• The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!

D&D 5E Multiclassing: A pathological extreme

transtemporal

Explorer
I wouldn't call him dead weight.

True, thats probably a bit harsh. Its not like a novelty character built on random criteria like "only adding casses that begin with r" or "adding classes in alphabetical order".

Oh wait, lol. :)

I guess my question is, yes you could play this character, but should you? Or would it be the kind of idea you think is great and the rest of the party is too polite to tell you it sucks?

I remember when I was playing the DnD online game and I made a warforged bard/fighter/wizard. I thought it was great. Super effective. So amaze. No one contradicted me so it must be true. I grouped up with the leader of my guild and he said "Straight up dude, that is the worst build I've ever seen." He was quite right.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


No, wait, that's still wrong.
Greenflame Blade+ Shortsword+ martial arts+ Hex +Dueling Style
{1d6(Sword)+2d8(greenflame)+1d6(sneak)+1d6(hex)+2(dex)+2(dueling)}+{1d4(kick)+1d6(hex)+2(dex)}
{3.5+9+3.5+3.5+2+2}=22.5 {2.5+3.5+2}=8. Which is 30.5 average damage, and an additional 2d8+2 greenflame damage to a target that happens to stand next to your target in melee.

If you can somehow get your attack bonus up to +9, such as by using a girdle of giants str, you will be decidedly on par.

Bonus action conflicts aside (Hex + Martial Arts), you cannot use Martial Arts unless you take the Attack Action. Greenflame Blade is Cast A Spell. So, even if you get your sneak attack somehow on a Hexed target, it's only 3d6+2d8+4=23.5 damage on a hit.

To make this concrete: against an AC 15 gargoyle, you're taking 4.75 damage per turn and inflicting 15.08 damage per turn. In the 3.44 rounds it takes you to kill it, you take 16.38 HP of damage, or 23% of your total HP. You can kill approximately 4 CR 2 Gargoyles a day. If we take Shield spells into account, each Shield spell effectively adds 6.19 HP to your total (it blocks one attack worth 5.5 HP and, 50% of the time, that happens on the first hit and therefore reduces the second hit from 2.38 DPR to 1 DPR, for an average reduction of 5.5 + 1.38/2), so six first-level slots buys you approximately eight extra rounds to kill gargoyles, yielding ((6.19 * 6)/4.75)*(15.08/52) ~= 2.26 extra gargoyles. You can kill about 6.25 CR 2 Gargoyles a day. I'm ignoring Gargoyle damage resistances here for simplicity--assume you found a +0 magic weapon.

A bog-standard Champion at this level with Str 20 and Defense + Dueling Style (longsword + plate armor + shield) fighting unimaginatively (attack, attack, attack every turn) would do 27.23 damage per turn to the same gargoyle with three longsword strikes (no point in using War Magic unless the Gargoyle tries to play movement games) while taking 2.55 damage per turn in exchange. In the 1.91 rounds it takes the Champion to kill the Gargoyle, he takes 4.87 HP of damage, or 4.87% of his 100 HP total (assuming 14 Con for simplicity). He can kill 20.54 CR 2 Gargoyles a day, without ever even accounting for Second Wind or HD healing or better tactics like grapple/prone. You're about 33% as effective as a bog-standard, unoptimized Champion who's just bashing away unimaginatively with his longsword.

(In contrast, a Warcaster Heavy Armor Master Paladin 9/Warlock 2/Sorcerer 1 using good tactics can easily kill a hundred gargoyles and still finish at max HP.)

The build is really quite bad. This is partly due to MADness and lack of ASIs, but only partly.
 
Last edited:

TwoSix

"Diegetics", by L. Ron Gygax
There is a skill monkey build where you become proficent in every skill and key everything off eldritch blast. Its something like rogue1/warlock2/lore vard 3/knowledge cleric 1 and then add whatever.

You end up with expertise in 4 skills iirc.
6 actually, 2 from rogue1, 2 from bard3, and 2 from knowledge cleric1.

There's a couple variants, but Half-Elf Rogue1/Knowledge Cleric1/Warlock2/Lore Bard3 has 16 skills (2 Half-Elf, 2 Background, 4 Rogue, 2 Cleric, 2 Warlock (via Beguiling Influence invocation), and 1 from Bard multiclass, 3 from Lore bard3) and expertise in 6 of them. VHuman with Skilled feat and a level in Ranger are options as well, but this is my particular favorite.
 

Zardnaar

Legend
6 actually, 2 from rogue1, 2 from bard3, and 2 from knowledge cleric1.

There's a couple variants, but Half-Elf Rogue1/Knowledge Cleric1/Warlock2/Lore Bard3 has 16 skills (2 Half-Elf, 2 Background, 4 Rogue, 2 Cleric, 2 Warlock (via Beguiling Influence invocation), and 1 from Bard multiclass, 3 from Lore bard3) and expertise in 6 of them. VHuman with Skilled feat and a level in Ranger are options as well, but this is my particular favorite.

Yeah it is an old build going back to 2014 on the WotC forums. Also makes a half decent archer spamming eldritch blasts.
 

ccooke

Adventurer
Why not just use a component pouch?

Because that's nowhere near as amusing, and realising that it's possible to have a single physical focus for all of the magic this character could do was irresistible.

Also, remember this was in no way an attempt to make an optimised character; there are several ways to make this better, depending on the first class you pick
 

ccooke

Adventurer
Bonus action conflicts aside (Hex + Martial Arts), you cannot use Martial Arts unless you take the Attack Action. Greenflame Blade is Cast A Spell. So, even if you get your sneak attack somehow on a Hexed target, it's only 3d6+2d8+4=23.5 damage on a hit.

To make this concrete: against an AC 15 gargoyle, you're taking 4.75 damage per turn and inflicting 15.08 damage per turn. In the 3.44 rounds it takes you to kill it, you take 16.38 HP of damage, or 23% of your total HP. You can kill approximately 4 CR 2 Gargoyles a day. If we take Shield spells into account, each Shield spell effectively adds 6.19 HP to your total (it blocks one attack worth 5.5 HP and, 50% of the time, that happens on the first hit and therefore reduces the second hit from 2.38 DPR to 1 DPR, for an average reduction of 5.5 + 1.38/2), so six first-level slots buys you approximately eight extra rounds to kill gargoyles, yielding ((6.19 * 6)/4.75)*(15.08/52) ~= 2.26 extra gargoyles. You can kill about 6.25 CR 2 Gargoyles a day. I'm ignoring Gargoyle damage resistances here for simplicity--assume you found a +0 magic weapon.

A bog-standard Champion at this level with Str 20 and Defense + Dueling Style (longsword + plate armor + shield) fighting unimaginatively (attack, attack, attack every turn) would do 27.23 damage per turn to the same gargoyle with three longsword strikes (no point in using War Magic unless the Gargoyle tries to play movement games) while taking 2.55 damage per turn in exchange. In the 1.91 rounds it takes the Champion to kill the Gargoyle, he takes 4.87 HP of damage, or 4.87% of his 100 HP total (assuming 14 Con for simplicity). He can kill 20.54 CR 2 Gargoyles a day, without ever even accounting for Second Wind or HD healing or better tactics like grapple/prone. You're about 33% as effective as a bog-standard, unoptimized Champion who's just bashing away unimaginatively with his longsword.

(In contrast, a Warcaster Heavy Armor Master Paladin 9/Warlock 2/Sorcerer 1 using good tactics can easily kill a hundred gargoyles and still finish at max HP.)

The build is really quite bad. This is partly due to MADness and lack of ASIs, but only partly.

I'm in two minds about contradicting you, because honestly, this build wasn't intended to be optimised - there's a clue in the thread title, even - but... I think your calculations have some issues.

Before I continue - let's agree that the pathological example is a terribly optimised character. It would be utterly trivial to optimise at least a little - different first class, different subclass options, but there's certainly going to be a limit. It's not, actually, ever going to be a great build. When I built the example at the start, I was going for fun choices that made for something interesting to test out the multiclass rules as I understood them at the time. I'm still tempted to play such a character, but I would not play this one. For a start, heavy armour is entirely resonable for this character, since they have several routes to qualifying for it (Cleric subclass is, of course, probably the easiest) and they could easily take the Defense style and concentrate on cantrip damage most of the time. However, that's not the example as I created it, so let's ignore that and take the AC as I created it - 17. I will change the spell selections slightly (After all, people have been using Hex as an example)

A CR2 Gargoyle makes two +4 attacks which each do an average of 5 damage. Against an AC of 17, they can be expected to hit 7/20ths of the time and get a crit for 10 damage once in 20. That averages out to 2.25 damage per attack against AC 17 - so, the actual damage per round is 4.5. With 71 hit points, that means 15.333 rounds of damage taken. However, that doesn't account for Shield, of course. While first level slots are available - assuming no short rests, that's five times - shield will reduce hits from 8/20 to 3/20. It's generally better to only use Shield when the first expected attack hits, so we say there are five rounds in which damage drops to 2/20 non-crit and 1/20 crit, or 1hp. That means we have 19.666 rounds of damage. But... we haven't accounted for any of the 2nd or 3rd level spell slots. let's start with Armour of Agathys cast at 3rd level, which provides an additional 15hp and does 15 cold damage per attack to enemies that hit every round it's up (without concentration, too). We'll be sensible and not cast shield while the temp hitpoints are up, so with three castings that provides us with 29.666 rounds of combat, and 12 spikes (on average, 15h will last four hits) of 15 damage each from the AoA. This isn't a complex tactical optimisation, and assumes no maneuvering (just like the Champion build). Then there are the 2nd level slots. Let's see, what's the simplest, least optimised choice for those... Let's go for False Life. An extra 33hp (average 11 * 3) brings us to 37 rounds of combat. Of course, six of those rounds involve spellcasting, so 31 rounds of doing damage, 12 of which will have a +15 bonus to damage.

Damage-wise, you had 23.5 damage, which is actually a little high I think. Assuming greenflame blade and no Hex cast, you're looking at 1d8(rapier)+2(dex)+2d8(greenflame blade)+1d6(sneak). Accounting for the Gargoyle's resistance, that's 16.5 average. Given I've assumed Shield for the 1st level slots, I'll actually take the lower figure of 19 on average. Against an AC of 15, that's 12.35 damage per turn (accounting for crits). Including the 12 instances of 15hp damage from AoA, that's a total of 562.850 damage over 31 turns, or enough to kill 10.82 gargoyles in a day.

The Champion probably has something like 85hp (assuming +2 CON), and takes 2.5 damage per round (4 hits ever 20 attacks, 3 non-crit, 1 crit, for 1.25 damage per attack). That's 34.8 rounds of combat. Let's be minimally sensible and allow the use of second wind and action surge, once each, for 37.8 rounds of combat.

The Champion in this example does not have a magical +0 weapon; having such an item is an overwhelming advantage to the Champion, because almost all of their damage is standard physical. Assuming STR 20, the Champion does 11.5 damage per attack, which is halved to 5.75. That's a theoretical 17.25 damage per round against this target, and they will hit 75% of the time. Accounting for crits on 19 and 20, that accounts for 14.663 damage per round. Over 37.8 rounds, that's 554.243 damage, or enough to kill 10.65 gargoyles in a day.

Which makes this overcomplicated, convoluted character just slightly better than a Champion using no clever tactics or creativity, if and only if Pathological is happy to spend all their daily resources to do it. That sounds about right, really - you could play the Champion a lot better than this example, and you can optimise Pathological somewhat more and use better tactics, but my point stands - when you compare them fairly, even this pathological idiot of a build is not utterly without merit. Well, unless you really don't like overcomplicated messes, of course!

If you want to bring magic items into the comparison, by the way, you need to use ones that benefit the different characters equally - and remember, 5e is not balanced around magic weapons. I think stripping them out of this comparison is the best way to see the native power. Even a +0 sword will naturally benefit a more martial character far more than a character who relies on magic and - with this much multiclassing - Pathological will always rely on spells.

(edited slightly to make my point clearer; it could be read initially that I actually believed this build could be optimised into something good...)
 

I don't think "Champion with no magical weapons against a creature which is vulnerable primarily to magic" makes a good baseline comparison for "utterly without merit". (That's why I excluded weapon resistance from the analysis originally.) You're saying that this character is just slightly better than an unimaginative Champion fighting nothing but normal-weapon-damage-resistant creatures, if he is happy to spend his daily resources to do it. That makes the analysis pretty niche, so niche that I'd say you're comparing vs. a fantasy PC who never really gets played in real life. It would be more reasonable (but more complicated) to assume a mix of gargoyles, allosaurs, giant crocodiles, etc., with maybe 1/3 of them having weapon resistance.

I simply don't believe there are any DMs here who would ever run a solo campaign for a Champion featuring nothing but weapon-resistant enemies (demons, etc.) and yet the Champion still wouldn't have any kind of a magic weapon by 12th level. That scenario doesn't pass the sniff test.

BTW the difference in our computed damage outputs is due to the fact that I included Dueling style and Hex, and you excluded them and included damage resistance. I understand why you excluded Hex (you'd rather have the Shields) but I don't understand why you excluded Dueling style, since you paid for it.

Edit: BTW, you really shouldn't include sneak attack damage in a solo scenario.

I implemented a Monte Carlo sim of Pathological vs the Gargoyles, and he typically kills about 5-6 gargoyles on average before dying using the strategy you outlined. (Shield only on first hit, when no temp HP.) Here's a link: https://repl.it/EnF3/0 Just hit the Run button to see ten combats. Pathological has a +0 magic weapon here. I'm giving him the sneak attack damage here even though I really shouldn't.

The unoptimized Champion's Monte Carlo sim is here: https://repl.it/EnFq/1. Tends to average about 7-8 kills, or 14 with a +0 magic weapon.
 
Last edited:

ccooke

Adventurer
I don't think "Champion with no magical weapons against a creature which is vulnerable primarily to magic" makes a good baseline comparison for "utterly without merit". (That's why I excluded weapon resistance from the analysis originally.) You're saying that this character is just slightly better than an unimaginative Champion fighting nothing but normal-weapon-damage-resistant creatures, if he is happy to spend his daily resources to do it. That makes the analysis pretty niche, so niche that I'd say you're comparing vs. a fantasy PC who never really gets played in real life. It would be more reasonable (but more complicated) to assume a mix of gargoyles, allosaurs, giant crocodiles, etc., with maybe 1/3 of them having weapon resistance.

I simply don't believe there are any DMs here who would ever run a solo campaign for a Champion featuring nothing but weapon-resistant enemies (demons, etc.) and yet the Champion still wouldn't have any kind of a magic weapon by 12th level. That scenario doesn't pass the sniff test.

BTW the difference in computed our damage outputs is due to the fact that I included Dueling style and Hex, and you excluded them and included damage resistance. I understand why you excluded Hex (you'd rather have the Shields) but I don't understand why you excluded Dueling style, since you paid for it.

Edit: BTW, you really shouldn't include sneak attack damage in a solo scenario.

I implemented a Monte Carlo sim of Pathological vs the Gargoyles, and he typically kills about 5-6 gargoyles on average before dying using the strategy you outlined. (Shield only on first hit, when no temp HP.) Here's a link: https://repl.it/EnF3/0 Just hit the Run button to see ten combats. Pathological has a +0 magic weapon here. I'm giving him the sneak attack damage here even though I really shouldn't.

The unoptimized Champion's Monte Carlo sim is here: https://repl.it/EnFq/1. Tends to average about 7-8 kills, or 14 with a +0 magic weapon.

I would argue that 5e is supposed to be balanced without magical items - if you're asking a question of balance, you should be cutting them out. That's well into matters of taste, though - I don't agree with you, but it's not as if I think you're wrong. The mythical +0 magic items that make no difference otherwise to damage output, though, are a little contrived for me - or have I missed them? I don't recall ever seeing such a thing. A +1 magic item would be more reasonable, and would change all the maths a lot for both - of course, the Champion would still come out better. I've never disputed that. As to the scenario, it was your choice, not mine.

I didn't pay for Duelling style - it wasn't in the original build. It certainly could be, of course, and would be better than the archery style I picked for the example, but I was limiting myself to the base Pathological example.

Anyway, I'm going to happily leave this here - we could get into a long argument about the fine detail, but the key point is that you think it's unplayably bad, while I think it's just about playable if optimised - as I said, I was very much in two minds about replying to you at all, I just wasn't quite happy with your numbers.

I will leave you with one little thought - never mind the sneak attack damage, the Pathological strategy has been using Greenflame Blade all the way. Slight problem there, since that necessarily does damage to a second target as well as the target of the melee attack - that'll be Pathological, in our stream of single Gargoyles. So, by that plan Pathological would do 2d8 damage to themselves every time they hit. It would at that point be a better strategy to use some combination of Firebolt, Hex and Expeditious retreat to stay out of combat whenever possible, which is... iffy. :)
 

I would argue that 5e is supposed to be balanced without magical items - if you're asking a question of balance, you should be cutting them out.

But you shouldn't simultaneously be running your scenario with nothing but gargoyles in it, because you know that will skew your results and make magical builds look more attractive than they really are. It's fine for a solo campaign to feature a Champion without a magic weapon (Conan), but it should have a mix of Giant Crocodiles and Cave Bears and Drow Warriors and Minotaurs in it as well as Fire Elementals and Gargoyles. If you're creating a simplistic scenario for an illustrative analysis, you either neglect weapon resistance by assuming a +0 weapon (as I did) or you pick a non-weapon-resistant creature as your testbed, because both scenarios are believable.

That's well into matters of taste, though - I don't agree with you, but it's not as if I think you're wrong. The mythical +0 magic items that make no difference otherwise to damage output, though, are a little contrived for me - or have I missed them? I don't recall ever seeing such a thing. A +1 magic item would be more reasonable, and would change all the maths a lot for both - of course, the Champion would still come out better. I've never disputed that. As to the scenario, it was your choice, not mine.

I chose a different scenario--gargoyles with a +0 magic weapon. You chose gargoyles with a non-magical weapon.

I'm AFB but there are a number of +0 magical weapons in the game, from the Bladelock's pact weapon to the DMG's Sword of Lifestealing, and of course anything homebrewed (e.g. the Summer Sword, a sword which can be planted in the ground and grows food after an hour). I'm sure I've seen others in the DMG, I just can't find mine at the moment.

And remember that Pathological with a magic weapon and sneak attack damage still wound up only 60% as effective as Champion Without A Magic Weapon (your scenario), and 35% as effective as Champion With A Magic Weapon (my original scenario), as shown by Monte Carlo sim with public source code, even using the behavior you yourself specified (Armor of Agathys, False Life, Shield only on first hit). The original BOTE calculation was surprisingly close to the more detailed simulation result.

Edit: although on further consideration, to be fair to Pathological, he should always be Raging when he is fighting under Armor of Agathys. And though it's not clear what type of Warlock he is, if he were a Fiendlock that would help eke out his HP even more, possibly to the point where he'd approach being 50% as effective as Bog-standard Unimaginative Champion, and perhaps 30% as effective as Bog-standard Tactically-Innovative Champion.

Here's a Grapple/Prone Champion (bog-standard build but more innovative tactics) who shield bashes the gargoyle once it's prone: https://repl.it/EnVv/4 He tends to do around 30% better than Champion With A Magic Weapon (about 21-22 gargoyles before dying--most of the damage he takes happens in the first round before he gets a chance to grapple/prone the gargoyle) despite not actually having a magic weapon.

I didn't pay for Duelling style - it wasn't in the original build. It certainly could be, of course, and would be better than the archery style I picked for the example, but I was limiting myself to the base Pathological example.

Huh. Must have been the other guy I was responding to directly who picked it, then. I know I was specifically addressing a build that factored in Dueling style on both the regular attack and the Martial Arts attack (which doesn't exist, as I pointed out). I haven't been keeping close track of who said what.

Anyway, I'm going to happily leave this here - we could get into a long argument about the fine detail, but the key point is that you think it's unplayably bad, while I think it's just about playable if optimised - as I said, I was very much in two minds about replying to you at all, I just wasn't quite happy with your numbers.

I don't think it's unplayably bad. I just think it's quite bad, less than 50% as useful as a normal PC. Sometimes playing mechanically-bad PCs can be fun because it means you have to do more in-play to make up for the bad mechanics. I think it is possible to build worse PCs, but it's quite hard to make a PC that's a complete waste of space--as in, it's hard for me to make a PC that I wouldn't have fun playing under any conditions. (It requires a multitude of not just bad class choices but also bad spell, feat and equipment choices.)

I will leave you with one little thought - never mind the sneak attack damage, the Pathological strategy has been using Greenflame Blade all the way. Slight problem there, since that necessarily does damage to a second target as well as the target of the melee attack - that'll be Pathological, in our stream of single Gargoyles. So, by that plan Pathological would do 2d8 damage to themselves every time they hit. It would at that point be a better strategy to use some combination of Firebolt, Hex and Expeditious retreat to stay out of combat whenever possible, which is... iffy. :)

I don't buy that interpretation of Greenflame Blade, and it doesn't matter because in that case you could just switch to using Booming Blade (ugh, horrible name--I prefer False Fetters) without changing any of the math.
 
Last edited:

Remove ads

Top