[5e] Level 1 character vs. a big bruiser

[Eldariel]

So, how silly can you get with party buffs at level 1?

Warforged fighter, defense fighting style, chain+shield.

Two forge clerics both used their class feature on your armor and shield. One casts shield of faith on you, the other used bless. A third cleric or Druid uses resistance. They also marry you and dedicate you (two castings of ceremony).

So now your AC is 26, and you get +3d4 on your first save, 2d4 thereafter.

Multiple changeling warlocks give you magic stones, for 1d6+4 attacks with +6 to hit.

A changeling bard casts heroism on you, for +4 THP

And let's say you've got 15STR, 16 Dex, 16 Con. So 17 HP and +5+2or3d4 Dex saves.

I don't know this guy's DC on the breath attack, but I think this may be good enough to win head-on.

Your DPR is (7.5)/2 + 11/20 = 4.3DPR, so you kill him in ~ 13 rounds on average.

His DPA against you is 11/20 = 0.55, killing you in ~ 30 attacks on average, which is basically 14 rounds.

So, on average, you win. Though it's really really swingy.

The breath DC is 13. Here the only problem is that it recovers breath on 5-6, and since you take half damage on a successful save you'll probably die even through Heroism and making the saves. It's about 3 turns to recover the breath so you'd need to recover the 7 HP you lose (you've got 13 + 4 temp and you get hit on average for 11 on a successful save so you take 7 actual damage and first one can be Second Winded). Third breath seems like it'd finally do you in so you've got not quite 13 rounds here; on average 7 rounds assuming breath on 1st round and every recovery thereafter. You'd need it to get a bit unlucky with the recovery. But this seems by far the closest you can get to physically beating it up. One problem is also that Heroism only lasts 1 minute so you only have 10 rounds of HP recovery.

I think this is defensively fine but we'd need to find a faster way to kill it. Perhaps take Dueling Fighting Style instead? +2 to damage should help a fair bit: it would raise your DPR to 5,4 allowing for a kill in 10-11 rounds (10,555... to be exact). Now it would increase the likelihood that he gets you hard; doubling them in fact. But since your primary problem is the breath, not his physical attacks, I'm not sure if it might actually be worth it...? Actually, Magic Stone doesn't feel that amazing; if you have a third Forge Cleric, your own Rapier will be +1 meaning you'll be attacking at +6 for 1d8+4 or 1d8+6, which is actually better than the Magic Stones (4,9 DPR without Dueling, 6 with). So we can just forget about those. This actually drops enemy durability to 12 rounds without or 9-10 rounds with Dueling. Oh, and you actually forgot to account for Bless here: +6+1d4 hits 67,5% of the time of which 5% is still crits so 0,625 * 8,5 + 0,05 * 13 = 5,9625 so it's actually on average under 10 rounds to take the enemy down with this setup (which is necessary here since with Bless and Heroism, they both run out in 1 min's time - even if you start the fight immediately after getting buffed you'll be cutting it close). Dueling would come out at 7,3125 for an 8 round kill. A tough choice: Dueling gives you leeway in fight duration and lets you avoid excess breaths but OTOH Defense does mitigate vast majority of enemy attacks.

Actually, just making the character a Vuman instead and going the Shield Master route is plain better. It can keep the Defense Fighting Style (since you lose another point of AC) but Shield Master is crucial since it gives bonus to the Dex saves and allows negating the breath which means there's no timer on this fight (making the defensive . The fact that you take hits at slightly higher likelihood is more than offset by the fact that it is physically possible to survive the third breath due to being able to ignore the half damage. If you want the last point of AC, just marry a third fellow.


Okay, that's actually pretty good. Now I think we should consider how small a party we can achieve sufficient buffing with. This is of course the extreme case where you have infinite at-will first level buffing resources available but the normal party is going to be a party of 4; even if you do have some resources available on all the casters, you'll only have 3 of them. The most important ones seem to be the two Forge Clerics and the one Bard (though I'm not sure if the 4 HP Heroism is big enough that you'd need to invest a character on it - 3 HP Heroism seems plenty and the third Forge Cleric would be a pretty big boon), which is conveniently a good 1st level party anyways. Hmm... That third Forge Cleric does make the whole deal much better though. How about not enhancing the armor? Enhanced shield is great for Shield Master too giving you much better Dex saves but you could potentially just enhance the weapon and the armor.

Alternatively, the PC could just be a Cleric themselves and just enhance their own item. But then they lack two HP and the Defense Fighting Style so I'm not sure if it's worth it. At least a third Ceremony caster; I guess he could marry his whole party to make up for the lost AC. But OTOH Dueling Fighting Style would be big. Getting to kill the enemy in 8 rounds is really massive here since it reduces the probabilities of getting ganked so I think sticking to a Fighter and then just skipping on either the armor enhancement or the Heroism is the way to go. I guess nothing is stopping the third Ceremony from being cast anyways since it has such an immense duration.