Ok, now that I've had a chance to go through the whole guide, let me start by saying, OMG, seriously GREAT work
@aadu !! Let me list some of the things I love about this guide:
- I love the fundamental premise that you're not trying to prove who's superior but endeavoring to establish that if an EK has a valid place in the frontlines dealing melee dps then a bladesinger does too. This is quite simply brilliant and exactly what is needed IMHO, for the people who say they shouldn't be there.
- I love that you're approaching it from the angle of a pure class melee gish, and not insisting that the choices are either a) to multi-class to be an effective, survivable melee, or b) to stay purely a back-line spellslinger with defensive perks.
- This is exactly the sort of character build I want to play, so it gets even more bonus points for that from me
Some questions/comments/observations:
Accuracy calculation
In your DPR calculations, you use a base accuracy of 55%. Not that this really matters b/c as near as I can tell it will just scale everyone's accuracy equal so the effect on overall DPR calculations will be the same across the board. But, purely for curiosity sake, I wondered why you decided to use that figure ?
Near as I can tell, using the table from the DMG p274 and assuming the party are fighting monsters of CR equal to their level, the base hit chance without magic items will normally be 65% (assuming as you do attack stat of 18 at L4 and 20 at L8). Also based on an analysis I saw somewhere that AC of monsters seemed to follow a trend of approx 12 + CR/2.5 with a std deviation of only about 2 AC, that would tend to imply that using 55% means the party is usually fighting monsters of approx 5 CR higher than their party level.
This seems quite high, although as I say, I don't think it really effects anything since it will apply to all characters equally, but I was just curious.
Action Surge DPR
In your DPR spreadsheet, you used an approximate value for Action Surge as 10% based on 2 combats of about 5 rounds each for a total of 10 combat rounds per short rest.
In my game combats only tend to go about 3 rounds. So out of interest, I edited a copy of the spreadsheet to show the effect of variance in that figure.
It was very interesting to me to see that if I made the # rnds / SR = 6 (% boost = 16.7%), the overall DPR graphs for EK & bladesinger tracked more closely across the level range.
If you are interested, I'd happily DM you my version if you wanted to take a look.
Defense Calculation
In your "cheat sheet" of overall which was better at each level (which is a fantastic way of doing it I think), the Defense ends up looking like EK for L1-3, Tie for L4-9 and BS from 10+. And yet the main quantitative measure used throughout the guide is HP, which the EK has clear dominance for L1-3 (same as Defense win),
I know BS gets Song of Defense at L10, and my gut sense is that you're right and at teen levels and up the BS will probably win Defense but I can't help but feeling it all gets a bit hand-wavy and qualitative compared to the rigour you've put into the quantitative DPR calculations. It might be too hard to do, but gee I'd love it if there was some way of being able to have a more rigourous, quantitative way to work out the defense too. I also wonder if it's entirely fair to consider the BS to have bladesong up for all encounters, esp at lower levels, some days 2-3 uses might be plenty but some days it won't at all. This is the single biggest concern I have post-Tasha's changes.
I originally thought of an Effective Health calculation, but given that their AC's are so similar through the range, it wouldn't end up being much different to the raw HP values. I wonder if there's a way of being able to make assumptions on the frequency of use of things like Song of Defense, Indomitable, etc, the same way you've done with Action Surge, BA attacks etc, and come out with a Time To Live or something ? I know it would be highly variable with things like # hits, size of hits, to hit modifiers etc but could we make assumptions about that the same way we've made with PC accuracy ?
My rationale here is that with the TCoE changes to Extra Attack, not too many EK's would dispute that it gives higher DPS than their own War Magic feature, so awarding BS the higher Offense isn't likely to be as contended. But EK being a heavy armour fighter, there's likely to be more contention that a pure wizard in light armour or no armour at all and 30% less hit points should be awarded the higher Defense. It's also the main driving point supporting the conjecture that Bladesingers shouldn't be in the front lines, it's not that they can't put out the dmg, it's that they're too squishy. So, if there's anything we can do to have more numerical support, it might go a very long way indeed. I'd be happy to help if you wanted ?
Race
I love that you've gone with High Elf / Eladrin. I love it so much. Not because I don't like min/maxing (I do btw), and not because I'm a purist that thinks that non-elves shouldn't be bladesingers (I'm not), but simply because I agree that the question of whether bladesingers should be able to be in melee combat or not shouldn't rely on some niche build, but should be demonstrated by a "normal" build (whatever that means). Great spot in the DMG variant of Eladrin for the Misty Step too.
As an aside, I also love that you've made a slightly unconventional choice of 16 Con. I would never have considered that if I hadn't seen it in your guide, but this is a great idea. I admit, it's a tradeoff with only having 14 Int, and potentially a significant one too, but if we're building a pure wizard to be able to survive in melee combat with barbarians, fighters, paladins, etc then it should totally be on the table. Kudos there !
You have a slight typo in the second sentence of this section btw, the starting array has 10 Wis & 10 Cha instead of 12 & 8 that you describe in your point-buy first sentence.
Build Comparison
You probably want to keep the same build on the EK throughout the whole process, but it's interesting that at L1 the main difference is that the EK is using a shield and hence has 2 higher AC, and the BS has higher DPS due to using an offhand weapon. If the EK wasn't using a shield for that 1st level, they'd be pretty much the same in both.
Btw, the way you've done the build section with a level by level breakdown including thoughts on why you chose different things and notes on how to use them in combat is absolutely top-tier, you should be extremely proud of doing this, it sets the bar pretty high for other guides ! Thank you
One thing the writeup doesn't seem entirely clear on, is even after you take Spirit Shroud, when you actually use it over Shadowblade. I can see in your DPS Spreadsheet in the Bladesinger Main Cycle tab, you list the progression and alternatives with DPS (this is gold btw, thank you for this as well!!), but comparing that to the Notes on Choices & Notes on Combat section from the build guide, it's hard to tell which one you're recommending as they seem a bit contradictory to each other.
Another thing that I found a little unclear is that you seem to have an option in there for a variant build which uses the TCoE rule to swap the +1 from Int to Con, and then takes slightly different Feats/ASI's as it levels. But it's a bit hard to track which is where, maybe it could be clarified a bit or a bit easier to find all the bits ? Perhaps in the very end section on Feats/ASI's options you could show an alternative build summary for this version ?
I find I very much agree with pretty much all of your spell choices too, there's very little in there I disagree with at all. I also really love that you've included some options in there for things like Animate Objects and Tensor's Transformation but haven't based the build or the calculations on them. To me, those are great "sometimes" options but a bit cheesy to base everything on.
Also, at L20 you advocate swapping to L7 spell slots for Spirit Shroud, although you previously said you would only do that when you could reliably cast them 3 times per day, usually when you get 2 of those slots from the wizard level progression and a 3rd from Arcane Recovery. But Arcane recovery says none of the slots regained can be higher than 6th level, and a 20th level wizard only gets 2 x 7th level spell slots, so strictly speaking using this rule you wouldn't use L7 slots for Spirit Shroud. Of course you could just use your 8th level slot for it, but that seems a bit of a waste ....
Ok, I think that's it. Once again, thank you doing such awesome work on this guide, I absolutely love it !
