The following post is a general guide on how to break 5E at least in terms of combat. Note I make the following assumptions.
You have around 2 short rests per day (if you even need them my PC often take 1).
You have 6-8 encounters per day (in theory)
You have a variety of encounters. Assume 1/3rd ranged, 1/3rd melee and 1/3rd a mixture. Sometime you will also be dealing with magical attacks. The ratios may vary a bit but in terms of DPR calculations in a real game you can’t count on a 10’10 room with a low AC opponent.
In general if I had a 4 person party I would build 2 melee PCs, 1 hybrid and 1 ranged PC. A 5 person group I would go with 2 melee, 1 hybrid and 2 ranged perhaps subbing in 1 more hybrid character depending on the build. By hybrid I mean something like a Rogue or tempest cleric that can go melee or ranged without a massive penalty.
Not I am mostly a permanent DM and most of the following tricks have been tried, the players however have not really stacked them all together to build an uber party. Note I do note advocate playing this way but if you like powerful PCs here you go. Or here are some things to avoid or say no to. Here are some of the abusable things to do in the game.
Negating Resource Depletion
Negating resource attrition. 5E assumes a certain amount of resources used such as spells, hit points etc. You can get around this in several ways. One way would be to design a party around the short rest mechanic. For example a life cleric, lore bard, fighter and a fighter/baldelock would be one way of doing this. The other way is to get around the expectations of the game. This means using concentration spells and getting around the hit point attrition the game assumes. At a basic level the resilient (constitution), warcaster and healer feats enable this. I would also rate those feats as the best 3 feats in the game. For example instead of casting scorching ray (and odds are 1 ray will miss anyway) cast flaming sphere instead. Instead of casting guiding bolt cast bless. The healer feat at low levels also heals better than a dedicated life cleric and even in the mid levels is in effect an extra 4th or 5th level healing spell that recharges on short rests.
A more advanced way of doing this abusing the life clerics disciple of life ability to grant extra hit points with spells that heal or restore hit points. The Cleric1/land Druid XYZ or Life Cleric 1, Lore Bard6+ is the prime example of this where good berry heals 40 hit ponts vs 1d8+ wisdom modifier for a cure spell. The Rogue: Thief 3+with the healer kit is another way of doing this with bonus action healing and the ability to grant 1 hit point to anyone with 0 hit points only limited by the amount of healing kits available. The Inspiring Leader feat and other sources of temporary hit point stacking also enable this.
Uber Damage.
There are a few things in 5E that enable a lot of damage or DPS. I’m not really a massive fan of this as I think there are better things one can do in 5E but there you have it. The basic combo of this is the sharpshooter feat and the great weapon master feat. Both allow you to deal +10 damage per attack at a -5 penalty. You just need to find a way to offset that penalty. The archery combat style does this along with bless and getting advantage. The easiest way to get advantage is generally of spells such as Faerie Fire, Hold Person/Monster, Greater Invisibility and Foresight. Certain class features such as the Avenger Paladin can also get advantage.
A surprising source of advantage is the shield master feat. You can use this feat and an athletics check as a bonus action to attempt to knock people prone. It helps if you can get advantage or expertise on this roll. Level 7 Champion fighters get advantage along with the enhance ability strength spell while Bards and Rogues get expertise in a skill which should be athletics. The Enlarge spell also lets you make attempts to knock over huge beings. Once prone you get advantage to hit them. Hex can also be used as it grants disadvantage to an enemies strength or dexterity checks. If they are big and/or where heavy/medium armor pick strength if they are in light armor pick dexterity with your hex spell. Get advantage and disadvantage and you are looking at knocking giants prone somewhat reliably.
The other source of big damage in this game is exploiting the spell eldritch blast and the warlock class. A Warlock 2/Sorcerer XYZ is a great and basic build just remember to start as sorcerer to get proficiency in con saves and then you can do things like quicken eldritch blasts for cheap as it is a cantrip and you can use your sorcerer spell slots to cast more hexes. Agonizing blast+quicken= win and your warlock spell slots(read hex) refresh after a short rest as well and you can sacrifice your higherlevel spell slots to get more metamagic points to quicken more eldritch blasts. You deal more damage than a fighter than said fighter using action surge unless said fighter is getting an absurd amount of short rests per day.
Getting Around the Concentration Mechanic
The designers of 5E apparently hate spell casters and nerfed them hard by putting concentration on spells such as dancing lights and dark vision. This was to presumably shut down spell combos. They also conveniently made NPCs very vulnerable to save or suck/die type spells with the exception of legendary creatures. The way to get around this is to put more primary spell caster in your group perhaps even 100% although you might want a single beatstick/tank type PC. Skillmonkies like the Rogue can be replaced with Bards and fighters can be replaced with bladelocks (fighter 1, bladelock XYZ). With 6-8 encounters per day each spell caster only needs to cast maybe 2 encounter defining spells per day and you can do this from level 1. An encounter defining spell might be something as simple as bless or faerie fire and works its way up to things like hypnotic pattern, fireball, twinned greater invisibilities and more. This also spreads the workload around and as long as you have decent DPS as well there is no real downside.
The Fighter Splash Level.
The fighter is a seriously front loaded class for a 1 level dip. And by dip I mean start as fighter and MC into what class you actually want. 1 level gives you.
Proficiency in con and strength saves which are the best 2 saves one can get out of the classes.
Proficiency in heavy armor.
A combat style.
Second wind (not worth that much fast but hey it’s a freebie).
The main things you are after is heavy armor proficiency and the con save proficiency. This is really good for gish PCs in light or medium armor and it also reduces multiple ability dependency (MAD). Under the default array you can really only have 3 good stats so strength, con and spellcasting stat matter and the fighter dip level fixes that. This turns the bladelock form a weak class to an outright better fighter as you get to use eldritch blasts which combined with the warcaster feat does some very good things for the bladelock. It also works well for death and war clerics, valor bards, etc. The fiend pact blade lock also gets to feed off temporary hit points and will end up with hex, charisma to melee damage and the ability to use eldritch blast at range so you more or less out damage the fighter, out tank the fighter, and don’t suck at range. You might even cast a fireball on occasion.
Negating Damage
Another way of braking the attrition based model 5E expects is to not take any damage in the 1st place. At the most basic level this is using things like temporary hit points, a high AC and things like a Paladins aura ability granting a huge bonus to saving throws to negate or reduce unpleasant effects. The inspiring leader feat would be another source of temporary hit points.
Taking it to the next level though there are a few classes which have great synergy at interfering with the NPCs ability to inflict damage. This is class abilities such as the light clerics flare ability, a Bards inspiration dice or cutting words, the diviners portend ability and the Abjurers warding ability. A party consisting of a Lore Bard, Light Cleric, a Paladin (Oath of the Ancients) and whatever else will cover most of the major bases. A 5 person party could add a bladelock and abjurer wizard. Using the standard encounter guidelines it is unlikely the DM will be able to deal with this party
Classes To Break the Game With.
Multiclass Fighters (single level only)
Bards (lore and valor)
Clerics (life, light in particular)
Sorcerers (wildmages not so much)
Wizards (transmuters, diviners, abjurers, necromancers if you want to spam undead)
Paladins (Avenger, Oath of the Ancients)
Multiclass Warlocks
Classes to avoid.
Barbarians (its just damage)
Most single classed fighters (shield bash champion if you have GWM types in the party)
Rangers (exception hunter archers)
Monks (all of them)
Rogues (exception thief with healer feat)
Warlocks (single classed, treat as an archer though not a spellcaster and they’re OK)
Wizards (invokers it is just damage)
I read this, and think of the scene where Jerry Maguire has delivered his manifesto to each inbox expecting the entire company to see the error of their ways and recognize his brilliance.
That was indeed a lot of typing. I'm not really sure what the point is.
Back in 3.5 days with Living Greyhawk we had a group of people we called "the cheese weasels". They figured out how to bend every rule and synergize their group and their party to the nth degree. They stomped on every mod people threw at them.
Then 4E came along. You know what? The same thing happened.
I've kind of drifted away from organized play, but if the group is still together, I'm sure they're still pulling the same old stuff.
Any RPG can be "broken". If the entire group has fun doing it, there's not an issue. If you hit a group like that you either accept their going to stomp on your encounters or you adjust your DMing. Don't give them short rests. Throw multiple wave. Give monsters templates so that the bad guys explode when they die. Get creative and have fun.
Encounters exist to be stomped on by players. That's the whole point.
You know, the ones who can't, won't, or don't take in to account the players/characters they're actually DMing for.
Yeah, this seems less like "breaking" 5e and more like putting forward a list of what you consider potent class combos. Which is fine, I guess, if that's what smokes your pork.
I guess your builds could be a problem in organized play, which really isn't fun or challenging anyway. But if a DM creates his own adventures and encounters those builds are no big deal, the DM will just create more powerful encounters. BFD. And a smart DM would do that to challenge and make the game fun for the players. It's not like I haven't seen those builds over and over and over again in the past year.
I do find this post an interesting read. I'm wanting to build a fighter/arcane caster multiclass, mainly for nostalgic purposes (my first ever character from 30 years ago is a fighter/magic-user). I've always been partial to multiclass builds. I'm currently playing a fighter (battlemaster). I'm at level 3 right now and plan to dip into sorcerer for probably 3 levels for now. The sorcerer certainly is a nice candidate with its metamagic ability.
Zardnaar wrote:
arnwolf666 wrote:
FallingIcicle wrote:
arnwolf666 wrote:
CCS wrote:
Elfcrusher wrote:
Bluenose wrote:
OoftaMeg wrote:
I have a question.
Spells/abilities/etc... with like effects don't stack, correct? So if a spell grants a bonus to attack, and a ring grants a bonus to attack, it just takes whatever gives the higher bonus, not combining them, correct?
Dwarfslayer wrote:
People, I know I’m not into that game, but Zardnaar seems pretty convincing, and the arguments against this work are mainly the same ones that were used to defend 3,X.
I always defend not only power-gamers, but everyone who essentially knows how to break a supposedly decent system. Now it’s just a guy you don’t know in the internet. Tomorrow even Uzbekistan knows about that and you have 5 power-gamers with broken builds knocking on your DM-door.
I didn’t pass the whole edition-war thing so that people would use the same argument all over again, thank you.
cassi_brazuca wrote:
CCS wrote:
I'm a big fan of Keith Baker's warforged hack even over the Unearthed Arcana take. But either of those two are preferable to that wack wiki version you linked.
None of what Z lists are broken in fact my group has almost the same classes + feats he lists as broken and I am kicking their buttocks as DM, doing a straight HoTDQ with almost no modifications. So I don't know what is broken about it. Maybe HoTDQ is just horribly unbalanced but that just shows how easy it is to augment a game so that the classes doesn't break the game.
gignere wrote:
I've found 5e to be far less "breakable" than previous editions. Nothing I see in the OP is all that red flag worthy really. Are some of them strong combos and potent synergies? Sure. Not all of them even though. But broken? Nah. Not even close. Not one that I see.
What's the definition of 'broken' being used?
I've played games like rifts, where a vagabond, a scientist, a guy with a massive railgun on his power armour and young dragon get together.
You do not know broken.
Right, that's the snag: using "broken" in the terminology. That implies that gameplay breaks down due to how damaging a particular ability or rule or whatever is as it interacts with the system. There are always going to be clearly superior and clearly inferior builds, various levels of competence across various pillars of the game, and suboptimal choices that speak more to flavor than mechanics. These do not a broken game make. Unless your definition of broken is everyone must be equal or painfully close to equal (which runs the very real risk of hyper-focusing on one minority of the target audience).
I need to go hug my players. We have an agreement that if anyone spots "cheese" or an abusive way to use the rules that detracts from the high fantasy feel or spirit of the game, they'll voluntarily avoid it. While the word "dip" isn't a designated curse word, it has a negative connotation.
I'll give a thumbs up to the exercise, though, kidding aside. Creative engagements help a DM understand the nuances of classes and rules. What you do with it from that point is up to your playstyle.
Hey, remember the last time Zardnaar posted this exact same thread?
And I said man, he sure posts this same terrible thread often?
And somone got all defensive and said nah man, he doesn't post the same thing over and over?
LordCorwin wrote:
danyc wrote:
there should be a sign don't feed ....
Zardnaar wrote:
any good combination is bound to be met with resistance. The greater the combination, the greater the resistance.
People only tend to try to find flaws with things they think are imbalanced. Very few people try to find flaws with things they think fit, even if the mechanics are questionable (curious case of magic missle for instance)
Z. seems to be expressing top low level number crunchie characters. but this is only as valid as people are comfortable with the way those rules are interpreted.
in the past, I've had a lot of "broken" rules discussions. I think I mentioned how to reliably do 20d6 damage at level 1. The wording though is very tricky. I think I showed how to get over 50 attacks per round. Easier said than done, but doable. Some people are still debating the vicarious infinite wish theories - even i tried to lock it down a bit and ran into problems. I was also skeptical of the 500 damage in one round combo someone showed me, but ended up figuring out a way to do even more damage using a similar pattern. I think i was averaging 600 or 900 when I was done, but i still didn't like it. My most recent experiment is getting a Wizard to Tank with more hp than a Barbarian. I might be satisfied if i can get them to have more HP than a Dragon, but I haven't gotten that far.
Pushing limits is important, because not every DM is a kindly face holding a cornucopia. Especially at old school convention style games, where the motto is 'bring it'.
but i think Z. misses the point - the best anything is what everyone lets you get away with. So the best combination is always political. It's nothing more than a logical fallacy. Just look at the good berry example. That's appeal to authority. I've seen plenty cases where people appeal to popularity. Sometimes the two clash - again, the good berry and delay action rulings.
Brimleydower wrote:
Criticizing him as a min-maxer doesn't even explain the problem, though, because as min-maxing goes, he's not actually doing anything like what you describe above. This isn't 3e and he's not talking about sarukh or thought bottles (or, in 5e terms, the very limited number of equally broken things, like simulacrum). He's also bad at it. Go look at some of his earlier posts for the tale of the Migthy Shield Mastery Valor Bard for an example.
Zardnaar's world is basically one where he discovers a new mechanic or combination in each game as someone uses it, obsesses about it being the most broken thing ever, posts about it here, and then repeats the cycle. Some of these are actually no more than observations of the most basic mechanics; see above how he explains to us lesser folk the amazing fact that flaming sphere might outdamage scorching ray in the long term. Truly astonishing, his level of mastery of the game.
The truly 'broken' among these items get added to an ever-growing list, and eventually we'll reach the point where he declares literally everything broken. Look at his list of classes at the end. If you read carefully, including all his exceptions, the only 'not broken' classes are Barbarians and Monks (and I guess he's never seen a Monk stunlock a BBEG). Broken feats now include healer, inspiring leader, resilient, warcaster, sharpshooter, great weapon master, shield mastery and (not in this post but he's talked about them enough) crossbow expert & polearm master. That's already about a quarter of the feats that even exist in the game, and if you assume he's discounting all 'RP' focused feats and only looking at combat ones, it's an even higher percentage. Broken spells include everything from concentration buffs to fireball to save or suck to out of combat healing.
When nearly everything is broken, all I can say is... reasonable game balance achieved?
danyc wrote:
This will be the Sixth time Zard has created a thread about this...
....and he has become exceedingly efficient at it.
Zardnaar wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
Zardnaar wrote:
zards advice is reasonable, and each of his posts do add and refine from his previous.
he just needs to tone down the retoric.
Elfcrusher wrote:
Ramzour wrote:
Breaking news! Foresight BREAKS 5e!
Film at 11.
(Speaking of which: Portent is freaking awesome.)
Ramzour wrote:
Ooh, I just thought of a new way to "break" 5e. Actually, I was about to start a thread about "Barbarian + Wizard Synergy" but then decided it would be funnier to put it here.
Anyway:
- 3rd Level Half-Orc Berserker (17 Strength) with Greataxe
- 3rd Level Diviner. Details irrelevant.
- Hold Person (with auto-fail from Portent)
- Barbarian does 6d12 + 10 (regular attack plus bonus action attack, each auto-critting for 3d12 + 5).
That's an average of 55 DPR, max 80. Somewhat situationally, of course. Not counting whatever the Wizard adds in subsequent rounds.
If the Diviner has two low Portent rolls to use that would be a dead CR: 12 Archmage in two rounds with no chance to use his Advantage on saving throws versus magic. 4,200XP each... "DING!"
The only "alignment of stars" needed is that the Diviner needs two rolls below his own Saving Throw (pretty likely) the DM throws a solo Archmage at two 3rd levels (pretty unlikely) and the Archmage loses initiative (decent chance). But if the stars do align, the 3rd levels will win most of the time with no lucky rolls needed. (The only thing that could go wrong is really unlucky attack rolls, or really bad damage rolls)
Clearly 5e is totally broken.
No, not really. But I had fun thinking about what those two characters could kill.
Elfcrusher, you forgot about that Archmage needing to not have counterspell (yes, I get that you are just playing around, I'm joining in, not trying to take you seriously).
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Ok, fair enough. I was just looking for the highest CR humanoid in the MM. 2nd place was Githyanki Knight at CR 8, which is also an easy kill.
Still, it's pretty sick DPR for two 3rd levels.
Elfcrusher wrote:
danyc wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Elfcrusher wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
AaronOfBarbaria wrote:
Just remember: Nothing is truly broken til you cast Bless on it.
Elfcrusher wrote:
Clutchbone wrote:
I think he was saying that the scenario I proposed doesn't work (or has a much lower chance of working) if the wizard doesn't get at least one roll of 12 or lower. I acknolwedge that in the description.
Still, if you ran this scenario 100 times, the 3rd level Wizard and Barbarian would do well over 100 points of damage in two rounds in many, many instances. Even in those cases where he had two high rolls for portent there's a chance the target would fail his saving throw.
Just another indication of how completely broken 5e is. (<-- sarcasm)
Elfcrusher wrote:
The cool thing is that at higher levels, as the Wizard's spell DC gets higher, the odds of getting those two (and eventually 3!) rolls increases. E.g. by level 8 the DC should be 16.