GWM build. Actually, given how Graze is in most instances more powerful than Topple, we're for sure going to do that.
Phew, almost there.
Feats!
Naturally, our GWM build is going to start off at level 4 picking up Great Weapon Master. While there are some redundancies, Polearm Master is a good pairing with this (swapping out a Greatsword for a Glaive) but I think I'm going to turn it down, instead getting Mage Slayer (on both builds,) which is so dang good (between that and the new Indomitable, Jax's mind is going to be hard to mess with). Both will also pick up War Caster (while the GWM build will already have a free hand for spellcasting, the advantage on Concentration saves and especially the cast-a-spell-as-an-opportunity-attack features are very nice). That leaves one more feat for GWM and two more for S&B, which will need to be a Strength feat in order to get our Strength to 20.
Now, of course, we could pick up Polearm Master for our GWM build. And it would probably be plenty good, even if the Pole Strike aspect of it would be slightly diluted by our several attacks. Here, though, I might just make an aesthetic decision and say we want to be using a Buster Sword-sized Greatsword. Now, Sentinel is an obvious choice here, but we have the following downside - our Warcaster opportunity attacks will not work as well when doing our Booming Blade trick. That being said, the language of War Caster means that we aren't technically making an Opportunity attack, so Booming Blade would't actually reduce their speed to 0. Then again, we really want to keep our Reactions open for Shield. It's a tough call.
I think in part for consistency's sake, we're going to go with a defensive feat (that still boosts Strength) in the form of Heavy Armor Master. Now, in those rare cases where we do get hit, we can reduce incoming bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by 4 (and I think this goes up to 5 at the next level). It's not going to be Barbarian-level damage reduction, and of course doesn't help with other damage types, but melee attacks still mostly do these types of damage (and even if it's a mix of, say, piercing and poison, that 4 still subtracts from the overall total).
This leaves what the final feat for our S&B build is using. Shield Master is certainly tempting - it's a little unclear to me whether you get to use your Reaction before or after knowing if you would succeed on your saving throw with Interposing Shield (as written it looks like before, which means we couldn't use, like, Absorb Elements if we got hit by a Fireball and got a 5 on our saving throw) but it does seem to interact well with Indomitable. And honestly, at this point there aren't a ton of feats left to choose from. So, yeah, we'll go with that.
So, to recap, we're going with War Caster, Mage Slayer, Heavy Armor Master, and then either Shield Master or Great Weapon Master (not necessarily in that order, but we're starting off at level 12, so we can have all four).
In terms of spells, I'm going to keep this simple for the sake of my sanity: we're using Booming Blade in single-target situations, and our spell slots are being reserved for Shield, Absorb Elements, or Misty Step.
Ok, finally, let's get those damage calculations!
Because we're essentially ignoring weapon masteries, I think we don't really need to worry about hit chance. We will still generally have a 5% crit chance, which will activate GWM's Hew attack. Again, between our Trident and Shield Master for the S&B build, we can probably actually knock enemies prone frequently, but I'm going to just have to ignore this again for the sake of sanity.
So, we're basically comparing damage on hits, which makes this a lot easier.
S&B:
Starting off with the build closest to our original one, we've got a +5 to Strength and +4 PB. While I had a +1 weapon in the original campaign, assuming some kind of big reset, I'll just act as if it's all mundane equipment.
Thus, our Trident hits are going to be 1d8+5. Booming Blade at this level adds 2d8 Thunder damage on the initial hit and an additional 3d8 if they move, but we'll assume we're both planting our feet.
Thus, on our turn, as the Attack Action, we are doing one attack for 3d8+5 (18.5 damage). Now, regarding our Breath Weapon, we will probably only use this when we can catch multiple targets in it - 3d10 is 16.5 average damage, which is quite good, but it's limited to 4 per day. If we want to go all out, we'll use this every turn, and this will of course dilute the distinction between the builds a bit. But let's assume some conservatism and say that on a single target, we're just sticking to our regular attacks.
Thus, our S&B build is going to hit with 3d8+5 + 1d8+5 + 1d8+5, or ultimately 5d8+15, which comes out to 37.5 damage. Again, this is assuming all hits, so we shouldn't look at this and think it's some really impressive DPR.
GWM:
Our GWM build is going to hit for 2d6+2d8+9 on our Booming Blade attack, and then 2d6+9 on the second and third hits, or a total of 6d6+2d8+27, which comes to 57 damage. If any of our three attacks as part of our Attack action crit, we get another Hew attack as a bonus action. With three attacks, we've got a roughly 14% chance to get a crit on our turn, which only deals 2d6+5 (we don't get to add our PB to this damage). 14%x12 is 1.68, so our 57 goes up to 58.68.
In other words, we're only doing about 64% of our damage with Sword & Board as we would be with GWM.
Now, the GWM build is built far more for raw damage. The many Topples we could do with our S&B build could potentially be very useful in some fights, and I think that the higher our AC, the more impactful even higher AC can be. A 23 AC is impressive, but perhaps not quite as much as a 27 that I was able to pull with my old build, where a creature that had a +7 or lower to attack needed to crit me.
Still, I think I'd be inclined to move more toward this damage-output focus, which would speed up combat. Also, we haven't talked about how awesome Graze is for a Fighter with Tactical Mastery - as a weapon mastery that only actually does something if we miss, this means we can always pick Sap, Push, or Slow when we do connect without sacrificing anything.
Ah, it'd be fun to play that character again.