Author: Audere
In a The Myth of Party Roles, we covered some “fake party roles,” which is how we described popularly perceived party roles that aren’t actually necessary, or aren’t effective at what they claim to do.
We missed one, and it’s been coming up again and again: the “skirmisher.” Whenever we write about Monk, we hear it in the feedback. Recently, we wrote about haste, and you can bet the word “skirmisher” came up in response to that post.
A skirmisher, as the term is commonly used in the 5E community, is characterized by high mobility, high melee damage, and the ability to move in and out of melee while avoiding enemy attacks.
This archetype of “hit and run” characters is nothing new. We’ve seen Doomfist or Tracer from Overwatch, Chipp from Guilty Gear, or Evelynn from League of Legends—characters that get in, wreak havoc, and get out, all on their own terms.
However, such fantasy is inadequately represented by the mechanics of 5E. There is no special movement, no mind game that plays to enemies’ blind spot to avoid harm, no flashy reward like landing all the pellets of a scattergun or hitting a powerful slam attack with a forgiving hit box. Mechanics that are supposed to make you slippery, like the Mobile feat, leave much to be desired.
Example “Skirmishers”
- Monks
- Rogues (especially Swashbuckler Rogues)
- Two-Weapon Fighting Rangers
What do the above characters have in common? They have moderate to poor defenses, and they don’t actually deal all that much damage. This is a big problem with skirmishers. They sacrifice damage, defense, and the power of ranged attacks for not much in return. But what if you could build a skirmisher with good damage?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with skirmishing itself, right? The thing where you dip in and out of melee, and laugh at enemies who chase after you but can’t reach you?
Sadly, this is a poor strategy, due to two facts:
There is no real payoff once you approach your target.
There is very little actual incentive in 5E to engage in melee with enemies. Most of the monsters published to date are significantly more deadly in close combat than at range. Melee attacks as a player don’t do meaningfully more damage than ranged attacks.
The amount of control you can exert merely by being toe-to-toe is minimal. Opportunity attacks are limited by reaction, so even in the best case (e.g. Sentinel) “being in melee” only prevents a single enemy from engaging with the rest of the party. You can physically block doorways and choke-points with your character’s body, but this is less effective on a character that must rely on their action each turn to continue to contribute than a bulky Spellcaster that can simply concentrate on spirit guardians and Dodge in the doorway.
If you are a “skirmisher,” however, you wont be able to benefit from any of these melee-only tactics. Your plan was to get in, hit, and get out again, right? Opportunity attacks are not working for you, they are working against you.
- A stunned creature is incapacitated, which means it cannot take actions or reactions, can’t move, and can speak only falteringly.
- The creature automatically fails Strength and Dexterity Saving Throws.
- Attack rolls against the creature have advantage.Â
Once an enemy is stunned by Stunning Strike, the adventuring party can attack the enemy with abandon, dealing heavy damage while the enemy doesn’t get to act on their turn.
In theory, this seems like a compelling tactic with little counterplay for the enemy. There are several ways in which things can go wrong, however. Getting to stun the enemy in the first place is quite the ordeal.
First and foremost, the Monk has to be able to reach the enemy. With the Monk’s increased mobility, one would expect this to be easier for them than for other classes. It might still be difficult to reach an enemy who is beyond a chasm, or flying in the air though.
Once they get there, they have now positioned themselves right next to the enemy, who is very likely to be more dangerous in melee range than at a distance. If their plan fails, they are now in a difficult position. Not to mention the presence of any other enemies who are grouped up with the Monk’s target.
The Monk now has to land their attacks to even get the opportunity to use Stunning Strike. With an assumed 65% chance to hit their enemy, a level 5 Monk that uses Flurry of Blows will most likely only hit 2 to 3 of their 4 attacks.
The enemy then has to fail a Constitution saving throw against the Monk’s save DC, which we can assume to be 14. They only need to fail one, but the chances of that happening are not great, especially if the target has Legendary Resistances.
Moreover, the most dangerous targets often have the highest Armor Class and Constitution saving throw bonus, and they might have Legendary Resistances, making the most valuable targets the hardest to stun.
Abilities that target Constitution saving throws are typically rated lower at Tabletop Builds because creatures in 5E have a tendency to have ludicrously high Constitution saves. Here’s a chart of monster saving throw bonus by Challenge Rating for the Monster Manual and Volo’s Guide to Monsters, with their mean Constitution saves in dark red:
Unfortunately, this means Stunning Strike is less effective than it would seem if you assumed all saves are roughly equivalent. On top of that, using Stunning Strike costs ki, which introduces a challenging resource problem for the Monk. If they use Flurry of Blows, hit 4 times, and apply Stunning Strike on each of those blows, the cost of this maneuver represents all of their resources at level 5, or a quarter of them at level 20. This means the Monk will only be able to do this once per short rest, or 4 times at level 20, with no ki left for other abilities, and little guarantee their target will actually end up being stunned. While this resource issue might be somewhat alleviated at higher levels, combat in Tier 3 and 4 poses a whole different array of problems for the Monk.
If you play in a game where you take a short rest after every combat, Stunning Strike would become more powerful, but the Monk’s power and effectiveness would pale in comparison to the Fighter’s or the Warlock’s in those cases. In general, spellcasters’ spell effects easily eclipse Stunning Strike. Web and hypnotic pattern inflict very similar, though slightly less dramatic conditions, but they have the upside of being able to target multiple creatures, targeting less strongly resisted saving throw abilities and possibly lasting for multiple rounds. Higher level spells like wall of force, forcecage and maze can even take an enemy out of the fight without providing a saving throw at all.
With all of that being said, it’s certainly one of the only effective tools in the Monk’s toolbox. There are times when you will face an enemy vulnerable to Stunning Strike, but it isn’t frequently a compelling reason to be in melee by itself.
Skirmishing rather than simply using a ranged weapon means effectively halving your speed.
Suppose we have Ob, a Rogue using a hand crossbow, and Mit, another Rogue who is dual wielding. They both enter combat against a troll who is 30 feet away.
Ob can simply move 30 feet away from the troll and either attack twice using Crossbow Expert or use her cunning action to Hide. If she’s already far away, Aim is also an option.
Mit, meanwhile, must move 30 feet toward the troll, attack, and—if he uses his bonus action to attack as well—become stranded in melee with a troll. If he uses his bonus action to Dash, he still ends up within walking distance of the troll.
But what if Mit has the Mobile feat?
With the Mobile feat, Mit would be able to end up 50 feet away from the troll in the end, but would still have to use his Cunning Action to do so, compared to Ob, who was free to Hide, Aim, or make a second attack. So Ob still comes out ahead. And what if Mit then starts 50 feet away from the troll next round? Now Mit will have to spend his Cunning Action to Dash again, get into melee, and be left with 30 feet of movement with which to leave—not enough to get out of melee range of the troll.
In general, skirmishing means that you have to use some of your movement to close with the enemy and some of your movement to get away. As a skirmisher, the range of distances where you can attack without retaliation is very small, or even nonexistent, depending on the mobility of your enemy.
This leads to performance issues when the troll’s bite and claw meets the Rogue’s 16 AC. Uncanny Dodge can only help you so much. If you want to engage in melee, defense should be a priority. It’s wishful thinking to imagine that your mobility will always be enough, when you have to use half of it to get close and half of it to get away every round.
We hear you. We really do. Skirmishing is neat and entirely valid as a character concept. It can perform passably at many tables. It’s simply not as survivable as attacking from range.
If you really want to play a skirmisher, we have a two suggestions:
- Invest in defense. Accept that you’ll be caught in melee reasonably often, and defense isn’t something you can neglect. You might be able to increase your defenses by multiclassing with a class that has the shield spell, or by dipping Fighter for more armor proficiencies and Defense Fighting Style.
- Have a ranged backup. There’s little downside to having a bow on your character sheet, and in situations where skirmishing isn’t tactically possible, having a ranged backup plan will let you continue to contribute without turning into a punching bag.
Finally, consider trying a similarly mobile build…but with a ranged weapon. You’d be surprised how many monsters are left helpless at arrowpoint!
While I do agree with most of the points you have made, I am surprised you did not mention booming blade, which could work really neat on a skirmisher (it does look to be designed in order to encourage that kind of play). High elf or half-high elf swashbucklers are truly quite potent and could deal significantly more damage than your average range rogue (depending on a build, of course).
BTW, keep up the good work, this blog is fantastic!
Yeah, definitely think it’s worth adding this to that last section. Booming blade actually rewards the skirmishing style of play, and will add on quite a bit of damage compared to a standard rogue.
Booming Blade is definitely an improvement, however, one of the main ways to increase Rogue damage is Haste for double Sneak Attack; Ready Action off-turn, Haste Attack on-turn. If you run away as a skirmisher you can’t do this with a melee weapon, while a ranged Rogue can easily do this. You could drop your melee weapon (no action) and pull out your ranged weapon using you Free Action, I suppose.
You can also just build it around riposte or brace manoeuvres or even sentinel to get double sneak attack a round this added to the booming blade/green flame blade which you can use action surge to do two booming blades. And by moving away you make them move towards you and this triggers booming blade if they come back into melee range you sneak attack using brace as a reaction or sentinel if they attack teammate or if they attack you and miss you riposte for a sneak attack
this is true. skirmish is just a build style alot of people dont understand sadly and they are missing out. i know this is cheesing it a bit but you could take pam warcaster as sage advice on that combo was from 2015 and they have yet to officially errata it, so you could get max sneak dmg.
I have played a 2 barbarian/x STRogue(swashbuckler) in several games (a couple of Treantmonk’s one-shot’s and with Lilith in some of Danktrain’s and would contend that that is in fact a viable skirmisher build. Maybe not the most interesting, but certainly viable.
As someone with 1000 hours playing a skirmisher I completely disagree with this post as it factors unoptimized builds. ie who tf plays two weapon fighting style rangers. Many skirmish builds easily out damage top tier range builds in consistent dpr. 1. I see you left out Mobile feat bladesinger, as bladesinger is skirmisher by definition. 2. this is less known but monk multiclasses that use symbiotic entity or spirit shroud have absolutely absurd dpr averages. let me give you few monk mc that do nutty dmg and can only work as a skirmisher. First, lv 17 Bladesinger monk (5 monk : 15 wizard) yes it is mad but its the fastest two mc and has some of the highest ac in the game; let me ask how much damage is 20 + 20 12d8 + 9d8 + 2d10 + 2d6? exactly the ranged ss can shove its dmg up its own tail; this can also has no extreme drop off when facing enemies with high ac and its not bursting on action surge. Ill give you this, if a skirmishers does not have non concentration speed multifiers it wont be as good as it can be ie boots of speed eagle whistle longstrider etc but 50 to 60 feet is all you need man, but you dont factor in speed multipliers aswell when critiquing this role. ill give you a few others dragon monk x tempest cleric; legit raiden, it can spirit shroud high lv and push enemies 40 feet per round. spores druid monk… i dont need to say much about this because its pretty obvious what it does. then your completely looking over the boomingblade rogues which is a staple of of rogues skirmishers??? man come on, it’s obvious that you dont know much about skirmishers just by you not mentioning bb rogue… and talking about two weapon fighting rangers?!… btw real nice writing a whole article hating on a playstyle.
This thing where you’re suggesting that stunning strike doesn’t work well seems wild to me but i did only DM a 5th lvl one shot, it’s possible the monsters in it were underdeveloped I dunno. Nothing had legendary resistance and halway thru i realized the enemies weren’t enough of a threat so i replaced a couple with much stronger HB but hey missing a turn to stunning strike (your numbers seem to me to suggest that at lvl 5 enemies should in fact be failing to a FoB SS) still rendered them useless
There exists a degree of optimization where monk does fine, and even relatively well compared to similarly optimized characters, in this regard and stunning strike is a really great feature. We define this as low-mid optimization and below in this article: https://tabletopbuilds.com/proposed-standards-of-optimization-levels/
The problem for monk comes in that melee monk doesn’t really have ways to push its power much beyond just maxing main stat, so it rapidly hits its power ceilling and there’s just no ways to make melee monk better from that point onwards. Meanwhile other classes can still massively increase their power and gain much much more output, which then leads to tougher encounters with more threatening monsters and monsters with way higher saving throws and more common legendary resistance. This is where the monk begins to struggle and what we mean when we talk about its problems in this article.
As a monk, you can expect to stun about 2 targets per short rest in tier 2 – this is simply not a great output relative to what other classes can do. An easy comparison here is the warlock, which in tier 2 has two third level (or higher) spells available, and the power you can get from a single casting of a third level spell much outweighs the power of a melee range stun (especially because warlock has different spells for different situations, so it can bring its power to bear in more encounters). You might also compare it to something like our Basic Builds Fighter ( https://tabletopbuilds.com/basic-build-series-fighter/ ), which is also gated by short rest resources, and is also great against single targets: it is expected to deal upwards of 70 points of damage in a single turn when burning through its resources at a similar pace as a monk would while using stunning strike against a boss, and it can do this at 120 feet of range whilst ignoring all cover (except total cover) – so Fighters get pretty close to simply killing the opponent you’d want to stunning strike. Then note that both the builds I mentioned haven’t even gotten extra strength from multiclassing, so there is still yet more potential to outperform the monk than just on these basic terms.
Another problem is how easy it is to win fights where only a single monster has great importance: Spells that generate difficult terrain or forced movement (such as Web, or Eldritch Blast with the Repelling Blast invocation) can stop single melee monsters from doing anything without even offering them a saving throw, it just happens – or if you have multiple builds like the earlier mentioned Fighter, you’re suddenly looking at 140 or more damage in round 1 at character level 5, this kills most monsters that one would consider “CR appropriate” for that level. So this means if you are DMing for such characters (and you will be if people are optimizing) you must add one or two more equally threatening creatures so that the encounter doesn’t instantly end in round 1. And these are the encounters where Stunning Strike becomes so unimpressive: the ones that not anyone can win. You’ll be able to stun one of the three threatening creatures, sure, maybe stun another next round, but this is no longer the famed performance of the monk shutting down the encounter: this is denying a fraction of enemy actions in the fight while putting yourself at an extremely risky position by going into melee with three threatening monsters.
So basically, while your observation that level (I assume this meant CR) 5 enemies should fail quite consistently against Stunning Strike is correct, you need to account for the fact that CR 5 monsters are not a relevant challenge to a level 5 party.
Even if you look at what is often considered the prey of stunning striking monks: the CR 6 Mage, which is a great target because it has low CON and also entering melee with it doesn’t put you at additional threat (because AoE spells hurt in melee exactly as much as they do at range), this monster just gets oneshot killed by a basic fighter from 120 feet away while the monk is only able to stun them, it’s just not very impressive over all.
I want to make clear that your personal experience does not reflect negatively on your encounter design, and it’s generally extremely hard for new DMs to predict how much adjusted XP an encounter needs to actually be challenging because the numbers in the book cannot match reality (since the weakest character people can reasonably create, and the strongest character they can create have about a 400~500% power difference). It’s also entirely possible that stunning strike just happened to be good against these specific encounters. Our criticism of the strategy is not to say that Stunning Strike skirmishing NEVER works, just that it does not generalize to challenging encounters that can be taken on by our Basic Builds Series ( https://tabletopbuilds.com/basic-build-series-introduction/ ) let alone by absolute powerhouses like the Flaghship Build Series ( https://tabletopbuilds.com/tag/flagship-build-series/ ).
Thank you for reading and commenting!
before you are two third level spells:
– one casts any warlock spell of 3rd level or lower, dc 15
– the other is scorching ray, melee attacks, each hit forces a dc 14 con save or stuns the target for 1 round, no concentration. Advantage vs the foe.
We’re in a combat with multiple friendly creatures, and there are, say, three enemies.
which do you select? What warlock spell are you thinking of that ends this combat, or does more effective damage than a monk?
hypnotic pattern!
The best skirmisher build is any GWM or PAM martial on a horse with a lance and shield. You can do this with no character investment as long as you have lance and shield proficiency, you just need to buy the horse, which is a good investment anyway.
Skirmishing is a strategy you should employ when it’s beneficial, not a play style you should try to build a character around.
There is a part that is a little missleading:
If they use Flurry of Blows, hit 4 times, and apply Stunning Strike on each of those blows, the cost of this
maneuver represents all of their resources at level 5, or a quarter of them at level 20.
This scenario pretty much never happen in practice. Because as you pointed out, there is around 65% chance of an attack landing. Also if stunning strike hit on the first or second hit, the monk would obviously not attempt to SS again (unless there is multiple targets to stun), and they might also not bother with Flurry of Blows.
So in practice the monk will only burn around 2.5-3 ki (or often less if focusing on Wisdom rather than Dexterity) while focusing on stunning, which make this tactic doubly more sustainable than is implied here.
I would be grateful if you talk about bb high elf rogues.
I think they do better damage than ranged Rogue builds.
But of course, Rogue is just a bad class overall.
I’m curious of your thoughts on specifically melee characters.
If you read the various party role articles and your “Proposed Standards of Optimization” it seems like most martial classes top out in the Mid-High tier and even then seem focused on ranged builds.
At what tier do you feel melee classes fall-off? And related allegory, at what point would a melee-focused class notice the power discrepancy from a more optimized ranged or spellcaster build? Rephrased, at what tier of optimization would someone want to skip a melee class so as not to feel overshadowed by their party members?
If by “melee” you mean ‘people that hit things within 5-10 ft of them with weapons’, then yes they’re less powerful and basically always require more build finesse than their ranged counterparts to compete at a given optimization level.
You *can* notice the melee-ranged discrepancy at any optimization level, provided ranged characters actually make sure to walk backwards and steer clear of the effective range of melee monsters (usually 30ft movement + 5ft reach). This leads to melee characters taking damage that would otherwise never have happened – unless the melee character decides to throw a single javelin and sit on their hands and wait for monsters to get into range.
This phenomenon becomes more and more common / required as your op level increases. By mid-high you *can* still bring a melee build to selectively nuke a target with combinations such as reckless attack + action surge + battlemaster maneuvers, but you *will* have to sit on your hands a lot. The perceived role of melee characters “frontlining” is long gone at this point.
At high op it’s looking quite bleak, and the only thing I’d consider is a paladin with polearm master, though that one would still try to keep at range with eldritch blast and only engage in melee when the monsters managed to get on top of the party.
Important exceptions here are the druid, which summons melee animals on top of enemies, that works just fine; and the cleric, who can dodge on a bunch of AC while concentrating on spirit guardians, which gives them a ton of durability (flagship cleric is 5-10 times more durable than a barbarian reckless attacking…) and spirit guardians deals a bunch of damage *and* denies actions with its *speed* reduction (not difficult terrain!), making it a class that works in ‘melee’ at all optimization levels.
What you think about ranged skirmishers like musket monks ect.
?
This does not follow the way we most commonly see “skirmisher” used, which describes melee combatants that run in and run back out again.
A fast ranged character that always runs away, like a musket monk can, is good and not subject to what we explain in this article.