Drops: Sorrow Knight Fighter

 I think this might be the first time we've gotten a full-on subclass from D&D Beyond Drops, and this one's a fascinating one.

Hey folks, it's October! That means it's spooky season, all leading up to my favorite holiday, Halloweeen. Getting into the spook spirit, D&D Beyond Drops has unleashed a whole bunch of scary monsters, feats, and this subclass.

Sorrow Knight Fighters are attuned to the magic of the Shadowfell, with some tragedy or horror in their past that connected them to this realm of gloom and despair. The Shadowfell is probably my favorite D&D plane, and I love fighting (and running) spooky monsters in shadowy settings.

Broadly, the Sorrow Knight has some similarities with the Battle Master, but let's get specific:

Level 3:

Despairing Strikes:

You have a resource called Despairing Strike Dice, which can be used to enhance your attacks. You begin with 3 of them, which are d8s. At level 10, they become d10s and you get a fourth. At 15, they become d12s and you get a fifth. After expending them, you get them back on a short rest.

    So, this is, I think, a bit fewer dice than a Battle Master, and I think there's less versatility for your options, but it's reasonably comparable.

When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend a DSD and roll it (one die per attack maximum, though no limit on uses per turn), adding psychic damage to the attack equal to the amount rolled, and then get to add one of the following effects:

Abandoned: The target must succeed on an Intelligence saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or have the Deafened condition until the end of your next turn. While deafened, the target regards all creatures it can see as enemies until the end of your next turn.

    Hey, so this won't work on a Gulthias Blight, who is immune to being Deafened. Still, while deafened is a pretty weak condition to impose (it does almost nothing to hinder a foe) the "treat everyone as enemies" option is potentially useful. While it won't guaranteed that a foe will attack its allies given that you and your allies are still there to be targeted, it is something you might use on a healer or some other creature that is trying to do things to benefit other creatures. Or, you could use it on an enemy with a big AoE to ensure that they don't avoid hitting allies when going after your friends. Situational, and of course, not very useful against solo monsters, but interesting.

Dread: The target had Disadvantage on the next saving throw it makes before the end of your turn.

    This is pretty broadly useful, either setting up a spellcaster or someone else who has a clutch saving throw ability, or even just setting you up for Abandoned or one of the other options you get later on.

Solemn Gaze:

You gain Darkvision with a range of 60 ft, or if you already have Darkvision, the range increases by 60 feet.

    Nothing huge, but not bad to have.

Also, as a Magic action, you can attempt to search the mind of a creature you can see within 30 feet. They must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or you learn an emotion that looms large in their mind, such as worry, love, hate, etc. If the target can see you, it knows you have read its emotions. You can do this Wis times per long rest (minimum 1).

    The utility of this feature depends a lot on DM interpretation. This isn't detect thoughts - you just get an emotion that looms large in them, not necessarily that they're feeling particularly strongly at the moment. In other words, I think this could add a ton of flavor to NPC interactions, but the degree to which this information is actionable is not obvious. Flavor-wise, though, it's amazing. And this is on top of the other level 3 features we're getting.

Level 7:

Dreaded Appearance:

When you use Tactical Shift, you can teleport 30 feet instead of moving. Immediately afte ryou appear, you can briefly take on the appearance of a creatures' fears, visible only to those creatures. Each creature of your choice within a 10-foot emanation muse make a Wisdom saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or take Psychic damage equal to a roll of your DSD (this does not appear to expend it) and is Frightened until the end of your next turn, or on a success, they take half damage only.

Once you take on this appearance, you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

    Note that I think the alteration for Tactical Shift is unlimited (other than by, you know, how many times you can do that). The damage here is pretty trivial, but an AoE fear is not a bad thing to have. And we're getting that as a free carry-on with all the other benefits of Tactical Shift, so I think this is pretty good. Obviously, as we've seen a lot of features with DCs based on Wisdom, you're going to want to pump that up as much as possible with this subclass.

Level 10:

Unsettled Strikes:

You have the following new options to use with your Despairing Srikes:

Apathetic: The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or have the Incapacitated condition until the start of your next turn. While incapacitated, the target can only give one-word responses when spoken to.

    Damn. I mean, the one-word thing is fine, but incapacitation can be enormous. For one thing, it breaks concentration, but obviously the bigger thing is that it prevents them from taking any actions, bonus actions, or reactions.

Lost: The target makes a Charisma saving throw. On a failure, the target is Blinded and its speed is reduced to 0 until the end of its next turn. On a success, its speed is halved only instead.

    That's not too bad either - Blinded is usually a Con save condition, and so you're probably more likely to succeed with this one. A good way to lock down an enemy and then give everyone advantage on attacks against them.

Weary: The target must succeed on a Constitution saving throw or gain 1 Exhaustion level. The effect cannot increase the target's Exhaustion above 2, and the levels from this effect are removed at the end of your next turn.

    So, this is... you see Exhaustion and your eyes go wide, but this isn't quite that. That being said, giving a foe a -2 or even a -4 to all d10 tests (and the -4 will be more likely to happen if they're already at -2 to Con saves) isn't bad. But it's only for one turn. Essentially, I wonder if I'd be more enthusiastic about this if I weren't thinking about how insane it would be to have long-term and unlimited exhaustion from this. Don't forget that it also slows a target.

Level 15:

Grim Constitution:

You have resistance to Necrotic and Psychic damage.

    Right off the bat, these aren't bad ones to have, especially if you're in a spooky Shadowfell/Ravenloft game, where you're likely to encounter both damage types a lot.

In addition, when you are subjected to an effect that reduces your HP maximum, you can make a DC 15 Con save, and your HP is not reduced on a success. Each time you make this Con save after the first, the DC increases by 5, but taking a short or long rest resets it to 15.

    Less broadly useful, but it could be good when fighting particularly undead (again, common foes in a Shadowfell/Ravenloft game). I'm surprised this doesn't just give immunity to such things. Eh, this one's not amazing, though the damage resistances are pretty good.

Level 18:

Grieving Mantle:

When you use your Action Surge, you attune yourself to the Shadowfell for 1 minute or until you become incapacitated. For the duration, you have the following:

    Before we get into the specific functions, I do kind of like how this turns Action Surge into the trigger for a "super mode" for Fighters. While this does then kind of discourage using it multiple times per combat, it's an interesting bit of tech.

Shade Form: When you are hit with an attack roll, you can use a reaction to become insubstational for a moment and reduce the attack's total damage to zero.

    Wow! Not halved, not gaining resistance. This just full-on nopes out of an entire attack. Obviously this depends a bit on how many attacks you're taking in a round, but the ability to use this if you get crit by some massive monster is really clutch, and while Action Surge is a limited resource, this means that for a whole combat you're going to be undoing one attack that hits you each round, which is quite nice.

Unwavering Resolve: You have immunity to the Charmed and Frightened conditions, and if you have either when you activate Grieving Mantle, the condition ends for you.

    Naturally if you have a Devotion Paladin in your party, this won't do anything for you, but it's still pretty nice if you don't have those bases covered.

Overall Thoughts:

    I actually think this is a pretty solid subclass. It's doing a lot of things that Fighters can't really do in most cases - indeed, some of these effects are pretty rare even for spellcasters (is "Abandoned" kind of Enemies Abound, a spell from Xanathar's?)

    You will be pretty dependent on getting a high wisdom, because there are a lot of saving throws that enemies will be making against these effects. Fighters can afford a secondary ability score a bit, but if you have a way to somehow attack with Wisdom, that could be very helpful. Taking magic initiate Druid and grabbing Shillelagh could work pretty well here, and maybe Polearm Master to enhance the power of a Quarterstaff (as the cantrip won't let you grab something that works with Great Weapon Master). Multiclassing with Druid or Ranger could also make some sense here, though if the campaign is going high enough, I'd be pretty excited to get Grieving Mantle.

    Yeah, generally I think this is a pretty solid subclass, and it drips with flavor, which is always a big positive.

A Take on Darsino for D&D

 I love my undead Rogue, Darsino. The first character I got to the then-level cap back in Burning Crusade (I started playing in September of 2006, during Vanilla, but leveling took a long time, and so I think my highest-level character by the time the first expansion came out was only in the 30s - I was also already a big altoholic; see the name of the blog).

Anyway, except for a brief stint focusing on Assassination around I think Warlords of Draenor, he's always been primarily a Subtlety Rogue, a subclass that seems to finally, after like two decades, be having a day in the limelight as one of the top DPS specs (not that it matters much given that I'm almost purely a solo player these days).

I was always drawn, when it comes to the Rogue, to the notion of being an unseen shadow, a blade in the dark striking out and taking down foes without being seen, and the Subtelty specialization really leans into at least the flavor of Stealth.

But here's my issue: after playing a Rogue for around a year in a campaign that eventually fell apart due to a busy DM, I don't love the Rogue as a class in D&D. I think it's got a lot of potential, but I've always wanted it to be more of a martial glass cannon that needs to be evasive and sneaky to survive, but hits like a freight train. We get the former, but it tends to come up short on the latter, instead focusing a bit more on being a skill monkey.

I've always had running concepts of what my World of Warcraft characters might be like in D&D, but with the WoW sourcebook coming out in two months, that potential feels closer to reality. So, how would I do it?

Truthfully, the only character option I'm sure doesn't yet exist but will is going to be the Forsaken playable species. In WoW, the official term for the playable race is just "Undead," which is also a creature type that Undead player characters... are not. Even more than in D&D, every player character in WoW counts as humanoid (with rare exceptions like the Death Knight's Lichborne ability temporarily making them count as undead, among other benefits).

The justification for this, though, is that while the playable Undead are, yes, former humans who died and rose again, they had their souls returned to them. So, they're sentient and sapient, with their normal free will and minds, but in decayed and rotten bodies that look like zombies. Originally raised into undeath as part of the Undead Scourge, this faction that regained their souls came to be known as The Forsaken, and eventually were brought into the Horde by the Tauren, who sympathized with their plight and sought to find some way to cure them and restore them to true life (though given that the living humans distrusted the Forsaken and tried to wipe them out along with the Scourge, it also made sense to align themselves with a faction that could realistically oppose the Alliance).

Anyway, I had some thoughts on how to replicate the actual feel of playing Darsino in WoW, and I came to an interesting conclusion:

He's going to be mostly a Fighter.

In WoW, the Warrior is the rough equivalent to the Fighter (I'd argue that the Fury Warrior is more Barbarian, though interestingly, the book seems to be positioning the Barbarian as the Shaman equivalent, which is funny given that Shamans in WoW all have a fair amount of spellcasting, even if one is still a melee/magic hybrid).

But in D&D, Fighters can take on many forms, and one can be a light (or medium) armored, dexterity-focused character.

Fighters are also the gold standard on actually being good at dealing a lot of damage with weapons (while the Paladin is arguably a stronger class overall, that's more because of their spells and support features, like Aura of Protection).

Now, Subtlety Rogues have a few abilities that allow shadowy clones of them to appear and strike at targets before vanishing. It's actually not unlike the Shadow in Draw Steel, which gets a similar feature at high levels (truly I think its Black Ash subclass for Shadows is about as close to a WoW Sub Rogue as you can get in a TTRPG). While this theme only emerged in the last couple expansions, I think it's one I'm going to lean into, in part because it aligns us with one of the coolest Fighter subclasses in the game: the Echo Knight.

The Echo Knight was from Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and as Critical Role gets sort of less entangled with Wizards of the Coast in an official capacity (though they did choose to stick with D&D for campaign 4 rather than going to their in-house game, Daggerheart,) I highly doubt we'll be seeing the Echo Knight reprinted in 5.5.

But that means it's going to still be the super powerful subclass it always has been.

The crux of the Echo Knight is that you can summon an echo of yourself (flavored as an alternate timeline variant of yourself, though this is pretty flexible) nearby with a bonus action, and you can effectively attack from its position or yours, choosing on each attack. The echo is fragile, with only 1 HP, but you can endlessly resummon it. You can also use a bonus action to swap places with it, giving it actually a ton of out-of-combat utility (summon it up on a high ledge and then swap places, for instance).

A number of times equal to your Con modifier, you can make one extra attack as part of the Attack action, but this has to be from your Echo's space.

For gearing, I'd build this around dual-wielding. While the Subtlety Rogue fights exclusively with daggers in WoW, that's not quite as viable in D&D. I think we'd probably instead go with a Shortsword and either a Scimitar or Dagger. The Scimitar does slightly better damage, 1d6 versus 1d4, but the Dagger has the advantage of the thrown property, and if we ever decide to take the Piercer feat, we could make all of our weapons piercing (even if we carry a Shortbow for ranged fighting when we need to).

Fighters get an insane number of weapon masteries, so there's no fear that we'll have any weapon we're using covered. We'll attack with our Shortsword for most of our attacks, and just get our off-hand with the Dagger. Thankfully, Nick makes this part of the attack action, leaving our bonus action open.

Depending on the level we start at, we might eschew stealth and go for bulky medium armor like Scale Mail. Once we cap our Dexterity, though, we will probably want to stick with Studded Leather, as this will give us the highest potential AC and no disadvantage on Stealth checks (we could get higher AC if we got Medium Armor Master, but this no longer removes the stealth disadvantage from Half Plate). If we can get a Breastplate very early, it'll be decent, but by level 4, when we should have a +4 to Dex, Studded Leather will do us fine.

Now, we want to get 6 levels of Fighter before we multiclass into Rogue. We want to get Extra attack at level 5, and then the Fighter's bonus feat at level 6. In fact, I believe that if we put 10 levels into Rogue and 10 into Fighter, we'll eventually have 6 general feats (though getting 11 levels in Fighter for our third attack might be a better investment - oh well, this build is only going to level 10).

Indeed, actually, by the time we hit level 10, if we have Fighter 6 and Rogue 4, that means 3 general feats, which is what a straight Fighter or straight Rogue would get at that level anyway.

Rogue subclass is a less obvious choice. Subtlety Rogues in particular in WoW have a bit of a "shadow magic" theme to them, though only lightly. I was even tempted to go Shadow Monk, but I think the choice here is probably just Arcane Trickster, generally seen as the best Rogue subclass because, well, magic.

Unlike many ATs, though, I don't think I'd grab Booming Blade, because that's really great if we only want to make a single attack. Darsino is going to be making three attacks by this point with each attack action (2x shortsword and 1x dagger). So, spells would primarily be for utility. We'd likely grab Disguise Self and things like Message, Minor Illusion, and maybe Prestidigitation (just because I always like having that). We get Mage Hand automatically.

For other 1st level spells (and we will only have 1st level spells for a long time,) Shield is obviously always good to have, and then perhaps getting Jump could be another way to make us more nimble, jumping across rooftops and such.

Now, feats: we will actually have plenty of feats to choose from.

For our fighting styles, I'm grabbing Two Weapon Fighting. This is one of the best fighting style feats in terms of how much damage you can add to your output each turn.

I actually think I won't be taking Dual Wielder. We're going to have a lot of uses for our bonus action, between our Echo and our Cunning Actions, and I just don't think that we can afford the feat for a somewhat weak attack once per turn. Yes, Rogues really benefit from having tons of opportunities to land Sneak Attack, but we're already getting three per turn.

Instead, I think Mage Slayer is a great gimme option, mostly for the pseudo legendary resistance.

Then, and sure, this feat isn't necessarily the best, but it feels really on-theme, I'm going for Skulker. This gives advantage on Stealth checks to hide mid-combat, gives us blindsight (which Rogues eventually get but we might be able to given our fighter levels) and prevents us from losing the Hidden condition if we miss with a ranged attack.

Finally, we could grab Piercer, which is ok. But again, perhaps less optimal but something I might just like, I kind of want to go Skill Expert. This will grant us one extra skill (making up for the one fewer skill we got for not starting as a Rogue - we do still get one extra skill when we multiclass into it, but Rogues normally get two extra) and one extra expertise.

The full list I grabbed was Acrobatics, Deception, Insight, Investigation, Perception, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth (using the Criminal background reskinned as Spy, which is how I've always conceived of Darsino, as basically one of the top intelligence agents of the Deathstalkers). Expertise is put into Stealth, Perception, and Deception (the latter of which makes up for dumping Charisma).

As mentioned above, the Criminal background grants Alert, which feels like a solid feat choice especially for a character who prefers to get the drop on his foes.

So, by level 10, with 6 levels of fighter and 4 of rogue, he will have his Dexterity capped at 20.

Ok, so here we are:

How much damage do we do versus a Wyvern?

Sadly, this is a build that uses Vex weapons, which vex me when it comes to figuring out the actual chances of having advantage on our attacks.

Our echo is not a creature (it actually doesn't specify that it's an object either, but that's how I'd treat it in game terms) so we won't be able to flank with it (though flanking isn't even mentioned in the 5.5 core rules, and I think it's actually reasonable to disallow it).

But, we're very sneaky. So, I'm going to skew things here a little: let's just assume we have advantage on all of our attacks. That might inflate our damage output a little bit, but I don't know that it's even that unrealistic. And it just makes my life far easier.

Ok, so, we have a +9 to hit with all of our attacks. Each turn we make two Shortsword attacks and one Dagger attack. If we hit on any of them, we will get our Sneak Attack bonus, which is 2d6 at this rogue level. If we go all out, we can use Unleash Incarnation to make one additional attack with our Echo. Our bonus action will be used to summon/position our echo, or use Cunning Action to hide or otherwise survive the fight better.

So, Shortswords with advantage: against an AC of 14, we're talking hitting on a 5 or higher, so that's an 80% chance to hit normally, which becomes a 96% chance to hit with advantage. With advantage we have a 9.75% chance to crit. We deal 1d6+5 damage on a hit, or 8.5, and 3.5 extra on a crit.

Thus, 8.5x96% is 8.16 and 3.5x9.75% is roughly .34, so we're looking at 8.5 average damage per shortsword attack, and thus doubled to 17.

Our dagger does 1d4+5 damage, or 7.5 on a hit, and 2.5 more on a crit, with the same hit and crit chances, so 7.5x96% is 7.2 and 2.5x9.75% is roughly .24, so we're looking at 7.44, bringing our total damage up to 25.44

Now, our sneak attack. With all this assumed advantage, we can probably guess that we'll be getting this if we hit. Our chance to actually land a hit on one of our three attacks is basically one minus 4% (our miss chance) cubed. So, 4% cubed is .0064%, meaning we are more or less guaranteed to get our sneak attack - literally the chance we miss on all three attacks is so low that I'd typically round it off.

However, we might crit. So, I'm going to basically treat the damage here as 100% plus 9.75%. 2d6 is 7 on average, so 7x109.75% is about 7.7.

Thus, the damage becomes 33.14.

We can only use Unleash Incarnation a couple times per long rest (our Con isn't enormous given the background we chose and the desire to put a little more into Intelligence and Wisdom, which are pretty important Spy stats,) so I think we can only really assume we're using this once in this fight, unless we really want to go all out.

This simply adds another Shortsword attack, so we get to toss in an extra 8.5, bringing turn 1 up to 41.14.

It's not amazing damage, to be frank. But I do think we'll be extremely slippery, between Cunning Action and swapping with our Echo. We can even play it really safe and send our Echo out to make all of our attacks if we want, striking against some dangerous foe while we're running for cover, so I think this could be very fun to play.

At higher levels, I think we'd probably want to put at least two more levels into Fighter (grabbing another feat, but also getting our level 7 subclass feature, which gives us some more utility). Then, four more levels into Rogue would boost our Sneak attack, give us another feat, get us 2nd level spells, and also give us Reliable Talent and Evasion, Cunning Strikes, Uncanny Dodge, and more Expertise. By that point we'd be level 16, but if we were pushing into tier 4, I think probably we put our last 4 levels into Fighter, getting a third attack by level 19 and another feat at level 20, plus, like Indomitable and Tactical Master (though our Vex and Nick properties are probably going to be what we want to stick with most of the time) and our level 10 Echo Knight feature, Shadow Martyr.

Alternatively, if we only went to Fighter 8 and did Rogue 12, we'd actually wind up with 7 total General feats, our Sneak Attack would eventually grow to 6d6, and we'd get more Arcane Trickster stuff including Magical Ambush and some more spells. For 2nd level spells, Invisibility feels like a classic one, and I love a good Misty Step (very much like Shadow Step from WoW).

Ranged Battlemaster vs. Wyvern

 I like the flavor of Matt Mercer's Gunslinger subclass, which was famously used by Taliesin Jaffe in Critical Role's first campaign. But the downsides, mainly the chance at Misfire on your attacks, is a kind of class design that doesn't really fit with other 5E class and subclasses, with nearly all features being pure positives. It may have been a holdover from Pathfinder or 3.5, but it always bugged me that a non-Gunslinger in 5E could fire guns without worrying about their breaking while a Gunslinger did have that concern.

So, I have long thought that if I wanted to create a similar kind of character, I'd go Battlemaster. Indeed, the Battlemaster and Arcane Archer already have similar ideas to a Gunslinger, with a limited ability to alter shots, but I think the Battlemaster is the most versatile.

Now, ranged characters are a little nerfed in 5.5, thanks to the change to Sharpshooter. But I don't know that it's that terribly bad, especially when we consider a couple workarounds.

I see two primary paths here for damage, built around two specific feats: Crossbow Expert and Great Weapon Master.

Now, just to address the issue: this build probably won't work all that great with guns. The two firearms available in the PHB (formerly the "Renaissance era" firearms) hit hard, which is nice, but they have some major downsides. One is range - the Pistol only has a short range of 30 feet, and the Musket only 40. But the bigger one is that there's no feat in 5.5 that allows you to ignore their Loading property. While you could very easily just take the Gunner feat from Tasha's, if you're allowed to grab 5.0 material (which I generally assume,) this feat mostly just lets those weapons work rather than actually boosting their damage. Downgrading to a d8 from a d10 is not an enormous damage loss, and you get a lot in return.

Let's talk about what Crossbow Expert does for you: this is a feat that might play into the build in both of its iterations. The most crucial thing it does is let you ignore the Loading property, which would normally prevent the weapon from really being used with a class that uses Extra Attack. It also allows you to attack in melee without disadvantage if you're shooting a Crossbow, which is certainly nice. The last bit, and the one that may or may not actually be useful here, is that you can add your ability modifier to the bonus attack you get with the Light Property as long as the attack is made with a Hand Crossbow and you aren't already adding it (such as from the Two Weapon Fighting Style feat).

The latter piece basically enables you to dual-wield Hand Crossbows (like a Diablo III Demon Hunter) and even more or less gets you the Two Weapon Fighting Style as part of it to allow you to grab just Archery.

Now, even if we want to use a Heavy Crossbow, we'll want this feat anyway, so you could take it at level 4 and be a little freed up in terms of which option you want to use.

The other feat, Great Weapon Master, is more specific, and a little kludgy. While GWM boosts solely Strength and its Hew property only works on melee weapons, the Heavy Weapon Mastery aspect of it actually applies to two specific ranged weapons: the Longbow and the Heavy Crossbow. (Bizarrely, the Automatic Rifle, Shotgun, and Musket don't count).

Now, if we're dual-wielding Hand Crossbows, this won't do anything for us. That might be nice, as we could focus on Dex-based feats, but I also suspect this will be a bigger boost to our damage.

Just to figure that out before we go into other choices, let's figure it out really quick:

Fighters don't need their bonus action every round unless they're dual-wielding, so the two hand crossbows should be pretty easy to use most turns. With three feats by level 10, we could get our Dex to 20 (though we might be behind if we go with GWM). At this level, we could shoot three Hand Crossbow attacks per turn, each of which is adding Dex, so if we figure that's like 1d6+5 three times, that's 8.5x3, or 25.5 damage. If we are shooting a Heavy Crossbow twice, but getting to add our proficiency bonus because of GWM, even if our Dex is only +4 at this level, that's 1d10+8 twice, or 13.5x2, which is 27. It will be slightly less because of the fact that our hit chance is a little lower.

That said, Hand Crossbows have Vex, which is a more direct boost to damage than Heavy Crossbows' Push. Indeed, because we have Tactical Mastery at this level, both the Heavy Crossbow's Push and Longbow's Slow masteries are essentially worthless to us, as we'd be able to do that with any weapon.

Still, given that the scaling would favor the Heavy Crossbow at higher levels as both PB and our number of regular attacks go up, I'm going to go that way.

So, with that in mind, here's how I'd go with feats:

At level 1, our Fighting Style feat is of course going to be Archery, a very solid one, giving us +2 to hit with ranged attacks.

At level 4, I think we pick up Crossbow Expert. For the next two levels, we can freely swap between going Heavy Crossbow or two Hand Crossbows.

At level 6, we grab Great Weapon Master. We will need to have at least a 13 in Strength to grab this, but given that we're pretty single-ability-score-dependent, I don't think that'd be too taxing on our build. The main downside is that we won't cap Dex at level 8 unless we take a full ASI.

But, at level 8, I think we have a couple compelling options: Piercer is actually a pretty obvious choice - all ranged weapons save "futuristic" ones do piercing damage, so this should apply to basically everything we do, and we can even grab a rapier if we want and still benefit (though thanks to Crossbow Expert, we might as well still shoot our Crossbow).

Mage Slayer, of course, is always a good option as well.

I actually think I'm going to go with Mage Slayer, not because it's necessarily the best choice here, but because I don't want to have to worry about the once-per-turn reroll of damage.

As a note, if we prefer the aesthetic (or the very long range) of Longbows, we could swap out Crossbow Expert for Sharpshooter. Our damage takes a slight dip, but we will also be able to ignore cover and be fully effective at 600 feet (imagine being able to nail a foe at a length of two football fields - not that your DM is likely to put you in situations where you can actually do that).

Ok, that's feats and equipment sorted. Our final bit of set-up is Maneuvers.

We'll know seven maneuvers by level 10, and we have five d10 superiority dice.

Goading Attack is very nice on a ranged attack, as it might simply impose full disadvantage on the attack (though we can kind of get this by swapping in the Sap property).

Menacing Attack, imposing frightened at range, can literally stop a target in their tracks.

Pushing Attack might seem redundant with the Push Mastery, but consider that you can add both, potentially pushing a target away up to 25 feet.

Maneuvering Attack can help you play a kind of overwatch role, helping allies get into position or away from danger.

Commander's Strike might not be quite as exciting given that we're going to be hitting quite hard on our own, but it can massively improve the damage of a Rogue by giving them potentially a second Sneak Attack per round.

Precision Attack is not quite as important with the new Sharpshooter, but it will help prevent misses. Given that we'll have a pretty high attack bonus, I doubt we'll be using this a ton, but it can keep our damage consistent.

Honestly, I think this is going to rely a lot on your party makeup. But the key is that we can probably afford to use a maneuver on most turns, though we'll burn through them pretty quickly if we try to use them on every attack.

Let's assume the following:

If we land a critical hit, we'll burn a Superiority Die to get some extra damage. For the sake of our damage calculations, we'll assume we're not burning maneuvers outside of that scenario. This will deflate our damage output a bit, but one of the things that's really appealing about the Battle Master is that they don't necessarily just have a pre-programmed "rotation," and can be very reactive to the situation on the battlefield.

So, each turn, we attack twice. We'll burn a maneuver on a crit, meaning we might do that twice in a turn where we get very lucky and crit twice. We can say, just for the sake of consistency, that it's a Menacing Attack, or a Pushing Attack if they're already frightened of us.

If we do miss, we'll burn a die to try to hit with a Precision Attack.

Let's math it out:

We have a +4 to Dexterity, so with the Archery Fighting Style, our attack bonus is +10. Thus, we hit on a roll of 4 or higher. And if we roll a 2 or 3 (nat 1 is still an auto-miss) we can do a Precision Attack (we don't miss out on the Menacing/Pushing damage because we're already not critting). If we had rolled a 3 on the die, this will always turn it into a hit. If we had a 2, it's a 9/10 chance that it also turns it into a hit, so basically, within that 10% of rolling a 2 or 3, 95% of the time, it's still hit. So, that's 85% plus 9.5%, meaning we effectively have a 94.5% chance to hit. Our crit chance is the same standard 5%.

Our hit damage is 1d10+8, or 13.5 on average (the extra 4 coming from Great Weapon Master). However, our crit damage bonus is effectively 3d10 if we're saving maneuvers for crits, so that's 16.5.

Thus, we're looking at 13.5x94.5% or approximately 12.76, plus 16.5x5%, or .825, giving us 13.585 damage per attack. This then doubles with our two attacks to 27.17.

That's actually pretty low compared with some of the other things we've been doing. But let's assess some other elements:

First off, we'll probably do a little more damage because we might not save all our superiority dice for near-misses and crits. Also, the utility of inflicting the frightened condition can be pretty huge (or DC would be 16, which is decent). Against flyers, Trip Attack can actually be really powerful if they don't have Hover.

Also, this damage goes up by a full 50% at the next level, where it starts to look a lot more respectable.

I think the takeaway here is that you shouldn't expect to be the real damage-dealing powerhouse of the party. Instead, you've got a ton of utility you can apply while still making a meaningful contribution to the party's damage.

Hell Knight Fighter (v2)

 So, my recollection of the previous version was that it was a solid and interesting design (as I recall, this was my general impression of all the villainous subclasses). Here, you're a warrior for the Nine Hells, whether forced into it via a bargain or doing it for infernal rewards. Primarily, it's built around Infernal wounds, which is an interesting mechanic we'll get into.

Level 3:

Diabolical Gift:

You gain the following benefits:

Devil's Sight: Like the Warlock invocation, 120 feet of regular sight in dim light and darkness, magical or otherwise (technically not Darkvision, so I think you can see colors).

Devil's Talents: You know Infernal, or if you already know it, you can choose another language to learn. You also gain your choice of proficiency in Deception, Performance, or Sleight of Hand.

    These are both perfectly nice to have, and particularly if you're in a party with a Shadow Monk, Shadow Sorcerer, and a Warlock with Devil's Sight, you could pull off some fun shenanigans.

Hell-Forged Weapon:

When you take the attack action, you can imbue each weapon you're holding with hellfire, making it a Hell-Forged Weapon, which lasts until you go unconscious or the weapon is 5 feet away from you for more than a minute, or you choose to end it. While wielding a Hell-Forged Weapon, you shed dim light in a 5-foot radius and you can deal your choice of Cold, Fire, or Necrotic damage instead of its regular damage (you choose the damage type when you imbue the weapon.)

    Notably, this is no action required, so you can easily have this up all the time. It doesn't do a ton on its own (and might make it harder to sneak around, though given this subclass encourages you to use heavy armor, you probably aren't sneaking anyway).

Infernal Wound:

You have an infernal wound die, which is a d6.

When you hit a creature with a Hell-Forged Weapon, you can deal extra damage equal to the infernal wound die, which is the same damage type as the one chosen for the weapon. Additionally, you can inflict the target with an infernal wound.

While wounded, the target takes damage of the chosen type equal to one roll of the infernal wound die at the start of each of its turns. The wound lasts for 1 minute, or until the target regains hit points, or the target or a creature within 5 feet of it takes an action to stanch the wound.

You can do this Con times per short or long rest (minimum 1).

    This is really the central mechanic of the subclass. It does mean you will need to invest in Con, but Fighters can often afford to do that - I'd certainly try to start with a +3 if I could. Unless the monsters are healing each other or going around stanching wounds for one another, you're probably going to get at least 2d6 damage out of this each time, and you can choose to use this on a crit to get an extra d6 in there. It's not enormous, but if combat lasts a while and they don't deal with the wound, the overall damage could build up. I'd probably err on the side of using this just once per combat, at least at this level, unless I knew that a rest was coming soon.

Level 7:

Advanced Wounds:

When you roll your Infernal Wounds Die, you can apply one of the following effects. If you roll a 6 on said die, you get to add the additional Devil's Luck bonus on each of the effects. Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until the start of your next turn.

    So, as a note, this can happen immediately when you first use the Infernal Wound, or you can have it happen when they take the wound damage at the start of their turns.

Purulence of Minauros: Caustic pus erupts from the wound. Each enemy in a 5-foot emanation from the target takes Acid damage equal to your Con modifier and is poisoned until the end of its next turn. Devil's Luck: Each creature that takes this acid damage also has a -1 penalty to their AC until the end of your next turn.

    For elegance's sake I might prefer that the AC penalty and the poisoned condition end at the same time, but I guess we want to make sure we benefit from the AC thing. Note that unless stated otherwise, emanations don't include the source of the emanation, so this only helps if the enemy is next to one of its allies.

Rupture of Cania: The wound ruptures with arcane energy. The target takes Force damage equal to your Con modifier. Devil's Luck: The target also subtracts 1d6 from the next saving throw it makes before the end of your turn.

    Pretty simple single-target option here, and the Devil's Luck element can help out our allies.

Stygian Gangrene: Infernal rime spreads from the wound. The target takes Cold damage equal to your Con modifier and can't take reactions until the start of its next turn. Devil's Luck: The target's speed is halved until the end of its next turn.

    This could help you set up an ally to escape from a scary monster. Indeed, this is better than Rupture of Cania unless the target is resistant or immune to cold, though the Devil's Luck feature complicates that.

    Overall, these are cool little effects. The damage isn't terribly huge, but I think the damage is somewhat secondary to the other effects. And I like the Devil's Luck elements.

Infernal Equipment:

You gain the following:

Infernal Resilience: When you finish a short or long rest, you can choose a damage type from Cold, Fire, or Necrotic. While wearing Heavy armor or wielding a shield, you gain resistance to that damage type until you choose a different one with this feature.

    This is akin to a Fiend Warlock feature, though more limited. Notably, this can help if you're traveling across areas with extreme temperatures.

Unholy Power: When you roll your infernal wound die, you can treat a 1 as a 6.

    So, this is exciting: first off, it increases the average damage of the die (4.33 up from 3.5) but it also means that the Devil's Luck bonus on your wounds now happens 1/3 of the time rather than 1/6. It's nearly as good as upgrading it to a d8, but without lowering the chance you get that bonus.

Level 10:

Hellfire Surge:

When you use your Action Surge when holding a Hell-Forged Weapon, you erupt in hellfire in a 20-foot emanation that lasts until the end of your next turn. When a creature suffering from an infernal wound starts its turn in the emanation, it takes damage equal to two rolls of your Infernal Wound die instead of one.

    So, this does require burning your action surge, which is still pretty precious, though you will be using it regularly. Naturally, this makes the wound do an average of 8.67, which is starting to feel like real damage, but it also means that our chance of getting Devil's Luck goes up to about 56%

Level 15:

Devil's Misfortune:

When a creature with an infernal wound hits you with an attack roll, you can take a reaction to roll your Infernal Wound die and reduce the damage taken by the amount rolled. On a roll of a 6, you can roll again (to a maximum of 6 rolls), reducing the damage by the total of all the rolls. In addition, when you do this, if the attack is a critical hit, it becomes a normal hit.

    The crit immunity is nice - not as much need for adamantine plate - but let's figure out what your average damage reduction is. Again, we treat 1s as 6s, and I assume this applies here as well for both the damage reduction and the exploding die. So, one die reduces it by 4.33 on average. Then, we have a 1/3 chance to reduce it by another 4.33. And then we have a 1/9 chance to reduce it by another 4.33. So, I think we're looking at an average damage reduction of 6.26ish. It does take our reaction, so it's not quite as good as Heavy Armor Master, but it works on all damage and isn't mutually exclusive with HAM.

Level 18:

Infernal Bargain:

When you roll a 6 on your Infernal Wound die three or more times before the start of your next turn, you gain Heroic Inspiration. You can use Heroic Inspiration in the following way:

Infernal Inspiration: If a creature you can see within 120 feet rolls a d20 test, you can expend your Heroic Inspiration to force the target to reroll the d20. If the number rolled causes the target to succeed on the d20 test, you regain an expended use of Indomitable or Second Wind (your choice). If the target fails the d20 test, you lose HP equal to 3d6 plus your Fighter level.

    Figures they'd fit a devil's bargain into the devil fighter subclass. There are a lot of means to roll infernal wound dice, so you could technically get Heroic Inspiration from a single monster if you first hit them with the initial wound (roll 1) and then they took the wound damage on their turn (roll 2) and then they attacked you and you used Devil's Misfortune. But this is going to be a 1/27 chance. It can get better if you have multiple wounded targets, but I don't see this happening a lot.

    However, if you play a Human, you'll have Heroic Inspiration quite often (and DMs should still hand them out for good roleplay). In this case, I think that the Infernal Inspiration feature could be really clutch - you just need to be ready and willing to take a bunch of damage to make that monster fail their save.

Overall Thoughts:

    Any Fighter subclass, in my opinion, has to work hard to justify going with it instead of a Battle Master or Eldritch Knight. A lot of them fail to do so. But I think that this one has a unique enough hook that it might do it.

    Power-wise, I really don't know if I have a sense of how actually good this is. But there's a really solid concept to it and a really consistent mechanical theme. And while it's built on a limited-used feature, you at least get a few uses that come back on a short rest, so I think you can probably manage to use this at least once in any significant fight.

Staff-And-Board Eldritch Knight Build

 So, there are a couple things that I hadn't really considered until recently.

First off: as an Eldritch Knight, you have an odd conundrum. You can use an Arcane Focus for your spells, which is great, but you don't get to use your weapons as arcane foci. It seems like an insane oversight that in 2024, the updated EK didn't change War Bond to let you use the bonded weapon as a spell focus. The feature is almost never relevant.

Why do we need an arcane focus? Well, if you have any kind of set-up where you've got both hands occupied, you technically can't perform the somatic components of spells. As such, my old Dragonborn EK Jax would constantly have to drop his +1 Battleaxe when he wanted to cast Shield, and then pick it up on his next turn.

There is some ambiguity over whether you can still use somatic components in a hand that is holding a spell focus when the spell itself doesn't have a material component, but I think the reasonable common-sense reading is that you could.

And so, we come to the Staff - an Arcane Focus option. It costs more than a Quarterstaff (5 gold rather than 2 silver) but it also pretty explicitly states that the Staff can also be used as a Quarterstaff.

And that solves Jax's problem.

Despite their size, Quarterstaffs (quarterstaves?) are one-handed weapons. You can bump them up to a d8 damage die if you wield them with two hands, but you don't have to.

The second thing I realized is that, 99% of the time when I think about the Polearm Master feat, I imagine using it with a Heavy Reach weapon - the Halberd, Glaive, Lance, or Pike. But it actually works fine with both Spears and Quarterstaffs - both its Pole Strike and Reactive Strike features can work with those weapons as well. (Screw Tridents, I guess).

So, I thought I'd try a build that uses this to allow the Fighter to focus on feats that boost Strength and doesn't need to worry about picking up War Caster. Notably, using a two-handed weapon actually also makes this less of an issue because we have a hand free when we're not in the middle of an attack. But if we truly wanted to never have to worry about material components or somatic components at all, or we wanted to go for a "sword"-and-board build, this does work for us.

And while we won't be hitting as hard with a Quarterstaff as we would with a Glaive (and more importantly miss out on Graze,) the addition of that Pole Strike attack could make this do pretty decent damage. I think.

    Now, I've been doing a lot of calculations for these builds when fighting a Death Knight, which feels like a pretty epic final boss of a campaign that ends at level 10. But I think the Death Knight's super-high armor, damage immunities, and other things might be skewing some of my results a little.

As such, I'm going to calculate this against a more typical enemy. The key takeaway is that we shouldn't compare this damage output with the various builds we've been doing for the last month. This is going to be higher than it would be against a Death Knight.

What monster to fight, though? Well, a level 10 character accounts for an XP budget of 1600, 2300, or 3100 xp in a low, medium, or high difficulty encounter, respectively. That'd be a CR 6 monster at medium difficulty. Chimeras, Wyverns, and Medusas all fit in that CR range, though I think probably the former and latter are more likely to be encountered on their own, so we'll use Wyverns, which feel like pretty standard fantasy monsters that can fit in tons of campaigns.

So, that's what we'll use for our standard monster example (they all have similar ACs, which is encouraging).

Now, the build!

    Weapons:

I think I laid this out pretty clearly - we're using a Staff in our main hand and a shield in our off hand. This will deal 1d6 damage and has the topple mastery (which could be amazing if we're fighting the monster mid-air, but we'll assume we're on the ground).

    Spells:

Naturally, as an Eldritch Knight, we're going to want Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade. If the Wyvern has a rider, GFB is a great option here, but we're going to focus on the primary target.

Once again, I think the only really clear spell to boost our damage at this level (I did say we were level 10, right?) is going to be Enlarge/Reduce, making us big to add a d4 to each attack. We can burn our Action Surge to cast it and then get our normal attacks.

Beyond that, I'd probably save spells for Shield and such.

    Feats:

Ok, because we've got our spell focus in hand, we don't need to grab War Caster (the advantage on concentration saves would be great, as would the opp attack spells, but we can afford to delay it).

So, to start off, for our Fighting Style we'll grab Dueling. Yeah, maybe if we're going sword-and-board we'd want to go Defensive for ourselves or Interception for our friends, but I think we can stand to push a little more into damage (and this will help mitigate the low damage of the quarterstaff as well). If we want to leave the option open to go for a two-handed weapon, we could take something like Defensive or Blind Fighting, or again, Interception. but for the purposes of this build, we'll assume Dueling.

Then, we grab Polearm Master at level 4, boosting Strength to 18 and giving us mainly our Pole Strike bonus action (Reactive Strike can be all well and good, but we're not going to factor it into our calculations). This lets us just make a bonus action d4 attack every turn as long as we're attacking, which is nearly as much damage as the quarterstaff normally gets.

For level 6, I'd grab Mage Slayer, which feels like it should be a martial staple from now on, though it doesn't increase our damage.

At level 8, if we want to fully commit to sword-and-board for the rest of our career, we could go Shield Master. Alternatively, if we want a bit more survivability, we could grab Heavy Armor Master. Sentinel might be the better option, and gets better if we want to keep open the option that we might use a two-handed polearm instead (though Dueling doesn't really work with that) but is still great for us as-is. So, I think we'll stick to Sentinel.

    Game Plan:

So, pretty simple: we Enlarge ourselves and then whack them with the staff twice, weaving in Booming Blade or Green-Flame Blade as appropriate.

There is one nuance we need to address, though:

If we knock them prone with the Topple Mastery, we can assume they'll spend half their movement to stand up. But does this count as moving to trigger Booming Blade? Thanks to Tactical Master, we can always swap our mastery to something else if we've already knocked them prone, so we could force that thunder damage if they want to get up and attack us again. There'll be some weird math to take into account, but the main thing is we can assume our first attack doesn't get advantage one way or another because they'll have stood up by the time it comes back to our turn.

As such, we'll save Booming Blade for our second attack.

Ok, so first attack is simple:

We have a +5 to Strength, and thus we have a +9 to hit with our attacks. Against the Wyvern's AC of 14, that means that we're going to be hitting 80% of the time. A hit deals 1d6+1d4+7 damage, or 13 on average, with an extra 6 on a crit. So, that's 10.4 plus .65 for a total of 11.05 average on this first attack.

Now:

If we do hit, the Wyvern needs to make a Con save against our Topple DC. That's going to be 17 at this level. With a +3 to Con saves, the Wyvern has to roll a 14 or higher to avoid falling prone. Thus, that's a 65% chance that they do fall prone. However, that only happens if we hit, which is 80%, meaning the total chance that the target is prone and thus giving us advantage on our next attack is 80%x65%, or 52%.

Now, I believe your Pole Strike has to come after your Attack Action, so we'll say the Booming Blade attack comes next.

If we don't have advantage, we'll have the same 80% chance to hit. This hit will, however, deal 1d6+1d8+1d4+7, or an average of 17.5, and an extra 10.5 on a crit. So, when we don't have advantage, we'll deal 17.5x80% plus 10.5x5%, which gives us 14 plus .525. That's pretty easy to add together. However, this only happens 48% of the time (which is fine because it'll be higher when we add the advantage version) so this contributes 14.525x48%, or 6.972.

If we do have advantage, that 80% chance becomes 96%, and the crit chance becomes 9.75%, so 17.5x96% is 16.8 and 10.5x9.75% is about 1.02375, so we're looking at about 17.82. This, then, is going to be 52% of the time, so it's roughly 9.3 damage.

Thus, our Booming Blade attack does about 16.3 damage on average.

(For future stuff here, we'll need to also figure out the average chance Booming Blade hits, which is 80%x48% plus 96%x52%, which gives us 38.4% plus 49.92%, or a total of 88.32%. We'll just hold onto this).

Now, our bonus action Pole Strike is where this gets more complicated.

If we successfully knocked the Wyvern prone on our first attack, we'd just swap to something like Sap on the Booming Blade attack. But if we hadn't, we'll still try to knock them prone. I actually think this winds up just being the same as if we were figuring out if they fell on either of two attacks - we don't need to consider how getting advantage on the second attack would have affected this because, well, we wouldn't have had it. So I think this becomes the inverse of 48% squared. Thus, we wind up with a roughly 77% chance to have them prone by the time we make our Pole Strike.

For the Pole Strike, we're going to use Tactical Master now to swap to Push, in an effort to trigger Booming Blade's extra damage.

Once again, we're looking at 80%/5% and 96%/9.75% for hits/crits, just in different ultimate proportions.

Our hits are less, though, here. On a hit, we deal 2d4+7, or 12 average, and 5 extra on a crit.

Without advantage, that's 12x80%, or 9.6, plus .25 for crits, so 9.85 overall. However, we only don't have advantage 23% of the time, so this contributes roughly 2.27.

With advantage, it's 12x96%, or 11.52, plus 5x9.75%, which is .4875, so we get almost exactly 12. And this happens 77% of the time, so it contributes 9.24.

Thus, the Pole Strike gives us an average of 11.51 damage.

Ok! So! On our turn, we should thus do 38.86 damage (this looks incredible compared to the Death Knight builds, but remember that this is a way lower AC monster).

However, there are two other things to consider:

Reaction strikes and Booming Blade bonus damage.

A few things have to happen for Booming Blade's extra damage to go off. We'll assume that if we do push the Wyvern that we're going to push them out of reach of us and any of our allies, and that they will need to move in some way. I think it's reasonable to say that "standing up" doesn't trigger Booming Blade's extra damage, so we're really just seeing if we A: hit with Booming Blade and B: successfully push the Wyvern away.

We figured out the chance to hit with Booming Blade earlier, which is 88.32%. Great. But we only get that damage if the Wyvern moves (on its own,) so we also need to land the Push attack with our Pole Strike.

23% of the time, we have an 80% chance to have advantage, and 77% of the time, we have a 96% chance to hit. Thankfully, there's no save versus Push. So, 80%x23% is 18.4%, and 96%x77% is 73.92%, so this winds up being a 92.32% chance we've been able to push them.

Oh no.

See, hitting them with the Booming Blade is also part of the math on determining if we topple them.

Uh, screw it, I'm going to keep going. I don't know how much that would change the math here, but it's probably not huge.

Actually, wait, no, it's fine, because we're going to try to push them anyway to get a reactive strike, so we'll be doing this whether or not the Booming Blade hit.

So, basically, we get the 2d8 (9 average) thunder damage from Booming Blade's secondary damage if we hit first with Booming Blade and then again with Pole Strike, so it's 88.32% times 92.32%, or about 81.54%. So, we add 9x81.54% to our total damage per round, giving us about 7.34 more damage.

That brings us up to 46.2 damage per round.

Lastly, we have our reaction strike.

Now, thanks to Sentinel and Polearm Master, there are a lot of ways for us to get a reaction attack. It is a bit dependent on enemy behavior. The worst case is if we fail to push them and they just attack us, which means no attack. But if they go after a nearby ally (we'll be out of range if we did push them, though) or if they do come back toward us after we push them, we can nail them with an attack.

There are too many factors at play here to get a strict probability, but for our "white room" scenario here, we'll assume that if our Push landed, we'll get to make this attack. We'll also assume they're not crawling toward us, so we won't have advantage.

Thus, it's our normal 80%/5% chance. In fact, I think all the math is the same as our first attack, so we can just add 11.05 damage - but only if we did get to Push them, which, as we determined earlier, is a 92.32%. Thus, this adds about 10.2 damage per round.

And that gives us an average of 56.4 damage per round.

Once again, I need to emphasize that we can't compare this to the earlier builds because the hit chance is so much higher than all our "vs Death Knight" ones.

Still, I'm inclined to think that this is pretty good.

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.

UA: Hell Knight Fighter

 The Nine Hells are evocative, but I also sometimes feel like they get overexposed when we talk about the outer planes. Modeled on Dante's Inferno, we're sort of queued up already to recognize its structure, its nine circles. In Asmodeus, we have a Lucifer without an official Abrahamic God in D&D's polytheistic cosmos.

So I get it, it's compelling.

I might be a little more annoyed by this focus if not for the fact that this UA does give us a corresponding subclass to the chaotic evil plane of the Abyss.

I could very much imagine an evil paladin of the Nine Hells, but giving Fighters some infernal power kind of reflects the more conviction-agnostic characterization of the Fighter class. There are various suggestions on why you might have become a Hell Knight, and while the subclass is very villain-coded (you will be sending souls to the Nine Hells when you kill) there are some scenarios where you might not have taken up this role willingly.

Let's get into mechanics:

Level 3:

Diabolical Gift:

You get two benefits:

Devil's Sight: You can see normally in Dim Light and Darkness, both magical and nonmagical, within 120 feet.

    This is worded just like the Warlock invocation of the same name, and notably is not Darkvision, which means that you should be able to see in color, and I think you could argue that "seeing normally" would be as if it were all bright light. While you might still consider the Blind Fighting style at level 1, this is going to cover a lot of what it covers, and better.

Devil's Tongue: You know the Infernal language, or another of your choice if you already speak Infernal.

    A "ribbon" that could be very useful in a devil-themed campaign (and if you're a DM with one of these in your party, you'll want to have some devils pop up - though their immunity to fire damage might hinder this character a little if they're fighting them).

Hellfire Weapon:

When you take the attack action, you can imbue a weapon you are holding with hellfire, turning it into a Hellfire Weapon. It remains transformed this way for 10 minutes or until you use the feature again, die, or the weapon gets more than 5 feet away from you for 1 minute or more. You can also end it early, no action requried.

While transformed, the weapon emits dim light out to 5 feet and you can choose to deal fire damage with it instead of its normal damage.

    The light isn't terribly useful given our Devil's Sight, and might actually be a hindrance, but it's certainly cool conceptually and can be useful if we need fire damage to take advantage of vulnerabilities or stop regeneration.

Infernal Wound:

We're not done with level 3!

You have one Infernal Wound die, which is a d6.

Once per turn when you hit a creature with your Hellfire Weapon, you can deal extra fire damage equal to one roll of your Infernal Wound die and give the target an Infernal Wound.

While wounded in this way, the creature takes fire damage equal to one roll of your Infernal Wound die at the start of each of its turns. The effect lasts for 1 minute, until the target regains hit points, or until the target or a creature within 5 feet of it takes an action to stanch the wound. A target can be affected by only one instance of this feature at a time.

You can use this feature Con times per short or long rest (minimum 1).

    This is pretty great, actually. A d6 isn't huge, and weirdly the die never gets upgraded, but it's a no-save DoT that requires someone's action to end. Put this on a troll and you're in fantastic shape. It also has the crit-smite advantage of being able to wait for a critical hit to use (though it's probably worth it on any hit just to get the wound ticking on the target).

Level 7:

Advanced Wounds:

When you roll a 6 on the Infernal Wound die (presumably either on the initial hit or the ticking damage) you can apply one of the following effects:

Purulence of Minauros: Caustic pus (gross) erupts from the wound. Each creature in a 5-foot emanation originating from the target takes acid damage equal to your Con modifier, and the target has the poisoned condition until the start of its next turn.

    Two problems: first, if you're in melee, that damage is going to hit you (unless you have a reach weapon - not a bad idea for this subclass). Also, if you get this on the initial hit, they might not do anything until the start of their next turn. Granted, for the ticking damage, this could poison them right at the start of their turn. (I also assume they don't take the acid damage given that an emanation goes out from them. Maybe I'm wrong?)

Rupture of Cania: the wound explodes with arcane energy, dealing Force damage to the target equal to your Con modifier.

    This adds insult to injury - they're already taking 6 damage from the wound, and now they're taking maybe three more. Good in a strictly single-target situation.

Stygian Gangrene: Infernal rime spreads out from the wound, dealing Cold damage equal to your con modifier to the target and preventing it from taking reactions.

    Oh, actually, this is better than Rupture of Cania unless the target is resistant or immune to cold damage. I feel like Rupture of Cania needs something more.

    The overall feature here will only come around about 16.7% of the time (for now) but luckily we have more at level 7:

Hell-Forged Equipment:

While wearing armor or wielding a shield (likely for a Fighter) you have resistance to Fire damage.

Also, damage from your weapons and fighter features ignores resistance to fire damage.

    Unlike resistance to poison or necrotic damage, as we saw with the Pestilence Cleric, fire resistance is actually quite common, including nearly all non-Devil fiends (devils tend to be fully immune). That's really helpful. And fire damage happens all the time, so having resistance to it is great (it even helps you when traveling through hot climates).

Level 10:

Hellfire Surge:

When you use your Action Surge while wearing armor or wielding a Shield (again, likely, unless you're like a Fighter/Barbarian multiclass) you can superheat your equipment, erupting in a 10-foot emanation. Each creature of your choice must make a Dex save (DC based on your Con modifier). On a failure, they take fire damage equal to your Infernal Wound Die (again, this is always a d6) and are burning (which is now a Hazard that deals 1d4 fire damage at the start of a creature's turn). On a success, they take half damage and are not burning.

    While certainly limited in use, this is an AoE DoT you get as a Fighter. Get in the thick of a bunch of enemies and light them up.

Level 15:

Blister of Avernus:

Your hellfire deals painful, boiling blisters (gross). When you roll a 6 on your Infernal Wound DIe, you can roll another d6 and add it to the damage. The maximum number of d6s you can add to the Infernal Wound's damage is 3.

    So, we might be hitting a point where the lack of a die upgrade is actually better for us, as we have a higher chance of rolling the max. The chance of getting a third die is 1/36, but this will get more likely with our level 18 feature. Between this and the Advanced Wounds, we get sometimes get a really lucky burst of damage, but I think you could argue this is a bit of a double-dip.

Level 18:

Hellfire Condemnation:

Whenever damage from your Hellfire Weapon or Infernal Wound reduces a creature to 0 hit points, the creature dies and its soul rises from the River Styx as a Lemure in a layer of the Nine Hells of your choice in 1d4 hours. If not revived before then, they can only be returned to life with a Wish spell.

    Theoretically, this could be useful against a foe that can escape death. Would this kill an Arch-Hag without needing to find their anathema? Does this prevent a Lich from coming back via its Soul Jar? That might be far too powerful for monsters that have built-in ways to come back.

    On the other hand, does this also prevent us from subduing targets non-lethally? I guess we can discharge our Hellfire Weapon, but while the flavor of this feature is cool, I think we need to revisit its implementation.

Infernal Bargain:

When you roll your Infernal Wound Die, you can treat a roll of a 1 as a 6.

    This is actually enormous for our earlier features: doubling the chance that we activate both Advanced Wounds and Blister of Avernus. The d6 now has an average damage roll of 4 1/3 (up from 3.5) and we now have a 1/3 chance to activate Advanced Wounds. The chance of getting three dice on a Blister of Avernus is now 1/9.

Overall Thoughts:

    This subclass is really interesting and different. Fighter subclasses come in varying levels of complexity, and while this will seem complex at first, I suspect that it will wind up being fairly simple after any significant experience playing it.

    I don't think we're looking at the same power level as an Eldritch Knight or Battle Master, but it's still pretty cool. Letting us set our DCs via Con also lets us pour all of our ability score stuff into just two stats (Battle Masters have the advantage of being truly SAD, but this is better, I'd say, than needing Intelligence on top of Strength/Dex and Con).

    It's kind of flavorful that these mortal knights empowered by the Hells are actually far less effective against Devils, who are almost all immune to fire, while they're quite capable against Demons, Yugoloths, and other fiends who are merely resistant.

Which Subclasses Should Get a Revision: Fighter

 The Fighter is the workhorse of D&D classes - the class itself is fairly simple (though a bit more than in 2014 because of the various Weapon Mastery-related features) but it's consistently one of the most powerful martial classes because it just does what it does so well.

Where the Fighter gets a lot more of its distinctiveness is its subclasses, where you can suddenly become an arcane battle-mage, a clever tactician, or have psychic powers.

Fighters have gotten a fair number of additional subclasses over the years. We'll be looking at the Arcane Archer, the Cavalier, the Samurai, the Echo Knight, and the Rune Knight. (And not the Purple Dragon Knight, which was, bafflingly, reprinted in Heroes of Faerun and remains terrible.)

Arcane Archer: No

    Conceptually cool, but here's the thing: if you want a Fighter with some kind of magic ability, just play an Eldritch Knight, which also works with a ranged build (probably not as well, but it does work). If you're drawn to the subclass because you like having cool things you can do to add on to your existing weapon attacks, play a Battle Master. This subclass is just a much more limited option between the two.

Cavalier: Yes

    I don't love the "focus" on mounted combat, as that's a really limited thing in a lot of campaigns, but the actual mechanical focus on this subclass is being the "tank Fighter," which is an archetype that makes a lot of sense for the Fighter class. I think another coat of polish on this and a real emphasis on being the knightly protector would be a great option (and honestly more "core fantasy" than the Psi Warrior.)

Samurai: No

    Setting aside that WotC is working very hard to move away from anything that could be considered culturally appropriative (I'm not here to get into that full discussion, but I think going too far in the "no cultural appropriation" side of things risks failing to include non-Western archetypes, which is equally if not arguably less inclusive, but that's not what I'm here to talk about) I also think that the Samurai's mechanics were only tangentially related to the fantasy - a fantasy that, perhaps, any Fighter (and even Paladin) could probably fulfill. I don't really know what, specifically, you could do to make a Fighter feel more like a Samurai, but I also think they're just not going to anyway.

Echo Knight: No

    This is almost a non-issue, because Echo Knights are a very specifically-Exandrian idea. I really like Echo Knights conceptually, but given that they appeared in a collaboration project, it might not even be theirs by rights to reprint. Anyway, the subclass is plenty powerful as it stands.

Rune Knight: No

    This is probably the one I could most easily be talked into giving another pass, but I think the truth is that it's already quite good as it is. We have a Rune Knight in my Wildemount game, and he's really effective (the Cloud Rune makes DMs regret rolling crits, for example). This one's in the Not-Broke, Don't-Fix camp.

And there you have it. I guess I'm a bit more conservative on this one, but I do think there's a lot of design space that you could explore that they haven't really, yet. That said, one of the challenges with Fighter subclass design is that the Battle Master and Eldritch Knight are so good that it's hard to come up with something that truly feels like it can't be covered by one or the other. The Echo Knight and Rune Knight both feel like they do things that the aforementioned can't really do, and I think a really solid revision to the Cavalier could accomplish that as well.

Banneret Fighter

 If you had asked me what my least favorite subclass in all of 5E was, I might say the Purple Dragon Knight. Fighters are a simple class at base, and my feelings toward the PDK were that it eschewed adding anything interesting to the class in favor of just spreading the meagre three unique things that the Fighter class could do.

So I'm a little shocked to see a revision/reprint of this one. But let's cast aside our previous judgments and take this subclass on its own terms. The class has been renamed the Banneret (which was always an alternate name for them) and is really built around the flavor of being a kind of battlefield inspiration - the kind of person who carries the banner of your armies into battle and rallies your troops.

Level 3:

Knightly Envoy:

You can cast Comprehend Languages as a ritual (Charisma is your spellcasting ability for it - I can never remember why that matters for spells without attack rolls or saving throws).

Also, you learn one language from the language tables in the PHB, and can replace a learned language with another one on a long rest.

You also get proficiency in your choice of Insight, Intimidation, Persuasion, or Performance.

    Clearly the idea here (right there in the name) is that you'll be a helpful envoy/ambassador. I don't think this will be quite enough to make you a party "face," but you'll certainly be able to help the party deal with people whose languages you don't speak (I think the PHB includes rarer languages, like Sylvan or Abyssal).

Group Recovery:

When you use Second Wind to regain HP, you can choose a number of allies equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1) in a 30 foot emanation to regain HP equal to 1d4 plus your Fighter level. You can do this once per short or long rest.

    So, while the die is much smaller than our own Second Wind, the bulk of Second Wind healing by level 6 is from your Fighter level, so you're putting out a decent amount of healing with it. The limitation to just once per short rest, to me, is kind of annoying. I mean, yes, healing needs to be carefully limited because it's the main source of tension in the game, but while the previous feature feels a bit ribbon-like, this feels thin for everything else we get at 3.

Level 7:

Team Tactics:

When you use Group Recovery, each chosen ally gets advantage on d20 tests until the start of your next turn.

    This can be a powerful effect, like we see with the Zealot Barbarian, though you'll need to time it A: when you want to do some healing to the group and B: when enough of your allies are within 30 feet, which is certainly not always going to catch the whole party.

Level 10:

Rallying Surge:

When you use Action Surge, you can choose allies within 30 feet of you up to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1). Each ally can take a reaction to either attack with a weapon or unarmed strike, or move up to half their speed without provoking opportunity attacks.

    Again, I'd really prefer this be de-coupled from using Action Surge, like Group Recovery from Second Wind. The effect is nice, though again, that 30-foot range will require some careful positioning to make the best use of it.

    Also, something that applies to Group Recovery: we'll certainly need a +2 to Charisma at least to be somewhat decent with this subclass. In a small party, that'll probably cover at least the other party members that are up on the front lines with you.

Level 15:

Shared Resilience:

When an ally within 60 feet of you fails a saving throw, you can take a reaction to expend a use of your Indomitable feature, allowing the ally to reroll the saving throw with a bonus equal to your fighter level.

    Indomitable got way, way better in 2024, and being able to spread the love with this is certainly good. The increased range is nice here. I actually think this is decent.

Level 18:

Inspiring Commander:

You gain two benefits:

Bolstered Rally: The area of your Group Recovery and Rallying Surge is now a 60-foot emanation.

Unshakable Bravery: You have immunity to the Charmed and Frightened conditions.

    It's fine.

Overall Thoughts:

I still don't like this subclass. It has a lot of the same issues I had with the old version, though I'll concede that with the buffs to the fighter overall, these features get a bit of a buff by association.

I can kind of sort of see a bit better the flavor the subclass is going for. Honestly, I think the proper use for this subclass is to be an alternative to the Champion as a "beginner-friendly" subclass. If you're worried about the complexity of an Eldritch Knight, Psi Warrior, Battle Master, or like, a Rune Knight, this is going to be more straightforward. I don't think it's very... good? But there is a clear utility to its features. I just think they played it safe with a subclass I never liked in the first place.

As you might recall, there was a totally out-there potential rework in the UA that retained the Purple Dragon Knight name and gave the subclass an actual purple dragon as a battle pet. While this flew in the face of the actual lore of this Cormyr-based knightly order that was merely inspired by an old amethyst dragon, I think that subclass would have been way cooler and more fun to play.

Luckily, our next subclass will be probably my favorite in the book.