DnD Quick Builds: Melee & Ranged Martials

39 Replies to “DnD Quick Builds: Melee & Ranged Martials”

1. Much needed article! Thanks!

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2. Wouldn’t the echo knight be more interesting than the battle master for the melee build ?

   The two additional attacks/ long rest can give you a stronger nova in a difficult fight, and you get extra attacks of opportunity and a lot of utility from the echo. In particular why spend 2 levels of rogue to get a bonus action dash when you can get a bonus action teleport instead?

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   1. Echo Knight is a valid choice, though we judge it to be weaker than Battlemaster in this context:
      The nova it has isn’t actually stronger than what’s offered by superiority dice, and echo’s nova is also more limited so you cannot play around short rests to get more mileage.
      Additionally, opportunity attacks and possible Sentinel utility are less relevant due to this being a mid-high op build, meaning you’d play it in campaigns where your party actually knows what they’re doing; and at that point there’ll be an abundance of difficult terrain and forced movement effects that will largely just do what echo does but better, and PAM alone will fill your reactions plenty via forced movement.

      Yes you could spend 2 levels somewhere other than rogue at the very end, but that’s not worth the power-cost you pay for the majority of the campaign before then – also dashing actually has really nice synergistic effects with speed increasing items and spells (especially Fly) that you cannot replicate with echo knight.

      But if you like Echo knight, you can take this same build (possibly put the rogue levels somewhere else instead), play it with echo knight, and still be mid-high optimization whilst having some unique strengths of your own

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3. Great article guys, thank you for giving a chance to martial characters! Quick question, have you considered the newly released Path of the Giant for this build? I feel like the Thrown property + 1d6 damage die per attack from level 6 as well as the damage bonus from the oversized weapon allowed by the subclass could strongly outdamage Zealot. Unless survival featured such as Warrior of the Gods and Fanatical Focus are that good? Thank you for reading

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   1. Giant barb is a very viable choice for this build, and depending on the circumstances of your table of campaign, it has good potential to be better than Zealot.
      Zealot features the better tier 1 and level 5; it also has some defensive utility for a good long while.

      As for giant: Rulings on oversized weapons and allowed play material are less consistent, especially when you get into *magical* oversized weapons, so there will be a lot of table variance. Also depending on what % of fights you have rage for, you’ll want to make different build choices if you want to fully optimize, things like Sentinel or Crusher could take precedent over GWM for example – but they don’t necessarily cause that % might go some other way, too. This makes it ridiculously hard to write an article about it, and the build wouldn’t necessarily be useful to people trying to play a different subclass.

      I’d rather have an oversized weapon giant barb with a magical weapon and a peace cleric dip than this Zealot build.
      But I’d also rather have this Zealot with a peace cleric dip than a giant barb forced to take a forge cleric dip to make their weapon magical

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      1. Wouldn’t it be enough to just use a Medium-sized magic weapon and make it Large with the Giant Stature feature? Everything you are wearing becomes Large with you from what I understood from the subclass, which includes weapons. We would technically still get the bonus boost from the Oversized Weapon rule without attacking at disadvantage as well. Unless you want a magic weapon that is directly Large so it becomes Huge for even bigger damage dice? I don’t know which one would be more optimal mathematically but the former probably makes the build easier to achieve at least.

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         1. Maybe, just a lot of table variance there. We can write with one assumption and then 90% of readers will come back with house rules differing from those assumptions. Or we can talk about all combinations that we can come up with, still miss half of them, and then 90% of our written work is irrelevant to our readers.
            If the rulings and cirucmstances for giant barb are good at your table, it’s an excellent choice for this build, especially when tier 1 and saving throws don’t matter that much at your table. If there’s enough rage uptime, then it’s possible GWM is incorrect, but that depends on accuracy boosts in your party and needs to be mathed out

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         2. The “oversized weapon rule” is from a section of the Dungeon Masters Guide which provides guidelines for DMs when crafting their own monster statblocks: it doesn’t apply to player characters. I wouldn’t even call it tech, honestly, I think its just an incorrect interpretation of the rules, at least when applied to features like Giant’s Might, the Enlarge spell, or the new Path of the Giants. These features all specify how they impact damage, and don’t make any reference that section of the DMG.

            Your best case would be if you turned large, disarmed a giant enemy, and took their weapon and lugged it around.

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            1. Sure, but… all large and bigger monsters use exactly these rules for their weapon attacks? It’s very likely that this is not because they all have specially made weapons for them specifically. Instead, the DMG tells us the rule for all large+ weapons. Yes, you are right, this is a suspicious position for a general rule, but it makes sense to use it.

            2. But again, those are guidelines for monsters, not player characters.

               For instance, the monster stat block for Duergar has an “Enlarge” feature, which explicitly states it doubles the damage dice for strength-based attacks from that creature. While the player character race “Duergar” also can cast Enlarge on itself, but it follows the rules for the spell Enlarge, which only increases its damage by 1d4 per attack.

            3. This is a good point! Unfortunately, this interpretation makes the spell enlarge very sad and leaves a mess of the rules for large+ weapons. Find one from an enemy? Extra damage dice. You enlarge one of your own? No change. You pay a smith to make some for you? Nobody knows.

4. Also, there seems to be a typo with the Longstrider spell in the first build. It says that this spell comes from the Gloom Stalker spell list while it’s clearly Disguise Self that should be here I think.

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   1. The ranger spellcasting feature allows you to replace a ranger spell you know for a different one when you gain a level. Gloomstalker spells are ranger spells, so you can replace them. This is what’s happening here.

      (People will argue this doesn’t work on D&DBeyond, but neither does the explicitly described swapping of Clockwork Soul and Aberrant Mind spells, and neither did picking spells on Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster for the longest while, so that really isn’t a valid counter claim.)

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      1. That’s fair, I totally forgot about the “you can replace 1 Ranger spell per level with another” feature. Does that mean you could also do it with the spells provided by Primal Awareness?

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         1. The rules of Primal Awareness are just entirely broken and contradict other points in the rules, especially in that they don’t assign the spells to a class but also all spells must be assigned to a class. So the game just doesn’t work properly in that place and we’re not touching it with a 10-foot pole. You can see this reluctance in action in the flagship ranger article

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5. Cool builds! I was looking for a Barbarian build for a long time 🙂 Is there any particular reason for picking Fog Cloud with our Ranger levels? Also, since you round up your Wisdom score with Resilient, you’re allowed to prepare another 1st level spell from the Cleric spell list. Which one do you think could work the best?

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   1. Another small correction for the ranged build: at level 11, it says that you pick a Fighter level, but it is actually a Ranger level. See below:
      Level 10: Cleric (Fighter 6/Ranger 3/Cleric 1)
      Level 11: Fighter (Fighter 6/Ranger 4/Cleric 1)

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      1. Thanks for the correction!

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6. How does the melee damage compare to flag pally? And how does it deal with ranged attackers?

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   1. It’ll be substantially higher than paladin melee damage, though their smite damage burst can compete in very short days/for single important tasks/undead and fiends. However, you lack the excellent supportive capabilities that paladin brings to the table and the ranged ability (eldritch blast) that flagship paladin has. To deal with ranged enemies – sometimes it’s not worth rushing into melee with them, since they or their allies might be even scarier in melee, but sometimes you do need to just reach them and kill them. For that, I recommend a good warhorse, or better yet a phantom steed. We also take Rogue levels later in the build to get Cunning Action bonus action Dash for the additional mobility. As with all melee builds, however, engaging effectively at range is something that this build struggles with.

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7. I love these builds, the peace cleric dip is my favorite part. I feel like people sleep on the one-level dip of bless + EB, but I have a question, about the melee build.

   I’m running a melee build with a similar premise, but instead, I’m going Fighter 12/Cleric 1/Ranger 3. Currently level 6 and picked up the one level in Cleric, I’m planning to go straight to Fighter 12, but should I go Ranger 3 first instead?

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   1. You absolutely should go ranger 3 before gunning for the fighter 11.
      A huge issue for melee fighter is that Great Weapon Master doesn’t actually really increase your damage unless you have substantial accuracy boosts going, which is why barbarian 2 is so core. Gloomstalker can give you some of that via conditional invisibility, though overall you should really consider the barbarian 2 dip and give up on the the third fighter attack: 3 attacks with advantage with GWM are better than 4 straight rolls – and you can get them earlier.

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   2. EB?

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      1. Eldritch blast

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         1. No.. Emboldening Bond

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8. I missed so much this type of content. Thank you.

   Need more build on these screens!

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9. Level 11 for the ranged build has an error – it says fighter, but should have been a ranger level instead.

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10. which one deals moar damage?

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    1. Melee, provided you get into range – though you’ll be taking disproportionately more damage, so range is generally better overall.

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       1. got it thanks

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11. small question, would being an earth genasi for PWT surprise be worse?

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    1. yea. PWT is a mid spell and BA attacks aren’t even that great

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    2. it would be worse for both builds, but not because of what Laughing Goblin says (which are both incorrect statements)
       In the case of the melee build, rage will disrupt your concentration.
       In the case of the melee build, you won’t have 2nd level slots to recast Pass Without Trace until level 11, and this slot availability hardly improves by the end of your progression at level 20.
       In both cases, what you get out of the race is not worth the much worse tier 1 performance and slower progression to critical feats for damage.

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       1. oops, the second “in the case of the melee build” is supposed to read “in the case of the Ranged build”

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12. Can you comment on taking Hunter in the melee build to get a reaction attack whenever you’re in melee with a Large or larger creature? Most monsters are in the medium-large category, and a lot of “boss” type enemies are Large or Huge. This wouldn’t increase nova dpr, but would help with sustained dpr. My play experience rarely involves truly dark environments. Inevitably there’ll be some party member who needs a light source or the dungeon will be at least dimly lit, making gloomstalker advantage relatively unreliable.

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13. Hi Moonsilver and Stefan.

    Many thanks for the inspiration of the two fantastic builds.
    Increasing the damage in the melee build, we can a use a heavy 2h glaive through GiantStatue if we take Barbarian – PathOfGiant instead of PathOfZealot.

    Can you please give this a thought? I think it will be at least as good as your build.

    Thanks a lot for the great work you did!
    Cheers!

    – Ranged but Fighter – RuneKnight instead of BattleMaster uses heavy 2h

    BattleMaster provides higher nova damage but using

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    1. For the melee build, i can absolutely see giant barbarian being better – I just did not feel like having the oversized weapon discussion and giant barbarian was released while i was editing the article, so i didn’t feel like reworking everything for a frankly somewhat fringe source book. The builds presented here should be interpreted in the context of ‘the big 3 core books’ of PHB + Xanathar + Tasha

       For ranged, i’d absolutely stick with battlemaster. the DPR increase matters *so* much less than the nova damage and you’re infinitely more likely to get it off than the melee build is

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14. PS: Copy & past error. Please ignore in the previous post:

    – Ranged but Fighter – RuneKnight instead of BattleMaster uses heavy 2h BattleMaster provides higher nova damage but using

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15. NGL, that melee build is just so…bad.
    Are you seriously going to suggest taking 2 lvls of rogue for non existent sneak attack and dashing in BA?
    Just take 2 more in fighter, and bam, now you have 20str faster or a feat!
    Don’t forget that you NEED 20str asap since you are going GWM!

    Zealot is nice, but if you are going for Nova DMG and consistency -GIANT barb is a way to go, that’s all. You are making 3 attacks from PAM and giant gives you 3d6 just for that.

    While Battlemaster isn’t bad, why not ECHO?
    Do you not like extra FREE attack? I thought you did, that’s why you went gloom…

    Cleric is a nice touch tho…

    Basically to fix that build you’d go

    NGL that melee build is kinda trash…
    The biggest offence here, are 2 lvl wasted on rogue.
    Like…what is the point I’m sorry? Not using half of the class feature so you can…dash or disengage as BA? WHAT?
    Those 2 lvls could go towards fighter 6 so you can take a feat or +2CON because it’s just that much better…

    Zealot is a nice subclass, but aren’t we going for Nova and sustain? At which GIANT is just way, way better.
    Battlemaster isn’t bad, it’s a day to our damage and some utility, but weren’t we going for Nova and lots of damage? ECHO is the play here.
    Cleric is a nice touch if taken at 6th lvl so we can actually land our GWM reliable.

    Here is the fix for y’all, don’t make those mistakes…
    Take Glaive or Halberd and custom lineage with PAM.
    Lvl 1-5 we are going with barb!
    Take Giant subclass and GWM as a feat. We need that extra attack at 5.
    Lvl 6, Peace Cleric time! Nice buff for our 3 attacks we want to land for that +30.
    (You can skip cleric tho, it’s a nice touch, but not that important)
    Lvl 7-10 is a Fighter time!
    Take Echo knight for that juicy free attack and !!!+2STR!!!, we need those!
    Lvl 11-13 Ranger!
    Take Gloom for that juicy free attack!
    Lvl 14-16 Barb again!
    We want that !!!+2STR!!! or other feat like Resilient,Tough or Sentinel, who doesn’t love attacking as a reaction! thought +2STR is just a way to go! We at 20 boys!
    Lvl 17-18 Fighter!
    Back for the ASI or feat. You can never go wrong with +2CON. Never, especially if it’s 14. If you want a feat – Sentinel if you didn’t pick it at 16th lvl.
    Lvl 19-20 BARB.
    Since you wanted to waste those for rogue just a minute ago, now you can THROW enemies and allies alike!

    With all that you have better hit chance, better damage and no wasted feature.

    Your round looks like that:
    Gloom Attack (d10+d6+d8)+Barb Attack and Extra (2d10+2d6)+PAM (d10+d6)+Echo (d10+d6)+30+25+15 = 5d10+5d6+d8+70

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