Spear of Backbiting Build

[Yakmala]

My adventuring party made it (mostly) out alive from the Tomb of Horrors and my character managed to acquire a Spear of Backbiting. For those unfamiliar, it's similar to the Dwarven Thrower.

You gain a +2 bonus to attack and damage rolls made with this magic weapon. When you throw it, its normal and long ranges both increase by 30 feet, and it deals one extra die of damage on a hit. After you throw it and it hits or misses, it flies back to your hand immediately. Whenever you roll a 1 on an attack roll using this weapon, the weapon bends or flies to hit you in the back. Make a new attack roll with advantage against your own AC. If the result is a hit, you take damage as if you had attacked yourself with the spear.

Because this was acquired via an Adventurer's League game, I'll eventually have the opportunity to trade it to another character in exchange for a different very rare magic item.

So, I'm brainstorming different builds to best make use of this spear.

First and foremost, playing a Halfling comes to mind. With their ability to re-roll 1's, the chances of the spear's curse causing harm are extremely low. Other ways to get around the curse include the Lucky feat or playing any sub-class of monk and using Deflect Missiles to avoid the damage and potentially toss the spear again.

Because the extra damage only applies to thrown attacks, we need a way to avoid disadvantage at melee range when throwing, so either the Crossbow Expert feat or some way to disengage (Step of the Wind, 2 level Rogue dip, playing a Goblin, Misty step) is needed.

So, that brings us to class choices. And there are a lot of them! This is already getting long, so I'll go over my initial thinking briefly. I welcome input from anyone and everyone.

1: Fighter: An obvious choice. More attacks are always good. Action Surge is very nice. Shield use is good. Dueling works with thrown melee weapons. Battle Master or Samurai seem great choices. You could make a strong argument for Eldritch Knight as well. You could also go Cavalier if you pick up Crossbow Expert and stay at melee range the entire fight.

2: Monk: Spear is already a Monk weapon, so from Level 11 onward it will do more damage. Kensei seems an obvious choice, but it's not without its drawbacks. Kensei's Shot won't work with thrown weapons and Agile Parry requires giving up one of your double damage throws for an unarmed attack. That being said, a mobile Monk staying at range, occasionally closing distance for a stunning strike, could do well.

3: Ranger: Even with the current state of the Ranger, there are some good options here. Monster Slayer could add a lot to this build, and Slayer's Prey damage stacks with Hunter's Mark. Gloom Stalker would also work well, but then, Gloom Stalker works well with just about everything. And if the Ranger's Variant Class Features make it into Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, allowing for Favored Foe, then Ranger could move even higher on the list of possibilities.

4: Multi-Class: I haven't delved too deep into this thinking yet, though if I were to multi-class, it might be for a Hexblade dip (yeah, I know, not very original), with the rest being Samurai or Gloom Stalker. I'd go with some variant of Elf or Half Elf and pick up Elvish Accuracy.

So... Thoughts? As a reminder, this is using Adventurer's League rules, which means no UA, though a lot of what is in UA currently might end up in Tasha's and would then become AL legal.

[Chugger]

Interesting. If you went Hexblade you can smite, I think, on a thrown or ranged weapon. It's weaker than pal smiting otherwise, you can only do one a turn iirc - and you have limited slots. But twice per short rest you can smite.

With hex you're doing spear (1d6) + hex (1d6) + extra magic spear dice (1d6) + 2 (magic spear) + 5 (assuming str gets to 20). Let's see, that's 10.5 + 7 or 17.5 per hit or 35 damage per turn in tier 2. If it's a long fight, like a boss fight, and you curse on top of hexing, you do even more damage. If prof is +3 that's 20.5 per hit or 41 damage per turn. At +4 it's 21.5 per hit or 43 damage per turn (2 hits).

If you start a fight with a hand xbow in your off hand (and you have xbow expert feat), on round one you're probably hexing w/ bonus action, but if on round 2 you're not cursing, you can take a bonus action shot w/ the hand xbow - probably better to use a shield tho. You only get the one shot per fight unless you spend a turn reloading = unless you can find a way to cheese it (like you drop the spear before taking the shot, because you have a free hand you could end your turn having reloaded the hand xbow - next turn pick up spear, stab stab, and shoot …. it might actually work - you can always do the hexblade thing to summon it to you if you need to).