what to do with a fighter

[CapnWildefyr]

What to do with a fighter?

Walk him and pitch to the low dex cleric.

Sorry, kept skimming this thread, and could no longer resist.

My only piece of advice to the OP: I've seen friends who've run single-themed characters, PAM or GWM etc. All good, but just remember to bring other weapons and plans too. Oil, acid, some kind of missile weapon (or more than one spear), caltrops, ball bearings -- something. Make sure you're never standing there going 'Gee, I wish I could do something.' Probably you've already got that covered.

[LudicSavant]

Ah, your results incorporated the chance to provoke a bonus action attack from a crit. Ok, well after re-running the numbers, my results concur with yours

Now, I admit that this doesn't disarm your initial argument. There are still cases where the greatsword outperforms the glaive, even on a build with Polearm Master But I think that the simplest case might have also been the best case for the greatsword, if inadvertently.

Note the section of your post I bolded and underlined. That's not the best case for the greatsword at all -- on the contrary, it's pulling punches by not replacing the PAM feat with something new.

But it is worth mentioning that all of these tipping points seem to be tied to the fighter and champion exactly.

There are plenty of tipping points on the other subclasses too, they just use different methods than the Champion. Every subclass is different, and should be built differently.

For example, on a Samurai, you don't want a bonus action attack on your Fighting Spirit turns at all. For another example, an Eldritch Knight can use stuff like Shadow Blade, Spirit Shroud, or Blind-Fighting + obscurement spells. An Arcane Archer should be using a ranged weapon. Rune Knight is one of the strongest fighters, and it's already got plenty of competition for its bonus action and reaction to reduce the value of PAM. And so forth.

[Mr. Wonderful]

Fighters are better tanks on paper, but in play it's difficult for them to keep the enemy on them. I bring up the life cleric here. That divinity heal is the ultimate tank ability. The enemy either fights a very tanky cleric (athletics and a decent strength score is a good idea) or the cleric keeps reviving the whole party on a short rest mechanic.

My experience is VERY different from yours and supported by hundreds of encounters over very long periods of time with a number of DMs.

This does not invalidate your point of view of course, and as I said earlier, party synthesis is the key to a successful adventuring group.

That said, you cannot say "do it my way or die." That's just lazy.

[KorvinStarmast]

What it costs you is one of:
- Spirit Guardians
- Summon Celestial
- Silence
- Banishment
- Aura of Life
- Holy Aura
- Etc.

Your fighter ally doesn't make a saving throw against you using that spell.
Aura of Life and Silence
Depending On The Situation
might be a better use some times.
I do not concur with your handwave on the other ones.

As usual, your spell centric tone and style are noted. You are consistent, I'll give you that.
I tend to be very bore sighted on team play; style preferences do vary, of course.

[sophontteks]

My experience is VERY different from yours and supported by hundreds of encounters over very long periods of time with a number of DMs.

This does not invalidate your point of view of course, and as I said earlier, party synthesis is the key to a successful adventuring group.

That said, you cannot say "do it my way or die." That's just lazy.

Oh I agree with you completely. You definitely would experience things differently. Clerics can't break their stereotype. Neither can tanks, a concept deeper rooted in MMOs that offered much more mechanical methods to draw agro.I'm bringing it up specifically because its not realized in most games.

People who build life clerics are trying to make the ultimate healer, but clerics, even life clerics, struggle to compete with a druids healing kit when it comes to raw healing.

While not often realized, everything in a life clerics kit is related to tanking. That said, the perfect companion to a tanky cleric is a tanky fighter. It's a very tasty combo IMO.

[KorvinStarmast]

While not often realized, everything in a life clerics kit is related to tanking. That said, the perfect companion to a tanky cleric is a tanky fighter. It's a very tasty combo IMO.

Concur, though I can't speak to play after level 12 on that since the tanky cleric we had was tempest, a dwarf. My tanky fighter and he were a good 'front line' but unless I could shove (shield master) the enemy, we were in truth not very 'sticky' in the way that a cavalier or someone with a sentinel feat might be.

[LudicSavant]

I concur with those saying that Life Clerics have the potential to be bloody fantastic tanks.

But bringing it back to Fighters...

I'm playing an orc fighter, and just hit second level. I'm planning on going Battle Master, and I've taken the fighting style variant that gives me a maneuver at 1st (I took riposte). I'm using an axe and shield for now, but I'm not entirely wedded to it.

So, question - how do I do more damage? Looking forward in progression, I'm not seeing any particular way to get above 1d8+str, which I imagine is going to get insufficient fast. The only thing I saw was Great Weapon Fighting (which would pair nicely with the feint maneuver), but I'd have to give up my shield to use it.

Here are some effective ways to generate more damage on a Battle Master while keeping a shield:

- Raise your primary stat. +1/+1 makes a bigger difference in 5e than you might think, especially over many attacks.

- Take the Dueling fighting style. This will add +2 damage per attack. This benefit scales, because your number of attacks will scale. I generally recommend not taking the maneuver-granting Fighting Style you chose, since it's just a single d6 per short rest, whereas those +2s are going to add up to a lot more than that fast. Quite possibly in a single Action Surge!

- Generating Advantage for yourself and/or your party (because causing your party to do more damage totally counts as you bringing more damage to the table). You can do this via things like knocking prone, using Blind-Fighting tactics, taking Crusher, or the like. Greater accuracy makes a big difference in your damage output in 5e!

- Per-hit damage buffs are particularly helpful to Fighters, because those benefits apply more times since they have more attacks. You might even be able to apply these yourself; for example you can grab Hex from Fey-Touched.

- Feats! Check out Polearm Master (shield+spear), Revenant Blade, Crusher, Elven Accuracy, Fey-Touched (Hex or Gift of Alacrity), Alert, Lucky, Shield Master (note: find out which ruling your DM is using for it, that's its own whole can of worms), Sentinel, and Piercer.

- Do not neglect the things that indirectly boost your damage output, such as...

- Having a higher initiative will increase your damage output too, because the difference between beating Team Monster's initiative and losing to it is an entire round of extra actions. Yes, that means winning initiative makes a bigger difference than an Action Surge. A party being collectively stealthy enough to get Surprise has a similar effect (and they stack).

- Increasing your mobility or range. Remember, even occasionally losing a turn to being stuck out of range or CCed is a huge damage loss that can be very hard to make up even over the course of a whole adventuring day.

[Yakk]

16 or 17 strength, spear+shield+polearm master, dueling style, level 4 5 and 6, vs 2 higher strength with an axe.

         3     4     5     6
  PAM    -   16@+6 25@+6  28@+7
  AXE  10@+6 11@+7 21@+7  23@+8

(rounded 0.5 up).

As you can see, the PAM spear gets a large bump at 4 from the bonus action attack tap. And does 17% and 20% more damage in exchange for 1 point of accuracy, a decent tradeoff at level 5 and 6.

And this doesn't account for the reaction attack when a foe approaches you! Which is another 1d6+str+2 attack. If we assume we get one of those 1 round in 2 it looks more like:

         3     4     5     6
  PAM    -   20@+6 29@+6  32@+7
  AXE  10@+6 11@+7 21@+7  23@+8

For BM maneuvers, you'll want one that lets you do +damage (the other effect is to taste) for when you really need to burn dice *now*.

The other maneuvers should include riposte (PAM also uses that resource; but doesn't burn dice) and precision. Once you know the AC of the foe, burning a precision die when you miss by 1 is near guaranteed damage, and even 2 or 3 is near guaranteed. And a miss turned into a hit with a 1d6 weapon is like 8+ damage after attribute and dueling bonuses, a max roll on a damage die for a on-hit rider, and it scales with better magic weapons.

Having the free PAM reaction now just makes your BM dice last longer.

Only use the other BM maneuvers when (a) there is a tactical use to disarm a foe (or knock them prone or whatever), (b) you have extra BM dice and need to drop them this turn and there probably won't be enough turns to burn the dice as precision or riposte, or on crits.

If you precision on a miss by 1 2 or 3, that happens on 15% of attacks. With 4 attacks/round (attack action, bonus attack, reaction) that is like 0.6 on average per round. In a 3 round fight you can expend to burn 1 - 3 dice on just precision, turning 88% of those chances from misses into hits, for about 7 damage per die burned this way. Better than the 4.5 you get from an on-hit boost, but not as good as the 9 you get from a crit boost.

A riposte on a foe you have a 60% chance of hitting does 5.3 damage on average. Also a touch more than the 4.5 from a hit. It also opens an opportunity to do another precision die (if you miss by 1 or 2) or drop a die on a crit (if you roll a 20), which are valuable.

If you burn riposte every 2 rounds, PAM reaction the other round, use precision on a 1-3 to convert misses to hits, you burn 1.1 dice/round and make 4 attacks. Those 4 attacks give you 0.2 crits/round, on which you burn a die for damage, so we are up to 1.3 dice/round. Over 3 rounds that is 3.9 dice, exhausting your pool.

You get 0.6 crits @ 9 damage boosted, 1.6 extra hits @ about 8 damage each, and 1.5 extra ripostes @ 5.3 damage each, converting your 4 BM dice to about 26 extra damage over the fight, almost 50% more than the naive "just do more damage" choice.

Now at level 5 and 50% accuracy, the baseline PAM was doing 18 damage per round (after accounting for misses), for a total of 54. That extra 26 is significant (bringing you up to 80), but naive use (just add damage dice whenever) would only cost you 10% damage output.

The above techniques scale better as your weapon and strength gets better, as it leverages turning misses into hits or getting extra chances to hit. And as the die gets bigger, you can precise attack on a longer range and have it reliably hit.

If we back up and we compare this to a axe+shield 18 strength duelist champion...

0.2 crits and 1.2 hits per round. +2d8 damage on crits, 1d8+6 damage (10.5) on a hit is 14.4 damage per round. Times 3 rounds is 43.2. So the PAM BM above is putting out about twice the damage of a duelist axe and shield orc. (I forgot to include orc crit damage boost in the above, so the gap is actually a big larger).

[Eldariel]

Your fighter ally doesn't make a saving throw against you using that spell.
Aura of Life and Silence
Depending On The Situation
might be a better use some times.
I do not concur with your handwave on the other ones.

As usual, your spell centric tone and style are noted. You are consistent, I'll give you that.
I tend to be very bore sighted on team play; style preferences do vary, of course.

My overall point was that there are lots of things you can do with your Concentration and locking it into a buff locks them all out. The buff isn't always wrong but I do believe for most parties the party can overall benefit more of some other Concentration effect. However, that of course depends a lot, as you said.

It's worth noting that Spirit Guardians specifically is an effect where you don't care if enemy makes the save. It locks enemies down and deals damage to them; whether they succeed or fail is really kinda immaterial since they're mostly ****ed as long as they're stuck inside the area of effect anyways, and they're taking damage regardless. Banishment though, granted, is an effect where the success or failure of the saves is huge - but it's also an effect you'll only cast if there's a very significant chance of the opponent failing (it's not cast on high Cha targets).

Do note, I'm all for teamplay; I love combining effects that add up to more than the sum of their parts (e.g. Shadow Blade + Haste is one such combination) and I like comboes like grapple + Spike Growth or CC + DoT or Oil + Create Bonfire or any such. I just want to get the best bang for my (and everyone's) buck resource-wise, which is why I always do my best to consider all the opportunity costs to every single choice made and Holy Weapon is one where sometimes it can be worth it but often there are better alternatives, which is why I'm not too keen on the spell (except maybe when we can ensure a sufficient number of attacks).

[Mr. Wonderful]

Oh I agree with you completely. You definitely would experience things differently. Clerics can't break their stereotype. Neither can tanks, a concept deeper rooted in MMOs that offered much more mechanical methods to draw agro.I'm bringing it up specifically because its not realized in most games.

People who build life clerics are trying to make the ultimate healer, but clerics, even life clerics, struggle to compete with a druids healing kit when it comes to raw healing.

While not often realized, everything in a life clerics kit is related to tanking. That said, the perfect companion to a tanky cleric is a tanky fighter. It's a very tasty combo IMO.

I enjoy reading the "eclectic list of fun and interesting builds" on this site and have tried out several. I've played most cleric variants, though of course not all to high levels (alas puir Tempest clark, we hairdly knew ye).

I've been trying for some time to convince my regular circle of friends to do an all-cleric party. I think that would seriously rock - incredible combat skills, plenty of social stuff and a built in roleplaying hook of arguing over who's deity is best. I don't know if Trickster has enough overlap to do the Rogue's traditional job but I'd think multiclassing is still on the table.

Last add - I asked earlier if your DMs follow the recommended 6-8 medium and hard encounters per day before a long rest. If not, would your opinion change if they did?

[LudicSavant]

I enjoy reading the "eclectic list of fun and interesting builds" on this site

<3

Last add - I asked earlier if your DMs follow the recommended 6-8 medium and hard encounters per day before a long rest. If not, would your opinion change if they did?

I can't speak for sophontteks, but I'm used to being able to deal with 6+ encounters a day, often with them being Deadly rather than Medium or Hard. And occasionally I'll have over 10 encounters a day (so indeed, the DMG recommended average is just that for me, an average... sometimes more, sometimes less). All of my builds that I post are tested for 6+ encounters.

And (at least with our veteran caster players who know how to play casters very efficiently -- it's very possible for a less experienced player to blow their resources inefficiently), Clerics and other casters still do amazing in these. You don't need to worry about the class failing you and running out of steam... instead, you have a more interesting problem: Figuring out how you, personally, can make the best in-the-moment decision to maximize your resources that day.

So yeah. A Life Cleric tank should be doing fantastic even in a very long adventuring day. I can make a longer post breaking down exactly why but maybe that would be better suited for its own thread?

In the meantime, you can find some discussion about how so-called 'resourceless' types fare against resource-burning types throughout the thread here. Though it's in the context of Champion vs Battle Master (and it's Pre-Tasha's -- Champions got some useful tools in that), a lot of the general concepts of resource efficiency apply to other classes.

hundreds of encounters over very long periods of time with a number of DMs.

As a random side note, "hundreds of encounters" is not a lot to me. Like, according to RPGBot, it takes about 200 encounters just to get a single character to level 20. (Note: I have not personally double-checked RPGBot's math). So you can get to hundreds of encounters in just one campaign, gaining the perspective of playing only a single character for only the first time.

I'm not saying that to say your experience is unimportant or anything, I'm just saying, you know, tip of the iceberg, my friend! So much more exciting things yet to see and do!

[Mr. Wonderful]

Hi Ludic,

I do enjoy your thread, especially for the lateral thinking.

When I mentioned that I had tested my theories with hundreds of encounters it wasn't intended as a brag, just showing that I have enough experience to have a credible opinion. Nor does it mean that I intend to have the last word - again, I read threads like yours to grow and expand my horizons.

The main thrust of my argument is to point out that when optimizing a character the aim should be instead to optimize the party. Too often these discussions spin down into an analysis of DPR and that kind of misses the whole point, which is if the party wins, the players win, period, end of story. Over the years (many years) I've developed a preference for strongly defensive characters, ones that can weather bad guys, bad rolls, and bad decisions by both players and the DM. To be successful over time a party needs to survive when they screw up or the dice just hate them that evening.

And so my preference is to play fighters, paladins and clerics, and do everything I can to ward against bad luck. In most encounters I plug along, casting Bless, healing, or doing 1d8+4. In others, the rest of the party is happy to surrender some of their pop to give it to the tank, via Holy Weapon, Spiritual Guardians etc. That's team play and smart teams will do that when appropriate. The key is to be flexible enough to win EVERY TIME, because one loss is catastrophic.

But I get how optimization threads focus on the individual rather than the group. It's WAAAAAYYY easier, but ultimately its a fruitless exercise.

I look forward to your next thread that discusses how two or more characters bring synergy to the party!

[LudicSavant]

To be successful over time a party needs to survive when they screw up or the dice just hate them that evening.

key is to be flexible enough to win EVERY TIME, because one loss is catastrophic.

The thing you're touching on here is a very important optimization concept! There were some people on the old CharOp boards who referred to it as "IP Proofing" (which stands for "Iterative Probability Proofing")

The basic idea is that a 1% chance is not a small chance when you're talking about something that will make you actually lose (or otherwise have catastrophic consequences), because a 1% chance is actually probable to come up over the course of 100+ encounters (e.g. a full campaign. After all, as we've just established, 1-20 is like 200 encounters).

I think we can see the importance of this (as well as how many people lack understanding of it) distilled in the XCOM community. People who can't beat Legendary Ironman mode consistently will say things like "I just had bad luck" or "RNG was nonsense, I missed a 95% roll multiple times in a row! I was just unlucky!" Whereas the people who can beat Legendary Ironman mode consistently will say things like "it's statistically probable that you will miss 95% rolls multiple times in a row over the course of a full campaign. If such an event is enough to make you lose, your strategy needs rethinking."

So, in order to prevent this, you basically can't bank on winning a critical roll, you need to have some plan for what's gonna happen when the @#$% hits the fan. You basically want a plan that has to fail in layers. And you can see that XCOM-veteran philosophy reflected in the builds I make, emphasizing well-rounded defenses and the versatility to make contingency plans or adapt to enemy counterplay.