Fighter Subclass Tier Ranking (Part 1) for Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the grim hollow players guide which is now available on kickstarter grim hollow offers a handbook for creating gritty characters in a dark fantasy setting completely 5th edition compatible the book is packed with new character building options including rules for blood magic spells and all new subclasses for every single 5e class best of all we are contributing to the book by creating several of the stretch goals subclasses so the better the campaign does the more we get to contribute we've got some really amazing ideas that we've been working on that we can't wait to share with you like the oath of pestilence paladin a plague-bearing knight who spreads death and decay to check out grim hollow and more of the work that we're doing for the book follow the links in the description below to find the campaign on kickstarter and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are going to be ranking the various subclasses available to the fighter in dungeons and dragons fifth edition now in officially published sources there are currently eight subclasses available to the fighter so we've split this into two episodes where we will be covering today the arcane archer the battle master the cavalier and champion this video was shot before tasha's cauldron of everything released so once that book does come out we will make a follow-up video looking at the new subclasses introduced in that book as well if you look on the screen right now you're going to see the criteria we use to rank our subclasses the fighter is a very combat focused class so we are looking at the nuances of how it performs in combat we are looking at the subclasses that are going to augment the core features of the class in meaningful ways as always we are not going to be taking role playing into account here because every fighter subclass has an equal potential to be amazingly role-played we will take multi-classing into account a little bit but it is not the main thing we're looking at in our ranking and in general we assume that you are playing in a game with feats which is very important for the fighter in particular we will be factoring that into the rankings when possible and we also assume that you're going to be playing in a situation where you face between two and four combat encounters a day with an opportunity for at least one short rest somewhere in there that's quite important for the fighter as a whole because it is a class that often relies on how many short rests it gets to take because in most cases the fighter doesn't get doesn't have any abilities that rely on long rests we're going to be taking a look at our rankings today and then at the end of the episode we're going to look at the community votes on these subclasses as well and compare the two together so let's take a look at the first four fighter subclasses there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling so the first subclass that we're going to be looking at today is the arcane archer introduced in xanathar's guide to everything this is a classic fantasy archetype that has been envisioned differently across many editions of dungeons and dragons but it all tends to surround a fighter who uses a ranged weapon in particular a bow blending magic with their fighting style oftentimes taken up by elves so like all fighters the arcane archer gains features at 3rd 7th 10th 15th and 18th level right away when you pick this subclass at third level you're going to get arcane archer lore which allows you to become proficient in either arcana or nature and gain the present digitation or druidcraft kantrip also at third level we're going to get the big feature of the entire subclass the ability that almost the entire subclass revolves around which is the arcane shot power when you gain the arcane shot power you are able to select two from a list of several different magical infusions that you can use once per turn when you take the attack action with a short bow or a bow only these abilities do not work with crossbows of any kind nor do they work with thrown weapons or melee weapons either the arcane shots can then be used twice before you need to take a short rest to regain them although at 15th level you will gain the ability that when you roll initiative if you don't have any uses remaining you gain one use back these shots also do some damage and that damage is increased at 18th level as well so without going into too much depth on all the shots there are some great choices here and there are some not so great choices some of my favorites would be things like the bursting arrow which allows you to do an aoe effect of damage i also really like enfieling arrow which allows you to target the biggest hitter do extra damage to them and possibly have them having their damage on their attacks the other one that i really liked was grasping arrow because there are many times in the campaigns i've played in where people have tried to flee or i just want to create some distance between me and them either way stopping an enemy in their tracks and making it harder for them to move without taking additional damage can be really helpful me personally i really like banishing arrow i think the application of being able to just banish somebody for one round even though it is only one round is pretty useful and can be quite relevant i also really like shadow arrow and i think it is the must-have shadow arrow causes the target if it fails to save to not be able to see anything further than five feet away from it because your arranged character that would usually include you because you're probably not standing too close to them you now gain advantage on all that your subsequent attacks against that target which means that you can go to town and action surge and dump a bunch of the fighters many attacks that fighters are well known for with advantage in the target so if you're looking for the really great offensive one shadow arrow is the way to go the other options like piercing arrow and seeking arrow might sound good on paper and there are some really exciting qualities of them but they are a little bit more niche in where you'll be able to use them and with a limited selection that you get as an arcane archer it's really important that you make the right choices and the choices that are going to come up in more than one case or instance also keep in mind that a lot of these features do require the enemy to make a saving throw so there is a chance of you blowing your arcane shot and then it not going through so be wary of enemies that have really good saving throws that might stop you and your tracks from using these awesome abilities the other abilities granted to the arcane archer are the fact that at seventh level all their arrows count as magical which is great if you don't have a magic bow there's actually not a lot of magic bows in the 5th edition dungeon masters guide and other sources so this might be useful the other feature that you get is curving arrow which allows you to use a bonus action if one of your attacks misses to redirect the arrow to another target i would much rather not have curving arrow and be able to take a crossbow expert with the subclass i think it would really make the subclass overall much stronger and that is my big reaction to the arcane archer as a whole i think if we are talking about a ranged damage dealer that has some cool utility we have to compare the arcane archer to the next subclass we're going to be looking at which is the battle master and i think that the limited number of uses of these abilities the fact that you are locked into using a bow or short bow even though you can still use sharpshooter which is one of the best feats in the game and a must-have if you play an arcane archer i think still makes this a little bit limited one of the nice things about the arcane shots is that you choose to use them when your attack hits but there's still a saving throw involved you really have to be pretty conservative which means that most of the time you're just gonna wish that you were a crossbow expert i give this a c in light of the number of times that you can actually use the arcane shots i think it actually makes the case that you might as well just take crossbow expert and carry an extra bow around with you for the few times that you want to use your arcane shots and then default to the crossbow the rest of the time but now you're just a worse battle master i don't think it's as big of a detriment that you don't get access to the crossbows i really like the idea of a character using a bow more than i do a character using a crossbow if i was going to play an arcane archer i've already bought into the bow wielding fighter and it does excel at making the archer better i gave the arcane archer a b i do think that there are things that take away from it in certain instances but i do think that there are reasons that it excels in certain instances which puts it right in the middle ground for me i think that some of the arcane shots are amazing i do think that the curving arrow is a really nice treat that if you get to me if you miss your shot you get to curve the arrow and hit a different target making even your missed shots matter now if i take the archery fighting style and i take the sharpshooter feet i'm already going to be a very powerful fighter build and in those key moments when it is essential i can lay down an arcane shot and do some really cool things with it so there are a lot of nuances here there are the arcane shots that you might not want to take because they will never come up but there are also the arcane shots that can actually do a lot of good in the right moment in the right battle the reason why i'm giving it a b and not an a or an s is because when you compare it directly to something like the battle master the battle master gets a lot of really cool maneuvers that are similar not necessarily the same but similar in concept to what you're getting with the arcane archer but the trick here is that the battle master gets more options for them and i do think that is the big hindrance on the arcane archer and yes at 15th level you get one extra use of it if you don't have any at the start of a combat but the battle master also gets that and is just going to get more so i think the arcane archer would have benefited from having more uses of arcane shot because the shots aren't any better in my opinion than a lot of the battlemaster maneuvers and if we had four or more of them to be able to use before needing to take a rest i think this would have been an a subclass but because it's a little bit more niche i put it as a b the bonus damage on the arcane shots over the course of a combat encounter and over the course of an adventuring day will be paltry compared to the bonus damage of a complete extra attack as a bonus action every single turn the limited number of times you can use the arcane archer's powers and the limited nature of their powers in general combined with the fact that you are losing the opportunity to take crossbow expert with this class and still combine it with your utilities really for me just yields this very unwieldy character that i i think is still strong and still a good damage dealer but it is not the best archer i see where you're coming from with this and and really like if we want to talk about it a battle master fighter who takes the archery fighting style sharpshooter crossbow expert and uses their battlemaster maneuvers in a meaningful way which they get more of is a better archer than the arcane archer give get them a magic bow and they're off to the races yeah so it isn't even the best at what it's supposed to be the best at and that that means that it's a c it it isn't and a re-flavored battle master will be a better arcane archer than the arcade archer if you want to just flavor text that your battlemaster maneuvers are magical in nature you basically have an arcane archer that's cooler now we spent a lot of time talking about the battlemaster as we were talking about the arcane archer so we might as well talk about the battlemaster properly and as you can probably guess there's a lot to love about this subclass every other subclass lives in its shadow and let's talk about why when you choose battle master right away at third level you're going to gain the bread and butter of what makes the battle master amazing and that is combat superiority you get four superiority dice which are d8s to start and you can use these to fuel your attacks with extra features choosing three right away when you choose this subclass you gain an additional superiority die at seventh and 15th level and your superiority dies go up to a d10 at 10th level and at d12 at 18th level you use the superiority dice to fuel the maneuvers for your attacks and you regain all of your superiority dice on a short rest finally at 15th level if you don't have any superiority dice left and a combat is initiated then you gain one use of a superiority dice you start off with three maneuvers and you gain two more at seventh 10th and 15th level when you do gain new maneuvers you can also retrain out old ones and mix and match now we've done a full episode of our show talking about each one of the battle master maneuvers in detail so be sure to check that out up over here but the long and short of it is is that the maneuvers of precision attack and trip attack are money particularly when combined with sharpshooter great weapon master polar master and crossbow expert because with the sharpshooter and great weapon master feats you take a penalty to your attack rolls but precision attack allows you to then add your superiority die to the attack roll result to turn a miss attack into a hit and trip attack gives opportunities for fighters of any stripe to knock their target prone thus gaining advantage on attacks against them and obviously you're gonna trigger action church and go to town on them student of war gives you proficiency in a set of artisans tools which can be just a fun ribbon ability and then know your enemy is actually giving the fighter something to do in social situations and we've seen it come up in our own dragonheim campaigns and be really useful as a way to gather information on an enemy or monster these aren't really the greatest abilities but really with the rest of the battlemaster package being so good these just add a little bit of icing to the cake so given all this it's nest here subclass are we in agreement on that i would agree yeah it's a hundred percent asked here yeah i i honestly think that there as we go through the rest of the fighter subclasses i think that many of the fighter subclasses offer interesting specializations that within their specific specialization may outperform the battle master but the battle master is always going to excel as long as you choose the right combination of battle master maneuvers and the right combination of other feats you cannot go wrong with a battle master that takes precision attack great weapon master or sharpshooter and trip attack so if you don't know what to take take those everything else is just gravy the great thing about the battle master is like we said several times a lot of the maneuvers work with ranged attacks they don't specify that it has to be a melee attack this makes it one of the most versatile subclasses you're not locked into anything you have a wide range of options and any way that you decide to build it any sort of theme that you're going for any sort of role play that you have to explore if you decided that you want to be a fighter there's a good chance that your role play involves you kicking ass and taking names as a badass fighter on the battlefield and the battle master is going to do that whether you're an archer whether you're wielding a two-handed weapon whether you're a sword and board no matter what you get to be the badass you get to trip up foes you get to make sure that your hits land you get to disarm them or shove them there's some weaker options here and some stronger but really you're going to have a lot of fun no matter which battlemaster maneuvers you pick and you're going to be able to flavor them to the idea that you had behind your fighter this versatility and the ability to bring it into any sort of game and use it anywhere to great effect means that it's got to be a nest here and many of the maneuvers are flexible allowing you to decide whether or not you want to use them after finding out if an attack has actually hit or missed while there are saving throws for many of them which does limit some of their usefulness there are many maneuvers that don't rely on your enemies making saving throws at all whatsoever and just take effect right away like precision attack you're not limited in the number of times per round you can use your maneuvers if you want to wreck somebody's day you can just drop maneuvers on them one even once they're prone just to get the extra damage that the the maneuvers often cause so this capacity this flexibility and this raw combat superiority well it's an aptly named class feature this is the ness next up we come to the cavalier the noble warrior atop a loyal steed don't let the name cavalier throw you off this does depict the image of the knight atop a great steed riding into battle but if you never mount your horse and you're always just on foot you'll still excel with a lot of the great features the cavalier offers so let's take a look so as kelly kind of intimated the name cavalier is a little bit misleading and if you start reading the first two abilities granted by the subclass the bonus proficiencies and born in the saddle you might think that you're going to start reading the rest of the subclass and it's all going to be to do with mounted combat and you're going to think oh well if i don't have a mount or if my mountain dies all my abilities are useless and this is completely untrue about the subclass because the unwavering mark power is actually its defining trait and one of the most unique powers in the game in fact when you hit a target with a melee weapon attack you can choose to mark that target until the end of your next turn the target stays marked by you unless you're incapacitated or somebody else like another cavalier marks the target while the marked target is within five feet of you it is disadvantage on any attack made against a creature that is not you if the target that you have marked damages somebody other than you on your turn you can use a bonus action to attack that target you get advantage on that attack and you deal extra damage equal to half your fighter level to them and you can use this bonus action attack a number of times per day up to your strength modifier at seventh level you gain warding maneuver which means that if you or an ally that you can see within five feet of you is targeted by an attack you can roll a d8 and add this to the ac of that creature if the attack still hits the creature has resistance to the damage this ability uses your reaction and you can use it a number of times equal to your con mod per day at 10 bubble you gain the hold the line feature which on paper looks a lot like the sentinel feat it causes creatures hit by your opportunity attacks to have their speeds reduced to zero and if a creature within your reach moves more than five feet it provokes an opportunity attack from you what's different about this from the sentinel feet is the sentinel feat stops creatures from disengaging but in practice in fifth edition d d creatures can move within the reach of other creatures without provoking opportunity attacks this means that if a creature is standing in front of you and is trying to use their movement to move around you something that normally doesn't provoke an opportunity attack this ability will trigger you to make an opportunity attack against them and stop them if you hit at 15th level you get ferocious charger if you run more than 10 feet towards your enemy and hit them with an attack they have to make a saving throw or else be knocked prone you can use this once per turn at 18th level you gain the vigilant defender feature which is pretty amazing actually because this allows you to effectively take a reaction on every single creature's term except your own and except when you use your own reaction you can only use this reaction to make opportunity attacks but in practice this means that you get to make opportunity attacks every single time a creature provokes them rather than be limited by the single reaction that you normally get per turn so when i look at the cavalier fighter this subclass really excels at some really cool things and whether you're on your horse or off your horse doesn't seem to matter and that's actually one thing that i misread the first time i've read this subclass and i gave this subclass a b ranking some of the features kind of overlap with the sentinel feed making me confused on whether i would want to take the sentinel feed but it's also missing a few gaps that i think it would benefit from still taking the sentinel feat meaning that there's this weird overlap of abilities lastly the cavalier does kind of lock you into a defensive play style doesn't offer the versatility of something like the battle master where you can go a whole bunch of different directions and still play a defending type of character the cavalier you are playing that defender you're not going to be the biggest damage dealer like some of the other fighter subclasses instead you're going to rely on focusing the attacks towards you if that's what you're going for and that's the character you want to play then this is going to be amazing and it might be an a tier subclass for that reason i give it a b but it is definitely a high b because rereading the subclass these features work on or off the horse meaning that it really excels in more ways than i initially imagined so kelly i agree with you that this subclass is narrow it really drives you towards a defensive play style and i do personally think that with the subclass you do want to take the sentinel feat because you probably want the benefits that sentinel gives you really early on and i'd be tempted to take sentinel at least with my level 6 ability and a score increase if not right away at level 4 and i would probably also consider taking shield master and possibly even polar master and doing the spear and shield spartan style which is now possible because the spear was added to the errata for polar master you've got the baseline features of the fighter like action surge and second wind to keep you in the fight i don't know if you are as tough as some of the other tanks in the game but your ability to control the battlefield and to control a large number of enemies is really amazing because this is reintroducing basically fourth edition and third edition style defensive mechanics in 5th edition d d here's where the subclass falters if in your party you have a really great battlefield control spell caster or a really strong and tough front line or you don't have squishies that you need to protect in your party you kind of might falter a little bit here the other thing that you might falter with yourself is that you're driving the attacks towards yourself and you don't necessarily have any more survivability from this subclass than the baseline fighter does so you're gonna have to find that in other ways so for all those reasons i think that there's a lot of reasons why the cavalier might not be the right character for your campaign but i think it excels within its specific area of specialization and that's why i want to give it an a i think it is really good at what it does and what it does is useful in a battlefield situation if you are playing theater of the mind combat if you're not playing tactical combat the value of this whole subfast tanks right down but if you play that chessboard style combat you got a lot to love here it's it's actually really tough because rereading the subclass it's excellent it's excellent there there are some excellent features there is nothing here that takes away from the fighter in any way it just adds to it and really if you are going to take uh polar master great weapon master and sentinel that great weapon master is going to make up for the fact that you're not the heavy hitter but now you are yeah yep so you can be a really powerful fighter that may not be the biggest tank but if you are teamed up with a great squishy healer who can make sure that you stay in combat and you can direct everything towards you you can as one of the ability states hold the line yeah and you can hold that line letting your your squishy mages and healers and whoever else is in the back lines stay put you could play a cavalier as the only frontline fighter and probably be a really important part of your team in fourth edition this style of play worked really really well and it kept dungeon masters honest because of the focus on tactical combat that fourth edition had but fifth edition really loosened that up and so i want to give this subclass a conditional a i i think i'm willing to concede to the a under those conditions and i will say that at worst it's a b which a b is still an a in the right campaign yep so i think that this is good enough in most situations to give it an a and if you're playing in a campaign that it doesn't work in it's a b it's still going to be good but you might find that it's a little lackluster in an inappropriate setting if you're not using miniatures in a grid don't even consider playing this class i think that you will really you really need the tactical combat to make it worth considering playing playing a cavalier and finally we come to the champion the archetypal hey welcome to dungeons and dragons here's a nice simple subclass to ease you into the game class if the fighter is the perfect default class for a new player to d then the champion doubles down on that idea trading mechanical complexity and depth for simplicity and ease of use to make that new player experience really really good so let's take a look at why people call the champion the first port of call for new players in d d so right away when you gain the subclass you gain one of the easiest things to keep track of and that is the improved critical you now crit on a 19 or 20 instead of just a 20. not bad at seventh level you become a remarkable athlete adding one half your proficiency modifier to any strength constitution or dexterity ability check that doesn't already include your proficiency bonus in addition you add your strength modifier to the distance you cover when you make a running long jump a 10th level you gain an additional fighting style so now if you want to be able to switch between your sword or your bow you can do that at 15th level you now crit on an 18 19 or 20. and at 18's level you have the ability survivor that lets you regain hit points if you're below 50 health 5 plus your con mod worth of hit points unless you're at zero so i originally was going to argue that the champion subclass was an a and here's why the champion subclass by our definition of what a is does not take away from the fighter subclass at all as a matter of fact it adds to the fighter subclass in meaningful ways it makes your crits better what fighter doesn't want to create you're getting a whole bunch of attacks as a fighter so now you are going to be the crit king or queen when you play a champion fighter you get to regain hit points when you reach the top levels you get an additional fighting style it all just makes the fighter more fightery so i was like yeah definitely an a tier then i read it again this morning before we decided to film this and i said no this is a c this is the most boring subclass out of all the subclasses in the entire game you can role play the heck out of a champion and have a lot of fun doing it but at the end of the day there's a certain excitement that comes from d d by having cool abilities that you get to use and announce i'm going to use this ability and it's going to be awesome the champion doesn't give you that so although it's adding to it it feels like a c because it's just so bland which if i'm battling constantly between whether this is an a or a c it means that yeah it's a b is it a great choice for a new player probably it's really easy to grasp it really lets them feel like a powerful character but if you have any experience playing d d this is one of the most boring options and i can't see myself ever wanting to play a champion fighter because i would just be bored playing it i think the champion fighter is purpose built to feel like you don't get a subclass so i think that this is a subclass of abilities that you're gonna forget that you have until you're like oh yeah i do crit on 19s cool i think that it's actually very hard to quantify the value of an expanded crit range which considering how many dice a fighter is going to roll with all their attacks means that it's gonna feel like a lot of crits it it feels cool um and it feels like it's doing something but i just can't get over the fact that i kind of don't like that this subclass gets recommended to new players it is so brain dead simple that it feels mundane if we're going to give this one a b i'm going to do that reluctantly because i i just don't like that it gets recommended to new players i think that new players deserve more credit than we often give them and new players deserve better than the champion fighter i've played a human champion fighter in a one shot it was great for the one shot i had a polar master sentinel great weapon master and i was playing a champion i crit more often in that one shot than i have with any other character but really my fun was coming from the use of sentinel polar master and great weapon master not from the champion subclass and i realized that towards the end of that one shot and i realized that i would not enjoy playing this for a long campaign but i just want a subclass to have more substance than this it doesn't take away from the fighter at all it actually adds to it in meaningful ways but those meanings get lost and they're kind of footnotes on what the fighter already is and so is it a great subclass i i feel very neutral about this whole thing i won't ever say the champion is a bad subclass i won't ever say it's a great subclass it's somewhere in the middle and you can play it if you want and if you want something really really simple to just get into the role play or get into d d in a different way then maybe you'll enjoy the champion fighter so up on the screen right now you're going to see our final rankings for the first four fighter subclasses we are going to be looking at the other four subclasses and doing an overall total comparison at the end of the next video and right now let's take a look at the community votes and see how they stack up against our own the arcane archer had a little bit of a mixed bag but 41.5 percent gave it a b tier ranking with 17.5 giving it an a tier ranking small percent giving it an s but a very large chunk 27 percent giving it a c tier ranking and 10 10.9 giving it a d tier ranking this is in fact the second highest number of d tier rankings and the second highest number of c tier rankings across all the fighter subclasses so well that does still put the arcane archer overall in the b category from the community the number of people that rank this poorly is quite high when we move on to the battle master it seems like the community really does agree with us here it is sitting at a 54.8 percent s tier and a 37.1 a tier with only a 6.8 b and very very little c and almost no d rankings whatsoever so this definitely falls into the largest amount of s-tier rankings out of any sub-class that the fighter gets making it easily the s-tier of all of the fighters i i think there must be a lot of fans of fourth edition in our community because 31 of them gave the cavalier an a ranking and 38 gave them a b ranking with even 9.1 giving it an s-tier ranking a sizable chunk of the community though was not too happy with the cavalier with 17 giving it a c ranking and 4.8 giving it a d ranking this is a pretty significant chunk of low rankings but overall the the response is positive which i think very solidly places the community's response to the cavalier as a b tier ranking with us we gave it an a but it was that sort of a with an asterisk which i can see from the community here the largest portions are a and b this is probably one of the wider spreads that we've gotten when we move on to the champion we also get a pretty mixed response here moving down the list if we look at the s tier getting a 7.9 a was given 30.2 percent beats here for 34 percent seat here at 19.5 and d tier at 8.5 a pretty even spread it does land in the b category and this really speaks to everything that we had to say about the champion with it being either a really boring doll class that falls into the c or d tier or being a really decent class that adds to the fighter in meaningful ways as an a or s tier but landing safely prominently in the b tier looking over the community comments that were left about the champion the biggest praises of the champion were its simplicity and effectiveness for a new player so up on the screen right now you are going to see all of the community rankings based on the majority votes and next to it here you're going to see again our reviews of the subclasses pretty evenly matched i'd say the battle master comes out of the player's handbook utterly swinging and i think many of the other subclasses are judged in its shadow and rightly so it is phenomenal and it really does speak to a lot of the image that people want to have from the fighter as a badass master of war so i can't judge you if you think that it blows the other ones out of the water because i agree with you so this has been a look at our fighter subclass tier ranking for dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about your favorite subclasses or your least favorite subclasses in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters all of our patrons a big thank you from the bottoms of our heart if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider supporting us on patreon you can find out how by following the links in the description below and if you want to check out some great fighters doing what they do best don't forget to check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6pm eastern at twitch.tv slash dungeon underscore dudes you can find all the previous episodes of the current campaign right up over here and we have many more tier rankings and class guides for d5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: axFjiEO_WZo

Length: 36min 21sec (2181 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020