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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nephilm X" data-source="post: 7553291" data-attributes="member: 6983866">Inspiring Leader is OK but HP is an inefficient line of defense unless you've got resistance. If you've got say a Barbarian and the DM is giving you plentiful short rests it's not a bad pick to increase your dungeoncrawling mode sustain, but you'd rather see it on a Sorcerer or Bard than on the MAD as hell Paladin.Heavy Armor Master only factors in when you actually take damage, and even then the true impact comes down to how many times you took damage during a fight, as it's generally trivial to patch yourself up between encounters. It kicks ass when 3 bps is like 25 to 10% of your HP applied per instance, but once you're past level 4 you should be really be thinking about how many times per fight it's actually applying. Absolutely worthwhile if you have an odd STR score you need evening out, but that's only going to happen with rolling, and from an optimization perspective PAM does far more for you at early levels.You're a little confused about War Caster: the feat lets you cast spells as a reaction in situations where the enemy would already provoke an opportunity attack, so you pair it with Booming Blade so you can cast that in lieu of making a normal attack.You can replace one of your Attack action attacks with a Shove attempt, so if what you're looking is crit-fishing then PAM is identical in function since you get a shove plus two attacks on top. Shield Master is nice for different reasons (namely, reaction evasion to avoid chip damage), not as an offensive tool.5e has a narrow window for optimization - there aren't really that many picks that make a difference - but the ceiling is high. For example, take two level 5 Paladins: one is a VHuman who started with 16 STR, took Polearm Master and Resilient(CON). The other is a Tiefling who took HAM at 4 to round up his CON to 16, and wants to be the tank so grabbed Protection Fighting Style.Do you want to know how much more damage the optimized human does? +108% on a typical fight. Literally two tieflings worth of DPR contribution, and if you put them together in a party and they played at equivalent skill levels, it'd be easy to tell who is the greatest asset to the team - because being a little individually tougher does not help the group overcome challenges as much as being twice as good at inflicting The Best CC.I agree with the sentiment of playing what you want, and there are many ways to contribute to the cooperative challenge-solving game that is D&D besides damage numbers, but to say individual character-building choices within a class don't make much of a difference is being disingenuous.</blockquote>

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