Karlach is a wonderful character,
a warrior of righteous anger, setting out to try to make the world
better before she bothers, worrying about her own
really serious problems. In this video
I just want to show you quick the build, I used for her
when I did my origin run with her. I'll talk a little bit
about the kind of items you can go out and find,
but principally I want to talk about just how I build Karlach from level
one to level 12. I might actually show
you two different builds. The first one I do
that works in the early game and the one I often convert it to
in the end game. For Karlach The other build I do is a little bit
less satisfying because it switches her way from barbarian,
which I think is so perfect for her. So we're going to start with the one
that fits more with her original class. It's got a barbarian backbone for
the class, so we're starting barbarian. That gives us rage in unarmored
defense for our skills. We do want a 17 in con, but we're willing to give up some wisdom
to get us or a 17 in strength. We're willing to give up some wisdom
to get a 16 in Constitution. We would love a 14 dexterity D but yeah, so we're going to go 17, 14, 16, eight, ten, eight. Those mental scores are not good. If this were, I would not use this build
a solo run partially for this reason. This is a big hole in the saving throws
skills pick your favorite is Colby
at D forces PYF. This is really close to his berserker
raging thrower honour mode build
so you should watch his video as well. Yeah, we'll leave it in perception.
Intimidation. That's fine. so right now we are a level one barbarian. We have 15 hit points
and you're going to play like a barbarian. You run up and hit things. Stick with that. Level two, we're going to be sticking
with Barbarian. What? You're me sticking with Barbarian
for a bit here, now we get danger sense, whatever reckless attack
which is actually really important because that's super important for
this build, but it's the most important barbarian feature for other builds
that rely on barbarian level. Three We are going Berserker. That's really important. We want to be a Berserker Barbarian because it lets us throw things
and we're going to be throwing a lot of things
as soon as you can get to the Goblin camp. The vendor there sells a returning pike. That's the best early throwing item
you can get and I recommend it. Don't use your thrower to start combat and try not to end their turn
until you hear the little sound that tells you
that it came back to your hand. They've gotten better at it, especially
since Patch five and Patch six made it meaningfully better, but throwing items
that have the like return property still have a habit of
not always returning. So you have to be a little bit
careful on that. But this build is going to be built
around this throwing thing because once you're frenzied,
you can do that with your bonus action. And unlike the frenzied strike,
it doesn't add a stack of frenzied strain, frenzied strain being the feature
that makes it so barbarians are less likely to hit the more they do
these frenzied strikes. That's not true. If you do the enraged throw. level four. We take the feat that breaks the game. And a ton of people have done
really great videos on this feat. So I'm not going to get super into it
right now. But we want to take the Tavern Brawler
feat, which somehow is a half feat, meaning
you get to bump one of your ability scores and breaks bounded accuracy,
which is like the entire design philosophy for 5e and adds extra damage
on every single hit. The most powerful feat in this entire game is Tavern Brawler. So take that. And now when you throw you to add your strength twice to your hit,
twice to your damage. And like I said, your strength is now
higher than it otherwise would be. Level five We are still a barbarian,
but that is going to change soon. You get like extra attack
This is what we really wanted at this level is the extra attack. So now on our initial round
we rage, we do our two throws it coming back to our hand
each time and our second round we get our two attack throws
and then we get our bonus action throw. That's three attacks all very likely
to hit because you broke bounded accuracy Level six things get interesting and we're leaving barbarian behind
for quite some time and instead we're going to go rogue. Yep. So you get the sleight of hands expertise, which is great
if you need someone to pick locks. Still though,
our dexterity isn't incredible and we can. We're now going to stick with Rogue until level eight. We get our cunning action,
which is helpful. But mostly we want to be
using our bonus action to either rage or throw things. Level three We pick the most broken rogue subclass in the game
Thief and wise Thief broken. Well, it's
not because it gives us resistance to falling damage,
I'll tell you that much. It's because it gives us an additional
bonus action every single round. So now you are doing your
your raging, you're doing your two throws and you're doing an extra bonus action
through in the first round. That's three second round. You burn, you do it
four times, you up to a total of seven and it just keeps going like that. This is one of the best damage
per round in survivability builds you can do because you're doing this
all at a distance. And even if they get in close,
you're still a barbarian. You can still swing that pike or whatever and do damage to the people
when they get in close. And because of your rage, you can still soak up a lot of damage
and you still have a six con, so you still have a lot of hit
points behind it. And so this works really well to be like your
DPR character in your party, DPR being damage per round. And so so we're going to ditch Rogue for a second because we want to just kind of make this a little bit higher burst damage. And so the best thing we can do
is get action, surge. So in that first round, we get an extra
action, can do two more throws. Are that much more likely
to take someone out? Right. I don't think this is necessary
for the build, especially depending on your party composition. I think you could arguably
you could take a lot of directions. You can use some more barbarian levels. You could, I don't want to say
add Paladin levels, but you could take like a couple of Paladin levels
and do some smite if someone gets up in melee with you. But what we're going to do is we're going
to take fighter fighting style. We're going to go with. I actually haven't tested if great weapon fighting works in a thrown
two handed melee weapon. Interesting. Anyway, anyways, I always go with defense
just up your survivability a little bit You could also respec at this point
and put your fighter one as your first level if you prefer,
like the saving to proficiencies you get from that. I didn't find that it mattered on a build for a character like this,
but I understand why other people would want to do that, especially
if you're going to be throwing on anything that might sometimes
be concentrating on the spell. But I want this character raging
every round so they can't concentrate. They can't. They don't need a constitution
saving to proficiency. So I think this is fine Action
search here at level two four Fighter. That's great.
That's exactly what we wanted. Now we get to throw out even more of those
those This is the core of the build already
before five barbarian three rogue two fighter Those ten levels
get you an incredible character and the last two
you've got a bit of flexibility. The game's telling me
I should take another level in a fighter. And sure, there's reasons to do that. Battle Master would give you
a couple of passive maneuvers. You can do in people getting close and a little bit of extra damage
on some of those attacks. With the Terran Brawler, though, you're already doing
a pretty great amount of damage per hit. And unlike Great weapon
master or sharpshooter, you're landing most of your hits
you can you champion again get a few more crits spike that damage
a little bit you could do Eldritch Knight They've got an ability
where they can bind their weapon and then when they throw it,
it automatically returns. There is possibly some better tone weapons
you could get without the honing property. Like if you missed your opportunity
to get the dwarven thrower or something like that. But like, I don't do that. What I do is I don't take this level
in fighter, I take it in Rogue. Initially because I want to. And again,
you've got a bit of flexibility here. If this character
is kind of acting as your tank, maybe you went tough for something
just to fill that out. If you've got like the gloves
of his giant strength or a lot of elixirs of cloud,
giant strength or something like that, you obviously don't want to do
what I'm about to do. But what I'm about to do
is put two more points in strength. Everyone that hits them, that's an extra
two points of damage on the throw. It's an extra
plus to to every time we attempt to hit someone with the throw,
which makes it even more likely they land. So I think that makes sense. Again, if you've got enough elixirs,
if you've got items, then it's probably worth dumping the strength
and bumping your Constitution. Also, I didn't talk about it much,
but armor here, you can wear medium armor as a barbarian, and so that's probably
going to be your best choice. That's also why I wanted the plus two
in dexterity because most medium armor in the game, you are limited
to a plus two bonus from dexterity. If you started
finding like the one t armor or the or some of the other exotic
material medium armors. Maybe you want to put those points
in dexterity and get a little bit of an AC boost. I don't think that that's going to be
an issue and I would generally favor dumping those points
into either strength or constitution. And so we dipped into Rogue just because it was ready with that
AC right there at level 11. And finally, to cap it out at level 12,
you've got a few things you can do. You can stay here and get uncanny, dodge,
help your survivability a little bit. You can do the fighter things
we already talked about. I generally round it out
with one last level in barbarian
having when extra rage is nice and the making it so you can't be charmed
or frightened helps with it can help
with some of the end game fights. Karlach Unlike basically every other
character I've played these so far, you can get from level one to level 12
without ever respeccing like I just did. And I do appreciate that
for this character. We kept a barbarian backbone. There's more levels of barbarian
than any other class in here, which fits appropriately for
I can't really imagine Karlach is a thief. So like, when I'm picking these classes,
I'm picking them for build reasons, but like, there's
a little bit of other things in there. As to that, I want to consider. I mentioned that the tavern Brawler Feet
is broken for throwing items, and it is. I mentioned there's another,
Karlach build. I sometimes do and I start monk abilities. We are going to
mostly be keeping those stats very close to where we were at and that other 117, 14, 16, eight,
ten, eight is actually the same and you can keep this
as barbarian for the first few levels. You if you want that extra survivability. But again, conceptually I like builds
that don't require a lot of respect. So we're going to start monk here. Colby over at D4 is a couple of builds
that are kind of like this as well. Again, we're going be taking advantage
of that extra bonus action that we get from the rogue instead of
using it to throw will be using it to like toss out
flurry of blows and things like that. Level two, level three, we get our monk subclass. We do not want the worst
one way of the four elements. We want the best one way of the open hand Level four. We are again taking the most broken feat
in the game and again bumping our strength to 18 month level five. We get our extra tech,
which is great, level six, we're taking rogue levels again and again. This conceptually is a very similar build. Both of these are just two different ways
to take advantage of the fact
that Tavern brawler is so broken when I'm the thrown aspect
one on the punching aspect, because you can get off
slightly more punches using this with like flurry of blows
until you burn through your key points. This arguably
does like slightly more damage is why I often like when we loaded into the save
my level 12 collect was this build but most of the time when I like when it wasn't done in per like origin per
like it was just in my party. I keep them as the thrower
just because it's such a great damage prevented
build case. So we got our thief subclass. There's a couple different things
arguably to do here. You can dip in for the feat. I would not you can go level six. Monk is a big level
and I would say it's arguably worth taking before
we try to like maximize our damage output. And I'm going to going a step further
and say, I don't think it's worth taking fighter levels for action
surge here. What I'm instead going to do is take more and more monk levels
to get more and more key points so that I can keep up more rounds of
using my bonus action to flurry of blows. Plus level six here gives us
makes our attacks magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance
and lets our attacks every single one of our attacks
to extra damage. So we need level six here. You can dip back to
Rogue whenever you want to get the feet. If you really feel you need it. But I would probably then go Level
seven Evasion Stillness of Mind. And another key point again,
we just want those key points. Feet. Here we go, Max. At our strength
now, level eight month of three Rogue, last level,
you've got a couple of options. And again,
magic items are going to change this build in that you distribute
more of these things. So for when you're not wearing armor,
which most of the time I think this character would be wearing armor,
you get some extra jump speed and you can do the key resonating punch
by burning some. Yeah. So this one's really up to you. Do you want to make your punches
slightly better? Get this extra kind of resonating
punch feature which like again takes a couple of rounds to set up and doesn't
generally fit with my build conceptions. I often think after eight levels in Monk,
I have enough key for the length of most of the battles
and I would generally dip over here, take a less stability improvement. And again, this is going to depend on
what items you have and stuff like that. But round out constitution ideally, ideally you've got like the amulet
of Constitution and Right. So you've dumped your Constitution
in like you start bringing up your wisdom
to be doing extra damage on your tax. And there's a bunch of items
that add that. But for now, just assuming new items in this build,
I would probably add Constitution level eight, monk, level four vote
a little bit of a less satisfying like Karlach build because it doesn't
stick with her core class. But I think conceptually
Catholic as this like angry person who's trying to channel
and controls that who comes up and just pummels you with these like,
powerful fists still mostly conceptually works. You lose out on
and there are some pretty good monk items that they put in here
to help bulk them up. But I think that just about covers
how I build Karlach I either do where kind of this
raging berserker thrower uses that extra bonus action
to get an extra throw in or I do it. Is this monk
where you're using that extra bonus action to do extra flurries of blows
here, right. And do all that kind of thing. I don't think
either one is like right or wrong. It's just two fun ways, in my opinion, to build this character
who's one of my favorite characters. What do you all thing? Do you have any ways
you prefer to build Karlach? Anything you think works better or you thought was weak
or could be improved in these builds? I would love to hear it. In the meantime, thank you for joining me.
