How would you rate this fighter build?

[astral]

Race: Drow
Subclass: Samurai
Equipment: Rapier + light armor + shield
Fighting style: Blind fighting

At level 4, take elven accuracy.
This combines very well with drow and samurai. Fighting spirit is the easiest way to obtain advantage, this combined with elven accuracy is good on its own. However, drow also get drow magic, which gives you faerie fire. This gives both you and your allies advantage on a number of enemies for an entire combat if you hold concentration, which is great. On top of this, you also get darkness, which is amazing combined with blind fighting.

Normally with darkness, attacks are treated as normal due to advantage and disadvantage cancelling each other out. However, with your 10 feet of blindsight, attacks against you will be at disadvantage and your attacks will be at advantage. All this advantage combined with elven accuracy is basically going to guarantee you hit, and also allow you to essentially farm critical hits due to the increased chance.

That is basically all you need to make the build work, you can pretty much do what you want from here, but I also recommend defensive duelist because it's really good.

What do you think?

[RogueJK]

Fighting spirit is the easiest way to obtain advantage

For 3 turns per day. That's the biggest drawback of Samurai, so it's good that you have additional ways to generate Advantage built in... Only 3 turns per long rest, even with Action Surge, isn't quite enough to make a good "crit fisher".


Darkness + Blind Fighting is similarly only going to get you Advantage for a relatively short period per day. Your blindsight only extends to 10 feet. So if you're within 10 feet of an enemy when you plunk down that Darkness, that's great... Until they either go down, or move more than 10 feet away from you. Then you're left either hunting around in the dark for another enemy or for the one that got away, or you're having to drop Concentration on your 1/day Darkness and go back to being a "normal" melee fighter.

Plus casting Darkness requires your Action, so that's one round where you're not doing any damage. Also consider how a big globe of Darkness is going to hamper all your allies who don't have blind fighting... (Similar realization that the Devil's Sight Warlocks and Shadow Sorcerers quickly arrive at as well.)


Faerie Fire is definitely great, being one of the best 1st level spells in the game, but you're looking at only being able to use it for 1 combat per day. Plus, unless you find ways to boost your CHA without detracting from raising your primary DEX stat, you may not always get it to stick on opponents since you'll only have a middling spell save DC.


Overall, there are other "crit fishing" builds with more reliable/frequent ways to get Advantage, and better ways to take advantage of those crits (like with Smites). But between Fighting Spirit, Darkness + Blind Sight, and Faerie Fire, you're bound to have at least a handful of rounds each day where you have Triple Advantage, plus any that you're able to generate otherwise, which is nice. So while not a totally optimized "Advantage Crit Fisher", I don't think you're going to feel underpowered... Because even when you're not using one of your Advantage-generating tricks, you're still a Fighter with multiple attacks. And you could try to work out party strategies with the other players to have other ways for the team to generate Advantage for you.

The other big thing to consider is how you're going to find ways to avoid or mitigate that pesky Sunlight Sensitivity disadvantage most of the time. If you're thinking of simply closing your eyes and using Blind Fighting to avoid Sunlight Sensitivity, that works against enemies within 10 feet of you, but then makes ranged enemies "unseen" by you, so this means ranged attackers and spellcasters would then have Advantage when attacking you. That's likely worse in many situations than having disadvantage on your own attack rolls. (Unless your DM is okay with you cheesing it with something like "I close my eyes when I swing my sword, then open them again to dodge", which I personally wouldn't be, since combat is happening simultaneously even though the rounds have to be acted out in turns.)

[astral]

provided you find ways to avoid or mitigate that pesky Sunlight Sensitivity disadvantage most of the time.

Yeah, I guess this build also works with half-drow so there's always that.

[RogueJK]

For a similar build with just a class change that would make it even better, consider:

Half-Drow
Ancients Paladin
Blind-Fighting style
Light Armor + Rapier + Shield (with a Longbow handy for ranged encounters)
8/16/14/8/12/17 with point buy, after racial modifiers are applied
Elven Accuracy for 18 CHA at 4th, 18 DEX at 8th, 20 DEX or CHA at 12th, the other to 20 at 16th

Rather than simply getting Advantage on 3 turns per day with Samurai, you now have several options to impose the Restrained condition on enemies, including Ensnaring Strike using spell slots as well as Channel Divinity Nature's Wrath 1x/short rest. (Of the two, Ensnaring Strike is superior, since it only costs a Bonus Action so you can still Attack that round, and after the initial STR save the enemy has to waste their Action in order to attempt a STR Ability Check - not a save, so no proficiency bonus - to break free.)

The Restrained condition gives you and all your allies Advantage on all your attacks for the duration of the condition, plus gives that enemy Disadvantage on their attacks, plus they can't move, plus they have Disadvantage on DEX saves so your spellcasters can go to town on them with DEX save spells.

You'd also still have your racial Faerie Fire and Darkness+Blind Fight to fall back on as the situation dictates, for additional Advantage options.

You won't have Action Surge, or as many attacks per round at Levels 11+ as a Fighter. But in exchange, you'll have better ways to generate Advantage more often (and for the whole party), your crits will hit extra hard thanks to Divine Smite, additional Paladin spellcasting, plus you get all the great Paladin abilities like Lay on Hands (way better than Second Wind), and most importantly two fantastic Auras for yourself and nearby allies - one that boosts all saves and another that gives resistance to spells.

[Droppeddead]

Race: Drow
Subclass: Samurai
Equipment: Rapier + light armor + shield
Fighting style: Blind fighting

At level 4, take elven accuracy.
This combines very well with drow and samurai. Fighting spirit is the easiest way to obtain advantage, this combined with elven accuracy is good on its own. However, drow also get drow magic, which gives you faerie fire. This gives both you and your allies advantage on a number of enemies for an entire combat if you hold concentration, which is great. On top of this, you also get darkness, which is amazing combined with blind fighting.

Normally with darkness, attacks are treated as normal due to advantage and disadvantage cancelling each other out. However, with your 10 feet of blindsight, attacks against you will be at disadvantage and your attacks will be at advantage. All this advantage combined with elven accuracy is basically going to guarantee you hit, and also allow you to essentially farm critical hits due to the increased chance.

That is basically all you need to make the build work, you can pretty much do what you want from here, but I also recommend defensive duelist because it's really good.

What do you think?

If you want to go crit-fishing with Samurai, GWF with a two-handed sword is probably the best load-out. Lucky is a nice feat for this so if you play a variant human you can get it at level 1.

[LudicSavant]

For 3 turns per day. That's the biggest drawback of Samurai, so it's good that you have additional ways to generate Advantage built in... Only 3 turns per long rest, even with Action Surge, isn't quite enough to make a good "crit fisher" It's only 3 turns per day for 35% of your class levels.

For 10%, you don't have Fighting Spirit at all. For 55%, you have an ability ensures you can Fighting Spirit at least once per combat.

And the spells will add in an additional period of triple advantage. Though Faerie Fire's save is likely going to suck (since it's not using your main stat) and I don't see it being useful all that often.

My main concern would be to check the quality of the damage you're getting out of it, since as a Samurai you're bringing little to the battlefield /but/ damage, and you're foregoing things like Sharpshooter or even Dueling and just getting 1d8+stat out of your hits, accurate as they may be.

[bendking]

My main concern would be to check the quality of the damage you're getting out of it, since as a Samurai you're bringing little to the battlefield /but/ damage, and you're foregoing things like Sharpshooter or even Dueling and just getting 1d8+stat out of your hits, accurate as they may be.

I second this. With Samurai granting you advantage, you really want either GWM or Sharpshooter to boost up your damage.
Right now, unless you're in a similarly unoptimized party, your damage is going to be pretty low for what a fighter can dish out, especially Samurai which is a damage focused subclass.

[RogueJK]

If you want to go crit-fishing with Samurai, GWF with a two-handed sword is probably the best load-out.

However, that doesn't allow you to use the Triple Advantage from Elven Accuracy, which only applies to attacks made with DEX, INT, WIS, or CHA.

So if the OP is wanting to utilizing DEX attacks with Elven Accuracy, they'd need to go with some other way to boost crit damage that still applies to DEX attacks, like Smite from my above Paladin suggestion.

(Otherwise, they'd have to completely switch it to a ranged Sharpshooter build, or a Hexblade Sword Pact Warlock with GWM, or something like that in order to trigger Elven Accuracy.)


It's only 3 turns per day for 35% of your class levels.

For 10%, you don't have Fighting Spirit at all. For 55%, you have an ability ensures you can Fighting Spirit at least once per combat.


Assuming you play all the way to 20th level (which most campaign do not), and your time in Tiers 3 and 4 equals your time in Tiers 1 and 2.

But that's not how the vast majority of D&D happens in the real world.

63% of play is in Tier 1
27% of play is in Tier 2
5% of play is in Tier 3
5% of play is in Tier 4

So for only ~15% or less of your realistic play with the character, you may have Fighting Spirit more than 3 turns per day. Assuming your campaign doesn't end before Level 10.

And for ~60% of your realistic play you'll have it for just 3 turns per day.

[bendking]

However, that doesn't allow you to use the Triple Advantage from Elven Accuracy, which only applies to attacks made with DEX, INT, WIS, or CHA.

So if the OP is wanting to utilizing DEX attacks with Elven Accuracy, they'd need to go with some other way to boost crit damage that still applies to DEX attacks, like Smite from my above Paladin suggestion.

(Otherwise, they'd have to completely switch it to a ranged Sharpshooter build, or a Hexblade Sword Pact Warlock with GWM, or something like that in order to trigger Elven Accuracy.)

A Hexblade X/Samurai 3 wouldn't be half bad, to be honest.

Anyway, it's true that a melee DEX Samurai is not a great idea because he can't utilize GWM.

[LudicSavant]

Assuming you play all the way to 20th level (which most campaign do not), and your time in Tiers 3 and 4 equals your time in Tiers 1 and 2.
No. You're conflating '35% of the class's levels' with 'percentage of playtime.' Your statement applies to 35% of the class levels available. That is not an assumption, that is a statement of fact.

Whether those levels constitute much of your gameplay or little of it is obviously going to depend on your table, and I mislike making unnecessary assumptions.


63% of play is in Tier 1
27% of play is in Tier 2
5% of play is in Tier 3
5% of play is in Tier 4

And here you seem to be conflating "proportion of D&D beyond character sheets at a given level" with "expected gameplay time of a given player at said level." Which is not quite the same thing. You can't really just leap to assumptions like "60% of a given player's realistic playtime will be spent at level X" from "D&D Beyond has X% of its sheets at level X."

Yes, low levels are played more often than high levels. But let's not start drawing assumed numbers out of a hat, shall we?


how the vast majority of D&D happens in the real world.

So for only ~15% or less of your realistic play with the character

And for ~60% of your realistic play you'll have it for just 3 turns per day.

There's nothing 'unrealistic' about playing D&D at any level, regardless of how common you believe it to be. I know I certainly am out there, in the real world, playing and DMing for characters of every tier.

[Droppeddead]

However, that doesn't allow you to use the Triple Advantage from Elven Accuracy, which only applies to attacks made with DEX, INT, WIS, or CHA.

Which is why you take the Lucky feat instead.


So if the OP is wanting to utilizing DEX attacks with Elven Accuracy, they'd need to go with some other way to boost crit damage that still applies to DEX attacks, like Smite from my above Paladin suggestion.

A Paladin is not a fighter build.


(Otherwise, they'd have to completely switch it to a ranged Sharpshooter build, or a Hexblade Sword Pact Warlock with GWM, or something like that in order to trigger Elven Accuracy.)

As many people have pointed out, a melee fighter isn't really that good for crit fishing using Elven Accuracy. Which is why other fighter builds were recommended.