First off, we're taking a little departure with this one: this is a multiclass build. For me, I think there's just such amazing utility to starting with one level of Fighter if you want to go Bladelock that I can't really justify not doing it.
But I need a story to justify it. I had previously built this character with the 5.0 version of the subclass and not even really a Bladelock. Our hero (more of an antihero) was a courtier in a lofty hall of a nobleman, but when treacherous fey visitors turned on his childhood friend/liege lord and slaughtered everyone in the manor, he was walled up Casque of Amontillado-style in one of the walls of the basement. There, he suffocated to death and was caught in a liminal void for countless years, until a mysterious voice contacted him, instilling life into him once more as a Reborn. Emerging from the haunted ruins of the manor in which he had done his life's work, he followed the directions of the voice to a ruined tower, and therein, he found an entire knightly order that had been corrupted into undeath by those same treacherous fey, and cursed to never leave their tower. The knights offered to imbue him with power if he would act as their agent in the world, and thus he became a Warlock.
The tweak to the story is that, likely rather than a pure bureaucratic functionary, he was likely a member of some kind of honor-guard for his friend, hence beginning as a Fighter.
With that out of the way:
Something about the Undead patron to me feels particularly good for a Bladelock - while you could certainly fight in the name of a Demon Lord or an angelic avenger (actually, a "thornblade" for a coven of hags sounds cool too) I've always loved Death Knights (WoW is a big reason why) and it seems like a servant of Death Knights really ought to be more martial in nature.
Classes:
We're trying to lean as hard into Warlock as possible. Once we secure Devouring Blade at level 12 (Fighter 1/Warlock 11) we might consider putting a bit more into Fighter to get Action Surge and a subclass, but that's outside of our purview right now.
The single level of Fighter does the following for us, though:
We get Weapon Masteries, including Graze, which will be the one we benefit from the most.
We get Medium and Heavy Armor Training. We're actually going to lean toward heavy armor because we'll need a reasonable Strength for both the Heavy weapons we want to use and the feat we'll want to take at Warlock 4.
We also get Con save proficiency, which will help us with concentration.
Once we have that first level, we're going to pour everything into Warlock, and stick with it for the rest of this 10-level build.
Stats:
Primarily, we want to start with a 17 in Charisma and a 13 in Strength, and then try to get a decent Con - I don't typically like to dump more than one stat, so you're probably getting a 14 in Con.
Invocations:
We're going to take most of the Blade-focused Invocations we can here. Pact of the Blade naturally at Warlock 1, and then Thirsting Blade and Eldritch Smite at Warlock 5. We'll also grab Devil's Sight, partially because Reborn don't get Darkvision, but even with other species, this lets us do Darkness shenanigans. Lifedrinker is a possibility, but I'm skipping it in favor of Lessons of the First Ones to take Tough and bolster our HP - we need to split ourselves a little between Strength, Charisma, and Con, so this will make up for both our mostly d8s of hit dice and probably not getting more than a +2 to Con. Tough effectively makes our hit dice d12s for the purpose of calculating our max HP. Finally, we'll grab Pact of the Chain as well, getting a nicely flavorful Skeleton familiar, though even though we can use them in combat, we probably won't. I'm also taking Agonizing Blast so that we can still use Eldritch Blast as a ranged option when we need to.
Gear:
Thanks to starting as a Fighter, we'll start off with Chain Mail. Now, one thing we have to deal with is that we actually will be slowed if we take Splint or Plate, because we're not going to have more than a 14 in Strength, at least until much later in our careers. If we can get better, magic Chain Mail, that'll be great, even if it only gives us the AC of Splint or Plate.
We're going to stick with a Greatsword as our main weapon - I don't think we'll have the feats to invest in both Great Weapon Master and Polearm Master, as we'll still want to take Charisma-boosting options after level 4. That's fine, these hit very hard and have Graze.
Feats:
We're going to grab Great Weapon Master at level 4, which will boost our Strength to 14.
Spells:
Ok, now for the big one:
We only have two Pact slots at level 10, but they're both 5th level.
The main spells I'd focus on using are Spirit Shroud and Armor of Agathys.
Both use a bonus action to cast, one providing a bit of damage along with some resilience, and the other boosting our damage. Thanks to Tough and our armor, we should be a fair amount more resilient than your typical Warlock. Agathys is great, and in theory we can even refresh its Temp HP with Form of Dread, though against a Death Knight (maybe even one of our patrons?) its effects won't be that useful aside form the Temp HP.
Given that we have Thirsting Blade, we won't be using spells like Green-Flame Blade or Booming Blade. Again, I'd grab Eldritch Blast for a ranged option, but the rest would probably be more utility spells.
Attack Sequence:
With our pact Greatsword in hand (doing either psychic or radiant damage - necrotic is no-go against a Death Knight) we're going to start off by casting Spirit Shroud. At 5th level, this will add 2d8 to each of our attacks, doing our choice of radiant, necrotic, or cold damage (we'll go radiant again). It's similar to Conjure Minor Elementals, but has worse damage scaling but only takes a bonus action to cast. Given how OP CME is, I think that still means this is a very solid spell. Also, CME isn't a Warlock spell.
We probably want to save our remaining spell slot to either re-up Spirit Shroud or use it on a crit for Eldritch Smite. At 5th level, Eldritch Smite does 6d8 damage, but we can make up for that if we hit three times with Spirit Shroud. But a crit would make it very worth to blast out some insane damage. Armor of Agathys could be an option if we are worried about survivability - it can also put out a lot of damage to attackers when cast at this level, but you need to hope that the Death Knight rolls low damage.
Notably, as Reborn, we might have Necrotic resistance, which would be great in a fight like this, but we also probably aren't taking it because we will get that anyway for being a 10th level Undead warlock.
Damage Output:
Notably, we only have a +4 to Charisma, so we're not going to be hitting quite as often. That said, Graze is going to help us out a lot. The calculation is actually quite simple, as ultimately we're just making two attacks that are buffed up.
With Spirit Shroud up, we're now dealing 2d6+2d8+4 radiant damage per hit, so that's 20 damage on average, with 16 more on a crit. That said, because we have Graze, we can actually just guarantee the 4 and throw the hit and crit damage together.
With a +8 to hit, we'll land an attack on a roll of 12 or higher, so 45% of the time. Add in the 5% chance of a crit, and you get 50% of 16, or 8, and then add in the guaranteed 4 each turn to get us 12 damage per attack, or 24 damage per turn.
If we do land a crit, we will be adding 12d8, or about 54 damage on average.
Still, I'm honestly a little surprised at how underwhelming this damage is.
Oh! I forgot Great Weapon Master!
So, let's rewind:
We're actually now hitting for 2d6+2d8+4+4 on a hit, or 24 on average, and adding 16 on a crit.
Again, we're going to pull 4 out of that and add it in later for Graze, so we'll look at 20 damage on a hit.
20x45% is 9 (such round numbers!) and 5% times 16 is .8, so it's really 9.8, and then adding in the guaranteed 4 to give us 13.8 per attack, which gives us 27.6 damage per round. Certainly a bit better, but still a little underwhelming.
However, while we've used our bonus action on this turn to cast Spirit Shroud, on subsequent turns, we will get to make a Hew attack if we land a crit. With two attacks, the chance that happens is 9.75%.
Without the extra 4 from GWM, we're going to do 12 average damage on an attack (as we calculated before, ) so in the 9.75% of the time we get to do this, we're adding 1.17 damage per round, bringing us up to 28.77, which still feels pretty low.
Ok, so we're switching our gameplan:
We're basically a Death Knight ourselves. And what does a Death Knight have? An army of skeletons.
If we assume we can find a whole bunch of bones, we're going to cast Danse Macabre, ideally before combat. We raise 5 Skeletons, and each skeleton is going to get a bonus equal to our Charisma modifier to their attack and damage rolls. This winds up actually giving them a +9 to hit, and their attacks (probably using bows to avoid being too close to the Death Knight) deal 1d6+7 damage on a hit.
If we can't cast ahead of time, we'll do this at the start of combat and immediately have them attack.
Each has a 50% chance to hit. 1d6+7 is an average of 10.5 damage, and they do an extra 3.5 on a crit. So that's 5.25 plus .175, or 5.425 damage per attack. There are five of them, so with our bonus action to command them, we're doing an average of 27.125 (already basically outpacing our previous plan).
Now, our bonus action is now spoken for, so we're just making our two melee attacks on our turn, and this time without Spirit Shroud. So, we'll deal 2d6+8 on a hit and add 2d6 on a crit, or 11 and 7. We can remove 4 guaranteed damage and calculate 11x45%, or 4.95 and then the 7x5%, or .35, for 5.3, add in the guaranteed 4 for Graze and we get 9.3 damage per attack, or 18.6 damage from us if we don't need to spend our action on Danse Macabre.
Thus, our damage becomes 45.725 and holy moly that's freaking incredible.
Two notes, one good and one bad.
The good note is that we actually don't need our bonus action after the first command if the command is simply "keep shooting at the Death Knight and spread out while staying in regular range with your shortbows," as the skeletons should continue to follow a command until it's completed. Thus, we can now get our Hew attacks in if we get them.
The bad note is that the Skeletons are going to be very fragile - the spell doesn't boost their survivability at all, and so they're prime targets to be wiped out by Hellfire Orb. Keep them spread out as much as you can to avoid losing too many to one.
Danse Macabre was a fun spell introduced in Xanathar's, but it mostly wasn't as good at higher levels when you started fighting monsters with resistance or even immunity to nonmagical weapon damage. But as that as a concept has been excised from 5.5, spells like this have gotten way better.
You will need to find corpses to animate - you can also make zombies with it, but skeletons are much better damage-dealers - but hopefully with a Death Knight you'll have plenty of bones around (though it's also unlikely that those bones are all inert).
Spirit Shroud will get a bit better when you can get 11 levels in Warlock and grab Devouring Blade (you might consider using it with Eldritch Blast when you are Fighter1/Warlock10, as EB will upgrade its number of beams a level earlier). But if you can keep those skeletal archers alive, Danse Macabre is honestly a really good source of damage.
No comments:
Post a Comment