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).
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. 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 an action (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.
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