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Half (High) Elf Swashbuckler
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<blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7986325" data-attributes="member: 7006"><p>I understand what you're saying and agree to a certain extent... obviously being able to do certain things certainly makes the combat mini-game more fun. If there's a part of your concept you can't do mechanically as well as other players with a straight build, then doing a feature swap or multiclassing to get that mechanic is understandable. The main one I think of when talking about this is always the Two-Weapon Fighting Style for PCs other than Fighters and Rangers. If you have a flavorful reason for dual-wielding as non-Fighter or Ranger-- like for instance you're a cleric and your deity's weapons are dual-wielded-- working to get the fighting style so you can add the modifier to the off-hand is fine. I wouldn't argue with that at all, and in fact would say doing so is helping your PC's flavor. </p><p></p><p>But when people comment about all the ways how the PC could get better mechanically without ever explaining why it would help them thematically, that's why I made my comment. In your case in particular for instance of the level of Hexblade... I can't help but wonder how the character's essence of being a high elf swashbuckler becomes better by switching over to half-elf and using CHA rather than DEX for combat? Obviously switching High to Half is <em>purely</em> mechanical... you're doing it for the bonus to CHA... and now you also have a Hexblade's Curse for additional damage, higher crit range and healing yourself when you kill someone? Even if you try and reskin it away from some sort of magic... how do any of that (attacking with CHA, healing after killing someone, not to mention now actually having spellcasting) make the character <em>more</em> of a swashbuckler? I dunno... in my opinion it doesn't enhance the rogue swashbuckler flavor concept at all. So to me... yes, it just seems to be a bid for mechanical enhancement only.</p><p></p><p>But if you or [USER=6801328]@Elfcrusher[/USER] disagree with that "hot take" (as I pointed it out as being in my very first sentence) feel free to build your characters however you want. It doesn't matter to me. But I'm also not going to stop pointing it out. I figure if six people can post obvious min-maxing recommendations in half-a-dozen posts... the thread can handle a single person who says "You don't have to min-max at all, you know. The game can work fine as it is." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="DEFCON 1, post: 7986325, member: 7006"] I understand what you're saying and agree to a certain extent... obviously being able to do certain things certainly makes the combat mini-game more fun. If there's a part of your concept you can't do mechanically as well as other players with a straight build, then doing a feature swap or multiclassing to get that mechanic is understandable. The main one I think of when talking about this is always the Two-Weapon Fighting Style for PCs other than Fighters and Rangers. If you have a flavorful reason for dual-wielding as non-Fighter or Ranger-- like for instance you're a cleric and your deity's weapons are dual-wielded-- working to get the fighting style so you can add the modifier to the off-hand is fine. I wouldn't argue with that at all, and in fact would say doing so is helping your PC's flavor. But when people comment about all the ways how the PC could get better mechanically without ever explaining why it would help them thematically, that's why I made my comment. In your case in particular for instance of the level of Hexblade... I can't help but wonder how the character's essence of being a high elf swashbuckler becomes better by switching over to half-elf and using CHA rather than DEX for combat? Obviously switching High to Half is [I]purely[/I] mechanical... you're doing it for the bonus to CHA... and now you also have a Hexblade's Curse for additional damage, higher crit range and healing yourself when you kill someone? Even if you try and reskin it away from some sort of magic... how do any of that (attacking with CHA, healing after killing someone, not to mention now actually having spellcasting) make the character [I]more[/I] of a swashbuckler? I dunno... in my opinion it doesn't enhance the rogue swashbuckler flavor concept at all. So to me... yes, it just seems to be a bid for mechanical enhancement only. But if you or [USER=6801328]@Elfcrusher[/USER] disagree with that "hot take" (as I pointed it out as being in my very first sentence) feel free to build your characters however you want. It doesn't matter to me. But I'm also not going to stop pointing it out. I figure if six people can post obvious min-maxing recommendations in half-a-dozen posts... the thread can handle a single person who says "You don't have to min-max at all, you know. The game can work fine as it is." :) [/QUOTE]
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