How to Build the Strongest Melee Damage Dealers in D&D 5e

before we get into this week's video we just want to shout out our very good friends at dwarven forge the official sponsors for this week's episode they've just launched their brand-new Kickstarter for their hellscape 3d terrain which is on now until July 1st dwarven forges amazing new hellscape modular terrain features lava themed pieces with inbuilt LED lighting available both hand-painted and unpainted to really elevate your game I have backed all six of dwarven forges previous Kickstarter campaigns from the dungeons to the cities to the castles and more and I have never once been disappointed by their amazing results the Kickstarter is a great time to get these pieces and an amazing discount whether or not you come back now or have to save up to jump in later dwarven Forge is sure to bring your game to the next level make sure to follow the links in the description below and check out dwarven forge to bring your game to life and now onto this week's episode more muscles means more damage so get pumped cuz we're gonna show you how to max out the damage in melee combat in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel will recover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for Dungeon Master's we upload new videos every Thursday so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we're going to show you how to play the muscle with our guide to strength based damage dealers in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition so let's get pumped so if we're setting out to play a strength-based melee damage dealer in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition what are we envisioning well I think for players that are really enamored with this archetype you're imagining everything from that hack and slash a brute to the Herculean hero you really want that character that is strong physically present and wields heavy weapons and armor in battle so many stories revolve around a strong action hero type character and when I think of the muscle when I think of the strength based characters there the sword and shield or the hack and slash and they're running in front lines doing the damage and getting the job done and of course we really want to throw down big numbers of course that's part of the equation here but even if you aren't trying to min/max your character or take things over to the overdrive there's a whole bunch of choices to make when you're building a strength-based frontline character in your weapons your character's personality and archetype and even narrowing down which class is going to help you envision the character that you want to play so Monty what would you say the top 3 things to look for if you're building a strength-based melee combatant I think that if you're interested in this archetype you're probably interested in three main things you want to wield heavy weapons probably two-handed weapons like great swords great axes glaives war hammers and the like we're gonna ditch that shield we're gonna take something in two hands and smash somebody with it at the same time you probably want toughness behind that character whether that comes from wearing heavy armor and/or have a lot of hit points yeah you want to not only be able to dish out the damage but if you're gonna be up in the fight every single time you want to be able to take damage as well I think the other thing that you want to have with this character is a focus on the physical skills like athletics acrobatics maybe even going into some of the other skills like stealth and perception if you have the supporting attributes to do it you need to be that person that's gonna be able to you know toss aside the boulder or knock over the tree or hold up the gate or crush the evil artifact with your bare hands I I know so many tropes that have the big strong guy amongst the adventuring party and they're always the one that everybody's escaping through the castle gate that's coming down and there's the strong guy holding the gate up everybody needs that strong guy you could be that strong guy yeah it's a really action-oriented character archetype and of course if you want to you can still have that tactician element or that kind of wise old warrior element or the leader depending on if your secondary or tertiary attributes include a focus on intelligence wisdom or charisma so we want heavy weapons we want them to be tough and we want a good athletic skill set that still leaves room for great role-playing so what are we gonna be looking at today I think the two things that are gonna be the cornerstone of this is whether you want to go all the way with the feats for melee damage healing which are gonna focus around great weapon master and probably pull our master and maybe Sentinel and then you're gonna have to really choose between one of three classes I think it comes down to if you're playing a strength-based character barbarians fighters and paladin's it's gonna be one of the three but all of which one of those three you choose we can weigh out the pros and cons because they have different role-playing opportunities and pretty big differences in place bio style despite all being characters that focus on strength have extra attack and have a bunch of ways to boost their attacks in battle so there's a few feats that you might want to look at if you're going to be building this really strong melee combat and character and we've covered these feats in length in other episodes so we're just going to mention them here and why we think that they're important for this character starting off with great weapon master great weapon master is a cornerstone feet for melee combat damage mainly because of the ability to take the ax penalty to your attack role to add plus 10d or damage it's one of the few ways to add damage to every single melee attack your character makes at no resource cost with every other ability that classes get like battle master maneuvers paladin smites and even the barbarians rage you're limited in some way in how often you can perform or benefit from those abilities but with great weapon master you can apply it to every single attack you make and plus 10 is a good amount of extra damage just on top of the damage you're already doing when you announce oh I just did 50 or 60 damage on my hit people at the table are gonna be like how did you do that and usually it's because they have the great weapon master feet yeah now when you're getting damaged up as high as 50 or 60 you're probably stacking on a bunch of other abilities there yeah I'm looking at a higher level character don't expect that at level 1 yeah not at all you may wonder is there a point at which the penalty for great weapon mastery becomes not worth it and from a lot of the math that we've run and that others in the community have also contributed to the drop off point appears to be somewhere around a sea of 18 so if you see some phones running towards you with plate armor you might not want to use the penalty from great weapon master yeah but if you have other ways to offset that such as advantage on your attack rolls or a friendly ally giving you the blessed spell that makes it even better we should also talk about pull arm master as another excellent feat mind you that this does kind of require you to take a certain weapon type which does mean that you're playing a certain type of character for example I played a character who I really really wanted him to carry a two-handed sword so the polar master didn't really work with that idea that I had unfortunately polar master makes such a big difference in the damage output because being able to weaponize your bonus action with polar master is a huge source of extra damage as well as that reaction attack when someone enters your reach comes up a lot yeah yeah and I do think that if you are playing a strength-based character and you want to output a lot of damage and make yourself a useful tool in battle I think that the Polar Master is such an incredible way to go I'm just doing just doing the raw comparison of a character that has both pull our master and great weapon master but only a strength score of 16 compared to a character that uses a great sword and has a strength of 20 pull our master and great weapon master together come out ahead if you play a variant human and take one of those feats at first level and the next one at 4th by you're hitting fifth level with your extra attack feature with massive amounts of an upswing and damage and it's just so useful and incredible speaking of classes we have three major classes that we're talking about today we're talking about the fighter the Barbarian and the Paladin as the three best melee combatants yeah and this is because all three classes are classes that offer the extra attack class feature gaining a second melee attack at fifth level and in the case of the fight or more and all three of these classes have other attributes between smite fighting styles action surge rage that boosts their ability to deliver melee attacks in some way all three of these classes have different benefits that work in different ways for damage output and basically versatility on the battlefield none of them are really better than the others but we are going to be talking about things like damage output and other uses of their skills and abilities all of them are proficient in all of the marshal weapons some of them get great armor options barbarians who don't get heavy armor still have a class ability that give them really good options for their AC to be pretty high but all three of these characters play very different roles in the party and we should talk about that so Monty you made three characters one barbarian one paladin and one fighter to crunch some numbers didn't you yeah so what I did was I made an eighth level character of each of these classes yeah all of them were variant humans and I made them all using the stock standard array so all the characters started off with sixteen strengths I then took great weapon master and pull our master as soon as I could I took pull our master as the variant human feet for all of them and then great weapon master at fourth level with all of them and then from there I boosted their strengths scores whenever they gain an ability score increase for the barbarian I chose the zealot for the fighter I chose the battle master and for the Paladin I chose the oath of vengeance and then I just compared them in terms of what they're capable of doing and what their output is if you're interested I've included PDFs of all their character sheets and links in D&D Beyond if you want to see how these characters were built you can find those in in the description below so you built all three of these characters at level 8 so the question is what's the significance to you of level 8 level 8 is when every character gains their second ability score increase so that's the first time that any character regardless of whether or not you're playing a variant human could take both great weapon master and polar master second of all it's because very few campaigns in my experience reach beyond level 11 to 12 that's often when campaigns tend to peter out because of either life or that's when the stories run its course yeah and most campaigns even the pre-written modules tend to only go to level 15 yes yep there's some rare exceptions but most of them level 15 is where you cap out so designing a character that doesn't reach their peak potential until level 14 means that you're just not playing at full capacity until you get to the final battle of the entire campaign so yeah I wanted to see characters that we're gonna come out really really strong really early and here's what we found with this in terms of raw damage the Barbarian is the king and that actually surprised me I assumed going into this that the fighter was going to take the cake for the best damage output and the Barbarian was going to take the cake for the damage absorption but this is the distinction is that this is the average damage that this character will deal round over round and the big thing that makes the Barbarian tick is rage and reckless attack a barbarian can gain advantage on every single melee attack that they make with no cost it doesn't matter what their party members are doing or anything the fact that they gain advantage like this means that they can use great weapon master with reckless abandon literally yeah and still hit reliably all the time when you combine that with the zealot barbarian gaining an extra bit of radiant damage on the first attack that lands each round you get something really impressive I chose elet instead of the berserker because I had pull our master and I don't need to get the bonus action from the berserk inge rage feature yes the zealot Barbarian just works better with the feats that we've mentioned and it's just a really strong choice not only that but if we want to talk about other great things the zealot barbarian has a really hard time dying so not only are you outputting a ton of damage you're not going down easy yeah now you could go with a bear totem barbarian here with slightly less damage but a little bit more utility and resilience so both of those work what I saw is that on average a raging barbarian with polar master great weapon master a strength score of 18 going all-out gets about 35 to 40 damage per round on average with all the chips down at level 8 yeah that is that is excellent and that's going to slay a lot of enemies in one hit and you're gonna be able to to really stand your ground and deal at some massive blows this character does about 20 damage on each attack they make which is insane but with the three attacks you're probably gonna miss at least once and that's why the average kind of falls around 35 to 40 yea the assumption being that you land two of your three hits yeah so that's the output of the Barbarian when we look at the fighter they have things like action search that can really push them further I'm guessing that that means that they're their general output is going to be less than the Barbarian but they can push if they need to at one point in a battle to excel at delivering a lot of damage so the fighter doesn't do as well as the barbarian for one reason and one reason only the fighter without advantage on their attack without their own way of gaining advantage their average damage is only about 25 points per round they gain a little bit of headway because the fighter at 8th level has now had extra ability score increases so they have a strength of 20 so that makes them a little bit more accurate but if they're not using any of their battle master maneuvers and if they're not gaining advantage on their attacks their damage output isn't going to be as high as the barbarians with the fighter if you're playing the battle master or even if you're playing the eldridge night or the champion the fact is that you need to be a little bit more tactical with your positioning and the way that you're using your abilities to get yourself to a place where you can output massive damage you need to use things like trip attacks or certain spells or things to gain that advantage whereas the Barbarian basically can have advantage whenever they want yes the fighter that gains advantage on their attacks does almost as well as the Barbarian and does definitely does as well as the Barbarian as soon as they start using action surge and battle master maneuvers the problem is is that those things are limited resources so in a long-term grind out battle the Barbarian will probably pull ahead of the fighter who wants their maneuver dice run out once they've used their action surge they don't really have the means of keeping up unless their party is helping them out so then I'm gonna ask why pick the fighter over the Barbarian if you want to dish out damage because if you have really good teammates that can help you set up that amazing action surge you're gonna spike your damage in a single round much higher than that barbarian can because if you're a fighter and you're set up to action surge and you make five attacks on one target that could slay a major enemy and so with the fighter that tactical element that teamwork element set you up for more success than the barbarian who the Barbarian can't gain advantage from their allies they already have advantage on their attacks there's nowhere to go from there the Barbarian is the person who just runs into battle not caring about the plan and just saying I'm gonna kill everything the fighters the one who's making the plan with their teammates exactly so the plan matters a lot more of the fighter then the Barbarian does what about the Paladin I mean obviously the first thing that comes to my mind when we think of the Paladin is the use of smite which in the right circumstances if you're fighting a fiend you can spike that damage to an insane amount mind you it is a limited resource just like the the fighters action surge and things like that battle master maneuvers but the ability to add that smite at the right moment in a battle I've seen them put out some ridiculous numbers some of the highest numbers I've seen at a table so the Paladin round over round if you just compare their raw potential compared to the other classes they're the lowest at an average of about 20 to 25 damage per round that makes sense but their spiky they can say like okay they are because this is not accounting for the paladin using smites swearing their oath of enmity and the other spells and other support abilities that the paladin brings not dissimilar to the fighter the paladin is able to spike very high when they gain advantage on their attacks thanks to teamwork and start dropping down little smites again the paladin runs out of gas though and once you run out of gas once you've run out of smites it really drops off I I played a vengeance paladin in one of our campaigns and really the whole dynamic of the battle was I was using standard attacks well my party would try to get into a situation where I would be able to get advantage and then once we had the main enemy tied down to a point where me as the paladin would have advantage I would just unleash all of my smites and hit it as many times as I could and I remember towards the end of the campaign rolling like almost a hundred more than a hundred damage on a single autonomous single at the YAC because we were fighting demons and I was smiting them and it was just so many dice in my hands and that I think is the joy of a paladin when they're not smiting they are extremely versatile I think they're one of the more versatile of the options we're looking at because they can also pose as somewhat of a healer they have spell casting there's a lot of options there and then they can spike that damage one need it yeah and the impact of things like the paladin's or a protection can't be understated the so having all that in one package as a character is really really valuable and I think the role-playing opportunities for paladin's are certainly appealing but they also mean that in order to have that good spell casting you now have to invest a little bit in your charisma score which already both the Barbarian the fighter and paladin all want good strength scores they all want good Constitution scores and now the paladin has a third ability score to worry about which the other two classes don't I would love to see a party that has a barbarian a fighter and a paladin in it and just see how much damage they can do against an enemy in a single combat just the fact that the fighter has things like trip attack and can easily knock people prone as a battle master would mean that the paladin could come smite yeah jumps way up yes advantage yeah and that's where your other party members as well if you have party members like a cleric or a bard they're gonna be providing spells like fairy fire or blasts that's gonna make a really big difference for the paladin and the fighter but not so much for the barbarian who's already got advantage on all their attacks yeah that was that was a big thing at the table with my barbarian it's every time everybody was happy when we got the enemies into a position for advantage and our barbarian was always like oh yeah I already have advantage it doesn't really matter to me a barbarian is very much kind of the lone wolf in combat where they're just they're just always gonna run in and it's worth mentioning as well that the barbarian gains advantage at the expense of granting advantage to everyone that attacks them now that actually has a tactical benefit to it because it's compensated by the fact that the barbarians raging so they take half damage from bludgeoning piercing and slashing attacks how often would you reckless attack if you were a barbarian probably all the time the barbarian doesn't have the armor class or the defenses of the Paladin or the fighter but the fact that they're having all that damage is it's difficult to quantify it makes them really tough it does I've seen barbarians go through hell and back in a single round of combat where it would have killed any other character yep and they still stood back up yeah and especially if you go with the ancestral Guardian instead of the zealot or the Berserker or the totem barbarian that really amps up that tankiness behind that character so I think that the bottom line of all three of these is that they're all amazing yeah they're all amazing and it depends on what you're looking to roleplay yeah barbarian is better at running headfirst into combat not worrying about strategies or plans and just swinging their weapon as hard as they can the fighter gives you a lot of more tactical options in combat and you want to look for the places to really spike your damage and the Paladin who's very versatile with it's healing and defensive abilities can still in the right circumstances push their damage far beyond some of the other numbers but in general the barbarians gonna output the most damage even though the Barbarian has the top round over around on average damage there's so much more to consider between teamwork and role-playing that makes the decision of I just want to crank my damage to the max much more complicated than that over the years this this community there have been many fantastic spreadsheets and mathematical breakdowns by users on reddit on world and many other D&D communities that break down the exact numbers behind all these different character bills and we're gonna include links to some of those in the comments and descriptions below so that you could check them out if you want to see those firsthand I do want to say that this high level of min maxing of eking out the most damage you can possibly do isn't always necessary in a real world campaign campaign I I'm I think that both Monti and myself are big fans of putting role-playing and storytelling first above min maxing but it is nice to have a character who is competent in battle and can deliver what you set out to do so we're not here to talk about maxing out and doing maximum damage round after round that is kind of what we're talking about but in a way that I think we want to focus on what are the other aspects of this character are you gonna have fun playing them yeah it gets boring when you're just like I attack I attack I attack you want to talk about how you're attacking what abilities are you gonna use how are you taking on the combat it can be really really fun to roleplay these characters out and when it comes to these archetypes especially if you're comparing the three classes and you're taking great weapon master and pull our master anyways if you don't really like the role-playing in the fantasy of the barbarian but you're choosing it because it does a little bit more damage on average it's not gonna be satisfying in the same way for you so so go with what your heart and your gut suggests and don't let the numbers get in the way of playing a character that you're gonna love I'm gonna say right now that I've seen people playing barbarians I've seen them playing fighters and I've seen people playing paladin's I've even played a paladin myself and at no point was the fundamental but I'm gonna tell you right now that the most fun I've ever had doing damage was with my paladin smiting a fiend mm-hmm at high levels I just think it's amazing so looking at just the damage output you're still gonna have fun playing any of these characters if you want heavy hitting high damage the last thing that I'll say on this though is that you can run into a little bit of a problem at your table if you're playing the Paladin that took all these feats and you're at the same table as a barbarian who didn't and that's where that person who's playing that barbarian might be feeling a little bit left in the dust because the impact of great weapon master and pull our master is huge and catapults any character that takes them over a character that doesn't and so it can sometimes cause a little bit of conflict at the table if a player hasn't kind of followed all these strategies and it's expecting to be the big damage dealer and then you show up at the table and be like no so I think that this is actually an important point about talking to the other players at the table I know that I have actually seen this at a table where a character who was meant to put out a lot of damage was putting out less damage than another character that they thought wouldn't be doing as much as them and it was a little disheartening for that character because they were there playing their barbarians saying I'm only doing like 15 damage per attack and meanwhile these other people are putting out all of this the one thing that I like to think about is I just like role playing my character and if it feels true to what I pictured them then great like I said I made a paladin with a two-handed sword because that is the image I had in my head and even though pull arm master would have bumped up my damage even further that isn't the character that I wanted to play I wanted to play the sword wielding half work barbarian yeah and it worked really well I still had a great time putting out the damage that I needed to yeah and there's so many other elements of these characters that you can enjoy beyond just dealing damage with a physical presence on the board there's so much creativity and room for improvisation in the midst of battle that can be more effective than just I attack I've seen moments where a fight was breaking out in a hallway next to a locked door and our barbarians spent his action slamming himself against the door making strength checks to burst it open so that they could escape he wasn't out there putting out the damage he was focusing on a tactical element that allowed the party to escape because he was the one who could break down that door I've also seen strength based characters holding things up or tossing things were pushing over certain objects I remember in one of our live plays Joe playing a fighter we had a a brazier that was shooting lasers at us and Joe just ran up and shoved it into the acid so that it was destroyed using his strength for a tactical advantage in that combat if you want to get inspired for like other cool things that you can do just because you had big muscles watching some of the feats of strength that are demonstrated in strongman competitions will just inspire you by what strong people can achieve in the real world and then when you take that to a fantasy level it makes those kind of amazing things like tossing giant logs or kegs of ale or holding up the walls of a castle or a portcullis that much more acceptable at the table and creative to do didn't we kick off a bar fight once with Joe grabbing a table and throwing it out of guys yes yeah I'm not gonna lie we're both a little hyped up from end games so we want to bring the Marvel Universe into this as we often do the reason why I love the Marvel Universe is even though it's not fantasy based in the medieval sort of fantasy sense they still have such clear archetypes for their characters and if you want to talk about a strong character with an 8 intelligence who still manages to be friendly and welcoming and hilarious and wonderful and contribute a lot is Thor Thor I think doesn't have the biggest intelligence but he's still part of the planning he's part of the strategy sometimes he just says I'm gonna run in there and smash it with my hammer but he's still contributing he's not an idiot on a similar take Drax the destroyer is also not a very smart person but a hilarious character that has a lot of great moments across all the films that he's in I will say though that Drax is the epitome of exactly what we said where you are playing kind of a dumb brute yeah but he does it in a very tasteful way that's so much fun to watch if you are gonna play the dumb brute look at Drax as an inspiration for that because you can add a lot of comedy and fun to the dumb bird so this has been a look at playing the muscle in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition if you have a favorite male a combatant that you've made tell us about them in the comments below if you're enjoying the show consider supporting the channel on patreon you can follow the links in the description below to learn how you can support our work and if you want to see an awesome fighter taking on some amazing enemies you can check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime which airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes on a playlist right up over here and we've got more build guides and in we've used in the classes Indian b5e wait up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 516,808

Rating: 4.9056706 out of 5

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: iLfZhu8Bx58

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2019