The stone wall: a pure tank build (AC 27+)

[Gavin O.]

Premise of the build: Achieve the highest possible AC, and a large amount of hit points, and some form of mark to discourage the enemy from attacking your allies, in order to effectively mitigate the monsters' damage, while not completely sacrificing our own offensive potential and while being playable at all levels.

Race: Hill Dwarf: The best race for this build would be Stensia Human from Plane Shift Innistrad, but since that's not legal in sanctioned play, here's the next best choice. Con and Wis bonuses, no speed penalty in heavy armor allows us to dump Strength, and extra HP per level. The biggest downside is we're starting with a lower attacking stat.

Starting Stats: 8 Str, 15 Dex, 15+2 Con, 8 Int, 15+1 Wis, 8 Cha
Stensian Human Starting Stats: 15+1 Str, 13 Dex, 13+1 Con, 8 Int, 14 Wis, 9 Cha

Starting Class: Fighter
Fighting Style: Defense
Our starting AC, with Chainmail, a Shield, and Defense Style, is 19, and our starting hit points is 14. A CR ¼ creature like a Skeleton has a to-hit bonus of +4 and deals about 5 damage per hit, which means it would take it over 17 rounds of attacking to bring us down.

Levels 2-6: Up to Fighter(6)
Our first ASI is spend on +1 Dex/+1 Con, bringing our hit bonus up to +3 and giving us 5 extra HP and a better Con save. Our second is spend on the feat Sentinel in order to punish foes who attack our allies instead of us, we're also taking the Cavalier subclass for that purpose.
Assuming we’ve not found any magic items up to this point, but we have upgraded our armor to Splint, our AC is now 20, and we’ve got 69 HP.

Level 7: Cleric(1) The forge cleric domain allows us to fortify our armor for +1 AC, as long as the armor isn’t magical, and also gives us access to the spell Shield of Faith, which has a bonus action cast time, lasts 10 minutes, and grants +2 AC. With our maxed out Con and Con save proficiency, we’ll easily be able to maintain concentration.

Levels 8-10: Monk(3) We’re taking three levels of Monk for the Path of the Kensei feature Agile Parry (We’ll take Longsword and Longbow as our Kensei Weapons), which gives us +2 AC as long as we include an Unarmed Strike in our attacks. This also gives us a bonus action unarmed Strike every round to help with our damage.
Levels 11-15: Cleric(6) We’re going up to 6 levels in Forge Cleric for Soul of the Forge, which gives us +1 to AC in addition to free fire resistance. We get one ASI which we use to take our Dex to 20.
Levels 16-20: Fighter(11) Finally, we finish up with our Fighter levels to get another Extra Attack.

AC without magic items: 18 (Plate) +2 (Shield) +2(Agile Parry) +2 (Shield of Faith spell) +1 (Defense Style) + 1 (Soul of the Forge) +1 (Blessing of the Forge) = 27 AC (achievable at level 10, or 14 if you rush for Extra Attack)
AC with +3 magic shield and +3 magic armor: 32
Hit points at level 20: 285


Tell me what you think. Am I missing some obvious way to increase my AC? Is a build like this viable?

 

[Ark the Pie King]

I feel like a 2 level dip into Warlock would be solid. Hexblade Patron gets you the shield spell, so 2 times/short rest if they somehow break 27AC you can bump it to 32.

 

[Gavin O.]

I feel like a 2 level dip into Warlock would be solid. Hexblade Patron gets you the shield spell, so 2 times/short rest if they somehow break 27AC you can bump it to 32.

I like that, especially since if you go up to 3 levels you could also take Darkness+Devil's Sight to give creatures disadvantage to hit you.

 

[ccs]

For non-AL, have you considered making it a Warforged? There's one WF sub-race(?) that grants +1AC

 

[ccs]

I like that, especially since if you go up to 3 levels you could also take Darkness+Devil's Sight to give creatures disadvantage to hit you.

Wouldn't your darkness also hinder your teammates? It's all fine & good to make yourself nigh invulnerable, but if your doing so begins to negatively effect the other players (or forces them to consider warlock dips for their own devil site)....

 

[Blue]

I like how it all comes together. That's pretty impressive survivability.

With a DM who does 6-8 encounters a day, it will be a while before you get enough slots to cast Shield of Faith regularly enough to include it in you "all day" AC - but you'll still have it for whenever things get tough.

You do not get a monk bonus action attack when wearing armor or a shield (in the PHB, second paragraph of "Martial Arts"). Also, even if you did the +2 bonus for Kensei only comes in when you use an attack from your Attack action unarmed which lowers your damage. Taken together, Monk might not give you as much as you expect.

You have a great AC, but I'm concerned you're neglecting your saves.

Also, do you have any way to prevent foes from ignoring you and going after easier targets? Proper positioning with Sentinel can stop one per round, but there seems to be little incentive for others to attack you in preference to the easier targets in your party.

Something like Barbarian (Ancestral Guardian) is good for that, but negates all the heavy-armor-only bonuses, enough so that it's an entirely different build.

 

[Gavin O.]

I like how it all comes together. That's pretty impressive survivability.

With a DM who does 6-8 encounters a day, it will be a while before you get enough slots to cast Shield of Faith regularly enough to include it in you "all day" AC - but you'll still have it for whenever things get tough.

You do not get a monk bonus action attack when wearing armor or a shield (in the PHB, second paragraph of "Martial Arts"). Also, even if you did the +2 bonus for Kensei only comes in when you use an attack from your Attack action unarmed which lowers your damage. Taken together, Monk might not give you as much as you expect.

You have a great AC, but I'm concerned you're neglecting your saves.

Also, do you have any way to prevent foes from ignoring you and going after easier targets? Proper positioning with Sentinel can stop one per round, but there seems to be little incentive for others to attack you in preference to the easier targets in your party.

Something like Barbarian (Ancestral Guardian) is good for that, but negates all the heavy-armor-only bonuses, enough so that it's an entirely different build.

Thank you

Once we're level 3 cleric, we have 4 level 1 spell slots and 2 level 2 spell slots, so if there's 6 encounters per day we can already use shield of faith for all of them. Plus since it lasts 10 minutes we might be able to carry it between encounters.

Oh, I forgot that Martial Arts doesn't work with a shield. I'd like to drop the Monk levels, but I'm not sure what I could replace them with.

As for our Saving Throws, we have +11 to Con, +5 to Dex, and +3 to Wis. I'd like to be able to work in Resilient(Dex or Wis), but this build is already strapped for ASI. If we drop the monk levels, we could probably work it in though.

The Cavalier Fighter has great abilities for convincing enemies to go after us. Unwavering mark imposes disadvantage to monsters to hit a creature other than us, and the fact that we don't have the strength to make the retaliation attack is covered by Sentinel, which also gives us a free attack when someone hits a creature other than us. We also get Warding Manuever (which we have enough Con to use five times) which allows us to give an ally +1d8 AC and resistance to the damage of the attack, if an attacker chooses to hit them.

 

[Blue]

The Cavalier Fighter has great abilities for convincing enemies to go after us. Unwavering mark imposes disadvantage to monsters to hit a creature other than us, and the fact that we don't have the strength to make the retaliation attack is covered by Sentinel, which also gives us a free attack when someone hits a creature other than us. We also get Warding Manuever (which we have enough Con to use five times) which allows us to give an ally +1d8 AC and resistance to the damage of the attack, if an attacker chooses to hit them.

My mistake, I missed the utility of Cavalier in marking. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out.

As for our Saving Throws, we have +11 to Con, +5 to Dex, and +3 to Wis. I'd like to be able to work in Resilient(Dex or Wis), but this build is already strapped for ASI. If we drop the monk levels, we could probably work it in though.

Three more levels of fighter will give two ASIs and another use of Indomitable. While not huge, that could be Resilient (Wis) and something. At first I was thinking Shield Master, but that Dex boost only adds if it's single target, and the other features compete for your bonus action and reaction. Anyway, Dex saves are most likely against straight damage, and you've got great HPs baked in.

Alternate uses for those levels could be more cleric for casting, or even a level of rogue - primarily for the skill and for expertise. Expertise I would recommend Acrobatics for one of them, which combined with the high DEX will get the character out of grabs.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Stensia human is nothing different from variant human with fixed asi and the tough feat and intimidate skill.

 

[Gavin O.]

Three more levels of fighter will give two ASIs and another use of Indomitable. While not huge, that could be Resilient (Wis) and something. At first I was thinking Shield Master, but that Dex boost only adds if it's single target, and the other features compete for your bonus action and reaction. Anyway, Dex saves are most likely against straight damage, and you've got great HPs baked in.

Alternate uses for those levels could be more cleric for casting, or even a level of rogue - primarily for the skill and for expertise. Expertise I would recommend Acrobatics for one of them, which combined with the high DEX will get the character out of grabs.

We could techincally get even higher AC by multiclassing bladesinger, but needed to max our Int is a significant cost.

I think the best use of the last three levels might be going up to Cleric(9), since Forge Clerics get the extremely powerful Animate Objects as a domain spell at 5th level. We also get one more ASI to spend on Resilient(Wis)