How to Build a Paladin Sorcerer Multiclass in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

greetings my name is marty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d and d 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 this week we are looking at how to play a paladin sorcerer or the sorcedin multi-class build in d d5e but before we get into that we have something very special to share with you as our kickstarter campaign is currently underway sebastian crowe's guide to drakenheim is a source book for 5th edition chock full of player options we've introduced 12 new subclasses one for each core class and with the stretch goals we've already hit we've introduced three more but on top of that we've also introduced our own brand new class for fifth edition complete with now six different subclasses available we've worked on this project in association with ghostfire gaming who have sponsored this week's episode and as we head into the last week of the campaign we have accomplished so much with the amazing help of our incredible community we put so much work into this book and all the amazing accessories and stretch goals that we've added on through the campaign so this is just your last opportunity in the next couple days to get in on this amazing project before the kickstarter closes if you want new spells new tool feats and a whole world to explore filled with eldritch terror and dark fantasy then you should check out sebastian crowe's guide to drakenheim by following the links in the comments below and with that let's take a look at the paladin sorcerer which in the world of rockenheim would be a super controversial character given the relationship between the forces of the faith of the sacred flame and the mages of the amethyst academy i'm imagining that some parents took their mage born child shoved them into a church to hide them from the academy and they became a paladin through that and now their powers are coming to light so the interesting combination of a paladin and sorcerer is really exciting no matter what world you're playing in because they can be really really powerful both being charisma based characters you have one that's very marshall focused and one who's a full spell caster so today we're going to take a look at what the breakdown of combining these two characters is how many levels should you take of each one what are the different feats and race options how to adjudicate your ability scores and how to build the best source it in in your games there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling so first and foremost one of the big questions is why should you play a paladin sorcerer hybrid and like we said they're both charisma based characters so you do get that going into this and i think that the number one reason is lots of smiting can happen with this character oh yeah because when you multi-class paladin and any other caster class you gain the multi-class spell casting progression instead this means that every level of source or accounts is a full caster level and you can't count half your paladin levels this means that depending on the level mix that you take between sorcerer and paladin you end up with lower level spell slots than what a sorcerer would have but higher level spell slots than what a paladin would have spell slots that you can use for higher level divine smites so a sorcerer paladin multi-class can get access to those fourth and fifth level spell slots earlier than what a paladin does and even get those even higher level spell slots enabling them to do much more damaging smites earlier in addition you get way more spell slots than what you would have with just a baseline paladin so you get more gas and if you've played a paladin before you know that running out of smites is the worst thing so this kind of addresses that problem and this character also allows you to really explore the spell casting side of a paladin which a lot of paladin players don't because they're using all their spell slots on smite and on top of that if we look at subclasses i think an important note here is that we think one of the best options is to pair this with the divine soul sorcerer not only is that very thematic because you're combining the divine nature of a paladin with the divine soul sorcerer but that's going to get us access to things like booming blade spiritual weapon and spirit guardians which are going to dial our paladin up to 11. if only there was a subclass for paladins that actually had a little bit more of an arcane flavor to it it would be a real cool thing if a pair of awesome dudes wrote a new book that had a really cool paladin oath that actually had sort of this witchy arcane sort of feel to it wouldn't it yeah that would be neat um check out the links below for sebastian [Laughter] uh so yeah there's so many cool things going on here and i think that as we move into looking at something like the ability scores this is where paladins always have a little bit of a problem because they're one of the only classes in the game that demands that you look at more than two uh which in this case we definitely want good charisma we're going to need at least a 13 in charisma in order to multi uh multi-class we want a good strength because we're going to be hitting things with our big sword but we also want a decent constitution just so that we can be a paladin on the front lines we actually have to have that 13 strength as well because of the multi-classing rules because of this it really drives us towards wanting to have a good strength score so we can make those melee attacks really effectively because with the paladin sorcerer we're not gonna get any of those fun little hacks like the paladin hex blade where you can use your charisma for your melee attacks you're still going to need your strength to be good if you want to deliver those melee attacks and we do so for this character i think if we're going with point by we gotta put 15s in both strength and charisma and we need to choose a race that is gonna give us a boost to both of those as well from there we're gonna be a melee character we need a good constitution score if we're gonna survive we're also gonna be concentrating on spells which means we're gonna be taking hits which means we're gonna be making constant concentration checks so we need a good con score so i think at a very minimum we need a 14 in our constitution score either if we get that because we get a boost great if we can go higher better and everything else i think we're gonna just have to dump it for this character you're relying on those three there is an option here that you do strength 15 con 15 charisma 15 and all the rest are eights that is one way to go but you can kind of divvy those up i think though as you divvy them up it's your con score that's going to go down not your strength your charisma um one of the things that we're going to do for this character is i think we're going to play a variant human and we're going to take resilient constitution as our feet starting as a level 1 paladin so this is going to give us plus ones to strength constitution and charisma so we could do 16s in all i think for this character we're not going to go all the way with the the min max point by and we'll put a 10 in dexterity and 10 in wisdom and that feels a little bit more balanced at least and so we end up with a 14 con proficiency in the con saving throws and 16 in strength and charisma if you're starting with a sorcerer you wouldn't necessarily need the brazilian constitution because you would gain the um you would gain proficiency in constitution saving throws but for this build we actually think that it's better to start with the paladin and we'll talk about why in a minute but for that reason variant human resilient constitution gives us our package we're going to be starting with paladin and that's the first feat that we're going to take as well brazilian constitution yeah as we build this character up i do think that there's two different ways we could go again we're going to be smashing things with a sword the question is how big of a sword so you either are going to take a long sword and a shield in which case you might want to pick up warcaster as an additional feat at fourth level or beyond but i actually think it's better if we grab a big old two-handed weapon like a great sword and take great weapon master yeah either way you decide to go we're gonna play it pretty straight for the first six levels of the character the the paladin sorcerer multi-class build is one of those multi-class builds where it takes a while to fully realize the character concept in many respects the character build is not going to feel like it comes fully online until about 11th or 12th level and so if you have to start the campaign at level 1 or even level 3 one of the best ways to progress with this character so that it is tolerable when you actually have to play the character at level one two three four and five is to simply play a straight up paladin for the first six levels so that's what we're going to do with this character build is go from level one to six is paladin until we get extra attack and aura of protection we're gonna get our ability score increase at level four which you really have your choice here again as kelly said if you want to go sword and board you can take warcaster because you're going to want to be able to have your ability to cast spells while you're holding your sword and shield or if you go with the two-handed weapon you can have a spell component pouch so that you can use your spell components and throw them away and still have your two-handed greatsword in which case you can take great weapon master it really depends on if you want that defensive focus or if you want that really aggressive build option you could simply boost your strength score to 18 if you wanted to at level four but i think the feats are probably stronger i agree i think that this is going to be a feat-hungry option at least for the beginning of your build so the great thing here is that as you're building up your six levels of paladin you have the right ability scores you're not really losing anything there's there's no trick here to trying to make it work you're just going to work as a great paladin for the first six levels and the benefit of starting as a paladin is that you get proficiency in heavy armor which we definitely want on this character so you get all of those beautiful being a paladin proficiencies you're gonna be great in combat you're gonna have a bit of spell casting we're gonna get a fighting style we're gonna get extra attack we're gonna have aura of protection when we hit six level all of these are really important features for our build is there a certain oath that you would pick or do you think it's pretty open-ended we're really here for the class features and don't forget divine smite obviously right i really feel with this character you kind of have an open-ended choice on what palette and oath you want to take because we're only taking paladin to level six and we're going to get a ton of other spell options for our sorcerer levels the paladin's expanded spell list is useful at kind of feeling some interesting gaps because you're going to feel the real restriction of the sorcerer's limited spell list but this is actually going to be addressed a little bit for those low level spells as a paladin so this is a great way to take oath of vengeance so that you've got your misty step because you probably want misty step there or this would be a cool place where just as a paladin to prepare a spell like aid which is gonna be pretty useful just for your party in general you're gonna have the high level spell slots to be the one that cast that to bring bless along i really think that one of the one permutations you might make with this with this build is take seven levels of paladin if you're going like oath of the ancients or oath of conquest because those are two oaths that have a really tasty level seven ability there is also an option here where instead of going full six levels or seven depending on your oath of paladin you actually do the opposite and you take only two levels of paladin and then go the rest sorcerer now we're not going to talk a lot about that option because for us that feels more like you're a sorcerer who wears heavy armor and can smite on occasion but you're actually going to be relying a lot less on your smites with that build and really you're kind of just there to be an armored sorcerer it's still a great build and a lot of people really love it but i think we're here for being able to grab the big weapon the fighting style we want the aura especially at sixth level the benefit of doing only two levels of paladin is that you still get true ninth level spells as a sorcerer so you're gonna get be able to get at very high levels of play you're going to get spells like wish if you think that your dnd campaign is going to go all that far great but one of the really big strengths of going six levels of paladin is that your character is going to feel like a demigod in the sweet spot of dnd which is from level six to about level 13. this character reaches the apex of its power i think between these levels and really comes online at that early sort of level 10 to level 14 range when a lot of campaigns are in their most climactic moments so i think that th this build really focuses on when d and d is at its best and doesn't worry about yeah we're not our campaign's not going to get to the level or we're going to cast wish you also don't get extra attack and you don't get or protection with the only two levels of paladin so that's the trade-off that you're making if you are going long-term now with six levels of paladin and if we went all the way with 14 levels of sorcerer you still do get one ninth level spell slot although you don't get access to anything higher than seventh level spell correct yeah now this is still useful even if we're only getting seventh level spells because there are a lot of spells that we might want to upcast we might not want to use those sixth seventh eighth and ninth level spell slots for smiting because smite does have a cap for how many extra damage dice you get to add to it so just be aware of that but extra spells for actually using the spell casting abilities is going to be great and hey if all you have left is a six level spell slot and it's the right time to smite then i'd still say go for it once we get to character level seven this is when we're going to start taking our sorcerer levels and at first we're not going to get too much from this but it's going to build up very very quickly because we're immediately going to see the impact of the faster spell slot progression that comes from multi-classing into sorcerer we're also going to get to pick up a few cantrips you might want to pick up booming blade or green flame blade as some of your cantrips in particular if you took warcaster one of the cool things that we're going to be able to do with this character once we get our amanda magic options is take quicken spell and a really fun nova move to pull off is to quicken a booming blade to get that extra bonus action attack which you can also smite on so conceivably as soon as we do have our metamagic options through our sorcery points we can be making three attacks smiting on all of them doing a booming blade it's it's messy you're expending all your abilities to do this but this is something that you can do is like an eighth level character and i don't think anything at eight level is really going to survive that much smiling and and that's the beautiful thing about combining the metamagic and the smites and all of that i would also look at other metamagics like empowered spell or twin spell these are always my favorite choices but they really feel at home here and one of the nice things about the paladin sorcerer multi-class is is that even though you don't get as many sorcery points through your source or spell slot progression you can convert your spell slots into sorcery points again and that's another great way to use those higher level spell slots that you can only use for either up casting or converting into sorcery points so sometimes it might be more worthwhile to simply expend your third or fourth level spell slot turn that into sorcery points so you can quicken more booming blades or something like that because we're going with the divine soul source result we're also going to have access to our prime pickings from the cleric spell list and this is where you get a little bit of paladin wish fulfillment because i think so many paladins would love to be able to have healing word spiritual weapon and eventually spirit guardians these are the ace and the hole for this character build that really take the damage to the next level in my opinion so at this point if you're in a big combat encounter that is going to last multiple rounds you can do some crazy stuff like in your first round of combat quicken spirit guardians run into combat and start smiting on your next round of combat you can throw up your spiritual weapon and continue attacking and if you really need to you could even on later round start quickening booming blades to add to all of that having all of these options online at the same time makes a really robust character that in a long combat encounter just keeps getting more powerful i think one of the interesting things with this character is that you really get to choose how many resources you want to put into a given combat encounter because spirit guardians and spiritual weapon are really efficient when you cast these spells you're getting bonus damage that you're going to be able to use for several rounds of combat so if you're looking at a slog of a fight these spells are really going to support you quite well on the other hand you can also use your spell slots and your quicken spells to smite and just put a ton of damage down now so you actually have this interesting choice between having really good sustained damage round over round or really amazing burst damage by throwing everything down and you can kind of do both at the same time you might hit a couple traffic jams and you're if you want to do both at the same time you're going to run out of spell slots but uh but you can do it in a big climactic battle i also think other spells that are available to us that we should consider are simple things like spirit shroud could really be helpful here even something like shield could be really helpful uh just because you're taking your two weapons having shield as a backup is just going to protect you more that's almost the most amazing thing that you get right away at seventh level when you take your first level sorcerer is now all of a sudden you have the shield spell and a bunch of first level spell slots it's a huge defensive boost that just happens at level seven whether or not you're going sword and board or whether or not you're you're going with the great sword option just boom level seven if you need plus five to your ac boom you got it absorb elements is pretty awesome here too there's a lot of great pickups and a lot of great ways to just augment yourself there's so many spells that will help out with your defenses or just make you better at running in and attacking you can add a bunch of spells to your arsenal as you get those six levels of sorcerer do you want to have some battlefield control take web or hypnotic pattern your savings throw dc isn't amazing but it's not bad either do you want more teleportation grab thunderstep do you just want to throw a fireball if necessary or do you want to fly or do you want to pick up haste all of these options are on the table for you and so you can kind of augment your character abilities as you need to with those spells because as long as you're hitting that bread and butter of what the paladin spell casting is giving you plus spiritual weapons and spirit guardians the rest of what you do with your sorcerer's spell slots is really up to you to customize your character with to fill those gaps and that's where i might look to what your other party members offer as well to bring those things in if you don't have anybody in your party that can cast fireball well guess that gets to be you as a 12th level character you're going to have access to fourth and fifth level spell slots although you're only actually going to have third level spells but as always up casting or smiting is going to be pretty awesome here and i think as we continue to build this character really the sorcerer levels all just complement what you want to do with a paladin and actually serve you better than continuing with a paladin we really get to dial our smites and spell casting up to 11 as we progress it's like adding just extra boosts and power constantly with each level we gain of sorcerer it's really unfathomable if you compare a paladin 6 sorcerer 6 to a straight paladin 12 it really feels like the multi-class build is just straight up better by every metric you have higher level spell slots you have way better spells a 12 level paladin only has third level spell slots and yes they get third level paladin spells but we're getting third level sorcerer spells and we also have the fourth and fifth level spell slots on top of this we have the meta magic to quicken the spells yes we're not getting the extra d8 damage of the improved divine smite on every attack and we lose out on one ability score increase our feet but overall it just feels way stronger you can kind of make up for the fact that you're missing out on that extra damage die by the fact that you have access to spells like spirit shroud spirit guardians or spiritual weapon oh it more than compensates for that spirit guardians alone it just adds so much extra damage potentially and a bit of battlefield control and you've got the hit points and the armor class between shield and your heavy armor to really survive up on those front lines this character ends up with a plus 10 bonus to constitution saving throws at level 12 and if you have warcaster you've got an advantage on your concentration checks so you are not losing concentration on spirit guardians even if you are taking hits i think what's really interesting here is we're starting to see this great multi-classing option in fifth edition that is based on this almost like almost like cross-referencing across all of the charisma-based classes it's like paladin sorcerer paladin bard warlock paladin warlock sorcerer warlock bard you can kind of just cross-reference these and mix and match them any way you want and you get some of the most powerful characters in the game we've now looked at the paladin sorcerer the paladin warlock we've looked at the bard warlock we've looked at the blade singer all of these gish type character builds i think that the paladin sorcerer is the least spell castery and the most martial focus it really feels like a marshall character that is using magic to augment their melee presence more so than i think the blade singer which the blade singer's the other extreme which feels like a magical character who is just also amazing at melee i will say though that a paladin with spirit guardians a spiritual weapon does feel like a gish character it does it does and and using your spell slots to smite it feels like you're using your magical powers i think that again the biggest limitation of this character really comes down to the character progression of how you're gonna level them up how you're gonna fit the ability scores around and ultimately not running out of gas by expending all your spell slots in one single turn because i think that this is totally a character who could good and would have fun doing that yeah you're going to destroy the boss at higher levels by doing this like you do have on the table with this character the ability to quicken whole person or at high levels quick and hold monster paralyze your foe and then auto crit them with a bunch of smites which is nasty like if you get if you pull that off especially on a boss i think your dm's just gonna be like well i thought that was gonna be a challenging encounter i was very wrong the book closes campaign's over yeah but really if you throw one more encounter at them after that then it's going to be a problem yeah so keep in mind that although this character might be one of the most powerful options in the game it also does rely on some resource management you don't have as many spell slots as a sorcerer does you have more than a paladin does but you can still blow through them a lot faster than normal palette and what because of the options presented to you so the regular paladin problem of being able to supernova and then run out of gas still persists here so keep that in mind as you go smiting into the dungeons so that's been a look at our paladin sorcerer multi-class tell us if you've played this character and what your thoughts on it are in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider supporting our show by following the links in the description below or checking out our kickstarter campaign for sebastian crowe's guide to drakenheim which is also in the links below and if you're wondering what all this kickstarter stuff is about and what is drakenheim you can check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which airs tuesday evenings on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more build guides for 5th edition dnd right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 203,451

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: 0Z21URtWQDA

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022