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Quick one today, this is already pretty well known, but: the vast majority of damage spells can't target objects. They just say 'choose one creature within range' or 'each creature in [X] area' or 'every creature'. Every single time.

Faced with a wooden simple door, RAW you can't Eldritch Blast it down, or dissolve it with Acid Splash; Chromatic Orb bounces off it, Guiding Bolt fails to make a mark, not even Erupting Earth can do anything. Burning Hands and Fireball both specify that they 'ignite... flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried', but given that the latter is 8d6 fire damage you might feel a little cheated at a simple ignition.

An incomplete list of spells that do explicitly allow targeting of objects are: Fire Bolt, Shatter, Scorching Ray, Disintegrate, Fire Storm.

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why silvery barbs is broken

The Power

The crit-cancelling is a red herring - most single attacks don't do that much damage - and the advantage-granting is just a cherry on top. The actual strongest part of Silvery Barbs is in forcing enemies to reroll saves, as save-or-suck spells are just incredibly powerful in this game and Silvery Barbs makes them even better.

Consider a basic case:

Cast a strong save-or-suck spell, eg. Polymorph or Hypnotic Pattern.

Suppose the enemy saves. Then you cast Silvery Barbs and force them to reroll.

Let's really look at the resource expenditure here. The original cast cost a 3rd or 4th level slot (or higher! Disintegrate!) and an action. Silvery Barbs essentially lets you do that again, except you only have to pay a 1st level slot and a reaction. That's both massively cheaper and great action economy.

Compare and contrast Heighten Spell metamagic. A sorcerer with Heighten Spell has to pay 3 sorcery points to impose disadvantage when an enemy saves against one of their spells. Definitely more expensive than a 1st level slot, no matter which way you slice it.

Now, Heighten Spell has a single advantage in that it doesn't need any additional reactions. However, Silvery Barbs has a bigger advantage in that you only choose to spend it after observing that an enemy succeeded on the save. This is - again - massively cheaper.

So overall Silvery Barbs just feels straight better than Heighten Spell. (Poor sorcerers.) This should indicate that this spell is strong.

The Ease

The thing that really amplifies the issue is that Silvery Barbs is just very accessible. For a start, it's on the Bard, Sorcerer and Wizard lists by default, all of which can definitely find use for it.

But even beyond that, Silvery Barbs is a 1st level Enchantment spell, which means that literally anyone can just get a free daily use of it with Fey Touched. Any casting class will be able to use their own slots for more uses after that. And, last but not least, it's a 1st level spell - extremely spammable.

All this can lead to some really awful scenarios - suppose you're an enemy and you're fighting the party. What can you do against:

The wizard tries to Polymorph you into a frog so they can drop you into a volcano.

You make the save, but the wizard casts Silvery Barbs as a reaction to force you to reroll.

You manage to make the second save, but the bard now casts Silvery Barbs, forcing you to do it again.

By sheer luck you manage to pass a third time - so the ranger who took Fey Touched now casts Silvery Barbs a third time.

You fail the fourth save, are turned into a frog and get dropped into a volcano.

I have a cool name for this combo. I call it 'bullying'.

This isn't even trying super hard yet - it's a pretty plausible party composition - and already you would have to make four (4) consecutive successful saves to not immediately perish. This is a problem!

Of course, Legendary Resistance trumps all of this and is almost the only way for a boss to avoid an expedited death. But it's still not ideal - burning LRs is usually pretty expensive and often not viable, but Silvery Barbs provides a much cheaper way to force an enemy to make lots and lots of saves.

The Solution

So, what's the fix?

Many people propose just increasing the spell's level to, say, 2 or 3. I was in this camp at first, but I soon realised it doesn't suffice.

After all, no matter what level you make it, it's almost always worth it to use Silvery Barbs to essentially recast a higher level save-or-suck spell for just a reaction. Spells go all the way up to level 9, so even casting it at 5th level is a no-brainer if you're using it to reproduce a spell like Imprisonment.

My current proposal is simple. Add this clause:

If the trigger was a successful save against a spell and that spell's level is greater than the level of the spell slot you used, the creature does not have to reroll.

So you can't just use a level 1 slot to force a reroll against a level 9 True Polymorph. This isn't perfect - it doesn't account for strong save-or-suck non-spell abilities, such as Quivering Palm - but it's an acceptable minimal solution to me.

Either that, or just ban it.

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how to bully a beholder (or maybe not)

Beholders! Iconic, iconic. Let's surgically remove their will to live.

The key is that almost all their offensive potential comes from their Eye Rays - but they can only blast targets they can see. Therefore, naively speaking, a simple cast of, for example, Blindness while outside their Antimagic Cone would almost cripple them, leaving them only with a pathetic Bite attack. Made at disadvantage, to boot.

This just works.* Beholders actually aren't immune to the Blinded condition, nor do they have access to Truesight or Blindsight or Tremorsense, despite their much-vaunted multiplicity of eyes. The moral in this case is clearly quality over quantity.

Blindness isn't perfect, however; your victim gets a save on cast, and then more saves every turn thereafter, giving them a lot of opportunities to break out of it. Beholders actually don't have as unfairly good Con saves as you might expect, so Blindness isn't even that bad, but nevertheless we might want something better.

Enter Fog Cloud.

Fog Cloud is, like all the best battlefield control, saveless. You cast it and the world is just heavily obscured now, impossible to see into, and there's nothing your enemies can do about it. (unless they have Counterspell, or Dispel Magic, or break your concentration, but shh).

'But wait,' I hear you say. 'What about Antimagic? Shouldn't the Antimagic Cone cut right through it?'

Indeed, the Antimagic suppresses the Fog Cloud wherever it overlaps; but critically it does not dispel the spell altogether. The only effect is to give the Beholder a small region in which it can see, but which separately suppresses its own Eye Rays. In fact, this can work to your advantage: martial characters can take advantage of the convenient break in the fog to get right up to the Beholder and smash them in the face while they can see.

It's worth noting the Beholder can, unfortunately, simply fly out of the AOE; therefore it's definitely worth upcasting Fog Cloud for a larger AOE, or using alternatives like Darkness (you can pick it up and move it) and Sleet Storm (an enormous area of effect). Still, it's very fun that a 1st level spell almost perfectly counters a Beholder for at least one round.*

(Bonus points for convincing a party member to just grapple the beholder; they are really not especially strong.)

*Time to get really cursed.

Unfortunately, there is one problem with all that I have outlined above. It is technical, incredibly obscure and in its full glory has significant effects on how Beholder encounters go.

It goes like this: a Beholder's Antimagic Cone is an effect whose area of effect is a cone (shocker). But the rules for areas of effect actually state that 'A cone's point of origin is not included in the cone's area of effect, unless you decide otherwise.'

Therefore, a Beholder can choose to include themselves in their own Antimagic Cone - and so completely suppress every magical effect that would target their space.

So, whether or not a Beholder actually has you in its Cone, it is immune to whatever magic you want to throw at it so long as it has its Cone up at all, and knows the rules well enough to include itself.

Blindness? Yup. Hunger of Hadar. Yup. Spirit Guardians? Hypnotic Pattern? Yes and yeah. They still won't be able to target things in heavy obscurement or darkness, but RAW Beholders are literally just immune to Fireball as far as I can tell. Sweet dreams.

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Barbarians' Rage unfortunately wears off at the end of your turn if you haven't attacked a hostile creature this turn or taken damage since your last turn, which commonly happens when you can't reach any enemies and none of them are attacking you. This is pretty painful if you play in a campaign with lots of fights a day, given that your Rage uses are highly limited.

How to keep it going? Old, well-worn wisdom is to carry javelins, so that you can make some piddly ranged attacks at disadvantage if needs must to keep it going. But what if there are no enemies within 120ft, or they're all around corners, or similar?

Here's one solution: smack yourself.

To elaborate, an unarmed strike against yourself will do damage - and therefore sustain Rage - if it hits. It's not much damage, given that you have resistance to bludgeoning: at level 5 it should be around 3 damage, fairly negligible. I recommend using Reckless Attack to make it more likely that it works.

Flavourwise, this is just your character deliberately stoking their own anger in order to maintain their battle mindset, so I think this is completely reasonable overall.

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Wall of Force can't be dispelled - it is specifically immune to Dispel Magic. However, it has an equally specific clause that says Disintegrate destroys it instantly. In fact, Disintegrate has a similar clause: it specifies that the target can be

a creature, an object, or a creation of magical force, such as the wall created by wall of force

again naming the other spell explicitly.

Now, Disintegrate is a big spell slot, but it often might be worth it to destroy an otherwise invulnerable, impermeable, inescapable barrier. So everything's fine?

No.

Unfortunately, there is a fatal flaw in this flavourful interaction. Disintegrate specifies 'A thin green ray springs from your pointing finger to a target you can see within range.' But Wall of Force is invisible!

So by default you physically cannot target Wall of Force with Disintegrate. You literally need a way to see all invisible things.

It's even worse than you might naively think: See Invisibility is the spell you might naturally first think of to compensate for this. Its description states that you can see invisible creatures and objects, as well as into the Ethereal Plane.

But Wall of Force is neither a creature nor an object - the wording of Disintegrate, as quoted above, specifically distinguishes 'creations of magical force' from both those categories. (!!) And, while Wall of Force even extends into the Ethereal Plane (it's so ridiculously good), it surely remains invisible there too. So See Invisibility is of no benefit!

True Seeing has exactly the same problem, as does truesight in general. Invisible creatures and objects only. Blindsight is of no help either; RAW it just lets you 'perceive (your) surroundings without relying on sight', when Disintegrate specifies that sight is required.

Faerie Fire is exactly the same story again. So is Divination Wizard's L10 feature. So is every other ability and magic item that I can find; every single time, 'see invisible creatures and objects' only.

It's horrific. The developers seemingly just forgot that they implied certain things were neither objects nor creatures. I can find literally no way to actually target Wall of Force with Disintegrate, short of Wishing for it.

All of the above also applies to Forcecage, by the way. Just as a massive cherry on top, of size equal to the original cake.

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Now here's a spell with more issues than a newspaper: Animate Dead. As a brief refresher, you can cast the spell on either 'the corpse of a Medium or Small humanoid' or 'a pile of bones' to turn it into a standard-issue Zombie or Skeleton.

So. Problem one: all the undead you get from this spell are mechanically identical. It doesn't matter if you cast the spell on the bones of a duck or a drakon; you get one Medium CR 1/4 undead minion. This is probably for balance reasons, but it's very funny.

Problem one meshes closely with problem two: RAW you can just order KFC and cast Animate Dead on the leftovers; from the most miniscule pile of chicken bones will pop a Skeleton, complete with bow and shortsword.

This leads me nicely into problem three: where does the Skeleton's equipment come from? The statblock just implicitly assumes it has a shortsword and shortbow. You could of course just say that it's magic and the spell makes it, but Animate Dead is Necromancy; for it to dip into Transmutation or Conjuration to make material objects is strange.

This isn't purely a conceptual problem either; could you just cast Animate Dead to make a skeleton, immediately smash your own creation to bits and then sell the shortbow and shortsword for 25gp a piece?

(As a side note, where do Skeletons' arrows come from? Do they all just have quivers? How many arrows in those quivers? It's never specified how many times they can fire before running out. It could be infinity.)

And lastly problem four. Namely. The spell requires either a corpse or bones, and can make either a zombie or a skeleton.

But it doesn't require that you turn a corpse into a zombie, or bones into a skeleton. You can make a zombie out of bones alone, or a skeleton out of a full corpse.

So, summing everything up: you can use Animate Dead to turn an entire T-Rex corpse into a single Medium sized skeleton with a shortbow. I love 5e.

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I'm hoping everyone doesn't know this already, but you can see into Hunger of Hadar.

Essentially, there are two effects pertaining to sight in its description. The first one prevents any light, magical or not, from illuminating the AOE. This isn't a problem so long as you and your party have Darkvision. The second one blinds any creature inside the AOE, no save; which doesn't affect anyone outside the area.

Therefore, if your party Ranger has darkvision, they can easily just plug away at enemies in the AOE. Since enemies are blinded, they even have advantage. A much nicer experience than Darkness, for sure.

Feasibility: This one is pretty reasonable, just a little odd.

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giant barbarian teleporto-throw

Giant Barbarian, let's do Giant Barbarian. Fresh off the presses, practically, at the time of writing. Ridiculous subclass, by the by; size increase and bonus reach, immediately at level 3? At level 6, just a free 1d6 slapped on every single attack? And the ability to just fucking yeet a halberd at enemies and have it do full damage, jesus christ. Both goofy and powercreepy. At least Rune Knight only gave bonus damage once a turn and only meted out the reach increase at level 18.

But today we will focus on the level 10 ability, Mighty Impel. Now, this is *styled* as the ability to throw enemies and allies around using your raw size and strength.

(Side note: It irks me that this is literally the first ability in 5e that does anything like let you pick up an enemy and throw them into a wall. (Unless you count the fifth level Wizard spell Telekinesis. Or the fifth level Wizard spell Bigby's Hand. God, wizards get everything...)

It's a travesty. This should be a martial staple! It would add a lot to Str-based gameplay, it would add a lot to the wrestling-type toolkit; the closest thing we get by default is Shove, which is a pathetic 5ft of movement. Suppose I'm a level 20 barbarian with 24 Strength, advantage and expertise on Athletics; you're really going to tell me I can't pick someone up and throw them further than 5 feet?)

But regardless, it's pretty great flavour, backed up mechanically; throw monsters into the air to the tune of fall damage or scoop allies out of danger. Unfortunately, the wording of the ability has holes you could drive a train through.

I'll not post the full text here, but the nuts and bolts are: move a creature of Medium size or smaller within your reach to an occupied space you can see with 30ft of you, as a BA while raging. Unwilling creatures get a Str save. That's it.

So immediately we see five billion issues with this. Firstly: this is basically a teleport in disguise. It doesn't say how exactly you move the creature; it doesn't say that the creature moves through any of the intervening spaces. It just says 'move'. So if you were to move an enemy into the middle of a Spike Growth, there's no guarantee they'd take damage. Ditto chucking them through Wall of Fire, ditto whatever you can think of. Counterintuitive, to say the least. (Of course, if they had said 'it moves through the intervening spaces' without saying 'in a straight line', you'd be free to scrape them back and forth across Spike Growth 9001 times, like trying to get jam off your hand. It doesn't say anything about the path taken, only that the eventual destination has to be within 30ft of you.) Furthermore, *since* it's essentially a teleport to somewhere you can see, you can do things like impel someone to the other side of a window. Or through a keyhole. You could carry an adamantine cage around and just teleport all your enemies in. You could even teleport someone into a Forcecage; or out of one. You wouldn't even have to make the Cha save, since it's not explicitly teleportation, despite me calling it teleportation fifty thousand times.

But let's get even goofier. Let's focus in on possibly the most innocuous part: 'a creature... within your reach.' And there's one creature who is always within your reach.

You.

Yes. This ability lets you throw yourself.

Well, okay, there's a small snag. The ability doesn't work on you by default, since due to the level 3 feature you become Large when you rage - in fact you're forced to become Large, unable to choose to remain at your current size. Fortunately, the subclass in its mercy gives us not one but two easy ways to bypass this.

Firstly, built into the wording of the level 3 feature itself is a exception - you do not become Large if there is no room for you to do so. So you just have to find a small closet or a cramped bathroom or similar and go all Hulk; and then you can throw your entire party through a keyhole and then yourself.

(As a side note, as ever 'not enough space' is not well-defined, and you can easily choose to rules lawyer the hell out of this - put a sack over yourself? That would be taking it to the absurd limit, but I feel like the same thing with a pop-up tent would work. It feels more room-like, I suppose?)

Secondly, at level 14, you can choose to become either Large or Huge. (Again powercreeping on Rune Knight of all subclasses, who can only become Huge at level 18.) But separately - this is key - you can now Mighty Impel creatures of Large size of smaller.

So you can now become Large while raging, and throw Large creatures. So you can again just throw yourself around, freely. Throw yourself 30ft forwards, or 30ft backwards, or 30ft upwards. Remember, The sky 30ft is the limit.

(As a general note, it could be interesting to combine this with a gliding race like Hadozee or Simic Hybrid; throw yourself up and then sail down at your leisure. Of course, this works equally well if one of your other party members is one of those races also. The mental image of you just throwing an ally like a paper aeroplane is pretty fun.)

Feasibility: Teleporting people through a window is quite the ludonarrative dissonance and imo shouldn't be allowed - at least not without having to break the window. Throwing yourself is completely nonsensical, but could easily be reflavoured as just an especially powerful leap, a la Beast Barbarian, and then it's basically fine imo. Have fun breaking the laws of physics!

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Consider any line spell; consider Lightning Bolt. Line spells' effects start from their point of origin and move outwards from there. If a creature is between you and the source of an effect, you usually get half cover. Half-cover grants +2 to Dex saves.

Therefore, when Lightning Bolt is cast so as to hit multiple creatures, every creature after the first one should get a +2 to the save. As if Fireball wasn't already the superior option...

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Echo Knight is a Fighter subclass which deserves several thousand more words from me in the future, and indeed surely tens of thousands of words on its perculiarities have already been committed to the internet. Today, however, I will focus on one specific exploit.

When you first get it at level 3, it lets you summon an 'echo' of yourself.

The echo has a few uses:

It will tank one attack if hit.

You can move it around, in any direction, as a BA.

You can attack from its position rather than your own

And you can switch places with it as a BA, teleporting at the cost of 15ft.

Think of it as a portal which you can move one end of, the other end staying right next to you at all times. You can stab someone through it, or you can walk through it. Simple enough.

It's worth noting that when I say 'any direction', I mean *any* direction. They did not bar it from moving upwards. They did not bar it from hovering unsupported, mid-air. They didn't even explicitly bar it from moving through solid objects. It's very possible that you could summon it and send it straight down underground. Hell if I know what happens if you try to teleport to it while it's stuck in something.

This ability alone is worth a tome's worth of analysis; the echo has only 1hp, but you can summon it perpetually and teleport through it infinitely. Unlimited bonus action teleportation. It boggles the mind. You can tell it wasn't originally designed by WOTC. (Wildemount and its consequences have been a disaster for 5e balance.)

One of the only limits is that if it is more than 30ft away from you at the end of your turn, it pops and you must resummon it.

And now we come to Echo Knight's level *7* feature. This lets you willingly go blind and deaf in order to see and hear from its position instead; and while you're doing this, you can send it up to 1000ft from you before it pops. But. Crucially. They completely forgot to make it so that you can't attack through it while you're doing this.

I have no idea what they were thinking.

Taking the ability literally, the game is letting you fly a fully disposable suicide drone a quarter-mile away, through which you can unleash your full offensive power as a Fighter. There is absolutely zero risk to you. And if they pop the echo? You can just summon another one and send it right back to continue where you left off!

Why even leave the house? Why even go adventuring yourself? Just send your fucking Bayraktar TB2 out to rain machine-gun fire on nearby criminals from above while you sip a cup of tea back in your supervillain lair. It's not even traceable! You could send it down into the ground, then make it pop up somewhere else and just start slashing, like the violent ghost of D&D 5e balance come back to exact revenge!

And now for part 2.

They didn't restrict the teleportation either!

What is a safe? What is a vault? You can just fly your busted class feature into it, teleport in, grab as much gold as you care for and then leave next turn. Again, *completely* untraceably, so long as you wear a mask or something.

Now, obviously, this is meant for scouting. The vast majority of people, on first reading this ability, will think 'oh neat, an ability that helps you scout; surely this isn't meant to just let you play from home.' But here we do not deal with mere 'meant'. Here we are hidden from the eyes of God, free to unearth his worst mistakes. Anyway, for any DMs, this obviously shouldn't be allowed and is patchable with trivial ease. Still, it's baffling that they didn't errata the living daylights out of this.

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#d&d 5e #dnd 5e #dungeons and dragons #bad RAW #fun facts #yet another reason echo knight is a busted subclass

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The Wildemount spell Immovable Object doesn't prohibit you from casting it on eg. someone else's clothing. Touch someone's helmet and cast the spell and they're just stuck in place for 1 hour.

It gets worse. You can upcast it; at 4th level or above, it lasts for a full day. At 6th level or above, it lasts *forever*.

Wrt. feasibility, this one is... not completely implausible from a plausibility perspective - it's not nonsensical - but it's probably not good for game balance.

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Fun fact: RAW, Gelatinous Cubes actually aren't immune to Grappled. They don't have amazing Str either; a barbarian could easily just run up and... grab it. You take no damage for it. It just works.

It gets worse; their signature ability is Engulf, where they just roll over someone and start digesting them to the tune of massive acid damage. But when they're Grappled, they literally can't move - so they can't Engulf anyone. They're reduced to making pathetic basic attacks; essentially completely neutralised.

This one is completely stupid and your DM should probably just say you can't grapple them, or at least take some damage for doing it.

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anti-spellcaster shadow monk

Here's a half-decent anti-spellcaster candidate: Shadow Monk.

Why Shadow Monk? So. At level 3 you get to cast a variety of spells:

Pass Without Trace, to sneak up on enemies;

Darkness to make it impossible for them to target you with any spells that require sight, and also let you just walk away without provoking AOOs;

Silence to make it impossible for them to cast any spell with a verbal component (unfortunately you can't carry this one around);

and Darkvision just for fun.

These have a fairly hefty cost in the form of 2 ki and an action, but they're often worth it imo. As the cherry on top, you even get Minor Illusion, which even ignoring raw out-of-combat utility is just a lovely cantrip full of RP possibilities.

Moving on: at level 5 you get Stunning Strike which, okay, has a lot of caveats as i'm sure you've heard, but theoretically speaking spellcasters should have slightly worse Con saves than most enemies? So it might work better? Maybe? i should analyse that sometime. And Stunned is one of the only conditions which any martials have access to which can actually stop casters from casting spells - Grappled, Prone, Restrained, none of them work, it's so sad. Whereas Stunned even breaks concentration automatically (Stunned implies Incapacitated and then it's in the Concentration rules). If you can actually get it to work, it *works.*

And then at level 6 you just get to teleport through darkness or dim light as a BA, up to 60ft, infinitely. i have an enormous soft spot for teleportation because it's just cool and you can do so much with it; get out of danger, get into range, infiltrate, exfiltrate, just flex on enemies and allies...

So those are the advantages. Now, the big drawback: the actual expected DPR output isn't great. You are a Monk without anything special to actually make you super competitive there. But you do have good anti-spellcaster tools, in return. The low damage is the price for your specialisation, alas.

A few Numbers for expected DPR at level 5-6ish (ignoring crits always and forever):

- subclassless fighter, longsword, dueling: 0.65 * 2 * (4.5 + 4 + 2) = 13.7

- monk, two qstaff attacks: 0.65 * 2 * (4.5 + 4) = 11.1

- monk, two qstaff attacks, one with advantage (eg. after shadow step): 0.8775 * (4.5 + 4) + 0.65 * (4.5 + 4) = 13

- monk, two qstaff attacks + fist: 0.65 * 2 * (4.5 + 4) + 0.65 * (3.5 + 4) = 15.9

- monk, two qstaff attacks + flurry: 0.65 * 2 * (4.5 + 4) + 2 * 0.65 * (3.5 + 4) = 20.8

Optimisation

i haven't really fully optimised this wrt. race, feats, etc.. Off the top of my head, you could go Drow for the free cast of Darkness? And that would open up the possibility of Elven Accuracy down the line... Bugbear is just really good on martials, especially MotM Bugbear for the first-turn Flurry of Blows into 4 attacks with +2d6 damage on each. Don't be fooled though, on any martial other than one of the real nova meme builds the real strength is the extra 5ft reach, which not enough people talk about - particularly on Monks, as it lets you hit people and then run away to behind the Fighter without them being able to hit back. Sure you could already do that with Shadow Step, but this doesn't eat your BA, which you want for damage in order to be remotely competitive.

Of course, fliers or VH/CL are still probably the best options, as always…

One thing to try for is to get a way to see through your own Darkness; that would let you cast it and then just teleport around with impunity, and would give you permanent advantage on anyone else in your darkness. Very tempting, but it turns out to be hard, however:

The classical solution is getting Devil's Sight, but two levels of Warlock is harsh and MAD on a monk. Could work, but it's harsh.

An alternative is taking Eldritch Adept, but this requires either the Pact Magic or Spellcasting features - which the 3rd level Shadow Monk feature does not count as. So you would need to dip one level into a caster to even be able to take the feat. Which itself is harsh given that Monks really really want ASIs in order not to die instantly, so this also isn't ideal. However, 1 level of cleric is pretty great on Monk regardless imo and there are some really strong domains after Tashas, so it might be worth. There's also just Fighting Initiate these days, which you can use to take the Blind Fighting style. It's not perfect because it only gives you 10ft of blindsight - can't get the full use out of your 60ft BA teleport. However, one feat is cheaper than one feat and one caster level, or two warlock levels. Now, if you do get a way to see through your own darkness and you're a Drow or some other flavour of elf, you could take Elven Accuracy, which would just give you three dice for each attack roll with Darkness up, which would actually make your DPR somewhat respectable i think? Not even so expensive since it's a half-feat for Dex/Wis.

You don't really want many feats, other than again maybe Elven Accuracy? Or some other Wis half-feats, maybe. You just need Dex and Wis too badly; remember your AC scales off of both, and you need to be increasing both so as not to squish.

Note that you don't really want Mage Slayer, ironically. It fits the build perfectly, but it's just too situational for me, and too weak to be worth justifying not just increasing Dex or Wis. If you have good stats or are certain you have room for it, go for it though.

Strategy

Not too much to say. Do bear in mind that you absolutely do not have to cast Darkness at the start of every combat, also - you could just go in instead, and often the best option will be not spend ki on things like this and instead just try and stun them, or just use all the ki on Flurry of Blows, or etc.

Feasibility

Completely RAW, not dubious at all; not insanely powerful either, so it's reasonable to actually play. However, the standard Darkness-build disclaimer applies: the DM may get tired of the gimmick and the rest of the party may rightfully be annoyed at you for blotting out the battlefield, even if you carefully explain the counterintuitive RAW of no one having advantage or disadvantage by default in Darkness.

(Basically, if you and an enemy are both in the Darkness, then you're Blinded, so you can't see to attack, so all attacks you make have disadvantage. But *they're* also Blinded, so they can't see attacks against them, so all attacks made against them have disadvantage. So it cancels out. This is pretty dumb, it should just be disadvantage imo, but this is the joy of 5e RAW.)

A good way to mitigate this is just to leave every turn, so as not to get in the way. However, even your slightly increased movement speed may not be sufficient for this by default. A few ways around this: just teleport out, sacrificing DPR each turn again. Alternatively, if you are a flying race or similar, you could just fly vertically upwards at the end of each turn to remove the sphere of Darkness from your party's view, and then fly back down at the start of each of your next turns.

Or just don't cast Darkness, of course.

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#dnd 5e #d&d 5e #dungeons and dragons #optimisation #builds #shadow monk #RAW

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index

mission statement

fun facts/bad RAW:

you can grapple gelatinous cubes

immovable object abuse

echo knight can play from home

almost everyone gets cover from lightning bolt

giant barbarian teleporto-throw

you can see into hunger of hadar

animate dead has many issues

you can't actually disintegrate wall of force

one way to keep rage going

how to bully a beholder (or maybe not)

most spells can't damage objects

builds:

shadow monk anti-spellcaster build

misc:

why silvery barbs is broken

#dnd 5e #d&d 5e #dungeons and dragons #fifth edition #optimisation #builds #RAW #fun facts

[fiftheditionflipkicks]

mission statement

Goal: babble about 5e. I will point out and analyse funny and/or interesting RAW builds, facts and strats in D&D Fifth Edition, occasionally with the aid of the worst MS Paint art known to mankind.

A large fraction of this stuff will be things that are silly; strange RAW interactions that lead to unexpected and nonsenical results. Note that I understand that DMs can and should overrule things that are absurd and/or broken in their games.

Basically, think of the category of chess puzzle positions in chess that are unlikely or nigh-impossible to come up in actual games, but are in some way quirky or visually appealing or interestingly unusual in some way; theoretical exercises, done for the hell of it. Think Tim Krabbe's site. This is all just for fun! I will try to remember to explicitly say how plausible or reasonable any given build or fact is to actually use in a real game.

Other than that, expect general optimisation talk, with the possibility of multiple Numbers. I have some IMO really interesting builds and strategies to share which are as a bonus actually sane; some of which are not at all common knowledge or just haven't been explored in detail that I know of. Here's a link to my index of all my posts.

#dnd #dungeons and dragons #fifth edition #dnd 5e #d&d 5e #optimisation #builds #RAW