Blaster Goo-Lock vs. Death Knight

 We've been looking primarily at weapon-based builds that mostly involve just attacking with weapons, which does make the math relatively simple, but here I wanted to go to my very first character concept and see how they compare.

There's a lot of discourse that talks about how spellcasters are just more powerful than non-spellcasters in D&D. And I think that's probably true in a general sense - my Wizard can just do so many more things than our party's Fighter/Rogue. One could imagine that martial characters would still excel in single-target damage, but some spells (primarily Conjure Minor Elementals, but others as well) can allow a caster to overtake a martial character even in that scenario.

Part of this, I think, is that people don't really play D&D the way that its design leans: essentially, people rest far too often compared to how often they get into fights. Martial characters often don't have to burn resources to be at near-top-form. If the Wizard is relying on cantrips most rounds, then yes, a Barbarian is probably going to do way more damage than they do. But I think when you only have a few combats per day, the casters never have to play all that conservatively. And I will say that this isn't entirely players' faults: I think that the output of damage that monsters do compared with the amount of HP that players have also means that players want to take a rest more frequently than the game's resource systems are designed around.

I did a post a while back determining how many encounters using the 2024 DMG's encounter-building system we should have using the 2014 DMG's "Adventuring Day" value's worth of XP. It's a bit unhinged - and given how conservative the 2014 encounter-building rules were, you'd have a massive number of fairly trivial encounters if you used it.

Notably, 2024's DMG got rid of the section on the Adventuring Day. While I think very few people actually used it, and I think that the designers reasoned that players these days treat combat more as action set-pieces than something you're going to deal with in every room of a dungeon, it does actually mean that there's a crucial piece missing in figuring out the overall difficulty of a day's adventure.

But of all the full spellcasting classes, I think the Warlock is somewhat bounded because of its weird, unique spellcasting system.

Warlocks will never have more than 4 spell slots, though to be fair, at higher levels they also get their Mystic Arcana. This encourages them to treat spells a little differently - especially in single-target situations, they're usually best off picking a good concentration spell and then using something unlimited, like Eldritch Blast or a Pact Weapon, to be their main action over the course of a fight.

Warlocks have fairly simple gameplay because of this limitation, but building them involves a lot of complexity through Eldritch Invocations.

We thus have a ton of ways to build out even a pure Warlock character, but I'm going to just go a single, simple route: We're going to make an Eldritch-Blast-focused Great Old One Warlock, and we're going to see how they do versus a Death Knight at level 10.

    Feats:

Ok, as usual, we're assuming we take a background that allows us to boost our Charisma, and via Point Buy or Standard Array, we'll start off with a 17 Charisma at level 1. I've been ignoring Savage Attacker for the martials here, and really just ignoring Origin Feats overall, so I shan't start incorporating them now!

At level 4, I'm tempted to deviate from my usual: War Caster is a fantastic feat, but the main benefit is that we get advantage on Concentration saves. That's super-valuable for a Warlock who doesn't have a lot of other spell-slots to re-up a concentration spell, but we can take Eldritch Mind instead as an Invocation. The other benefits of the feat - the spells-as-opportunity-attacks and ability to do somatic components with weapons or shields in hand are... not actually that useful for us. We're going to be staying way the hell away from our foes if we can (though we might need to dip in briefly to establish a clairvoyant connection) and this ain't a Blade pact build (though even then, a Pact weapon can be used as a spell focus).

So instead, I'm going to grab Spell Sniper. This will let us use Eldritch Blast in melee without any penalty, and then it will also let us ignore partial cover when we attack with it.

At level 8, we could just take an ASI to cap out our Charisma, but I think that's leaving some tasty tools on the table. Some of the usual hits are a bit less appealing - Fey Touched, for example, is a common choice because Misty Step is so awesome, but not when you have to use your very limited 5th level spell slots to cast it (after one free casting, of course). Telepathic is also a bit redundant with our Great Old One subclass features.

Telekinetic, on the other hand, is thematic and not terribly redundant, and we don't really need our bonus action very much (which we'll talk about in Spells) so we can use the Telekinetic Shove very frequently. I think this is probably the one to grab.

    Invocations:

At level 10, we'll have 7 Eldritch Invocations. Let's get the obvious ones out of the way:

Agonizing Blast is a must-have, helping our Eldritch Blast scale almost as well as a weapon (actually scaling just as well as a nonmagical weapon,) meaning we're doing about as well as a Fighter with a Heavy Crossbow or Pistol.

Eldritch Mind is then a must-have because we're skipping War Caster.

Now, what about a Pact Boon? We're skipping Pact of the Blade because that's not the build we're going for. Pact of the Chain could give us advantage on one of our attacks, which isn't nothing. Probably our best bet for this purpose, sadly, would be a mundane beast rather than any of our special options to get something with Flyby, though I do really like the Sphinx of Wonder's Burst of Ingenuity reaction. We'll set this aside for now.

Actually, if we're just getting a mundane familiar, we might as well get Pact of the Tome instead, with which we can get Find Familiar as our free ritual spell. I like this pact boon a lot, but I think our main cantrip is going to come with the class anyway, so again, we'll save it for if we have extra slots left.

Repelling Blast won't increase our damage, but it's a fantastic bit of utility (especially as we get more blasts leveling up).

Gift of the Protectors is, again, not going to boost our damage, but it can keep one of our friends up, so I think it's worth grabbing. This does require Pact of the Tome, so if we take it, that's 5 claimed, and two left.

Fiendish Vigor is ok, but it notably doesn't say you get False Life automatically prepared - you can just cast it without a spell slot, and get a flat 12 Temp Hp. That's actually pretty good for keeping you a little more resilient over an adventuring day, but it doesn't scale with your level at all.

Honestly, there's not a lot left to just boost damage, so I'd personally take Devil's Sight, Mask of Many Faces, and, let's say Lessons of the First Ones to grab something nice like Tough, Lucky, Alert, or what-have-you. This last one might be less valuable if we're already, like, a Human with two Origin feats. We'll assume we have Lucky somehow.

    Spells:

Our concentration and our spell slots are precious, so this will probably be pretty simple.

Our main "thing" is going to be Eldritch Blast, which resembles a Heavy Crossbow for a martial in a few ways: it does 1d10 damage, we add the 4 of our main ability modifier to damage, we push targets pack 10 feet when we hit them, and we get to make two attacks per turn.

In terms of non-concentration spells to consider, Armor of Agathys is good for both protection and to punish attackers, but ideally we're going to stay the hell away from our Death Knight adversary, and let the melee martial characters tank it. If we had the minute and components to cast it, Magic Circle could really work wonders at protecting us from the Death Knight. But we'll assume we can't really do that.

Thus, we're going to focus mainly on just a single concentration spell and our cantrip on subsequent turns.

I think there's an argument for Hunger of Hadar here - Death Knights have Darkvision, but that won't pierce the darkness of the spell, and because we have Devil's Sight, we'll be getting advantage on our attacks. Furthermore, if the Death Knight tries to move out of it, we can use our Repelling Blast and/or our Telepathic Shove to push them back into it. Both damage types from the spell will be effective against the Death Knight, but there's no save against the Cold damage, so we'd pour our upcasting into that, doing 4d6 cold at the start of the DK's turn and then 2d6 Acid on a failed save.

There are a couple problems, though: first is our friends. Hunger of Hadar is kind of area-denial, and sadly that applies to our party members as well. If we think we can reliably box the Death Knight into it (get a friend to cast Wall of Force around it, or something) it'll be great, but if we want some melee characters engaging with the Death Knight, this will hinder them.

Second, the Death Knight can move with legendary actions. So even if we push them back 20 feet, and even another 5 with our Telepathic feat, and they're in difficult terrain, they can still do 37.5 feet of movement each round, which will get them out of the spell's radius. (Granted, if you put it in a bottleneck, that might run them into your melee folks).

I think this would be a really cool play, but I think the simpler option is what I really wanted to build around anyway, which is Summon Aberration.

Now, for pure damage output, the Mind Flayer (formerly Star Spawn) option is going to do the most because of their Whispering Aura. But these spirits are pretty fragile - it'll only have 50 HP and an AC of 16. The safer option is to use the Beholderkin, which can hover and shoot rays at a range of 150 feet. Put them far away from any of the party so they don't get caught in a Hellfire Orb and you should be ok as long as you maintain concentration.

    Game Plan:

This is pretty simple: We cast Summon Aberration on turn 1 (it's an hour duration, so if we know things are about to pop off, we can cast it ahead of time, but I'm assuming the fight comes as a bit of a surprise).

Next, we scoot up to just within 30 feet of the Death Knight and attempt to use Clairvoyant Combatant on them. Full disclosure: if the Death Knight fails, they will probably burn a Legendary resistance, so this probably won't do anything. But it's worth a shot, if only to burn that LR.

Our familiar acts on its own initiative (barring a home rule) and so we'll have it Help whoever hits the hardest in our party. We'll have it take an Owl form so that it can fly, help, and then fly out without provoking an opportunity attack. Like the Beholderkin, we want it to spread out to avoid AoE spells. Because this might go to helping, say, the Paladin, I'm not going to include it in our calculations.

We have our Aberration fire two Eye Rays at the Death Knight.

On turn two, we will use Eldritch Blast to attack the Death Knight twice, and then have our Aberration keep shooting.

    Lucky and Advantage:

We'll have 4 luck points at this level. Lucky and Heroic Inspiration have kind of flipped in 5.5, so this will just grant advantage, or disadvantage if we're attacked. We could use this on two rounds of Eldritch Blasts to get advantage on all four of those attacks.

I... boy, here I think that the white-room optimizer nature of this series suggests that's what we should do, but in practice, I'd for sure hold this for, like, a saving throw against Hellfire Orb or Command or something.

Ok, bowing to the real world of actually playing this game, I'm going to say we're not burning Luck Points to get advantage on attacks. Sorry.

    Eldritch Blasts:

We have a +8 to hit here, meaning we have to get a 12 or higher on the die, and so we have a 45% hit chance. Without advantage, unless we're using our Familiar for it or Luck Points, that's just going to be it.

Our damage is 1d10+4 at this point, or about 9.5, with a 5.5 bonus on a crit. Thus, 9.5x45% is 4.275, and our crit bonus is 5.5x5%, or .275, so our total damage per attack is 4.55. Double that and we get 9.1.

    Aberration:

Our summoned Aberration is going to be doing a bit more: they have the same hit/crit chance, and it's also doing two attacks. Each hit lands for 1d8+8 at this level, or 12.5, and adds 4.5 on a crit. So, 12.5x45% is 5.625 and the crit bonus, 4.5x5%, is .225, giving us 5.85 per attack. Double that and we get 11.7.

    Summing It Up:

Thus, we get 20.8 damage per turn starting on turn 2.

That's actually well behind what we were getting on our other builds.

I will argue, though, that we bring some utility here, especially with Repelling Blast, which is a no-save pushback. With our long range on our attacks, we could spend potentially a couple rounds just pushing the Death Knight away from us if we can hit them from far enough away.

Let's try something different:

If we can bottleneck the Death Knight in a corridor or something, and we have a couple of meatshields - say a Paladin and a Barbarian) to block the way, let's see what we can do with Hunger of Hadar. Our melee allies would stand at the edge of the spell, unaffected but preventing the Death Knight from getting through. While they wouldn't be able to see the Death Knight inside it, the Death Knight is also blinded, and thus both our allies and the Death Knight would be making straight rolls. We, however, would be making attacks at advantage.

We give up our Aberration's damage, which is a big blow, because they actually hit harder than we do. But we gain the damage from Hunger of Hadar and also the increased damage because of our Advantage.

We're also assuming that the Death Knight will A: not burn legendary resistances against Hunger of Hadar and B: not retreat out the back of it. These are some generous assumptions, but it's what we're working with.

    Eldritch Blast:

The damage is the same, but we now have a different hit and crit chance. These will be 69.75% (wait, did I mess up the math in my Barbarian post? I think I had this as 67.75, but I calculated the miss chance as 55% squared, and found the difference with 1, and got this. Oh well, the Barbarian was winning anyway). And then, 9.75% chance to crit.

9.5x69.75% is 6.62625 and 9.75%x5.5 is .53625, so our total damage per blast is 7.1625. Double that for our two blasts and we get 14.325 per turn - after turn 1.

    Hunger of Hadar:

Cast at 5th level, we'll be able to add 2d6 to either (or one to each) the acid or cold damage of the spell. Because the Cold damage has no save, we'll do that. Thus, when the Death Knight starts their turn in the spell, they'll take 4d6 cold damage, and then at the end of their turn, they'll take 2d6 Acid damage if they fail a dex save at the end of their turn. Again, we're assuming we can keep the Death Knight in there the entire time.

So, 4d6 cold damage, no save, means 14 damage every round.

Then, there's the Dex save. This is a save-for-none, so it only works if they fail the save. Death Knight have Magic Resistance and a +6 to Dex saves. Our DC at this point is 16, so they fail on a 9 or lower, a 45% chance, but because of advantage, they need to fail on both dice, so it's 45% squared, or 20.25%. The damage is 2d6, or 7 on average, acid on a failure, so on average, that's 7 times 20.25%, or 1.4175.

Thus, the damage we're getting from Hunger of Hadar becomes 15.4175.

    Summing it Up:

This brings our total damage to 29.7425, which does beat our both our Rogue and our Artificer, but falls behind our Eldritch Knight and our Berserker, and this is in a scenario where things really favor us.

    One Last Thing:

Honestly, there's an alternative here: What if we just blow our spell slots on Synaptic Static?

Synaptic Static does 8d6 psychic damage, basically a Fireball that targets Intelligence and has some nice knock-on effects, but is also two spell levels higher. Death Knights only have a +1 to Intelligence saving throws, so they need to roll a 15 or higher, and still take half damage on a success.

Weirdly, we can kind of treat this like Graze in that way - the equivalent of 4d6 is hitting them no matter what, and they save to avoid the other 4d6 (is this actually easier? I don't know). So, they've got a 70% chance to fail on the save, though this becomes 49% because of advantage (70% squared). Thus, they have a guaranteed 14 (well, average) damage coming their way, and then a 49% chance to take another 14, which comes to 6.86, so the spell is doing 20.86 damage to them on average.

That is actually very, very slightly better than our Eldritch Blast/Aberration. However, we can only sustain it for two rounds, whereas the EB/SA version is sustainable for literally an hour, and our Hunger of Hadar version can last a full minute.

Death Knights actually don't have a ton of hit points - only 199 - for a creature of their power so if you're in a party with other big damage-dealers, doing the simplest and burstiest kind of damage might actually be the right call.

That being said: the truth is that D&D combat doesn't happen in a vacuum, and you can combo with other players in a lot of fun ways. The forced movement of Eldritch Blast can be very helpful, and blinding the Death Knight with Hunger of Hadar will, among other things, prevent them from using Command or Fell Word.

I'll also say that my choice of Death Knight as the target of these builds, along with the lack of any magic items (like a Rod of the Pact Keeper) does disadvantage builds focusing a lot on attack rolls, as DKs have pretty high AC for this level.

Again, I suspect that a Death Knight would be very likely to burn a legendary resistance on Clairvoyant Combatant, and they'd already have to roll quite low for it to work in the first place. There are tons of monsters for whom I think this build would be a lot more effective.

So take all those grains of salt.

Berserker v Death Knight

 So, I've been having fun figuring out what a fairly straight-forward single-class build of various sorts (arguably the Armorer and Eldritch Knight had a lot of moving parts, but weren't that complicated - the Rogue was the tough one because of how complex Vex makes things).

Of all D&D classes, Barbarian might be the one I've played the least (Druid is also there - both were basically partial one-shot characters).

That said, after playing Alan Wake II - a game that might have my favorite narrative and overall artistic ambition of all time - I started getting kind of excited about the idea for a Barbarian character. The premise was that the character had been trapped in the Shadowfell for over a decade. During that time, in order to survive there, he either manifested a dark alter-ego or perhaps in truth, some actual entity from there possessed him. Either way, when he rages, he becomes a terrifying shadow-monster (the visual would be like if you were watching a film and someone had taken a black sharpie and colored over a character frame-by-frame, but scratched a rough, grinning face out of the sharpie with a needle).

While the flavor of the character is highly supernatural, looking at the various subclasses, I actually felt that the Berserker wound up being the best fit - even if the Berserker is, in theory, the "basic, mundane" Barbarian, every subclass feature seemed to play into the fantasy of this character - you can't be frightened or charmed because the shadow-monster has already taken control, for instance.

And don't get me wrong: I really like the flavor of the World Tree Barbarian, not to mention its mechanics. I would also love the Path of the Beast if they fixed the "this subclass gives you special weapons but no obvious way for them to scale" problem, and can really imagine a kind of Werewolf Barbarian (guess I should play a Stormwight Fury in Draw Steel). But Berserker, heavily reskinned, feels the best option here.

Ok, so, as I've been doing with the other builds, this is going to be assuming a 10th level Barbarian versus a Death Knight as our really scary tier 2 boss monster (either a campaign boss or the hurdle we need to clear to get into tier 3). Likewise, I'm going to assume no magic items (which would be DM malpractice, but it makes the theorycrafting easier). We're doing a straight-class build, and we're assuming we've got a background that boosts Strength so we can get a 17 in Strength at level 1 with Point Buy.

I am also, perhaps unfairly, going to ignore Origin Feats - Savage Attacker would boost our damage, but I think (and maybe I need to do the math on it) it's not terribly significant (though as someone who often does the math here to like four decimal places, it's certainly more significant than that). Anyway, we're going to ignore it. Likewise, I'm ignoring Species features - I'm sure that a, like, Fire Goliath is probably optimal, but whatever.

So, let's talk about our build and then we'll get into our damage output.

    Weapon Choice and Feats:

This is going to tie pretty closely into feats. Barbarians are arguably better-incentivized than most to make lots of attacks, because we get to add our Rage Bonus each time. But does that make up for the lack of a big heavy weapon, which both has bigger damage dice and also allows us to get Great Weapon Master? Not to mention Polearm Master?

I think (I think) that I did the math back in 2024 and found that basically every Strength-based character will do better with a two-handed weapon than Dual Wielding - even when you have Paladins getting Radiant Strikes. Barbarians don't get a Fighting Style, so they wouldn't get Two Weapon Fighting without sacrificing a chance at bumping their strength, which cuts into the potential benefit of getting one (or after turn one, two, if we're using a Nick weapon) extra Rage bonuses. GWM is just so powerful - 4 damage added to two attacks at this level is going to be better than adding 3 damage on two additional attacks. And if we're thinking damage dice, if we use a 2d6 weapon, we're basically getting the same number of d6s per turn making two attacks as we would making four attacks with 1d6 weapons.

Thus, I think we're going to stick to a big heavy weapon. But which one?

Mathematically, the best weapon of this type is the Greatsword, which edges out the Maul (the only other to share its dice) because Graze is just that powerful, especially against a high-AC monster like a Death Knight.

I know some people have underestimated Graze because it only does anything when you miss with an attack, but except when dealing with extremely low-AC enemies, it still winds up doing more. However, I will concede that its effect is pretty boring - it doesn't reshape the battlefield at all, except more efficiently killing your foes.

But, also: the math is easier.

That being said, there are two weapon types with Graze - the Greatsword and the Glaive. The latter will do less damage, having a 1d10 rather than 2d6 as its damage dice (5.5 versus 7). That being said, the Glaive will open up Polearm Master for you, which lets you get another hit in with a bonus action - kind of giving you that benefit of dual-wielding but without having to actually dual-wield.

But... uh...

Ok, look, the Glaive approach is probably the most "optimized" one, taking GWM at level 4 and PAM at level 8.

But we sort of just did that with the Eldritch Knight.

So, instead, we're going to stick to a Greatsword. While it's tempting to just cap Strength at level 8 with an ASI (unlike the Fighter or Rogue, we only have two General Feat levels by 10) I think we'll instead take something like Mage Slayer. To be fair, this might be less important on a Berserker who's already going to be immune to fear and charm, but it's still pretty good. Beyond that, there aren't a ton of really appealing General Feats here.

    Game Plan:

Ok, this will be relatively simple:

We're going to start off our first turn by Raging. And then, we're going to use Reckless Attack every turn.

We'll start off with an attack that has advantage from Reckless, because we have a higher crit chance and will prefer to use our Frenzy damage on this one.

Next, we forgo advantage to do a Brutal Strike. The secondary effect will vary - we can use the push effect if we need to maneuver them into a position, or default to slowing them if we like where they are. 

Then, if we get a crit on either of these, we'll do our Hew attack.

Finally, if the Death Knight strikes back against us, we use our reaction for Retaliation (this one's DM/monster dependent).

    Calculating:

Ok, this should be relatively simple. Brutal Strikes has to be called out on a particular attack, so unlike Sneak Attack, we'll only factor it into a single attack with hit and crit chances we already know. The non-damage effects of Brutal Strikes won't affect our damage output.

Now, unlike our previous builds, we only have a +4 to Strength at level 10, so we'll have a total of +8 to hit, meaning that we only hit on a 12 or higher against the DK's 20 AC - meaning we have a 45% chance to hit, without advantage. With advantage, we'll have a 57.75% chance to hit, and a 9.75% to crit. But we also know exactly when we'll have advantage or not (assuming something isn't giving us disadvantage).

The one complexity here is that our Frenzy bonus (which is part of why we're committing to always recklessly attacking) does have the Sneak Attack thing of potentially coming on different attacks. So we'll deal with it separately from the attacks themselves.

First Attack:

With advantage, we have a 57.75% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit. Our damage on this attack with a Greatsword will be 2d6+4, but then we also add 4 from Great Weapon Master, so it's really 2d6+8. (Actually, had to go back and change this because...) And, of course, we have our Rage bonus, which is +3 at this level, so really, it's a total of 2d6+11, so we're talking an average hit damage of 18.

That said, we can slice out the 4 from everything because of Graze and add it in later. So, we have a 57.75% chance to do 2d6+7 (or 14, as we're just cutting the 4 from Strength) and 9.75% to do an additional 2d6 (or 7). So, that's 8.085 plus .6825, or 8.7675, and then we add the guaranteed 4 back in to give us 12.7675.

Second Attack:

Now, we're forgoing advantage, but getting to add a d10, so our hit damage is 2d6+1d10+11, and our crit bonus damage is 2d6+1d10, but the chances are 45% and 5%. Graze is still in effect, so we'll slice it out. 2d6+1d10+7 on average is 19.5, and then multiplied by 45% is 8.775, and 5% times 12.5 (the crit damage bonus) is .625, so the average damage for this is 9.4. Add that 4 back in and we get 13.4.

Mystery Bonus Attack:

We won't be able to get this on our first turn even if we do crit, but if we get Hew from Great Weapon Master, we'll have a chance to get another attack in at advantage. It won't get our GWM damage bonus, though. So we're talking 2d6+7 on a hit and an extra 2d6 on a crit. Graze applies to any and all attacks with our Greatsword, so we can once again slice out the 4, though because of our rage bonus, we can't just lump hit and crit damage together. However, we're still enjoying our advantage from Reckless, so we'll be at advantage. It's almost like our first attack, but we have to cut out the GWM bonus. So, we have 2d6+3 (the 3 is the rage bonus) or 10 on a hit, and a bonus of 2d6 (or 7) on a crit. 10x57.75% is, pretty obviously, 5.775, and then our crit bonus of 7x9.75% is, as before, .6825, so the average damage for this is 6.4575. And then, we add back in the 4 from our Strength, which we'll always get, so it's 10.4575.

But how often do we get this? We're assuming this is a solo monster fight, so we won't get Hew from downing an enemy. Thus, it has to be from a critical hit. With our two normal attacks per turn, we've got two chances for that crit, but the chance of getting one is different because one is made with advantage. To figure out the chance of getting a crit on either of two attacks, we're basically taking the inverse of the chance of not getting  a crit on both. So, if we have a 9.75% chance on the first attack to get a crit, that's a 90.25% chance not to. On the second attack, the 5% chance for a crit means that we've got a 95% chance not to get a crit. Therefore, the chance we have to not get a crit on either attack is 90.25%x95%, which winds up being 85.7375%, and therefore our chance to crit on either one or both of our attacks is 14.2625%.

Therefore, we multiply that damage of 10.4575 by 14.2625%, and we get, roughly, 1.49 damage per turn - though notably, only on turns 2 onward, because we needed our bonus action to rage on turn 1.

Retaliation:

Berskers at this level will get to respond to taking damage from a creature with an attack made as a reaction. This does mean that the Death Knight does have to attack us, but we are making ourselves a prime target (and this is often the Barbarian's role in a group).

If the Death Knight attacks us every round, we can reliably make this extra attack. Again, it should still benefit from Reckless Attack, but doesn't gain our GWM damage bonus, and so the damage is actually the same as our Hew attack (when we get it). We might not get it on the first round if the Death Knight goes before us (which is plausible) but if we're their primary focus, we should get it consistently.

The damage and hit/crit chance, again, are the same as our Hew attack, so we can just carry that forward: 10.4575.

Frenzy:

Ok, now we have the Frenzy bonus. At this level, our Frenzy bonus is 3d6, or an average of 10.5 extra damage.

We don't get to choose when our Frenzy goes off - it's the first hit we land when we make Reckless Attack on our turn (with a Strength-based attack, but duh). We'd probably choose to roll it that way anyway, especially because we're making our first attack the one with genuine advantage.

3d6 is an average of 10.5. On our first attack, we have a 57.75% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit. Because this is all dice and thus all doubled on a crit, we'll just lump the hit and crit chances together for our total damage on this first attack, so it's 10.5x67.5%, or 7.0875.

Now, if we miss on the first attack, we'll have a 45% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit on the second. This means that we can just take 50% of the Frenzy damage, or 5.25. However, this only goes off if we miss on the first attack, so we take 5.25 and multiply it by the 42.25% chance we missed the first time. That's 2.218125.

What about Hew? Well, we sure as hell ain't getting Hew if we didn't hit anything with our two primary attacks, so we can ignore it. And we also ignore Retaliation, because Frenzy only works when we hit on our turn.

Thus, our Frenzy damage just sums those two earlier values, which comes to 9.305625 (too many decimal places?)

Totaling It:

It's a bit of a judgment call as to what, of these, we should count in the full calculation. Most reliably, we can count the two main attacks and the frenzy damage, which would total 35.473125. On turn 2, we can also reliably add in the 1.49 from Hew, giving us 36.96 (yeah, we're rounding, and frankly we can probably just round to one decimal place).

Retaliation is the one thing that is really dependent on the DM. We're presenting ourselves as a tempting target (actually, if we took Sentinel at level 8, we could basically ensure that we can get a reaction attack every round as long as the target isn't casting an AoE spell or something) by giving them advantage on attacking us (if we knew it was an undead-heavy campaign, being an Aasimar or Cthonic Tiefling could help us with the necrotic damage,) so I think it's not unreasonable to think that we could add it in. And if that's the case, that means that after round one, we'd be putting out 46.27 damage per round.

Honestly, that's actually quite good, and kind of surprising me by beating the Eldritch Knight even with a cooperative Death Knight. (Now, I think the EK will start outscaling it the next level with their third attack, but still).

I'm tempted, then, to look at a spellcaster next. I think it's nigh-impossible to beat the simple combination of Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray (real quick, with a 50% hit chance and both cast at base level, we're talking 26.4 damage. Blowing 5th level spells for both, it becomes 67.65 damage on round two, and then casting at 4th on rounds 3-5 it's 56.375, so once it gets going, it's freaking nasty). I'd like, instead, to see how a Warlock could do with a simple Eldritch Blast and summoned creature, maybe a GOO-lock with Summon Aberration.

Eldritch Knight Damage Optimization

 Ok, yeah, I couldn't resist.

The Eldritch Knight is the first subclass I played in a long campaign, and I'd love to return to him because of the pure upgrades that Fighters and the subclass itself got in 5.5 (even Dragonborn did!)

I know that the Eldritch Knight can be quite powerful, even if it might not quite reach the heights of a pure spellcaster that uses some really synergistic spells (I've only used it in one fight, but my Wizard did do an upcast Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray, which also happened to be in a fight against ice elementals that were vulnerable to fire damage, so I'm pretty sure I did 200 damage in a single turn at level 9).

My Eldritch Knight was built to be super tanky, but Fighters can optimize for damage by combining a few feats with some heavy weapons. So, let's get into the build (as before, I'm ignoring Species features, we're not using any magic items, and we're figuring out what we can do against a Death Knight at level 10).

    Feats:

Fighters are the featiest class, getting extra ones at levels 6 and 14 compared to others. Like the Rogue, at level 10 we'll have three feats, which means that we can cap our Strength (and we'll be a Strength fighter) taking three General/Half Feats.

I will acknowledge that I've been ignoring Origin Feats. Savage Attacker is definitely a damage boost, but I don't believe (I can't remember how the math works out) that this is an enormous damage boost. I think it's better than the Great Weapon Fighting Style, which is also technically a boost to our damage but only a tiny amount. I'm going ignore both of them (at my own peril) and just assume we've taken something with more utility like Blind Fighting or Alert, Tough, Lucky, something like that. We're basically going to ignore these all.

However, our General Feats are going to be a big deal:

While my sword-and-board EK really should have gotten War Caster earlier, as we'll be using a two-handed weapon, we're actually ok on Somatic Spell components, because we only need both hands on the weapon while making the attack (I really wish War Bond had let us use a weapon or shield as a spellcasting focus).

First, obvious one, is Great Weapon Master. People were afraid this feat had been nerfed when it lost the giant +10 bonus to damage, but in most cases, the consistent PB bonus (4 at this level) without any penalty to our hit chance actually winds up being more damage overall, and, you know, you hit more, which is more fun.

Next, we're going to get Polearm Master. This has some redundancy with GWM, and it does mean slightly downgrading our weapon's damage, but the always-available Pole Strike ability is going to be pretty nice.

Finally, it won't do much for our damage, but I think Mage Slayer is going to be very nice - between that and Indomitable, we'll be far more capable of making those saves against nasty fear, charm, and other mental effects.

These will let us cap our Strength (assuming we got a 17 at level 1).

    Weapon:

We're going with a Glaive. In my napkin math calculations (these posts are all napkin math) the Graze mastery is the best for damage output. Some scoff at it because it only does something on a miss, but missing in D&D is a pretty common thing (especially against a heavily-armored Death Knight). Even with a pretty small miss chance, though, the amount of damage this grants you on average winds up being a pretty enormous boost that other Masteries don't really give you.

We'd use a Greatsword until we get Polearm Master (hopefully your DM is generous with magic items that work best for you) for the same reason.

    Spells:

Now, we've got to dip back into 5.0 content here, but obviously any EK worth their salt (unless, I guess, they're a ranged EK, which is a thing you can do if you really want) should take Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade, which are even better for us in 5.5 thanks to the new War Magic.

Our options for damage-boosting concentration spells are somewhat limited, but I think our best bet right now is probably Enlarge/Reduce, enlarging ourselves to deal an extra 1d4 damage on each hit with our weapons. We will need an action to cast it, but we can cast that with our Action and then Action Surge on turn one to start hitting things right away. The nice thing here is that the damage boost doesn't require any kind of failed save (like Web) or the like. A modest but significant boost.

We do have Eldritch Strike, but I don't think that that's necessarily going to play a big role here.

    Game Plan:

So, when we confront our DK bad guy, we'll start off by casting Enlarge on ourselves, then action surge to start laying into them. We will start off with a regular attack, using Graze. We'll then use our bonus action to make either our Pole Strike if we missed or just got a regular hit, or our Hew if we got a crit. Now, unless we can't block the way to our more vulnerable allies, we'll then use our second main action attack to do Booming Blade and use Tactical Master to swap our mastery to Push, shoving the Death Knight back 10 feet.

Potentially, if the Death Knight then marches back toward us, we'll use our Reaction to do a Reactive Strike on the Death Knight as they come back.

Blessedly, none of this involves advantage, so the math should be a lot simpler than the freaking Rogue.

    Damage for Each Attack:

We have a +9 to hit, so we've got a 50% chance to hit our AC 20 Death Knight. We also have a 5% chance as usual to crit.

Now, while Graze would let us just ignore the static damage and only care about dice, our Great Weapon Master's Heavy Weapon Mastery adds static damage only on a hit. We can still just separate out the 5 from Strength and add it in once we account for hit chances.

And remember, we have Enlarge, adding 1d4 to all of these attacks.

Our hit, minus Strength, is 1d10+1d4+4, or 12.

Crit damage adds an extra 8.

With a 50% hit chance, that's 6 average damage, then .4 damage from our 5% chance to add the crit damage, giving us 6.4, and then adding in the always-happens Strength damage, giving us 11.4.

Next, we're interrupting our Attack Action to use our bonus action, and this is where it gets more complicated:

95% of the time, we're using our Pole Strike from Polearm Master, but 5% of the time we're using Hew from Great Weapon Master. Notably, neither gets the +4 bonus from GWM, so we can actually do the Graze trick.

Pole Strike gives us 2d4+5 damage (the second d4 from Enlarge), but still is from a Glaive and so should still give us the Graze benefits, but because this doesn't benefit from GWM's damage boost, we can just take the shortcut and save the 5 for after we account for hit chance. 2d4 is 5 on average, and we multiply it by 55%, so that's 2.75. And then we add in the 5, giving us 7.75 But this is only 95% of the time, because if we get a crit, we'll use the Glaive's blade instead. So that's really 7.3625.

Now, Hew gives us 1d10+1d4+5, and again, we don't get to add the 4, so we'll do the same trick. 1d10+1d4 is 8 on average, and multiplying it by 55% is 4.4. Then, we add the 5 back in and get 9.4, but this only happens 5% of the time, so it's really .47. 

Thus, our bonus action in the middle of our turn will give us an average of 7.8325.

Now, things change up quite a bit:

Our second regular action attack is going to be a Booming Blade with the Push Mastery. I think we have to pick Push before we hit or miss, so we can't just default to Graze if we do miss. (Also, yes, we're casting a spell with an action surge, but we're not actually using the Magic action, nor expending a second spell slot, so it should work).

The first element of this is the attack itself. At this level, Booming Blade adds 1d8 Thunder damage to our attacks. Thus, we're hitting for 1d10+1d8+1d4+9 (the 9 is from both our Strength and Great Weapon Master) so an average of 21.5 on a hit. We then add 12.5 on a crit. Still at a 50% hit chance, that's 10.75 plus .625, so we get 11.375 damage.

This is all the damage that happens on our turn - a total of 30.6075 (note that dropping Graze meant that even the bonus damage from Booming Blade left us hitting for less on the last attack - without the following, sticking to Graze would be beneficial).

But wait, there's more!

This, admittedly, relies on the Death Knight cooperating a little, coming back into our range. Note also that if we were within 5 feet of them when we pushed them back, we'll want to open up just one more square of 5 feet from them (which should be safe to ensure that they provoke our Reactive Strike).

Assuming the Death Knight moves on their next turn, that's an extra 2d8 thunder damage if the last attack hit from Booming Blade. 2d8 is 9 on average, and there's a 50% chance we landed it, so that's an easy 4.5 extra damage, again contingent on the DK moving.

Now, if the DK moves toward us, entering our threatened area, we can use Polearm Master to make an attack as a reaction (naturally, saving your reaction for Shield might be the better call if you're low on HP, but then that's what Second Wind is for). This won't get the Great Weapon Master damage bump, but effectively is the same average damage as a our Hew attack (and gets Graze) so we're looking at another 9.4 damage. Again, though, there's only a 50% chance that our Push attack actually landed, so this is cut in half, being 4.7.

Thus, under ideal circumstance, we should be doing 39.8075 damage per round.

And I've got to say, that's about 10 DPR better than our Rogue or our Artificer were doing.

Now, one caveat here is that Graze is highly valuable here with a target that has such a high AC. Its value is still pretty high even if we have a 70% hit chance, but it does diminish.

And again, if the DK refuses to play ball with us, we might have damage closer to 30, which is only just a little ahead of the others.

Rogue (Single Class) Damage Optimization

 The Rogue is a class that I really love, conceptually. While I tend to think of my go-to fantasy archetypes as some mix of heavy armor and arcane magic (basically Eldritch Knights, or Battle Smiths/Armorers if we want to add in some steampunk) I also have a soft spot for the sneaky Rogue.

If you were to ask me how to balance a Rogue in a TTRPG, I'd say that it should be basically a martial/physical-damage glass cannon, meaning that while it shouldn't be as resilient as a Fighter, Paladin, or Barbarian, it should be able to make up for that by putting out massive damage numbers.

Now, I think the design intent behind Rogues' Sneak Attack is to do just that, I think in practice a lot of theorycrafters have argued that the class doesn't really do great damage. And while they're the best at skill checks in the game, that utility doesn't quite match what a Wizard can do - being able to pick locks very well isn't that impressive when the Wizard can just cast Knock.

So if Rogues pay a damage tax for their non-combat utility, I don't think they deserve to do so. I'll note that while I still (still) haven't gotten a game of Draw Steel together, I do really like the way that their Shadow is designed. But they're ultimately very different systems.

The question, though, is whether they really are paying such a high tax.

In my last post, I calculated the damage output of a pure Armorer Artificer against a Death Knight at level 10. This would be a tough, final-boss kind of fight (or at least tier boss) where damage output would likely be the most important. My conclusion ultimately was that they could do roughly 28 damage per round. Artificers are also not known as the kings of damage output, but I'm curious how we'd compare a Rogue with them.

Thus, we'll simplify things and just do a level 10 build and figure out their damage.

Ok, let's talk about our loadout:

The Arcane Trickster is still probably the best Rogue subclass, but it's also something of an unusual one, having limited spellcasting options. At level 10, an Arcane Trickster would have 2nd level spells. That's shy of spells like Spirit Shroud or Conjure Minor Elementals, which can really add a lot of damage if we optimize for making lots of attacks. Getting a cantrip like Booming Blade can give you some more damage as well, especially if you attack a foe and then disengage as a bonus action, forcing them to take the extra thunder damage from moving.

But I suspect that our gameplan is actually going to be to try to get as many attacks in per round, and I'll tell you why:

Sneak Attack, by level 10, is going to be doing 5d6, which is more damage than I think we'd ever be doing with a weapon attack alone (our highest-damage weapon I think does a d8, so even with a Vicious Rapier and +5 to Dex, we're doing 1d8+2d6+5, or 16.5, compared with 17.5 from a level 10 Sneak Attack).

We can only get it once per turn, but if we land just one hit (with the proper conditions) we'll get the whole thing.

Thus, I think instead we want to build around a dual-wielding set-up, getting both a Nick off-hand weapon and the Dual-Wielder feat.

    Weapons:

So, in other words, we're going to go the Shortsword and Scimitar route. This will let us land two attacks as an action, and with the feat, we can get a third attack as a bonus action (I also think technically we can make that third attack with the Shortsword, as long as the Scimitar was one of the attacks of the attack action). These bonus attacks aren't going to hit very hard, because we don't (and won't be getting) the Two Weapon Fighting Style, but the main thing is to give us some help if we don't hit at first to get that Sneak Attack in.

While it would be good to get at least +1 weapons by this level, I'm going to just act as if we're deprived of magic items from our mean DM.

We're not going Crossbow Expert here to dual-wield hand-crossbows because we wouldn't be able to benefit from Dual Wielder, as they don't have Nick.

    Subclass:

If we're not using the Booming Blade trick, I don't know that the Arcane Trickster actually adds a ton of damage at this level. The Assassin has some situational boosts to damage, but to be frank, I don't want to have to calculate whether we have advantage on our first attack because we beat the Death Knight in initiative and take that into consideration for the overall damage output.

Thus, I kind of think we might go subclass-agnostic. Soulknives get Homing Blades at level 9, which could for sure increase damage output. Thieves' Stealth Attack is more useful for a ranged build. So to preserve my sanity, I'm going to not worry about subclass features.

    Feats:

We're going to take the Dual-Wielder feat, which allows us to make an attack with a bonus action if we hit with another light weapon as part of our action. If you're not familiar with the 5.5 update to this feat, the effect is that if we have a weapon with the Nick weapon mastery, we're going to be able to make our initial main hand and then off-hand attack within our Action, which then allows us to get effectively a third attack with this feat. Like the additional attack from the Light property, we don't get to add our Dex modifier to the damage, but this gives us a little bit more damage and a third chance to get off our Sneak Attack if the first two attacks missed. Also, because we did use our Scimitar as part of our action, we get to use our Shortsword for this one and potentially get the benefit of the Vex property.

As a Rogue, we will have a third feat by level 10 (we get it at level 10) and thus we can take half-feats/general feats instead of ASIs and get capped at 20 Dex by this point (assuming we took a background with a +2 Dex bonus in it, which I assume we did. Honestly, Criminal is pretty great, though ironically there's some redundancy with the Alert feat if we go Assassin, a subclass that is better but not where I hoped it would be with the 5.5 revamp). Thus, we can consider two other general feats.

Personally, I think Mage Slayer might be the martial equivalent of War Caster, as the feat that basically anyone who likes either Strength or Dexterity will want, because it gives you a limited Legendary Resistance (though only against mental saves, which is mostly Wisdom). This is a solid option, but for damage, we might consider others.

Piercer is worth considering. It won't work with the scimitar, but we could use a dagger instead if we desperately want the bonuses, and honestly, we'd only be sacrificing an average of 1 damage per turn if we went with a dagger, which also has both style points and can be a ranged option. But we get to reroll a die each turn and get a little more damage on crits. And also, if we find ourselves needing to use a ranged weapon, almost all of them also deal piercing damage, so this covers that as well.

Sentinel, actually, can be really good for a melee Rogue, if you're willing to stay in melee with foes, because the Guardian opportunity attack can potentially give you a second Sneak Attack each round, which is a massive boost to your damage output. (This works especially great if you have an Ancestral Guardian or Armorer tanking for you.) The Opp attack isn't guaranteed - the foes might just target you instead - but if you can find a way to disincentivize them from going after you, it can be great (honestly, Uncanny Dodge is a pretty decent survival ability, somewhat akin to a Monk's Deflect Attacks, though it can't ever fully negate an attack like that can).

I think that, while Sentinel sounds amazing, I suspect that monsters (like our Death Knight) might choose to just focus you down without some outside help and incentive. So I think I'll stick to Dual-Wielder, Piercer, and Mage Slayer. The latter won't really have an effect on our damage, but the others will.

Given these choices, I do think I'd actually go Shortsword and Dagger (again, the damage of our weapon itself is somewhat less important due to the fact that we get a bunch of damage from Sneak Attack).

    Attack Sequence:

I could be wrong, but I think if we want to make two attacks with the Shortsword, we'll need to attack in this order: Shortsword (thus allowing an off-hand Nick weapon as part of the action), Dagger (thus being a light weapon attack as part of the action, allowing the Dual Wielder feat to let us attack with a different weapon as a bonus action) and then Shortsword. While we could break up our action with a bonus action attack, I think that we need one attack to trigger the next. Another possible attack sequence would actually be to start with the Dagger, then the Shortsword (I think this is Kosher, but I could be wrong. Basically, if the Nick property applies to any use of the Light property, and not just the attack with the weapon that has Nick, we could do the Dagger first) but there's not much advantage to this given that we'll still basically always be sandwiching our dagger attacks between two shortsword attacks, even if they aren't on the same turn. I think Shortsword-Dagger-Shortsword is probably the most reasonable sequence.

    Advantage and Weapon Damage:

Oh boy, here's the big question: Sneak Attack is not guaranteed each turn, as we need to either have advantage or a friendly creature within 5 feet of our target.

Now, advantage should be pretty common for us - if we make our first attack on a turn with our Shortsword, we'll get it for our Dagger. We won't get it for our bonus action second shortsword attack, but that should confer it (if it hits) with the first attack on our next turn.

If we get disadvantage, we're in big trouble, as this shuts down our sneak attack entirely. Mage Slayer can help prevent some forms of disadvantage (such as saving against Fear effects) but any Rogue is going to have a terrible time if they're at disadvantage.

For the sake of sanity, again, we're going to want to come up with an abstraction of how often we have advantage. If we assume it's only coming from the Vex property, that simplifies things. So:

At this level, we should have a +9 to hit, and we're attacking a target with an AC of 20, which mercifully gives us a beautifully round 50% hit chance (yes, Death Knights can parry, but let's just ignore that, again, for sanity). If we hit with our Shortsword the previous attack, that becomes a 75% hit chance.

2/3 of our attacks will confer advantage. If these are made straight, then we're essentially getting advantage 50% of the time on one of our attacks and 75% of the time on our other two attacks, so we'll say we have an average chance to have advantage of 67%. It's actually better than that, because hitting on our bonus action shortsword attack at the end of our turn will then make it more likely we hit with the shortsword at the beginning of our next turn.

Our Dagger never confers advantage, so we'll assume that the bonus action attack from Dual Wielder is never made with advantage - oh, this might change what I said in the previous paragraph. In this case, the BA Shortsword is a 50% hit chance (and 5% crit chance), and thus the simplest to calculate.

However, because Vex can carry over from our previous turn, we might have advantage on our first Shortsword attack on a turn because we hit on our previous turn. Thus, 50% of the time, we have advantage, and 50% of the time it's a straight roll.

The Dagger, then, is the most complex, because we're more likely to have gotten the benefit of Vex, because thanks to the 50% chance of advantage on our Action Shortsword attack, we're more likely to have hit.

Let's back up:

For the Action Shortsword attack on turns 2 and onward, our average chance to hit is either 50% half the time or 75% the other half of the time. Thankfully, this just lets us average them, so we get 62.5% to hit. Then, we have a 5% chance to crit half the time and 9.75% chance to crit the other half, so that's an average crit chance of 7.375% chance to crit overall.

For our Dagger, we have a 62.5% chance to have advantage and a 37.5% chance to make a straight roll. So, basically, we're talking 62.5%x75% and 37.5%x50% for our hit chance, which comes to 46.875% and 18.75%, so our total hit chance is 65.625%. Our crit chance on the Dagger, then, is 62.5%x9.75%, or about 6.1% plus 37.5%x5%, or 1.875%, so our total crit chance with the dagger is 7.975% (roughly)

So, let's figure out the damage our weapons are doing. Remember, thanks to Piercer, we're doing a little more on average with each die, and we're also getting beefier crits. The way it's worded, I think we could do the damage reroll on our Sneak Attack if we get it with the Dagger, which is probably slightly better than using it on the d4 from the dagger, but for sanity's sake, we'll assume we can only do it on the weapon die itself.

Action Shortsword:

Hit Damage: 1d6+5, giving us 9.25

Crit Damage: 2d6 extra (not just one extra die, because Piercer) for 7 (yes, we can choose to reroll the die that rolls lowest, so it's a little better, but again, sanity).

Thus, our damage per attack with the Shortsword is 9.25x62.5%, or 5.78 (roughly) plus 7%7.375%, or about .52 damage, and thus a total of 6.3.

Dagger:

Hit Damage: 1d4, which gives us 3 with piercer

Crit Damage: 2d4, or 6 (same caveat)

Thus, per attack, we're talking 8x65.625%, or basically 1.97 ish and then crit damage of 6x7.975%, or .48 ish, so, screw it, let's say it's 2.45.

BA Shortsword:

Hit Damage, this time, is 4.25, as we're not adding Dex

Crit Damage, again, is 7

9.25x50% is 2.125 and then 7x5% is .35, so that's 2.475.

Thus, our total weapon damage, before Sneak Attack, is about 11.2. That's pretty pitiful on its own, but what of Sneak Attack?

    Sneak Attack:

Basically, we're going to assume we're using Sneak Attack the first chance we can on a turn rather than holding out for a crit.

While we will get Sneak Attack if we have advantage on our attack, we'll assume ideal circumstances where we have a friend in melee with the target as well, and that any hit will result in Sneak Attack. This won't always be the case, and we might instead use our bonus action to get Steady Aim or some other means of advantage (you can hide and get a melee attack in, I think, though I realize I might be confusing some of the rules here with the ones from Draw Steel. I'd certainly rule that you could hide and then roll that stealth check into the approach to attack someone in melee).

Sneak Attack at this level is 5d6, and while Piercer could apply to its damage to bump it up a little, I'm going to apply its bonuses instead to the weapon damage, as I have already. This is suboptimal, as we should add an extra d6 on a crit even with the dagger, but just for ease of math, I'm doing it this way.

So, we'll need to consider the likelihood of getting a hit or crit with the Action Shortsword, applying that to Sneak Attack damage. Then, if we missed and thus don't get advantage on the dagger attack, we find the average hit and crit damage, with a coefficient for missing on the first Shortsword attack (because if we did hit on it, we'd have already used up our Sneak Attack). Then, finally, we have to find the chance that we missed on both the first Shortsword and the Dagger attack, and use that as our coefficient on the adjusted-for-hit-and-crit chance on the bonus action attack.

To break it down:

Our Sneak Attack damage is 5d6, or an average of 17.5. Because this element is pure dice, it's actually easier to deal with crits, because with a 50% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit, we can just multiply that 17.5 by 55%. But we don't get to do that just yet.

As we determined before, we have a 62.5% chance to hit on our Action Shortsword, and a 7.375% chance to crit, so our Sneak Attack damage on that first attack is 17.5x about 69.9%, or about 12.23.

Now, there's a 37.5% chance we missed on the first attack. On its own, we have a 50% chance to hit with our Dagger (because we didn't get advantage) and 5% crit chance, so 55%x17.5 is 9.625. But we only do this if we missed on the first one, so 9.625x37.5% is about 3.61.

Lastly, that 50% chance to miss with the Dagger times the 37.5% chance to miss on the first Shortsword attack means we've got an 18.75% chance that we need to hold out hope that our bonus action attack is the one that finally gives us our Sneak Attack damage. After missing, of course, our chance to hit and crit is the same for the same amount of Sneak Attack damage, so that's 9.625 again, but this time multiplied by 18.75%, or roughly 1.8.

    Bringing it All Together:

So, now we just add it all up: our weapon damage from our three attacks came to 11.2ish, and our Sneak Attack damage adds up to 17.64, roughly. Which means that our total damage output is 28.84.

Some Caveats:

Again, we're not truly using Piercing at its best - we aren't strictly limited to rerolling the weapon dice, and I think in theory we could add a d6 to a Sneak Attack crit and not just a d4 if we crit with the dagger. Still, I think these are pretty marginal boosts. The damage should probably be slightly higher, but only by a very small amount.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides: if we don't have a friend within melee range of our target, we will need to rely either on Vex or Steady Aim or some other source of advantage to get our Sneak Attack. While Vex makes it likely we will get it, bad luck on the dice could screw us, and chop into the greater part of our damage.

Now, we are out-damaging my Armorer build by a little bit, so that's good. I'm tempted to try out an Eldritch Knight build, which I think probably outdoes this, but I'm not sure. I'm certain that a Wizard with Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray blows maybe anything else out of the water (is there a Sorcerer subclass that gets that? Because Innate Sorcery could make that even better).

The Meaning of the Axons

 In my replay of Expedition 33, I've now gotten through Visage and Sirene. The latter is one of my favorite areas of the game, even if the number of flying enemies can be frustrating (I just wish there were more ways to deal with them than just shooting them in Free Aim over and over). Sirene's boss music is mind-blowing, in that category with the Ancestral Spirit from Elden Ring as the kind of "how is this even combat music?"

However, one thing that's a little frustrating is that the bosses are just going down too quickly. I didn't have a chance to get used to the timing on the parries (or is it jumps?) for the Grand Ballet during Sirene's fight because she only got one of them off before I finished.

It's a reminder that, while the highest-level post-game stuff can be extremely hard, the actual story stuff is pretty reasonably challenging, and with a lot of experience with that post-game stuff, I've gotten good enough at figuring out builds, timing parries, and understanding the interplay between characters' powers that I'm just, I don't know, good at the game now. (I also know where more of the optional content is, so I might be a bit overleveled - though there's also a 20% XP bonus if you don't take damage during a fight, which might also account for being higher level.)

Anyway, the Axons are super cool, but when you first approach them, you might not entirely understand their significance. What makes them distinct from Nevrons, for example?

For that, we need to go into serious endgame spoilers.

Armorer Damage Optimization

 I think I've come around to the opinion that the Battle Smith is probably a more powerful subclass than the Armorer, but I still have a deep love and affection for the Armorer, and I suspect that if I ever get a chance to play one in an ongoing campaign (boy, I wish I had more friends eager to DM - if I could be playing four nights a week I'd consider that really great) I might stick to the Armorer as my subclass of choice.

Now, I was first drawn to the Armorer for their tanking capabilities, and the Guardian model certainly gives you a bit of that semi-taunt ability on your weapon attacks.

But D&D is a game that doesn't necessarily need tanks and healers the way a game like WoW does, and I think there's a strong argument to be made that maximizing damage is the better strategy - indeed, it can even help with a game's pacing by ending combat encounters faster (I love combat, but it's by far the slowest aspect of the game).

So, I wanted to figure out what the best options for maximizing damage on an Armorer would be. Naturally, there are some arguments to be made that multiclassing would be the best choice - perhaps getting enough Wizard levels to get insane spells like Conjure Minor Elementals. But at a certain point, we start to lose that Artificer identity, so I'm planning on doing what I generally prefer with any character and do a single-class build.

Let's talk about some of the challenges we run into:

First off, the Armorer is limited to basically one kind of weapon at a time. All count as Simple weapons, so that the armorer doesn't need to get new weapon proficiencies (like the Battle Smith or Artillerist) and lack some of the other limiting properties that might cause problems for a character relying on Intelligence for their attacks.

What this means, though, is that a lot of the weapon-focused feats that can really boost damage are left out of reach for us: None of our weapons are Heavy, so we can't use Great Weapon Master. None are covered in Polearm Master's categories (which are Quarterstaffs, Spears, and then Heavy Reach weapons - the Force Demolisher has Reach, but not Heavy). None are Light, either, so no Dual-Wielder.

The Dueling fighting style could work for us, as each of our weapons are one-handed and we won't have a weapon in the off-hand, but taking a Fighitng Style feat doesn't boost any ability scores.

Thus, I think we really need to lean into the fact that we're an Int-based spellcaster for our damage boosts.

Again, sadly, some of the spells that work great with characters that make attacks aren't available to us - Spirt Shroud and Conjure Minor Elementals. We can get the latter if we are playing specifically in Eberron - taking the House Lyrandar Heir background, and thus getting Mark of the Storm, and then taking Potent Dragonmark at level 4 would allow us to get CME at level 7. The downside is that this background doesn't boost Intelligence. (I actually think this is amazing on a Monk, who can even Flurry of Blows on the same turn they cast the spell - though there's a little ambiguity over whether a non-caster gets the Mark of the Storm spell list.)

Starting at level 5, having a Homunculus Servant and casting Dragon's Breath on it at the start of combat (a bonus action) is probably going to be standard practice for most 5.5 Artificers. At 11, we'll pack Lightning Bolt into our Spell-Storing Item and hand it to the Homunculus, who should be able to cast it every turn in combat unless we have a very long day of fights.

But the Homunculus stuff is, honestly, probably just going to be the standard for every Artificer (sorry Alchemists and Cartographers, who don't get a good 3rd level damage spell).

What of ourselves?

    Armor Models:

Well, of our three armor modes, we have a ranged and two melee options. Obviously, going Infiltrator is going to be the safest route. I'll say if we want to prioritize damage-dealing, we might skip the Guardian. So, the question becomes who deals more damage: Infiltrator or Juggernaut?

The Juggernaut's Force Demolisher does have a higher damage die, but the Infiltrator's Lightning Launcher also has some riders that might change that math.

The Force Demolisher does 1d10 Force damage, so if we're looking at a +4 to Int (which we'll probably have by level 4) we're talking about 9.5 damage on average per hit. At level 15, this changes to 2d6, and we probably have +5 to Int, so we're talking probably 12 damage on a hit.

(EDIT: I forgot to actually calculate the damage per attack, rather than per hit. At level 5, if we assume a 60% hit chance as we do in the rest of this post, we've got 9.5x60%, or 5.7, and then 5.5x5% for our crit damage, which is .275, so we wind up with an average damage per attack of 5.975. We didn't bother with the damage upgrade at level 15, because clearly the Lightning Launcher is doing better, as both are 2d6 weapons, but the Lightining Launcher still gets its once-per-turn bonus d6.)

The Lightning Launcher does 1d6 damage, but that's not strictly true: once per turn, we can add 1d6. Thus, at levels 3 and 4, it effectively does 2d6, or 11 on average with a +4 to Int. Then, at level 15, the damage increases to 2d6, but we still get that extra 1d6. Clearly, at levels 3-4, and then levels 15+, the damage is strictly better than the Force Demolisher. But at levels 5-14 (where we're most likely to spend the most time playing unless it's a high-level campaign) who wins? Well, 1d10 twice is basically 11 on average. 1d6 twice is 7, but then we have an additional 3.5, which is 10.5 - however, we're more likely to get that bonus d6 than either specific attack, because even if we miss on the first attack, we might be able to add it to the second. Thus, if we have, say, a 60% chance to hit, we've then got an 84% chance to get that extra d6 (because the 40% chance to miss becomes a 16% chance to miss on both shots).

So, 11x60% is 6.6, and then 7x60% is 4.2, plus 3.5x84% is 2.94, so the Lightning Launcher is actually doing 7.14.

Ah, but I forgot Crits!

Well, it's basically 5.5/20 times 2 (which is .55) versus 3.5/20 times 2 (which is .35) (oh duh, dividing by 20 and then multiplying by 2 is just dividing by 10) and then some really complicated math regarding whether the bonus d6 crits (because we can't know ahead of time if we're going to crit on our second attack after we make our first... do we just add the .175? Let's say that and if someone sees a flaw in the math, they can sue me). Ok, so we're just saying that .525. That means that the crit bonus is still better for the Force Demolisher, but only by .025, which does not make up for it.

    Spells:

So, the Lightning Launcher seems to be the highest-damage option here, at least in raw output, at all levels. But how can we enhance it further? (And might the Force Demolisher wind up having some extra edges because of its forced movement?)

Again, by level 5, my guess is that we'll mostly be casting Dragon's Breath on our Homunculus Servant to get a quick burst of 3d6 damage in a cone each turn. So, if we have spells we want to use to increase our damage, they've got to beat that (and remember that AoE spells are going to get tons more value if we have a target-rich environment).

Web is a solid spell that can play nicely with the Juggernaut's ability to knock enemies around the battlefield - if they get out, you can knock them back in. But it's hard to quantify precisely how much damage that translates to.

Heat Metal is a solid choice, especially if you use it on an item that the foe cannot quickly discard, like metallic armor. 2d8 damage is 9 on average, which is a little less than 3d6 (10.5 average) but there's no save against it. One of the really great benefits, though, of Dragon's Breath is that it's a bonus action to cast, and if we're doing it on our Homunculus, we don't need to worry about any action economy loss after that.

Once we get 3rd level spells at level 9, we get a few more options. Naturally, we can use our own spell slots to cast Lightning Bolt, which is pretty solid even against a single target, but best if we can get a bunch of enemies together in a line. (If the targets have a 50% chance to save, it's an average of 21 damage per target. Compare that with our attacks: with a 60% chance to hit, we're talking 1d6+5 (possibly still only +4 at this level depending on which feats we grab) or 8.5x.6, or 5.1 twice (10.2) plus 3.5x84% (2.94) and then we'll say 3.5/20x3, or .525, giving us a total average of 13.665 damage. So, yeah, the Lightning Bolt is definitely out-damaging that even in single-target situations, but it's a precious 3rd level spell slot.

Haste is adding an extra attack each turn (naturally, we might cast it on someone who hits harder in our party, but we're doing this in a vacuum). That means that we've got another chance for our bonus d6 if we miss twice with our normal action (making it a 93.6% chance to happen) and then an additional 13.14 damage - which does out-do our Dragon's Breath from the Homunuclus (in single-target) and also frees up the Homunculus to use its own attack, which only does a little damage, but hey, it's something.

Now, we haven't talked about Magic Weapon and Elemental Weapon. The rules are slightly ambiguous as to whether you can separately replicate your built-in weapons to get +1 versions of them. Also, if the armor is magical (if you've got, say, +1 Plate) does that mean the weapons are magical as well, and thus not suitable for these spells?

But let's take a look at how, Elemental Weapon would affect our damage:

At 3rd level, we're getting a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls and an extra d4 damage on a hit.

Thus, in our standard scenario, we now have a 65% chance to hit, and our hits land for 1d6+1d4+5 (we'll assume we're just taking General feats and won't cap Int until 12). So, our average damage is 11 on a hit. We have a 65% chance to hit, so 11x65% is 7.15, and then 14.3 over two attacks. Now, we have an 87.75% chance to land our bonus d6, so that's 3.5x87.75%, or 3.07 (roughly) per turn. So we get basically 17.37 damage per round. But the part of that coming from the spell, compared to just attacking without it, 13.67 (ish) as we determined earlier, means that this spell is only increasing our damage per turn by about 3.7. By contrast, a 3rd level Dragon's Breath with a 50% chance to fail on saves is 10.5 damage per turn.

So I don't think these weapon-enhancing spells are worth it (the one time I found it clutch was when we were in Curse of Strahd and I cast Magic Weapon on our Gunslinger's non-magic guns, which were doing nothing against the Amber Golems in the Amber Temple).

Ok, now, while I'm focusing mostly on tier 2, if we get up to level 13 and can cast 4th level spells, we should talk about Summon Construct. This will get two attacks that do 1d8+8 (average 12.5) on a hit, so with a 60% hit chance, we're looking at 7.5, and then .225 for crits, doubled to 15.45 damage. How is that? a 4th level Dragon's Breath would let our Homunculus do 5d6 damage on a breath, so with a 50% success rate, we're talking 13.125 - so yeah, this is actually a bit better. While the Construct is vulnerable to getting destroyed, so is the Homunculus, and the Golem's beefier. And hey, the Homunculus is probably shooting lightning bolts with the spell-storing item anyway.

And then, of course for 5th level spells, you can get something like Bigby's Hand, which does decent damage (22.5 average, so with a 60% chance to hit, basically 14.625 including crits, but with some nice utility). But that's not until tier 4, so we won't worry too much about it.

For our Armorer-specific spells that aren't Lightning Bolt, we have a few options - Thunderwave and Fire Shield might help if we're going a melee route. Shatter can be an all right poor-man's Fireball (though it's only a little more damage than Dragon's Breath, and we can get that each round if our Homunculus survives).

    Feats:

Ok, because we have weird, unique weapons, we won't really be able to benefit from any major damage-increasing feats. But what of the more Intelligence-focused ones?

Again, I'm going to leave out the ones from Forge of the Artificer just because they're a bit more setting-specific. So we'll stick to the PHB ones. And I'll stick to those that can increase our Intelligence, as we'll probably be doing that at 4, 8, and 12 (though we can take an ASI if we want to move onto others, like Heavy Armor Master).

Fey Touched is, of course, a classically great one - Misty Step is a fantastic spell. We could pick up Hunter's Mark, though we will probably want to concentrate on a different spell pretty early on (Dragon's Breath, again, as a prime example - this is a spell that wouldn't be so good if we didn't have a little Homunculus to be its recipient).

Ritual Caster, actually, would let us get Find Familiar, and thus have a back-up if someone takes down your Homunculus Servant.

Shadow Touched is probably not as popular as Fey Touched, but you could use it to grab Hex, like Fey can get Hunter's Mark, though it has the same problems.

Spell Sniper unfortunately doesn't prevent disadvantage with attacks from your Lightning Launcher, though it does let you ignore partial cover. Unfortunately, Sharpshooter (which could be a good alternative) doesn't boost Intelligence. A decent choice after we've capped our Int (though a pretty big commitment to the Infiltrator mode).

Telekinetic is a pretty great one, actually - especially given that we don't really need our bonus action for much, and the shoving can combine with the Force Demolisher to give us a bit more battlefield control.

Telepathic is also solid, though it's a little less combat-focused.

War Caster, of course, is always a great choice, and especially if we're in melee more. We'll want to make sure we've got some single-target spells. I think that as long as you only choose the creature provoking the opportunity attack, you should be able to use Magic Missile.

    Replicated Magic Items:

Ah yes, a core element of the Artificer.

First, let's talk weapons. My interpretation of the rules is that you can replicate the weapons built into your armor, and that they're separate from the armor itself, so you could have a +1 Lightning Launcher and +1 Plate. If that's the case, these will be high priorities:

+1 Weapons are going to be the obvious choice once you get your subclass. We don't need a Repeating Shot given that the Lightning Launcher doesn't have ammo. Now: there's another matter of interpretation: does having "Weapon, +1" give you the ability to replicate any +1 weapon when you finish a long rest, or just one you choose the plans for? And if you swap your armor model, does that mean you can't make the right weapon for it? D&D Beyond is no help here because it doesn't even list a "Dazzling Force Demolisher" as an option. If I were the DM, I'd grandfather the old version of the Armorer that lets the Infusion transfer between weapons when you swap your armor model, and thus let you at the very least learn "+1 Armorer weapon," though I'd probably just say you have plans for "any +1 weapon."

At level 6, we get some new options. Unless we're struggling with how many plans we're swapping out (we'll want to get +1 Plate at this level, swapping from, like, Gleaming Plate) we can easily grab Dazzling Weapon and replace the +1 version, as you get the +1 bonus with that anyway along with other stuff. Weapon of Warning will sacrifice the +1 bonus, but you do get advantage on initiative, which is nice.

At 10, we probably want to upgrade to a +2 weapon - it's not actually that big of a jump in power, and so we might stick with one of the others we got at level 6 potentially.

At 14, though, we hit a point where we actually need to seriously reconsider our Armor Model, because we can get a Flame Tongue Force Demolisher. Flame Tongues can only be melee weapons, so this will work for that or the Thunder Pulse weapon, but not the Lightning Launcher. A Flame Tongue grants no bonus to attacks, but it does add 2d6 fire damage on a hit (you need to activate it with a bonus action). That extra damage is enormous, and will wipe out any damage you'd be losing from the lower chance to hit. Basically, by level 15, if we have this, the Force Demolisher is going to be landing for 4d6+5 damage on a hit, which is serious damage.

Now, what about other stuff?

Items with charges can be really great thanks to Magic Item Tinker, which lets us charge them up with spell slots, or more likely, to drain them for spell slots. Indeed, if you have two plans for items with charges, just use the first one up, transmute it into the other, and then drain it for peak efficiency.

Some good options here are Wand of Web, Pipes of Haunting, Mind Sharpener. Necklace of Fireballs doesn't technically have "charges," but given that you can just use it up and then transmute it into something else is pretty great.

So, let's imagine a scenario and see how much damage we're going to be putting out.

Let's imagine a big boss fight at level 10 - the conclusion of some major arc. I think a Death Knight functions pretty well (if it's on its own, otherwise it's too difficult) as a tier 2 big bad.

So, at this level we don't have the final slew of replicated magic items, but we can get a +2 weapon. We also don't have Replicate Magic Item yet (we're very close). If we're grabbing all the General Feats we can, we're talking still a +4 to Int.

Our Death Knight has an AC of 20 and a Dex save bonus of +6. 

If we have +4 to Int, we're looking at a spell save DC of 16, and we're rocking a +2 Lightning Launcher and thus have a +10 to hit. We have a Homunculus Servant.

If we're not worrying about battlefield control and just trying to zap as much damage as we can, here's a gameplan:

We cast Dragon's Breath with a bonus action, upcasting to 3rd level, on our Homunculus. Then, we make two attacks with our Lightning Launcher.

Each attack has a 55% chance to hit. They deal 1d6+6 damage, or 9.5 damage on average, on a hit, and add 3.5 on a crit. So, 55%x9.5 (which is 5.225) plus 5%x3.5 (.175) gives us 5.4 per attack, or 10.8.

We then have our bonus d6, with a 79.75% chance to land on our turn. That gives us 3.5x79.75%, or 2.79125.

Now, to get really crunchy, the crit chance on that bonus d6 is 5% on the first attack, but then, the chance of it critting on the second attack is only 5% x 45% (as we'd only get to crit with it if we hadn't hit on the second attack) so we're talking 5%x145%, which comes to 7.25%, which we then apply to our 3.5 from the d6, giving us .25375 damage.

Thus, from our Lightning Launcher, we're doing a total of 13.845 damage per turn. Not... amazing, but continuing on:

We can cast Dragon's Breath on our Homunculus Servant at 3rd level, which means it will be doing 4d6 damage on a failed save, or 14 average, and then 7 average on a successful save. This should happen every turn, so we can easily just add it to the damage turn-by-turn. The Death Knight has a 55% chance to succeed, so 55% of the time we're doing 7 damage and 45% of the time, we're doing 14. 14x45% is 6.3 and 7x55% is 3.85, so the spell nets us an average of 10.15.

Thus, that brings our total damage per turn to 23.995, which is better, but not amazing.

However, if this is a serious boss fight, it stands to reason that we're going whole hog. At level 10, we only have 2 3rd level spell slots. Should we just blow them on Lightning Bolt?

Lighting Bolt does 8d6, or 28 average damage on a failure. But our DK foe has a pretty good saving throw bonus, so again, 55% of the time they're only taking 14. 14x55% is 7.7 and 28x45% is 12.6, so on average our Lightning Bolt is doing 20.3 damage.

Now, we could do this twice, but this would mean downgrading our Dragon's Breath to a 2nd level (and we'd only be able to start casting Lightining Bolt on turn 2, as we still need to cast Dragon's Breath on the first turn). I believe we can just take our average 3rd level Dragon's Breath damage and cut it to 75% (because it's 3d6 instead of 4d6) so that should give us 7.6125 damage per turn.

Thus, if we do it this way, we can do 21.4575 damage on turn 1, and then on turns 2 and 3, we can do 27.9125 damage. I'd say we're now talking at least respectable, if not insane damage.

Notably, one level later, things change profoundly: we'll be having our Homunculus flying off at a safe distance and shooting a Lightining Bolt probably every round of combat with the Spell-Storing Item, which does take Dragon's Breath out of the equation, but that's doubling what Dragon's Breath was doing, and we can just start things off with our own Lightning Bolts as well, so that's basically 40.6 damage on turns 1 and 2 and then dropping to 34.145 after that, which I honestly think is quite solid.

Revisiting the Mysteries of Expedition 33

 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game that tells a story utterly drenched in mysteries. There are multiple massive twists in the story that left players deeply conflicted as to what the better of the two endings you can choose for the game really is.

Diving into the game when it first came out with no sense of what the story held (not even knowing that Verso was going to be a party member, and so not really thinking much of his many, many mentions by NPCs before he shows up for real) the game's massive twists really shook me - particularly after finishing Act Two, I had to just step away and take the rest of the day to recover.

But while those big reveals in the main plot do totally reframe the way you think about the story, there are subtler mysteries and hints at some of the background that aren't really answered in a straightforward way.

We're going to go deep into spoiler territory here.

Returning to Expedition 33

 I'd thought for a long while about whether I wanted to do New Game Plus or just start a new save file in Expedition 33. Indeed, I'd worried for a bit that one couldn't even make a separate save file (Oh, apparently Control Resonant will have a NG+, but no word on retroactively implementing that for the first game or if there will be a conventional "multiple save files" for Control Resonant, but it's something).

Anyway, having ground all the way to level 99 on all characters on my original save file (and still hitting brick walls on the DLC bosses) I decided I wanted a return to the simple, early levels of the game, and so just started a brand new save file.

Knowing what I know now, I found the Mime to fight in Lumiere (which gets you a record you can get at the end of the game). The game takes a fair amount of time before you actually get into the meat of it - though I suppose you can skip a lot of dialogue if you really don't care about the stuff in Lumiere at the beginning - I think you'll miss out on some materials, but it's not like you can't find Chroma Catalysts, Recoats, and Chroma out in the world.

The Gommage scene still yanks at your heartstrings, though it's also kind of fascinating seeing all the subtle hints at what's to come now that I know the real story. (For one thing, the fact that Lumiere Harbor is flanked by statues of Verso is kind of crazy). It's pretty nuts to think that, as devastating and horrific as this moment is, it's not even the most emotionally devastating moment.

When I first played the game, I truly knew nothing of the coming story, so it didn't occur to me to think of Lune and Sciel as anything special in the send-off party the night after the Gommage. While, again, the plot takes even darker and more painful turns, there's this constant juxtaposition of beauty with all the existential horror. Even the Nevrons (especially in these early areas) are kind of beautiful. The more terrifying designs like the Marionette are a ways off, and so the Lanciers and such that we encounter in Spring Meadows honestly look like they could have been whimsical guardians and protectors rather than human-exterminating death-constructs.

Because this is a game where good timing can prevent all damage, and the Nevrons you encounter at the start of the game rarely do more than a single attack in a turn, I've done a pretty decent job of getting no-damage encounters, which then gives you bonus XP. With only a pair of weapons for Gustave and Lune each, there's very little "build" going on here, which is kind of refreshing. I think, knowing the mechanics of the game a lot better, I'm going to try to lean into making my own builds for the characters, though again, I kind of prefer when it's more just taking what you can get.

AP is a lot more plentiful later in the game, so I'm getting used to the rhythm of having to do regular attacks every other turn or so - though of course, if you're really good at parrying, you can generate a ton of AP that way.

But yeah, I'm not executing everything perfectly, but these early levels are also a lot more forgiving - I think I only got all the parries on Eveque's "casting a spell" attack once or twice, but getting hit only did like 25 damage or something when Gustave was at like 400 HP and Lune at maybe 250. Very different than when, at high levels, you basically go down if you miss like two dodges/parries in a monster's 7-hit combo.

I do remember finding the game plenty challenging even before the post-game stuff - I remember dying several times in the first Renoir fight. But so far, it's been relatively smooth sailing (Lune went down during the Chromatic Lancier fight - which you might be intended to skip initially. I think Chromatic foes are usually there to give you an excuse to return to zones, but I felt confident I could handle it, and seem to have been right.

Indeed, I think the only thing I have left to do in Spring Meadows is to come back when I can break those paint-spikes.

Ok, just in case people who want to try this game but never got around to it are reading, let's do a spoiler cut.

Darklords of Ravenloft

 We're now a little over a month (though less, I think, for people with D&D Beyond subscriptions) from the release of Ravenloft: Horrors Within.

I've said many-a-time here on my blog that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is my favorite 5E book. It's kind of the last of the big, beefy campaign setting books - we would later get the disappointing Spelljammer and Planescape box sets, the latter of which was not as bad, but still not nearly as comprehensive as I had hoped.

But Ravenloft is also kind of tied with Planescape as my favorite D&D setting - I guess because I think I'm too good for just a normal fantasy world with kingdoms and castles and stuff.

I know that there are some, especially old school D&D players, who really disliked Van Richten's. Many of the reasons they cite are things I just flat-out disagree with: core amongst them (pun intended) is the excision of the idea of "The Core," which in the original Ravenloft placed each domain of dread in geographical relation to one another. For example, Borca was just northwest of Barovia, and there was a road that led from Krezk in Barovia to Levkarest in Borca. The Mists could become an impenetrable border if either of the Darklords of these respective domains decided to make them so, but that was the geographic relationship.

Now, this could be just what I was first exposed to, but my first brush with Barovia was Curse of Strahd, the very first adventure module I bought for the game after getting the core books (and maybe Volo's Guide to Monsters, if that was out yet) but starting in that beloved adventure, Barovia and the domains of dread in general were presented, as they are in Van Richten's, as being demiplanar bubbles afloat within the Mists. Spatially, they were cut off from one another, meaning that travel between domains was not a matter of getting on the correct road but instead of getting your hands on the right Mist Talisman - a magically-charged artifact from that domain that could act as a lodestone to guide you there.

Likewise, as presented in Curse of Strahd as well as in Van Richten's, the domains function on nightmare logic - even if you get a map of the Svalich Woods, the woods can shift and stretch according to the will (conscious or not) of Strahd in order to terrorize those passing through it. I think the hazy isolation of free-floating domains fits that idea better.

I will concede, though, that if you want to play Ravenloft less as a series of nightmare-prisons and more as a contentious land of evil powers seeking to undermine and defeat one another, this geographical connection makes more sense. It is more conventional, as a D&D setting. If you want to send your party on a quest that requires them go from Barovia to Lamordia, they'll likely have to pass through Borca and Falkovnia along the way.

That being said, I think that you could also do this in the free-floating 5E Ravenloft, where you only get Mist Talismans that allow for travel to the "in-between" domains of your choice.

Another change, of course, that was somewhat controversial, was the changing of some Darklords. In some cases, the change itself was canonical, where you had Valachan's Ulrik von Kharkov overthrown by Chakuna. Others were more like retcons - Viktor Mordenheim was reimagined as Viktra Mordenheim, and her relationship with her flesh golem creation was also changed significantly - Viktor's Adam was a pretty direct parallel with the Frankenstein story with an absentee father and wrathful son, whereas Viktra's relationship with her creation, Elise, was one of a lover desperate to re-create her lost love.

I do think that some of these changes were really important to give the Darklords more distinctive characters - Vlad Drakov was kind of vaguely just "another vampire," inspired more by the historical Vlad Tsepes more than the literary Count Dracula, while Vladeska Drakov is a tyrant warrior who has brought disaster upon herself and her kingdom (and also gives us the "zombie apocalypse" domain).

So, again, I get that the book was controversial, even if I freaking loved it. My love for it was also less about the specific details and more about the structure of the book - its discussion of horror as a genre and the way that it was more about presenting ideas for adventures than strictly laying out how things would have to be.

But one thing I will concede is that it would have been cool to get bespoke stat blocks for the Darklords.

In the case of Harkon Lukas, his stat block was in the book, though presented as a general Loup-Garou that could represent other characters. And while I do think it's fun to give Strahd his own specific features and abilities (as we saw in both Curse of Strahd and Vecna: Eve of Ruin) it's also kind of fitting that, as the first vampire in the D&D cosmos, he should have the standard CR 13 legendary vampire stat block - almost as if to invite players, when looking at that block in the Monster Manual, to consider that any use of a vampire statblock should aspire at least to have a character as rich and thought-out as Strahd.

But then you have something like Viktra Mordenheim, and the suggested stat block for them is a Spy, which is a CR 1, non-legendary creature that also, you know, doesn't really have any of the kind of mad-scientist abilities that you'd expect someone like Mordenheim to have.

Now, I understand the ethos of having low-CR Darklords. A Darklord need not always be the final boss at the end of a big dungeon like Strahd is for Castle Ravenloft (though again, even he need not serve that function). But I think tossing them all these generic stat blocks (I think Spy is used for several of them) puts a lot of burden on the DM to ensure that an encounter with them is, well, interesting. A Spy just has a +1 to Intelligence, and surely Mordenheim would be smarter than that? Again, even if she's not meant to be much of a fighter, couldn't she at least have some kind of lightning-weapon, or the ability to summon, say, a Flesh Golem to defend her?

Like, I think that a "Viktra Mordenheim boss fight" is probably one in which she's behind some impenetrable barrier overseeing a workshop/factory of flesh golems and other constructs as they attack the party that must be defeated before we can gain access to her control room, after which taking out the good doctor is a formality.

But I do still think that it's more fun if the villains can play that "final boss" role.

Now, I'm given to understand that this is one of the issues that Horrors Within intends to address - I've seen a screenshot from the digital Maps assets from the book that include a Wilfred Godefroy that appears to be CR 6 (unlike the CR 4 Ghost he's presented as in Van Richten's) and Saidra d'Honaire as CR 7 or something (in Van Richten's, she's a Wraith, though also one with an effectively unlimited Disintegrate spell with a crazy high CR of 18, which I'd think would bump her up a fair bit from a Wraith's normal CR 5).

Thus, I suspect that we're getting a bunch of Darklord statblocks (we've already seen on for Cthulhu).

I do wonder, though, if they intend to roll back any of the controversial changes from Van Richten's - I hope not, as I'm very happy with the way that the setting is presented in that book - but we'll see.

Racing Through Pragmata's Post-Game

 After you beat Pragmata, you get an option to start a new save file that basically backs you up to before the final boss fight, with all the upgrades an unlocks that you've got, and a new area appears on the map. It's not a full zone, but instead is basically another Shelter-like space that has ten simulation beds like the one you use for your Training Missions.

When I showed up, several of them were already open. I believe this is because, in the course of the main game, I had collected all the items, boxes, etc., in each zone - I suspect that these open training pods would have been closed if I had not yet completed that element of the game. Four others can be unlocked by going back and fighting upgraded versions of each of the four major bosses from the zones (prior to the central tower).

Maybe because of my thoroughness and upgrades I'd already gotten, I didn't find these bosses terribly challenging. I don't think I died to any of them (in fairness, I think the only bosses I died to in the initial run of the game were the one in the Terra Dome and the final boss). Still, it was fun to come back to them (and I hope that you can just re-fight them as much as you like, though I haven't tried to).

Each opens up another simulated mission, which are all somewhat similar to the challenges in the Training Mode from the base game, but none had time limits or bonus objectives, so while there were some tough combat challenges, it wasn't anything to break your controller over (the final challenge is a gauntlet of fights, eventually pitting you against two of those Dead Filament-corrupted kind of Ninja-like robot minibosses, the first of which you have to fend off while Diana is being repaired at the Cradle, though there's an incinerator you can lure them into, and I was able to wipe out one very quickly).

I've completed all the challenges in the hidden room, which opens up a vault containing new costumes for Hugh and Diana, a new weapon that lets you shoot Lunafilament (yes, you can turn what is essentially your XP/money into ammo,) and a Mod that I believe doesn't actually do anything for you mechanically, but notably seems to help people infected with Dead Filament survive.

UPDATE: I beat the game again - there are few enough changes that I'm just going to add to this post instead of making a whole new one.

Uh, spoilers: