Fighter or Barbarian? - D&D: Optimized #8

[Music] hi everybody welcome to dnd optimized the show where each episode we take a deep dive into one single character build for dungeons and dragons 5e and do our best to optimize it for your chosen role to give you the greatest numerical advantage possible my name is colby and thanks for being here appreciate having you so the episode today is going to be a little bit different um i'm still going to do a character build i'm still going to take a look at the numbers but there's a bit of a a long preamble here so you know i've long wondered which of these strength-based characters fighters or barbarians would benefit the most from a sustained damage perspective uh from what are commonly thought of as two of the strongest feats in the game the great weapon master feat and the polar master feat which among power gamers are very commonly used right and talked about each of the character classes have their own strengths that they bring to the table fighters and barbarians and i wanted to do a deep dive to figure out you know what the numbers looked like on each but also answer the question you know would there be a way to multi-class this particular character build to try and take advantage of the strengths of both classes and if so how would that compare to going just a straight barbarian or straight fighter and you know how many levels of each would you take would you mostly be a barbarian would you mostly be a fighter so i put together a lot of different builds did a lot of number crunching a lot of theory crafting a lot of spreadsheets and graphs i had a lot of fun doing it i came to a conclusion and i so you know i'm gonna have a character build um the one that i landed on that i think is the strongest at least the strongest um you know towards the late game i may have broken the game in the process for myself um because this build that i that i ended up with is is ridiculously powerful um so you know we'll see we'll see if you agree um we'll find out when we get there but for now i hope that you enjoy all of the number crunching and exploring that i did for my own benefit as well as yours so for those not familiar with them the polar master feat is fantastic it basically gives you a way to get an extra attack every turn by using as a bonus action the the the butt of your uh pole arm and you get to add all of your juicy you know plus to damage bonuses with that attack that you that you may have so it's very strong it gives you some other nice features too but for for dpr's sake for sustained damage sake that's the real benefit and the great weapon master feat is fantastic because it basically lets you add 10 flat damage when you make an attack with a two-handed weapon like a pull arm at the expense of -5 to hit so if you have a high to hit or advantage or you know some other way of of making sure you land those attacks frequently it's very very strong and benefits a lot from getting a lot of extra attacks and so coupled together they're they're very strong you get you know once you hit level five and you get two attacks per per turn you get you're getting three attacks around uh that potentially can do an extra 10 damage each just with those two feats that's you know 30 damage plus the dice plus your strength bonuses on et cetera et cetera so very strong lots of great damage as far as which class can better take advantage and get more you know more sustained damage out of out of these two feeds each class has different strengths right the barbarians are great because of rage which is going to give you extra damage per attack and maybe more importantly though reckless attacks which gives you advantage on every attack therefore making it much more likely that you land those hard hit attacks because of your minus five to hit they get some other benefits too brutal criticals etc but those are their two big ones the advantage that fighters get are the great weapon fighting style which is nice it basically adds a little bit of damage unless you re-roll you know when you get a one or a two on on the weapon attack on the weapon damage and they get a lot more ability score increases or feats than other classes do so you get your strength up quick more quickly adding to your you know hit chance and your damage and probably the biggest of all is they get more extra attacks at higher levels so you know most martial classes get an extra attack at level five with a fighter you get another extra attack at level 11 and even another one at 20 if you ever get there um so those are kind of the the different strength different advantages and so the question is you know well which one then is going to end up pulling ahead in the in the sustained damaged dpr race um as i looked at it you know the straight the straight class builds the barbarian pretty much just has the upper hand throughout against the fighter it turns out that advantage on every attack that you get from the barbarian reckless attack really just outpaces any advantage that the fighter can bring by itself including extra weapon attacks including you know a higher strength score earlier on including more damage from your great weapon master fighting style having advantage when when you get a plus 10 to every attack just ends up being better overall um and and so that that became fairly obvious fairly quickly as i was crunching the numbers um then i however started to kind of look at okay well you know are we better off going mostly barbarian with a little bit of fighter or mostly fighter with a little bit of barbarian early on um the the mostly barbarian with a with a fighter dip was was better um at about level eight the mostly fighter with a barbarian dip catches up and they're they're pretty much neck and neck from that point but once you hit level 14 um the fighter just goes supernova the fighter with a barbarian dip goes goes supernova basically and leaves everybody else behind including any other sustained damage build i've ever looked at at least at low and medium armor classes um you know and i think the the real reason for that is this the the greatest strengths from the barbarian come at early levels for the barbarian rage and reckless attacks you get by level two right um the the strengths of the fighter primarily the additional ability score increases and the additional attacks come much later for the fighter so you need a lot of fighter levels to take advantage of them so you only need a little bit of barbarian and then once you get a lot of fighter you're really kind of um combining the best of both worlds and and just going to the moon as far as your sustained damage goes um you know i thought initially that the barbarian with the fighter dip would have a big advantage thanks to the synergies between brutal critical from the barbarian and um the champion fighter sub class uh archetype fighter archetype because brutal criticals let you roll more dice when you get a crit and the champion archetype lets you get a crit on a 19 or a 20 not just a 20 effectively doubling your um your critical hit chance and so i thought you'd be getting a ton of crits they'd be hitting really hard this would be really strong turns out um for for these builds anyway you know it didn't have as big an impact as i thought it would and i i mean that's primarily because most of the damage that you're getting from these builds is coming from the flat damage that you add to every attack great weapon masters plus tan rage is you know two to four um you get your strength bonus and so you know the the damage that you get from that flat uh from those flat bonuses outpace you know anything that you might get from hitting landing a critical hit and and rolling an extra die or two um and so yeah it just when you crunch the numbers um that that was that was the results and again for those who don't know i do post links in the show notes or video description um to the math and i've got all my numbers and graphs and things up there so you can take a look at all these different builds and see how they do based on enemy armor class based on level i found it really fascinating and really enjoyed putting it all together but so um tldr if you're going barbarian with a fighter dip you're going to have a clear advantage up until about level eight um at which point the both the multi-classes kind of are neck and neck to level 14 and after that point the fighter with the barbarian dip just far outpaces everything but both of the multi-class combinations end up doing better than just straight barbarian or straight fighter so that's that's good to know um all right with all of that said that long preamble we're going to then focus our build uh this episode on the fighter with a barbarian dip or the fighterian as i'm calling him yet another ugly ugly name so let's get into the level build all right at level one your race should be very inhuman if you're going optimal if you're not take something else but that free feat that you that variant humans get is just too good um you need two feets and it just really gives you a nice head start so um the the feet that you would want to take would be polar master that would let you get basically a another attack every turn from the get-go with the butt of your pole arm for your skills assuming point by you're going to want to buy a 15 strength and then you get your plus one use your plus one from variant human there so you'd have 16 a 15 constitution for hit point purposes plus one again so you'd have 16. um i would go 14 decks that's going to help you with your armor class and with your um initiative among other things and then uh you know after that do what you want um for equipment i'd recommend doing getting gold and buying things because the fighters start with some stuff well you're not going to be able to get everything that you want namely medium armor you're for most of this character's career you'll be wearing medium armor um and you don't really get an option to start with medium armor with standard fighter equipment so get gold buy yourself some scale mail it's only 50 gold and it's medium armor and then you can get a pike for five gold you're going to want a a pole arm of some kind halberd or a glaive are a little more expensive but they're 20. and other than that you can spend your gold on whatever necessities you have you know clothes rations uh explorers pack all that kind of stuff um for your fighting style as a fighter you get a fighting style you're going to choose great weapon fighting um essentially what what this is as i've kind of mentioned already is when you're using a great weapon a two-handed weapon um and you roll the dice for damage if you get a one or a two you can re-roll it you have to keep the second roll but when you crunch the numbers what that ends up meaning is um on the d10 portion of the hit instead of the the weapon die being an average of five and a half it's going to be an average of 6.3 so about one almost one point of damage more per attack and the the butt of the pole arm is just a d4 and so on average instead of a two and a half it'll be a three so you get a little more damage a little over one total by taking that but it's going to be the best for you i think at least from a sustained damage perspective moving on at level two you get action surge and everybody knows action surge is amazing it lets you um basically take another action on your turn um and so for the for the purposes of sustained damage you know you take another attack later on you'd be taking two attacks when you get an extra attack later on you'll be taking three attacks right you don't get an extra bonus action it's not like a whole new turn it's just an extra action so keep that in mind but it just lets you um you know now this this character is going to excel both on the sustained damage charts and on the nova or burst damage charts at level three you get a martial archetype i'm highly recommending the roon knight if your dungeon master allows unearthed arcana check it out on dnd beyond or wherever you get your dnd information the roon knight really cool basically among other things it's going to let you grow in size once per long rest for a minute and and when you do that you um get to add a d6 to your weapon attacks later that becomes a d8 and so that's just going to be great for your sustained damage um if you get some other cool abilities too some little runes and things that let you do some utility or defensive stuff they're they're cool they're kind of like spells if you can't if you can't take the rune knight um i probably go champion or battle master champion if you're going to be doing uh a lot of barbarian levels to take advantage of brutal criticals otherwise probably battle master at level four you get an ability score increase or a feat i'm recommending that you take the great weapon master feat here and again just to review great weapon master among other things is going to let you add 10 damage to any weapon attack you land at the cost of a minus five to hit um you can choose to to sort of activate the feet right but um yeah plus ten to hit minus five and of course there is a there is a there is a level at which it makes sense numerically to not use that feat right um because your chance of hitting becomes so low that you're going to be better off just um not using that so that you can at least hit them and if you look at my spreadsheets you'll notice that i have a little cell that's colored yellow and that indicates the the enemy armor class at which you should turn off the feet as it were but very very strong at level five you get an extra attack so now when you take the attack action you get to attack twice that's fabulous so now you're getting three attacks per turn right at level six you are going to take your first level in barbarian this is fabulous because you get rage and you know for rage when you're not wearing heavy armor you get extra damage per weapon attack a melee weapon attack it's two and it'll just that's where it's going to be capped for this character build it's not going up because you're not taking a lot of barbarian levels but two extra damage and more importantly really for you it gives you resistance to all non-magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage so any weapon damage basically or other you know bludgeoning piercing or slashing if it's non-magical you have resistance to it meaning you're going to take half damage and that's very important because this character is going to be getting hit a lot um i'll explain why in a moment but first let's do a damage report at level 6. um for a an enemy with a 10 armor class you're gonna be doing about 46 damage per round and against an enemy with 15 armor class you'll be doing 29 pretty good not amazing but strong and as i mentioned coincidentally the barbarian primarily barbarian with a dip into fighter um has a clear advantage here they're they're at 58 and 38 damage per round respectively um so yeah that's uh that's fantastic now at level seven you're gonna be taking your second level into barbarian um and you pick up reckless attack this is really the the main reason why we are in barbarian at all the other main reason i guess i should say um having advantage on your attacks as i've mentioned is so strong when you are using great weapon master and getting a minus five to hit um especially against higher enemy armor classes something to keep in mind um oh sorry reckless attack in case you didn't know at the beginning of your turn you choose to attack recklessly meaning that um you get advantage on on all of your attacks that you take that turn at the cost of giving your enemies advantage against you when they attack you so this will essentially be like you casting a taunt spell on your dungeon master because now all the monsters have um advantage and it's and and they're just it's too tempting they wanna they wanna hit you it's it's easier to hit you than pretty much any other character um so in all likelihood they will be attacking you especially when they see later on especially how much damage you're doing to them and all of their friends so be prepared to be getting targeted a lot you don't have a really high ac here right you've got medium armor and a plus two decks so you're probably at like a 16 ac maybe if you've picked up some better medium armor along the way you might be like an 18 but you know it's not amazing um and they have advantage so they're going to be hitting you a lot the monsters that is strongly encourage you when you are planning your adventuring party for the adventure in which you are going to play this character that you convince one of your friends to roll a cleric or a paladin focused on healing you know somebody that can help keep you alive because you are going to need it you're probably going to be getting knocked unconscious a lot even with your resistance to non-magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage you're gonna be you're gonna be getting hit a lot taking a lot of damage all right moving on at level eight uh barbarian level three this is the last level of barbarian you're going to be taking you're here for the primal path and you're going to be taking the path of the zealot that's what i'd recommend strongly for two reasons one divine fury is nice once per turn not every weapon attack but once per turn on the first hit that you make against a monster you get to do an extra d6 of damage plus half of your barbarian levels rounded down i'm assuming it doesn't actually specify in the player's handbook but i'm assuming rounded down and since we're done with barbarian levels here that's just an extra one right because you're three you're a barbarian three so a d6 plus one that's nice once per turn you know it's a little extra the main reason actually that that we're here and i don't usually talk about non-damage features when we're when we are um doing a sustained dpr build but this is important uh you get the warrior of the gods feature and this lets someone cast a revivify or a raised dead you know or some other resurrect spell on you without having to expend the expensive material components that always accompany those spells like a diamond that's worth 300 gold or something like that um you're probably going to need this more often than you'd like and your companions will dislike you a lot less if they don't have to be constantly spending 300 gold every time you go down because you are you're going to be going down unless your dungeon master is just really really really nice um or you have a really strong support character cleric or something like that um all right at level nine you're back to fighter so you you are a fighter six at level nine and you get an ability score increase um that's fantastic that at a level six fighter you get an ability score increase so you're going to bump your strength um your strength will now be an 18 giving you plus four to hit and plus four two damage damage report for level nine against a 10 ac you're you're climbing fast here you're doing 75 damage per round on average and against a 16 enemy ac you are doing 55 damage per round again as i mentioned by now the barbarian with the fighter dip is about the same it's actually one point higher in both instances but for all intents and purposes the same right at level 11 fighter 8 i skipped a little you get another ability score increase and so you're going to bump your strength to 20. now you're capped essentially for a plus five bonus to your strength um going to skip a few levels there are some nice defensive and buffing features that you pick up along the way here but they don't really do much for your sustained dpr at level 14. here we go you are a fighter level 11 and this is where you pick up um another extra attack so when you make an attack as your action instead of attacking twice you get to attack three times keep in mind again plus your bonus action hitting them with the butt of your pole arm so you're getting four attacks uh per turn every turn and again when you if you use action surge you get to take your attack action again so it would actually be three plus three plus your bonus action so seven attacks in a single turn um this is where you go to the moon and and usually i do a damage report at 13 but i waited to 14 here because it's such a significant difference maker to go one more level coincidentally so was bladesinger but i stuck with 13 there i should have i should have i should have buffed the blade singer numbers by waiting till 14 but i didn't anyway damage report at level 14 this fighterian is doing um 112 damage per round to an enemy with a 10 ac um yeah that's ridiculous and against an enemy with a 17 ac they're still doing 84 damage per round if they use action surge it's 196 damage per round and 145 respectively yeah that's that's stupid to give you an idea of how overpowered this is okay if you were to try and solo a challenge rating 14 monster which you should not be able to do right the way that the difficulty of monsters they use the challenge rating uh system right and you're not supposed to be able to solo a challenge rating monster that's that's the same level as you essentially um it's more like half of your level if you're level 14 and you're fighting a challenge rating monster of of 14 it's uh it's it's triple the deadly encounter threshold so it's way beyond what you should be able to to do right you you could do a level seven challenge rating seven monster and it would be considered hard but but doable not deadly um okay so for argument's sake though let's say you do try and take on a challenge rating 14 monster at this level which we're going to use a an adult black dragon challenge rating 14 all by yourself if you win initiative and get the first attack um and and survive one round so you get a second round of attacks um you know what you you probably don't even need to survive initiative or sorry win initiative because the the black dragon to you will do you know even if it uses its legendary actions against you um it would bite claw claw and tail attack and it can only use one legendary action because there's only one of you it can only use one legendary action per character enemy character right um so all four of those attacks it would do a total on average to you of 58 damage and you would be resistant to all of that so halved at 27. um even if it used its breath attack and you failed your save your deck save which you you probably wouldn't because as a fighter you have an advantage against a save if you fail a save you can reroll and you've got a decent deck so you've got a good likelihood of succeeding on that deck save but for argument's sake you fail your save he uses the dragon uses its breath weapon you would take that plus a legendary action tail attack um 61 damage so you take 61 damage at this level you have 133 hit points so even if the dragon recharged its breath weapon and you failed your your deck save again you'd take another 61 122 so you're still alive after two rounds but on the flip side of that you uh to the black dragon with a 19 armor class assuming you have your action surge up and if you're fighting a black dragon by yourself you will you would most likely on average do enough damage to kill it in two rounds barely but but you'd get there so yeah level 14 fighterian versus adult black dragon um advantage fighterian um either way the fight's probably over in two or three rounds it's a it's a mike tyson heavyweight match so yeah that's that's absurd um but we're moving on at level 15 you are a fighter 12 you get another ability score increase or feat i would probably take the tough feat that would give you two extra hit points for each level that you are and so that scales and it's nice a way to to boost your hp um that or maybe just bump your constitution up to an 18. skipping ahead to level 17 fighter 14 again you'd get another ability score increase or feat i'd probably bump your constitution again regardless damage report at level 17 um it's not too different you haven't done much to to increase your your damage really so against a 10 ac you're doing on average 114 damage per round and against a an 18 ac you're doing 84 damage per round final thoughts i kind of feel like i've lost my innocence um it's it's not that bad admittedly th this build gets outpaced um at higher acs at like 18 and up uh by by last week's episode the blade singer um which is my favorite of course the blade singer doesn't have action surge um but but they have wizard spells so arguably even better right and higher ac better survivability um well they don't get resistance to damage so maybe not regardless um yeah at lower acs this character lower to medium i should say ac's this character does insane insane damage and even at higher acs um and speaking of which if for some reason you're going to play a campaign where you're starting a character at like level 16 17 and playing a high level campaign you could do this build but instead of taking variant human go elf of some sort uh or half elf um and you then pick up elven accuracy as a feat and uh it's it's much much worse up until really high levels when you finally can get your strength up to where it needs to be uh because you're so behind by not getting the extra feet and by having to take an extra feet of an accuracy but you know since you have advantage on every attack of an accuracy is going to let you roll three times and yeah you're even stronger it's in the graphs i'm not going to talk about the numbers here um right so again if you're doing if you're doing a lower level campaign and and and this play style uh is appealing to you i'd recommend going you know barbarian primarily with dips into fighter go fighter to level four for four levels of fighter so like barbarian to five fighter to four and then continue on with barbarian because you want to get that extra ability score increase to bump your your strength that's going to be the best numerical advantage for you um right uh again at uh at low to mid to mid armor class even before 14 this build-out pace is just about anything uh with the exception of the pam occasionally and then at higher acs you know there are some that outpace it but you know personally i hate this i hate this build but i love it at the same time um obviously one thing that i love about this game is creating characters that feel really strong really powerful same with any rpg role playing game that i play you know anytime that i have the opportunity to feel like a real hero a real champion it just it makes it that much more fun for me i love i love the idea of being able to solo a dragon uh like in the stories and legends out of you know king arthur and things um that's just that's awesome but it has the serious threat of unbalancing uh your campaign and your encounters so um with that in mind let's discuss dm tips preventing rest of course will always be effective against this character if you find that someone at your table is playing this build and or something like it and you know really trivializing your encounters and or upsetting the rest of your players because they feel you know kind of they pale by comparison um you know keeping them from resting is going to make them have to pick and choose when they're going to use their rage when they're going to use their action surge which is going to significantly reduce their damage and also significantly reduce their survivability um and you know speaking of survivability honestly like i think my number one dm tip here would be just kill this character um i mean they're going to be easy to hit yeah they'll be resistant to damage and you can work around that right you can have enemies that do um magic magic damage um there's plenty of them out there but you know focus all all firepower on the superstar destroyer if you if you take them out they won't be doing so much damage and it might make them exercise a little more caution and not cause them to use reckless attacks every single turn thereby significantly reducing their damage output um you know i think actually that could that could create uh some great um memorable role-playing moments for your players as well if you have a character who's who's dying all the time right um and going to meet their god he's he's a zealot barbarian keep in mind um so he's going to to he or she is going to meet their god and having this moment of like sorry i died again and and then you know the their their cleric is kind of going oh man this this character went down again i got to bring him back he goes into valhalla and and his god says no your mission isn't finished and sends them back you know that kind of stuff um it could be could be really cool um other things you can do obviously um you know find a way to keep to to to let rage expire uh on this character by either ensnaring them and and staying out of range of their weapon attack so that they can't attack or be attacked if that happens for a full turn they're going to lose rage or otherwise you know disabling them with a stun or a paralyze or something so they can't take that action or get attacked and then they'll drop rage that again will significantly reduce their survivability you know if all else fails uh just increase the difficulty of the encounters um maybe instead of one dragon you have two one for the fighterian and one for everybody else be careful of course with increasing the difficulty too much because if the rest of your party isn't you know super optimized and this character goes down you could tpk everybody right and cause everyone to to wipe which can be problematic but at the same time you know of course as a dm you should never be afraid to do that the game isn't very fun if it never feels like there's a threat or a challenge so anyway that's our show for the week thanks everybody for for tuning in really appreciate it uh as always please subscribe like share comment on either the podcast version or the youtube version of the show i really appreciate it and you know find ways to reach out to us we're on social media the email is dnd optimized gmail.com or you can comment in the show notes or in the in the you know in the youtube uh comment section of course um always happy to interact with with uh with all of you that are listening and of course if you ever have a build that you would like me to do an episode on just send send that over to me let me know some details about what that build will look like and i will do my best to optimize it for you thanks everybody really appreciate it have a great day

Channel: d4: D&D Deep Dive

Views: 16,735

Rating: 4.9726028 out of 5

Keywords: D&D, Dungeons & Dragons, Fighter Guide, Barbarian Guide, GWM, Character Optimization, 5e, dnd, great weapon master, polearm master, PAM

Id: PwoJt5B1rYA

Length: 38min 45sec (2325 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020