D&D General What builds have actually broken a game?

[Dessert Nomad]

In original 5e if you had a (beast master) (or dual wield) ranger it was really not fun for them. And in a friends party the Ranger was considered almost broken weak. (And the used the revised version when it come out to make that character playable/not hinder the others).

I agree, the power floor for base classes with non-terrible stats is reasonably close to the cap now. You can still easily make a terrible character by multiclassing, but I think that's fine. And it's kind of amusing that a lot of 'power builds' I've seen would actually be pretty obnoxious to play. Often a very fragile setup, not a lot they can do other than one damage thing, not a lot of endurance, not a lot of versatility.

I remember seeing a discussion about moon druid on reddit, and someone responded with an idea for a monk/druid multiclass with 5 levels of elements monk (to turn all attacks elemental, give flurry of blows for lots of hits, and use charger with a form that has a charge for more damage. If you presume the monk/wildshape interactions work, it got a pretty good numbers in a DPR calculator for the 2+round of combat while it was maintaining concentration on conjure minor elementals. But... man that character would be so much weaker than a level 12 moon druid in actual play - the moon druid can use CWB (less single target but more general) without the fragile setup more times per day, has 5th and 6th level spells too, gets almost double the THP every wildshape, has better feat choice, and better wisdom.

 

[ECMO3]

I can back that one up.

In the game I mentioned previously, the cleric player was not a "strong" player in the build or tactics department (and he's a fun guy to play with, and that's much more important isn't it?). But he didn't have to do anything special - just use the temp hp ability and have the druids (because there was a shepard's druid AND a land druid) conjure animals and .... oh god

In the 2000 or so 5E games and thousands of PCs I have seen played since 2015, I've only seen a handful of PCs actually die. I am going to say around 20 total and most of those were high-level PCs killed by Power Word Kill. One of the few mid-level PCs I've seen actually die in a game died with me playing a Twilight Cleric while I had Twilight Sanctuary active.

 

[Zardnaar]

In the 2000 or so 5E games and thousands of PCs I have seen played since 2015, I've only seen a handful of PCs actually die. I am going to say around 20 total and most of those were high-level PCs killed by Power Word Kill. One of the few mid-level PCs I've seen actually die in a game died with me playing a Twilight Cleric while I had Twilight Sanctuary active.

Level 9 spells can turn up az early as lvl 7 RAW.

I clobbered my players with metror swarm at lvl 13.

Damage dealing soells generally suck unless they have a rider eg synaptic static, the fight situation for Fireball/lightning Bolt and meteor swarm.
Chromatic orb seems to be the best lvl 4-8 blasting one.