FormerlyHemlock
Hero
[From a PM discussion, which might or might not be of interest to a broader audience. Lightly edited]
Q: I saw in your post the 3 types of wizards you play. One of which is rogue2/bladesingerX.
I have a question to this: I believe you take two Levels of rogue, because you want cunning action from THW Rouge at level 2. Do you prefer this over a pure bladesinger build (bladesingerX) with the feat mobile? If yes, may I ask why?
A: Yes, I prefer it over a pure bladesinger for two reasons: Expertise and Cunning Action. Until Volo's came out, a Rogue 2 dip was the only way aside from a Haste spell to be able to act on your turn and also Hide--and hiding is very powerful defensively (unless your DM rules differently) because monsters have to target you blindly. A Rogue 2/Bladesinger X has a number of powerful defensive options that can protect him when he's scouting ahead. E.g. he can always Invisible + Hide in the same round; or drop a Fog Cloud + Cunning Action and then start fighting back.
[Edit: remember that a round in which the monsters can't hit you back is a round of free offense for you. Because of the way 5E is constructed, it is much, much easier to land several attacks unopposed in a row via strong defense rather than by stacking Action Surge + Quickened Spells. You can't get three Action Surges at a time on every PC in a party, but you can build a PC or even a party which is untargetable by monsters 75% of the time or more, and they amount to the same thing.]
There's nothing at all wrong with a Mobile feat, and the last Rogue 2/Bladesinger 10 I played (in a theorycrafted practice game where I played both sides, 4 PCs against 4 Chasmes) did in fact have both the Skulker and Mobile feats, though I think next time I would opt for Mobile and Moderately Armored because Skulker is covered well enough by Invisibility. If you have Mobile and Rogue 2 you can do neat stuff like cast False Fetters (nee Booming Blade) on an enemy, retreat back into the darkness or around a corner, and Hide. If you weren't Mobile you'd have to spend your bonus action on Disengage instead.
So that's it for Cunning Action. The reason I like Expertise is for Stealth Expertise and Athletics Expertise. Athletics Expertise synergizes well with the Bladesinger's Extra Attack. That Extra Attack isn't very significant offensively because of melee cantrips, but it does allow you to grapple an enemy and prone it in the same round. Add in an Enlarge spell (because hey, you're a wizard) and now you can easily have +9 and advantage on your Strength checks and you can grapple/prone anything that isn't gargantuan.
The extra d6 sneak attack bonus damage is all right when it happens but isn't something I care much about. The extra skills are sometimes convenient though.
In your own game, the key question I'd ask yourself would be: "How does the DM run stealth, and how would the rest of the party react to having Fog Clouds/etc. cast around them? How does the DM run heavy obscurement? Will the Fog Clouds give the rest of the party advantage (per RAW) or disadvantage or nothing?" Also, "How much scouting ahead alone am I likely to do?" A party which relies on the Roguesinger to do scouting (so they can prepare their tactics in advance) will benefit much more from Stealth Expertise/Cunning Action than one which just uses the Roguesinger as another combatant.
Also be sure you read this thread to see the potential awesomeness of Cunning Action: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Hide-as-a-bonus-action-and-i-cant-target-him
P.S. BTW, it probably goes without saying, but grapple + prone of an enemy means you get advantage on all your attacks against it (so you get that d6 sneak attack) and it has disadvantage on all of its attacks against you. For a high-AC Bladesinger that means it basically can't hit you at all.
Also, I misremembered the Rogue 2/Wizard X game I played recently. It was actually a Rogue 2/Illusionist X, hence had only AC 15 (plus Shield), hence why I would have taken Moderately Armored in a redo. A Bladesinger obvioiusly wouldn't benefit much from Moderately Armored because it interferes with Bladesong.
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Q: Hey Max, you also referred to cleric life 1/illusionist X and Fighter 1/ NecromancerX build. May I ask about your thoughts on this?
A: The Cleric 1/Illusionist X and Fighter 1/Necromancer X builds kind of illustrate why I'm a little bit leery of the whole concept of guides. What I mean is that a good guide, instead of making choices for you, should lay out some principles and some options and then let you make your own decisions. To illustrate:
Life Cleric 1/Illusionist X makes a good tank in combat because of the combination of heavy armor + shield from Life Cleric and defensive spells from Wizard. Cleric has some good defensive spells too like Sanctuary and Shield of Faith--Shield of Faith requires concentration so cannot be used at the same time as e.g. Greater Invisibility, but Sanctuary is fairly unique in that it is a bonus action defensive spell which doesn't require concentration. Let's say you're tanking away invisibly under the effect of Greater Invisibility. Every turn, you run up to an enemy, attack him with False Fetters (my rename/refluff of "Booming Blade", since Booming Blade is a dumb name with dumb fluff--False Fetters binds the enemy in shackles of cloudy air which burst explosively when stretched too far), and then move away, provoking no opportunity attack because you're invisible. Then you've still got your bonus action open, so if you want some extra protection you can then cast Sanctuary on yourself too. Now an enemy who tries to kill you has to make a Wisdom saving throw to even target you in the first place (and hopefully you're positioned so he can't just change his mind and hit someone else instead, e.g. you're 25' away from your nearest buddy) AND he has to hit your AC 20 at disadvantage AND if he wants to actually damage you he also has to beat your Shield spell (AC 25). You'll lose Sanctuary next turn when you attack again but oh well, it's just a first level spell slot.
In practice of course Sanctuary turns out to be overkill in that scenario, and you probably wouldn't even bother stacking it on top of Greater Invisibility. But if you were e.g. maintaining an Evard's Black Tentacles on one group of enemies to give your allies advantage, then it's nice to have the option to stack Sanctuary on yourself (while either Dodging or attacking with cantrips or non-concentration spells like Blindness/Deafness) without breaking concentration or costing your action.
So the important part of that combo is just the Cleric 1/Wizard X part. I picked illusionist because I find illusionists fun, since they get to use Malleable Illusion to do things like turn the whole party into shapeshifting X-Men (Mystique) spies via Seeming. (That is, you get to change the appearance of anybody or everybody in the party at will, for free all day long.) But Cleric 1/any other kind of wizard X works just as well. The main downside is that you have to invest at least a 13 in Wisdom in order to make the multiclassing come out, on top of the probably-15 you want to put in Str to wear heavy armor. (You can get away with less than that in Str and just use Longstrider to increase your movement speed when you need to, but IMO it's more fun to have at least 30' movement built in so you never have to worry about being slower than most monsters.)
One more thing about Cleric 1: eventually when you get Contingency, an excellent choice of contingencies is "Cure Wounds V whenever I drop to 0 HP." It's almost as good as a semi-permanent Death Ward. Yes, you'll lose concentration on whatever you were concentrating on, but it still means that an Ancient Red Dragon who breathes fire on you for 91 HP of damage won't put you down and making death saves--you'll pop right back up and be at 20-30 HP immediately.
Note that you can take your Life Cleric 1 level either immediately at first level or later on (e.g. at level 8 after you already have Fireball/Polymorph/etc.). Either way you get the same heavy armor benefit.
There are other valid choices for Cleric 1 which also give you heavy armor proficiency, e.g. Nature or War or Forge from the cleric Unearthed Arcana. I like Life because (1) having Bless and Cure Wounds as domain spells is kind of nice, since you almost always want to have those as options; (2) I don't allow Unearthed Arcana at the table nor expect other DMs to allow it. Otherwise Forge would be an arguably even better pick than Life Cleric, since I don't have that much use for Disciple of Life on a wizard tank. (It's okay, but Cure Wounds with Disciple of Life is still worse than Aura of Vitality from a real healer.)
Fighter 1 is similar to Life Cleric 1, with a few key differences: (1) you get proficiency in Constitution saving throws instead of Wisdom saving throws, which helps with concentration and poison/stunning but makes you more vulnerable to mind-affecting spells (fear, confusion). In general I think that tradeoff is worth it (failed Con saves scare me worse than failed Wisdom saves, since the penalties are often worse, and since it's nice to be able to risk melee hits without much chance of losing your concentration); (2) you lose a few spell slots compared to a cleric; (3) You get access to martial weapons (nets are fun) and Second Wind for a few extra HP once per short rest; and (4) you don't need a Wisdom 13 in order to do it. Especially if you roll a low stat array or are using point buy, it's nice to be able to just rely on Str 13 Int 13+ instead of Str 13 Int 13+ Wis 13. It might actually let you afford a decent Con, or higher Str, or even to play the concept at all instead of being stuck without. But remember that strictly speaking you can play a Life Cleric 1/Wizard X with only Str 5 Dex 8 Int 15 Wis 13, although in that case I'd definitely recommend the Mobile feat to offset your slow movement.
Anyway, the fun of Fighter 1/Necromancer X is that an AC 21 "Necrotank" (AC 26 when Shielding) is extremely tough in battle, and he gets to leech HP off his enemies with Vampiric Touch and regain an extra 9 HP every time he kills one with it. (Grim Harvest is the 2nd level Necromancer feature and it grants you extra HP under a number of conditions, e.g. every time you make a kill with Vampiric Touch, or multiple times per round if you make a lot of kills with Evard's Black Tentacles or Wall of Fire.) In fact, you don't have to just kill enemies. If you want, you can pick up a bunch of cheap chickens for 2 cp per chicken according to the PHB and carry them around with you, then when you need to heal yourself you just cast Vampiric Touch III and drain ten chickens to death to regain 90 HP from Grim Harvest (or 150 HP if you cast Vampiric Touch V). It turns out that there are more efficient ways to restore HP in 5E, but it's still a lot of self-healing for a tank. Plus your DM will enjoy watching you cart around all those chickens from level 1 in anticipation of the day, some day, when you learn Vampiric Touch and start draining them to death.
That's all I've got to say for now. Happy gaming!
Q: I saw in your post the 3 types of wizards you play. One of which is rogue2/bladesingerX.
I have a question to this: I believe you take two Levels of rogue, because you want cunning action from THW Rouge at level 2. Do you prefer this over a pure bladesinger build (bladesingerX) with the feat mobile? If yes, may I ask why?
A: Yes, I prefer it over a pure bladesinger for two reasons: Expertise and Cunning Action. Until Volo's came out, a Rogue 2 dip was the only way aside from a Haste spell to be able to act on your turn and also Hide--and hiding is very powerful defensively (unless your DM rules differently) because monsters have to target you blindly. A Rogue 2/Bladesinger X has a number of powerful defensive options that can protect him when he's scouting ahead. E.g. he can always Invisible + Hide in the same round; or drop a Fog Cloud + Cunning Action and then start fighting back.
[Edit: remember that a round in which the monsters can't hit you back is a round of free offense for you. Because of the way 5E is constructed, it is much, much easier to land several attacks unopposed in a row via strong defense rather than by stacking Action Surge + Quickened Spells. You can't get three Action Surges at a time on every PC in a party, but you can build a PC or even a party which is untargetable by monsters 75% of the time or more, and they amount to the same thing.]
There's nothing at all wrong with a Mobile feat, and the last Rogue 2/Bladesinger 10 I played (in a theorycrafted practice game where I played both sides, 4 PCs against 4 Chasmes) did in fact have both the Skulker and Mobile feats, though I think next time I would opt for Mobile and Moderately Armored because Skulker is covered well enough by Invisibility. If you have Mobile and Rogue 2 you can do neat stuff like cast False Fetters (nee Booming Blade) on an enemy, retreat back into the darkness or around a corner, and Hide. If you weren't Mobile you'd have to spend your bonus action on Disengage instead.
So that's it for Cunning Action. The reason I like Expertise is for Stealth Expertise and Athletics Expertise. Athletics Expertise synergizes well with the Bladesinger's Extra Attack. That Extra Attack isn't very significant offensively because of melee cantrips, but it does allow you to grapple an enemy and prone it in the same round. Add in an Enlarge spell (because hey, you're a wizard) and now you can easily have +9 and advantage on your Strength checks and you can grapple/prone anything that isn't gargantuan.
The extra d6 sneak attack bonus damage is all right when it happens but isn't something I care much about. The extra skills are sometimes convenient though.
In your own game, the key question I'd ask yourself would be: "How does the DM run stealth, and how would the rest of the party react to having Fog Clouds/etc. cast around them? How does the DM run heavy obscurement? Will the Fog Clouds give the rest of the party advantage (per RAW) or disadvantage or nothing?" Also, "How much scouting ahead alone am I likely to do?" A party which relies on the Roguesinger to do scouting (so they can prepare their tactics in advance) will benefit much more from Stealth Expertise/Cunning Action than one which just uses the Roguesinger as another combatant.
Also be sure you read this thread to see the potential awesomeness of Cunning Action: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Hide-as-a-bonus-action-and-i-cant-target-him
P.S. BTW, it probably goes without saying, but grapple + prone of an enemy means you get advantage on all your attacks against it (so you get that d6 sneak attack) and it has disadvantage on all of its attacks against you. For a high-AC Bladesinger that means it basically can't hit you at all.
Also, I misremembered the Rogue 2/Wizard X game I played recently. It was actually a Rogue 2/Illusionist X, hence had only AC 15 (plus Shield), hence why I would have taken Moderately Armored in a redo. A Bladesinger obvioiusly wouldn't benefit much from Moderately Armored because it interferes with Bladesong.
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Q: Hey Max, you also referred to cleric life 1/illusionist X and Fighter 1/ NecromancerX build. May I ask about your thoughts on this?
A: The Cleric 1/Illusionist X and Fighter 1/Necromancer X builds kind of illustrate why I'm a little bit leery of the whole concept of guides. What I mean is that a good guide, instead of making choices for you, should lay out some principles and some options and then let you make your own decisions. To illustrate:
Life Cleric 1/Illusionist X makes a good tank in combat because of the combination of heavy armor + shield from Life Cleric and defensive spells from Wizard. Cleric has some good defensive spells too like Sanctuary and Shield of Faith--Shield of Faith requires concentration so cannot be used at the same time as e.g. Greater Invisibility, but Sanctuary is fairly unique in that it is a bonus action defensive spell which doesn't require concentration. Let's say you're tanking away invisibly under the effect of Greater Invisibility. Every turn, you run up to an enemy, attack him with False Fetters (my rename/refluff of "Booming Blade", since Booming Blade is a dumb name with dumb fluff--False Fetters binds the enemy in shackles of cloudy air which burst explosively when stretched too far), and then move away, provoking no opportunity attack because you're invisible. Then you've still got your bonus action open, so if you want some extra protection you can then cast Sanctuary on yourself too. Now an enemy who tries to kill you has to make a Wisdom saving throw to even target you in the first place (and hopefully you're positioned so he can't just change his mind and hit someone else instead, e.g. you're 25' away from your nearest buddy) AND he has to hit your AC 20 at disadvantage AND if he wants to actually damage you he also has to beat your Shield spell (AC 25). You'll lose Sanctuary next turn when you attack again but oh well, it's just a first level spell slot.
In practice of course Sanctuary turns out to be overkill in that scenario, and you probably wouldn't even bother stacking it on top of Greater Invisibility. But if you were e.g. maintaining an Evard's Black Tentacles on one group of enemies to give your allies advantage, then it's nice to have the option to stack Sanctuary on yourself (while either Dodging or attacking with cantrips or non-concentration spells like Blindness/Deafness) without breaking concentration or costing your action.
So the important part of that combo is just the Cleric 1/Wizard X part. I picked illusionist because I find illusionists fun, since they get to use Malleable Illusion to do things like turn the whole party into shapeshifting X-Men (Mystique) spies via Seeming. (That is, you get to change the appearance of anybody or everybody in the party at will, for free all day long.) But Cleric 1/any other kind of wizard X works just as well. The main downside is that you have to invest at least a 13 in Wisdom in order to make the multiclassing come out, on top of the probably-15 you want to put in Str to wear heavy armor. (You can get away with less than that in Str and just use Longstrider to increase your movement speed when you need to, but IMO it's more fun to have at least 30' movement built in so you never have to worry about being slower than most monsters.)
One more thing about Cleric 1: eventually when you get Contingency, an excellent choice of contingencies is "Cure Wounds V whenever I drop to 0 HP." It's almost as good as a semi-permanent Death Ward. Yes, you'll lose concentration on whatever you were concentrating on, but it still means that an Ancient Red Dragon who breathes fire on you for 91 HP of damage won't put you down and making death saves--you'll pop right back up and be at 20-30 HP immediately.
Note that you can take your Life Cleric 1 level either immediately at first level or later on (e.g. at level 8 after you already have Fireball/Polymorph/etc.). Either way you get the same heavy armor benefit.
There are other valid choices for Cleric 1 which also give you heavy armor proficiency, e.g. Nature or War or Forge from the cleric Unearthed Arcana. I like Life because (1) having Bless and Cure Wounds as domain spells is kind of nice, since you almost always want to have those as options; (2) I don't allow Unearthed Arcana at the table nor expect other DMs to allow it. Otherwise Forge would be an arguably even better pick than Life Cleric, since I don't have that much use for Disciple of Life on a wizard tank. (It's okay, but Cure Wounds with Disciple of Life is still worse than Aura of Vitality from a real healer.)
Fighter 1 is similar to Life Cleric 1, with a few key differences: (1) you get proficiency in Constitution saving throws instead of Wisdom saving throws, which helps with concentration and poison/stunning but makes you more vulnerable to mind-affecting spells (fear, confusion). In general I think that tradeoff is worth it (failed Con saves scare me worse than failed Wisdom saves, since the penalties are often worse, and since it's nice to be able to risk melee hits without much chance of losing your concentration); (2) you lose a few spell slots compared to a cleric; (3) You get access to martial weapons (nets are fun) and Second Wind for a few extra HP once per short rest; and (4) you don't need a Wisdom 13 in order to do it. Especially if you roll a low stat array or are using point buy, it's nice to be able to just rely on Str 13 Int 13+ instead of Str 13 Int 13+ Wis 13. It might actually let you afford a decent Con, or higher Str, or even to play the concept at all instead of being stuck without. But remember that strictly speaking you can play a Life Cleric 1/Wizard X with only Str 5 Dex 8 Int 15 Wis 13, although in that case I'd definitely recommend the Mobile feat to offset your slow movement.
Anyway, the fun of Fighter 1/Necromancer X is that an AC 21 "Necrotank" (AC 26 when Shielding) is extremely tough in battle, and he gets to leech HP off his enemies with Vampiric Touch and regain an extra 9 HP every time he kills one with it. (Grim Harvest is the 2nd level Necromancer feature and it grants you extra HP under a number of conditions, e.g. every time you make a kill with Vampiric Touch, or multiple times per round if you make a lot of kills with Evard's Black Tentacles or Wall of Fire.) In fact, you don't have to just kill enemies. If you want, you can pick up a bunch of cheap chickens for 2 cp per chicken according to the PHB and carry them around with you, then when you need to heal yourself you just cast Vampiric Touch III and drain ten chickens to death to regain 90 HP from Grim Harvest (or 150 HP if you cast Vampiric Touch V). It turns out that there are more efficient ways to restore HP in 5E, but it's still a lot of self-healing for a tank. Plus your DM will enjoy watching you cart around all those chickens from level 1 in anticipation of the day, some day, when you learn Vampiric Touch and start draining them to death.
That's all I've got to say for now. Happy gaming!
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