Critical Role Echo Knight is Wildemount's Most Popular Subclass

D&D Beyond shared some stats about the things people are using from Explorers Guide to Wildemount. These are stats from 28 million characters.

 

[Mistwell]

I always go back to the Mystic Theurge when these Hexblade/Echo Knight/Cleric of Order broke the game arguments.

I always go back to the 3.0e monk, when 3e first came out. People looked at how they got something every single level, and thought that meant they were easily the most powerful class. Took about 6 months for that to die down on this message board.

 

[Kurotowa]

I always go back to the Mystic Theurge when these Hexblade/Echo Knight/Cleric of Order broke the game arguments. Mystic Theurge was a 3E option offered that blew people's minds. It gave you access to wizard AND cleric spells. Your spellcasting fell a few levels behind a pure spellcaster, but while they were casting 7th level wizard spells, you had access to both 6th level wizard AND 6th level cleric spells.

I came in later to 3E so my experience with that sort of thing was the original Warlock. Them having the first at-will magical attack just blew some people's minds. People on the forums did up charts of its "potential damage" if you used it every round for a continuous eight hours, as if that was a realistic use case. Then, as you say, people using them in actual play and it turned out to be nothing particularly special.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That actually all sounds awesome. Though you might be letting the echo do more than intended in the text.

Yes, I think I would be much stricter in what I allowed the echo to do, irrespective of RAW. If the echo is supposed to be an alternative universe version of you, it seems unlikely that there exists a universe in which you are hovering 15' in the air.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think it's entirely reasonable. I cannot count the times that I've seen someone claim that such-and-such (in D&D, WH40K, or other games) is over/underpowered when in my experience in game it wasn't (and vice-versa with claims that something is not over/underpowered).

There are too many variables in actual gameplay that drawing conclusions from simply reading it or considering "white room" scenarios is inherently flawed. Also, the scientific method requires testing.

White room is the scientific approach, or the closest you're going to get to it, in D&D. I needs to be used intelligently, i.e. not assuming you can long-rest after every encounter or the like, but it's the best tool we have.

Actual play is subject to no controls whatsoever, and tends to produce results that are meaningless unless they highlight very specific issues (which will almost always have come up prominently in white room examinations), because too much else is in play, not least player skill, DM skill, DM kindness-nastiness, whether the DM is keen to "shut down" a certain ability, how the DM builds his encounters, what the rest of the group is playing, the environment of the adventure, whether the DM is running 1 encounter/day or 15 encounters/day, and so on. Actual play definitely has some value, but claiming you should totally ignore white room analysis and act like a class/race/etc. is fine until it shows it isn't in your game is obviously silly. Yet that is literally what is being proposed by some people.

(Also, as an aside, I really feel like if we found all the people who claimed white-room stuff was pointless or whatever, then compared that to a list of people who preemptively banned stuff because it was OP or broken, we'd find it had many of the same people on it. Not practical, sadly.)

WH40K vs D&D shows a steep difference, too, here, which kind of ruins your point. WH40K is an adversarial skirmish game where you both have specific rules you're supposed to be sticking to and are both trying to "win", rather than to essentially "tell a story together", as all D&D is. Actual play is therefore massively more reliable in that case. It's still subject to player skill, which is a huge variable, and army comp, which is another huge variable, and a dumbass with a bad comp, or a dumbass who runs into a counter-comp may manage to make the most profoundly broken (not just OP, broken) army look bad. But that's rarer, because there are a lot fewer variables and people are "playing to win", not role-playing or encouraging a story being told.

I've been playing skirmish games and RPGs for 32 years now. So I can compare two things:

1) The number of times something looked bad in a reasonable white-room analysis (i.e. not one assuming a long rest after every encounter or the like), and yet played absolutely fine because of some unexpected factor.

and

2) The number of times something looked pretty bad in a reasonable white-room analysis, and then played out somewhere between close to as bad, or much worse.

And 2 is vastly more common than 1, in my experience. People who are mechanically-inclined aren't idiots about this sort of thing. So long as the white room analysis is reasonable, the worst case scenario is that it points out potential problems. Negative bias applies to both scenarios so claiming that doesn't work here.

I do have some sympathy for people who are distrustful of white-room stuff though, because the key word here is "reasonable". A lot of white room analysis isn't reasonable. It makes assumptions that are either not true, not intended, or are based on an extremely specific combination of factors, without being clear on it. And some white-room analysis is simply bad faith stuff designed to make something look bad even when they know it isn't (thankfully rare here, because we're so damn old, I suspect, that we just don't care enough to do that!). So like I am sympathetic to not wanting to trust white-room stuff, but equally, my experience is that when it is done in a reasonable way, it is usually correct in at least highlighting that there is an issue/problem.

If your position is just "take the white room stuff on board, but see how it actually works for your group", then I think that's fine and not silly. But ignoring it entirely, even where it's reasonable? Silly.

(As discussed, Echo Knight merely seems powerful to me, rather than broken or anything. It's not going to be any more of an issue than a well-played Wizard - probably less. That's one thing D&D 5E has to reckon with - some of the most "overpowered" classes and races are the base classes and races.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Whatever use white room analysis has for evaluating a class in the combat pillar, it is not use whatsoever in the exploration an social pillars. And the issues raised here are with the Echo Knight's exploration pillar performance, not it's combat performance.

 

[Shardstone]

When you guys were describing how the Echo Knight got around these traps and what not, I just thought it sounded cool tbh. What's the point of features if you can't use them creatively to get around stuff? That's the whole point of features...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Whatever use white room analysis has for evaluating a class in the combat pillar, it is not use whatsoever in the exploration an social pillars. And the issues raised here are with the Echo Knight's exploration pillar performance, not it's combat performance.

I actually largely agree with this. I was responding to the frequent suggestion that white room stuff is broadly useless. It is less useful in exploration/social pillar stuff, because that is so variable.

That said, a lot of actual tabletop experience of those pillars is equally subjective/inapplicable. I play with three different DMs, and their styles (and mine) are all different. One guy makes you roll checks to the point where you feel like you're going insane, and thus something like Reliable Talent or the Eloquence Bard's deal with never rolling less than a 10 on Persuasion/Deception would be insanely amazing in his campaign. Whereas another one of them goes strongly on RP and description and rarely ever makes you check unless it's pretty dubious and you're relying on the character to do it, and those abilities wouldn't come up a great deal.

 

[jgsugden]

Whatever use white room analysis has for evaluating a class in the combat pillar, it is not use whatsoever in the exploration an social pillars. And the issues raised here are with the Echo Knight's exploration pillar performance, not it's combat performance.

This was addressed extensively. And, as noted, it is a whiteboard problem, not an actual gameplay problem.

Teleporting past a locked gate - rather than picking a lock or breaking the gate down - cool, not game breaking.
Teleporting across a 15 foot wide gap - rather than leaping over it - cool, not game breaking.
Teleporting up a 15' cliff - rather than climbing it - cool, not game breaking.
Teleporting past a trap - rather than walking around it, disarming it, or otherwise evading it - cool, not game breaking.

That is not to say that there are not places where the Echo Knight can do something that the DM may not have intended to be possible. You get it at 3rd level - when misty step is available - and most of what you can do with the Echo Knight in the exploration tier is pretty much something that can be done with Misty Step. And as those things will be few and far between, the ability to do them over and over is nearly meaningless.

In my party that has the Echo Knight, only the Echo Knight can use these techniques to bypass challenges. The rest of the group has to find other solutions. The dwarf druid with mold earth filled chasms, built mounds to walk up, bypassed locked areas and traps, etc... for the entire party. The dungeon setting had to be right for that, but it was one of those situations where that cantrip was uber useful.

Here are the most powerful uses of the ability I saw:

• Drawing fire. There were several situations in which the image drew a spell, a big attack or other single use or recharge ability away from other targets.
• Avoiding attacking through cover. The image was able to position itself in a way to avoid attacking through cover, even though it was exposed to danger, while the fighter stayed in a covered position that had full visibility.
• The extra attacks, obviously. Both the Unleash Incarnation and the extra OAs. The fighter has a 16 con, so there were a lot of extra attacks there, a lot like a war priest, especially at low levels.
• Scouting after 7th level was obtained. With no ability to hide, this announced the presence of the party wherever it went. Still useful in some situations, although it caused more trouble than it prevented at first.

However:

• The amount of time this subclass requires your bonus action is painful. The fighter went down a few times because he made the choice to use the bonus action on the echo rather than second wind.
• We've mentioned the circumstances in which damage auras make the echo knight abilities useless.
• There were a lot of combats where the echo knight's subclass did absolutely nothing beneficial for the party. The extra attack was not available or otherwise unusued, and the fighter could have attacked just as easily. It didn't even lock down OAs better. It might as well not have been there.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This was addressed extensively. And, as noted, it is a whiteboard problem, not an actual gameplay problem.

Teleporting past a locked gate - rather than picking a lock or breaking the gate down - cool, not game breaking.
Teleporting across a 15 foot wide gap - rather than leaping over it - cool, not game breaking.
Teleporting up a 15' cliff - rather than climbing it - cool, not game breaking.
Teleporting past a trap - rather than walking around it, disarming it, or otherwise evading it - cool, not game breaking.

Whether or not it's game breaking depends entirely on the game, which is why it is impossible to actually whiteroom. How big an obstacle a locked gate is intended to be depends entirely on the adventure design - it may well be designed to be too difficult to pick and too heavy to lift.

That is not to say that there are not places where the Echo Knight can do something that the DM may not have intended to be possible. You get it at 3rd level - when misty step is available - and most of what you can do with the Echo Knight in the exploration tier is pretty much something that can be done with Misty Step.

Misty Step costs a 2nd level spell slot. Using it to overcome obstacles comes at a cost - a very significant one at 3rd level. The issue isn't that the echo knight can bypass obstacles - it's that they can do it for zero cost.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I always go back to the 3.0e monk, when 3e first came out. People looked at how they got something every single level, and thought that meant they were easily the most powerful class. Took about 6 months for that to die down on this message board.

Reminds me of discussions of the Hexblade Warlock, tbh. It “gets more” than other subclasses, but...it doesn’t make a more powerful character than what is available in the phb. It just reads as powerful because it has more bullet points than other warlocks.