Polearm Master - Feats in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

the palarm is perhaps the most ancient tool and weapon used by humans spears hal birds and pikes have been prized by hunters guardians and soldiers for their balance of offense and defense and today we're gonna talk about the ultimate polearm Master in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition [Music] greetings adventurers my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes on today's episode we are taking an in-depth look at the pull our master feet in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition we're gonna give you a quick breakdown on how the feet works but then we're gonna dive into discussing the different classes spells and other abilities as well as additional feats that really complement the polearm Master feet and drive it up to produce one of the most impressive melee damage dealers as well as frontline fighters in the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition game we're also gonna look at some roleplay options so that you can really get behind why you might choose this feat with that let's dive in and get right so monkey let's talk about the polar Master feet and all of its awesome uses yes so the polar master is a feat that you can take for any Dungeons and Dragons character in place of taking an ability score increase when you level up or you can nab it as a very human right away at first level and it's it's very useful obviously it's designed around the idea of if your character is using a pull arm weapon this will help complement that fighting style now the feet is very specific here's how it works when you are wielding a glaive a halberd or a quarter staff and take the attack action on your turn you can then use your bonus action to make an additional attack with the other end of the weapon this attack uses your same attack modifiers and deals one be 4 plus regular modifiers bludgeoning damage on a hit when you're wielding a quarter staff Pike halberd or glaive creatures provoke an opportunity attack from you when they enter your reach so right off the bat the pull our master feet locks you into using a pretty small selection of weapons but in return for that you now get another way to use your bonus action and your reaction to make more attacks on your on the combat round and this is really key because the use of a polearm you well in all cases gives you a reach yeah almost all the pull arm weapons that requires other than the quarter staff all give you additional reach of up to ten feet so when you're using the puller master feed if a creature is ten feet away from you 15 feet away from you and walks in as soon as they cross that 10-foot barrier you get to slam them with your halberd or glaive if you're reeling a quarter staff unfortunately you don't have the reach to do that incidentally almost all of these are two-handed martial weapons with the exception of the quarter staff yeah so that's kind of the the give-and-take there is the the two-handed ones will give you that reach yeah single-handed one does not yeah but you can use a quarter staff in two hands as well awesome for extra damage yeah and then on top of that I mean we have we have the benefit of being able to to hit them when they enter your reach and not only that but then on your turn you can make additional attacks exactly and I think that extra bonus action attack is really what everyone is here for with the pull our master feet and just because polearms in general are a great weapon to wield even if they're not iconic as swords are I think that throughout human history though the spear and the pole axe type weapon had been far more prolific in human conflict in general yeah they're great weapons for monster hunter's two wheels yeah yeah because you think about how humans have used Spears to take down big animals like I think of that scene from 300 where Leonidas is fighting the lion or the the tiger and a vicious animal that's gonna tear you to pieces are you gonna pick up a little sword or you're gonna pick up a weapon that keeps them at bay yeah and that's and I think in a fantasy world I think you actually see a lot more adventures using polearms because you really want to get that close to a dragon you really want to get that close to a giant do you really want to get that close to a mine player no never never yeah what you want something that keeps keeps here enemies away from you it's a it's a really good tactic and I mean yeah we've seen it through all of history and a lot of people in when they look at fantasy they think well I got to use a sword because Torian shields the coolest but yeah this is actually a much more tactical use and it just makes sense that I mean we've seen really really cool characters I use poems yeah like you just think of all the Spartans or the Greek hoplites that used those weapons in formations but also the factory like there's a big reason why you know Spears were often used by town guards right because you could corner somebody with them you could restrict where they could move and the polearm Master feet really brings that to life in the game it really makes you feel like you have this reach and this control over the battlefield in a way that the other weapons really don't one really cool thing is I think a lot of people see that the the bonus attack that you get is only d4 and they say oh well that's not too much but the fact that you're adding that on top of your other attacks I know that you played a variant human yep and took pull our master right away absolutely and at first and second level like nothing it's a lot of extra damage it really adds up because you're adding your strength modifier to the damage rules and this is where when we actually look at our next topic is like what do we combine this with to get more out of it right and the first thing is well is there a little way that we can get a little bit more damage on this third attack or even on that reaction attack and the truth of the matter is there's a lot of ways and it really doesn't matter what class you are if you're a good melee damage dealing chances you've got different options let's talk about some of those yeah I think the first one for all classes that anyone's gonna gravitate towards too right away is great weapon master defeat and yeah that so that's another feat that pairs very well with pull our masters so if you're taking pull our master early you might want to look at other feats that you can take to complement that great weapon master is one of the best ones yeah the reason being is a great weapon master adds that whopping +10 damage bonus at the to a damage roll as long as you take the - penalty but the two feets kind of complement each other in a really nice way because because you're now making a third attack with your bonus action it compensates for the fact that you're making less accurate attacks yeah so and you say third attack after level five when most of these yes in general unless you're a variant human you won't be able to have great weapon master and pull our master together before level eight yeah right I actually let fighters can have it as soon as level six and at that point you're gonna have the extra attack class feature and I think in general with both of these feats you're probably gonna want to take them on a class that gets extra attack to begin with so you can get those two first hits and then the third hit in or if you're a fighter get those additional and great weapon master just means that with with the bonus of being able to attack more times you have a higher chance of hitting that +10 damage yep exactly and it just adds up like you look at a fifth level fighter that took both right away or a fifth level paladin or barbarian it's three attacks right at like anywhere from thirty or more damage on a single turn there's actually you know you look at the monsters in that range you got a pretty good chance of one shot one rounding a creature with that kind of damage right can we talk about my other my favorite Sentinel oh yeah okay this is this is one of my favorite combinations in all of D&D Sentinel if you read the description and and read it alongside pull our master the to basically stack on top of each other to make you the craziest bottleneck fighter in the whole game if you position yourself in an area where the enemies need to try to get past you to fight anybody else you you're going to slaughter a roomful of enemies so let's talk about why this is so the first benefit of the Sentinel feat is that any enemy that's hit by your opportunity to attack has their speed reduced to zero now remember that because you are using a pull arm and you automatically get an opportunity attack on creatures that enter range yes and pull our master is very specific it says you get to make an opportunity attack against someone that enters your reach and sentinel also says someone that's hit by your opportunity attack as their speed reduced to zero so what this means is that if an enemy approaches you as soon as they enter your reach you get to attack them if it hits they their speed is now zero which means they stop moving which means if they don't also have reach they now can't get to you and then you combine that with the fact that you also pull a lot of attention to yourself if you are gonna be the tank ya party because with sentinel if they attack somebody other than you that's within 5 feet you get to make an opportunity attack on them now bear in mind with that element of sentinel if the enemy is v is within your 10-foot reach but not within 5 feet of you that won't trigger sentinel to go off yeah but then if they try to get away from you by disengaging you still get to attack them and if they just don't disengage or just try to run away and you attack and hit well they stop and now they're stuck so this can create a really big no-win situation especially if you're a battle master fighter with the riposte maneuver because now you've got a situation where if an enemy approaches you you can use your act your your reaction to attack them if they attack you you can use repost to attack them if they attack your ally beside you you can use sentinel to attack them and and then if they approach you or try to get away from you you also get to attack them so this means that like pretty much every situation that they could do if they want to fight you results I'm getting attack results and then getting attack and then you top that on with 3 attacks on your turn now because yeah well our master and you're just attacking everything all the time yeah it really is a fantastic way to get that advantage in the action economy of being able to leverage your bonus action and your reaction in a really interesting way and it really makes your character feel like you are the protector the controller of this battlefield right so it creates everything from like this um kind of like the Zen master wielding the spear in like that flowing fashion to the like I am the Spartan and this is where I stand my ground yeah both two really awesome images that you can use when role-playing and describing how your character fights right of course there's a few other cool ways that we can sneak in some more damage on top of all this and the first thing is any way that you can get advantage yeah advantage is just going to help you out especially combined with a lot of the things that we mentioned before what are some ways that we can gain advantage well if you're a battle master fighter you've got the trip battle master maneuver yeah so you can just apply that on your first attack and now everything else has advantage and it just piles it on for your trip with the first attack and then everything everything's just gonna have a better chance of hitting I combined that with polar mastering great weapon master yep yeah that's you know what the other cool thing though is is that if you're a battle master fighter and you have that maneuver if you're not using it on your riposte attack but you can apply the trip to your opportunity attacks so someone can come into your reach their speeds reduce to zero and you trip them so now you haven't even needed to use that on your turn you've already got the advantage set up and if you use that and you set up other players this way exactly it's a great way to be a team player too right if you're a paladin that's the oath of vengeance you might be able to just swear your vanity and now you've got advantage on everything if you're a barbarian you're just gonna reckless attack there's also the the warlock has some cool abilities that can really help up here so the Warlock especially the hex blade is a really interesting take on this my favorite one it makes you a little bit less of a team player than the others is take the devil sight invocation and the darkness spell and cast darkness on yourself and now you're just a blob of black death because they can't see you so yeah it's great that the only thing that competes against is like if you're a ranger or a warlock you might want to use hex because you're gonna get or hunters mark yeah because you're gonna get all these extra attacks thrown in and all of them will benefit from that extra d6 points of damage right if you've got any other way of gaining additional damage on your attacks whether it's your magic weapon or anything this is just all gonna take and get taken into overdrive right it's a fantastic combination it's really I think the the next point that I want to do with it's like how should we approach this as a DM if we've got a player that wants to use this combination you would probably want to give a few of your creatures weapons that have reach yeah so that you're not just getting slaughtered by the polar master and in particular longer reach than them Yeah right this is a combination that doesn't it especially if they're going to Sentinel unless they're a fighter it's this won't come online until relatively high level play I think the soonest you can get pull our master great weapon master and Sentinel would be a 6th level human fighter that use all of their ability score increases on feats instead which is actually really good but even by then you've got monsters like Giants ochres and flying creatures with arranged attacks that you can use and I will say that ranged attacks are the ultimate bane of this character yeah they're they're meant for one thing in one thing yeah if you're building them this way and that's standing in the forefront against melee combat yeah but if you have a bunch of ranged attacks spells being thrown at them things like that they're not really built for that exactly you know they can still probably take a lot of hits from the ranged weapons but even the spell casting is going to get around a lot of this too it's not going to help them if they're hit by a fireball and in particular if the Sentinel pull our master is trying to clump up around their allies to protect them from the melee attacks it means that they're really vulnerable getting fired yeah and ultimately like the other big thing with all this is like that character is going to deal a lot of damage and you as a DM just have to be prepared for that right and if you look at like what the baseline is like that action surging polearm Master Sentinel fighter could drop easily fifty to seventy-five points of damage and so if you've got a boss fight coming up and your boss only has 50 hit points you might want to rethink that one yeah right I think that's the best way to deal with it is DM it is a lot of damage and I think that it can be frustrating for a DM to have to deal with this character that has such an amazing suite of abilities because it makes them super good at fighting in melee combat right but if all of your encounters are all built around a straight-up combat fight like here we're gonna line up all our enemies right now and we're just gonna go toe-to-toe that's kind of what the Polar Master wants to be good at Yeah right like you you might want to present them with that opportunity a few do so let them feel you really really feel salutely should you should let them go to town and have the fight like it's awesome it feels great as a player when you get to use your build and I think that as a DM yes this is on the highest end of the power curve in the game in terms of melee damage output but if you have a player that really wants to use it give them the opportunities to go crazy with it have that first encounter where they get to just blow it away and then build up the encounter where they have to think a little bit more tactically about their abilities well when I when I started looking at these these options I started imagining a lot of times when I think of my fighter I think of the sword and shield fight yeah yeah but I started to imagine like dönitz hello from Ninja Turtles or the red viper from Game of Thrones you know the other one that I kind of imagined was I imagined a high wisdom score path of the zealot barbarian who's sworn to Odin okay because Odin was known for wheeling a spear there's a bunch of really cool deities that wielded Spears because the again the spear was such a cool symbol of humanity especially early on so if you look at early mythology there's a lot of famous polearms most of them are spirits so you kind of have to use your imagination if you want to adapt it perfectly to the feet yackin spear is not what are the options for pole art which is weird trying to personally think it's weird that it's not there and and is Adm would be willing to work with the player to to give that image especially if they want to do like the Odin thing or even like um the spear was often the symbol of Mars or Aries the traditional god of war right so you could totally have that oath of vengeance palette in that is sworn to Ares that here you go spear in hand right mm-hmm and you could even do that whole Spartan thing of like having that adaptability of maybe your character carries a bunch of Spears and javelins and has a shield and that's how they deal with the ranged attack thing is that they've also are great at throwing javelins right yeah right I also love like just in terms of like the the spear as a tool pole-vaulting I love this idea of like an athletic character that like pole vaults over the chasm or uses it to catch themselves as they're falling like a spear is just such a cool tool that's actually one thing and you just gave me even more ideas but my character who uses a spear I like to describe the pole vault and the using the form well in my case a spear but pull arm to kind of launch myself at the attacks or do yeah things like that it's absolutely super cool like especially for a character that's proficient in athletics you can really kind of use that it's great with the images like fighting a dragon or a larger creature because again like humans have used Spears and pull arms to fight creatures that are larger than ourselves and so there's a bunch of real-world precedents for like how you fight or the the classic image of shoving the spear in the dragon's mouth as it's closing around you to prop it open so it can't bite down on you right perfect perfect ideas right yeah yeah so this has been our guide to the pull our master feat in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition we hope that you feel inspired to slay some monsters with your new pull arm yeah and we're gonna be taking a look at more feats in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and we would love to know from you what you'd like to see us take a look at next tell us about it down in the comments below now one of the classes we talked about most in this episode was the fighter and we have an entire guide to that right over here and of course we did touch on a few of the sub classes from Zanna thorns guide to everything so you can check out our reviews of those right 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: 310,438

Rating: 4.9219837 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, feat, feats, sentinel, great weapon master, melee, damage dealer, tank, polearm, master, pole arm, glaive, halberd, pike, quarter staff, martial weapon, polearm master

Id: e7Ukhg0WVTw

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2018