A 5e fighter gets another feature called “action surge” which let’s them perform another full attack action once per short rest. This means that each time they get another attack, their damage potential for a single round of combat goes up by two attacks. This makes them about the best focus-damage Nova builds.
Well, outside of conjure animals and paladins because WotC fucked up hard with them (but that is getting fixed in the 2024 revision).
And so does the Dance Bard. Inspiring Movement does not trigger attacks of opportunity, so if an enemy ends next to one of your ally, you can move up to 15ft (halve movement) away from nearby opponents without getting attack. Your ally can then move up to 60ft (regardless of their own movement limitations) in response. It’s a bit clunky, but something that you can trigger relatively regularly.
This doesn’t actually get YOU out of danger tho, it depends on another ally being in danger, and only after a creature was able to use its action. The ability clearly wants you to use it to swap with an ally who is in danger, and swat the offending creature. Most other monks gets to somewhat trivially prevent attacks of opportunity on their own turn, by shoving enemies away (Elements & Hand) and using their higher movement to get out of their movement range, or the ability to cover themselves with darkness to prevent enemies from being able to attack (Shadow). As a result, they can go in, attack, and move away to safety. Bards have to stand there to take it until an enemy triggers their Inspiring Movement, and they don’t have higher movement speed of a Monk.
Level 5 - Bard can spend their spell slots to use Bardic Inspiration once per turn. This means a bard can get up 2 back per round from Font. (burn a spell slot on your turn to use a bardic inspiration, then on another player or opponent’s turn, burn another to gain a new one once you have used your prior).
That’s a good point! I didn’t clock that, mostly because I only built the Bard up to level 4 and I was looking over the subclass more than the main class. That would be a good exchange in the right situation. Cheers!
Okay but compare that to 3/4 monks, who get to attack an enemy on their turn, and either push them far away at the end of their attacks or disengage for free, and then use their +15 feet of movement to position themselves further away, all before an enemy creature gets to have its turn. A well played elements monk can easily outage and kite enemies without ever putting themselves into attack range as well. A shadow monk can use darkness’s full obscurement to simply walk away, or teleport far away.
The dance Bard has to get into melee range, then wait for another creature to have its full turn to do all the offensive things it wants to do, before ending its turn next to an ally, then they can move away.
It’s not at all comparable. It’s a good support ability for an ally, not a reliable mobility and disengage tool for the bard.
The Unarmed Strike part of the subclass I think would be more for crowd control than damage. You can knock a bad guy prone thanks to having expertise in Athletics (hopefully they re-word this subclass and Martial Arts so the Shove/Grapple features of unarmed strikes can use DEX instead of STR for DCs in these two instances).
As you’ve pointed out, as written it doesn’t work that way, and you wouldn’t need to increase the damage die to get that effect. If that was the intent of the feature, WotC would put on a ‘push’ rider to the attack IMO.
For AC, you do also get access to either or all of Shield, Mage Armor, and Shield of Faith making you hard to hit even with a slightly lower DEX to focus on CHA first. The Monk through magic initiate or multiclass could get the same but not as easily as the Bard.
Unfortunately Mage Armor would overwrite the unarmored defense feature. Shield is the only thing that makes this class possibly have decent AC, but I am hoping and praying that it gets the nerf-stick in an upcoming UA.
But concentration spells should be avoided, unless you are putting it on a frontliner that has solid means of focusing all attack rolls onto themselves. Concentration is such a valuable resource that you can’t spend it on yourself to protect just yourself IMO.
…Booming Blade…
Booming Blade and Green Flame Blade aren’t on the spell lists for this playtest tho, which greatly reduce the capability of fullcasters’ to spellblade it up.
But in general I see this Bard as you’re depicting it, except as a support first and foremost that does not make proactive use of its unarmed attack. Because there isn’t enough incentive to put yourself into danger unless you want to save on spell slots but still deal damage.
Truly what it would need to do is trigger when a creature moves within 5 ft of you or an ally.
The creatures will still melee attack prior to your reaction as is. It isn’t avoidance of the initial attack, as monks can currently perform. It’s only able to let you and an ally potentially avoid an attack of opportunity on your own turns.
Correct. 18 is good AC at level 1, which martials can achieve by using a shield.
I absolutely think that shield (spell) should be nerfed, by the way. I agree that going arcane spell list is the only way to be a frontliner with this subclass at all as is. But that is committing your reaction to AC rather than inspired movement.
You’re being rather belligerent for someone who is gliding over the fact that the highest resting AC you can get at level 1 is 18, using standard character creation rules.
Well it’s not that 16 is awful on its own. It’s awful when there aren’t any mechanisms to get out of melee without catching attacks of opportunity, and your kit wants you to be in melee.
However I have fixed one of the problems with this subclass! There’s an edit in the main post now as well attesting to this, but with Tavern Brawler, this subclass gets to swat people away from themselves all the dang time. Also, going in on Speedster at level 4 allows a dex focused Dancing Bard have that extra mobility that monks get for free, and helps them play keep-away from baddies.
The playtest itself starts in about 2 hours, and I’m quite excited to see what the player thinks… They couldn’t be bothered to do any of the character building with UA material, unfortunately.
Resistance and immunity to non magical B/P/S is kind of annoying to run. At a certain higer level it never matters since all characters will have at least one magic weapon and at lower levels no one will have it.
Well here's the weird thing, it does matter because all creatures with resistance to BSP are rated at having 2x the Effective HP of creatures that don't have it, in terms of CR calculation. So every time you pulled out a monster with resistance to BSP and it got trounced by the party who were kitted out to ignore that defense makes perfect sense. The CR system doesn't account for the fact that everyone is ignoring it.
I want to really give this a more thorough shot, by continuing my playtest and not giving anyone any magic items. I want to see how well CR performs with nothing but the baseline class features.
Actually someone on the discord pointed something out that changed my position on this: There is language in the DMG about raising or lowering fight difficulties by full categories if resistance is or is not present.
I am aware of this language, it includes a lot of other general guidance as well, such as tactical advantages and damage being sustained each round by one side but not the other (it's actually a great way to alter difficulty on the fly without fudging!).
If we just keep that rule of thumb in mind, we can craft deadly encounters, and ratchet them down to 'hard' when the players are able to circumvent the damage resistances. If CR remains as useful as it has for me in the UA playtest, that might be enough to have dramatic and fulfilling combats.
[5e] Astral Elf or Eladrin would be perfect to have all the teleportation the Ciri does, as their Fey Step or Astral Step will allow a lot of trivial, non-spellcasting 30 foot teleportations. And bonus: Ciri is part elf!
Additionally Relentless Hex will allow the character to teleport directly to their hexed opponent.
Medium armor is there to represent aesthetics as well. Additionally, Invocations can be learned for Planeshift, teleport, and other flavorful selections to represent Ciri's ability to traverse different worlds entirely. Additionally, turn by turn a hexblade can get by without using magical blasts, just using their sword and various things that boost the damage output.
And while the OneD&D UA for Warlock doesn't have the hexblade class yet, I feel like it would more easily represent Ciri's casual use of magic as well as the depths of magical ability she can sometimes call on.
So Monk is the one class we didn't get a prior UA for, which means all the changes are totally new. I'm still wrapping my head around it. Martial Arts die increase: good. Martial Arts die not affecting weapons: bad. Step of the Wind buff: good. Stunning Strike nerf: bad but reasonable?...
I think what you're largely missing is how the damage ceiling has come down due to the removal of many methods that optimizers would use to stack a lot of damage into a single turn.
Given that, the lack of damage increase is either fine, or only slightly sub-par.
I never really like the idea of using two stat bonuses calculating your entire AC in 5e. It’s a holdover from earlier editions, when getting stat boosts through stacking bonuses from magic items, spells, and potions would allow for very high scaling.
There’s a clear direction from all the rewritten subclasses, in that each one contains a method of either pushing away your target when you hit them in a variety of ways, or providing clear ways of disengaging from melee. Maybe this should just be placed in the base class, that 1/turn any Monk gets to push a target away that is struck with an unarmed attack, like the ‘Shove’ feature of the Tavern Brawler feat? Or maybe just giving Monk the ‘shove’ weapon mastery to all unarmed attacks, and the Monk gets to add other specific masteries as they level up?
I told people that this would happen! But now we just have a precious small amount of time to SPECULATE as to how extensive the revision of the spells in the next UA....
Treantmonk: "One D&D Rogue: Yes, it's fantastic" (www.youtube.com)
5e fighters be like (i.postimg.cc)
Is the Dance Bard all that good?
As always, I’ve crossposted this over to the OneD&D subreddit in the link below. Feel free to upvote there to raise visibility....
18+ Kotaku Cringe, Bears, and Bedrooms (idk how 2 do interesting titles please help me) (ttrpg.network)
Monk and Rogue playtest report - 1st blush
This post is crossposted to /r/onednd here . Please feel free to upvote it there for higher visibility....
On System changes and balance changes
This discussion has been linked on the r/OneDND subreddit. Please feel free to upvote it there for more visibility over here....
[5e][PF2e] How would you build Ciri? (No spoilers)
(In the absense of a WhatWouldYouBuild type of community, I figure 3d6 is the closest place here for such things, but correct me if I’m wrong.)...
Best use you've seen of the Cthulhu Mythos Skill?
I asked this post once in another site that shall not be named, and it had a lot of fun answers, so I'll throw it out here....
How does Conjure Animals work? IDK let's find out together! (ttrpg.network)
What do we think of the new Monk?
So Monk is the one class we didn't get a prior UA for, which means all the changes are totally new. I'm still wrapping my head around it. Martial Arts die increase: good. Martial Arts die not affecting weapons: bad. Step of the Wind buff: good. Stunning Strike nerf: bad but reasonable?...
UA Playtest 6 - REVISED SPELLS ARE LANDING!
I told people that this would happen! But now we just have a precious small amount of time to SPECULATE as to how extensive the revision of the spells in the next UA....
The Origin of Grognard (youtu.be)
A brief history of the creation of D&D, and the origin of Grognard.