How to Build the Strongest Melee Damage Dealers in D&D 5e 

"It'd be fun to have a party with a barbarian, a fighter, and a paladin all together". All three of these guys completely buffed out; I'm picturing a Jojo-style group glamor shot.

Fighter: What's the plan, guys? Barbarian: hit it till it dies! Paladin: alright, let me get more dice.

A fighter, a paladin and a barbarian walked into the dungeon. The monsters ran out.

Barbarian : LEEEEEEROOOOOOOY JEEEEEENKIIINSSS!!!!!!!! Fighter : Did he just run in there? Paladin : Yep, he did. Lets follow.

Barbarian: *Rolls a measly 1d4 for damage.* DM: Alright, how much damage did you do? Barbarian: 19. DM: ...Sounds about right.

Great job I really like how you gave some example build to lvl 8 instead of 20 like other people

Paladin's dumping everything into single big hits are best friends with the Grave Cleric who can make the target vulnerable to all the attacks damage. Path to the Grave indeed

One of my players is a Dragonborn barbarian. His name is Dylan, because he "spits hot fire"

"Don't let the numbers get in the way of playing a character that's you are going to love," except Ranger.

DM: Hi, welcome to dying school. *Player makes Zealot Barbarian.* DM: Aaaaand you failed.

I looked at that Dwarven Forge kickstarter, they have $682,554 out of a goal of $100,000. Damn.

Barbarian: Rollo from Vikings, "attack attack attack. That is all he ever says" Fighter: John Wick, "he killed three men, with a f***ing pencil" Paladin: Jules Winnfield, "This was divine intervention. Do you know what divine intervention is?"

Grog in Critical Role is a great example of a strong man character, both the benefits of being a tank & the negatives of being vulnerable to many mind attacks -

3:45 Like That minotaur in Narnia. *Double hits chest* "The real hero"

I have a fighter with 20 strength. We lost our weapons and thrown in a jail. We broke out and I managed to suplex an enemy breaking their neck (nat 20) made me excited to fight more.

As someone who has never, but always wanted to play DnD, you guys do a hell of a job for the community. Your videos are fun, informative and make people like myself itch like a crack fiend to find a group. Keep up the good shit.

Champion also tends to crit a lot when rolling with advantage. Druid throws faerie fire, and the champion will wreck stuff.

We had a one shot at level 15 and a group including one fighter, barbarian, and paladin. The difference was that the fighter was a champion using a +2 great sword, paladin was vengeance with a +3 maul, and the barbarian was totem bear using a +2 maul. In one round we dealt a total of 367 damage to a single ancient black dragon (it had double max HP) and it felt amazing. Dont remember if we could do much more than that but I'm sure it was close to max damage.

I played a zealot barbarian that took the tavern brawler feat. My damage output was perfectly fine, and it was fun punching, wrestling, and smacking people with objects to death.

*Demons:* Yeeeeessss *Paladin:* YEEEEEESSS! *Demons:* NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

it does matter to a barbarian if the party get you advantage, albeit in a different manner : you can stop reckless attacking wich means ennemies stop getting adventage to hit you

Monty: "The fact that the barbarian is halving all that damage is difficult to quantify" Me: "It's basically the same as if they had double hit points, especially if they're bear totem"

i just want to point out...that is a dope jigglypuff hat

Ranger: "am i a joke to you" yes

Mechanically, the PAM+GWM Zealot is a no-shitter. I actually find the simple mechanics liberating though, as everyone know exactly what I'm going to do every round in combat. That frees me to roleplay is up with goofy antics and cheesy action-hero one-liners.

I recently made a strength-based tortle kensei monk for a one-shot and I'm really starting to think that tortles should almost be a no-brainer pick for barbarians. They gain a +2 to strength and +1 to wisdom while having an innate AC of 17 due to their shell's natural armor. To me, a high-AC barbarian just sounds like a nightmare for any physical fight. Plus, you could always channel your inner Raph from Ninja Turtles for roleplay.

For absurd melee damage you merely need to look at Grog's one turn of combat in "The Search For Grog". Two consecutive Natural 20s led to him dishing out abound 151 damage in a single round, more or less one-shotting the Corrupted Empyrean that the party was fighting. That is why Barbarians can be damn scary. And add on to that the fact that Grog was easily one of the hardest members of the party to actually take down, and Grog is perhaps the scariest member of Vox Machina if he ever manages to get into melee range.

"Don't let the numbers get in the way of playing a character you're going to love" is a wonderful thing to keep in mind.

Hey, Thor is educated, his battle charisma is just too high to compete

Yeah just a great weapon master fighter with a great sword - 8d6 damage at level 20 - and 16d6 with action surge.

Please do a video like this for Building strong ranged fighters :)

Why use Battlemaster to crunch numbers? The way you ran scenario it adds nothing. Eldritch Knight can get advantage with a familiar, Champion crits more, Samurai gets advantage with Fighting Spirit

Guys, I'm always so pumped when I see your new video!!!

I play a Barbarian and I love her. She’s one of my top favourite characters so far. Lol

I'm playing an oath of conquest Palladian and that's a show stoper

The most important thing to me about character optimization is that I really need to know what’s possible. If it fits my concept I want to use it and I want to selectively choose a “lesser” path only when the RP/concept demands it. But I don’t want to waste who knows how many hours building an ineffective party member. Thank you so much for these guides.

From my experience of playing a barbarian, the 4 times of rages you have at level 8 is decent, but you can't rely to have them for every combat in a dungeon / hostile area. Worst part is that it is actually relatively easy to drop off if you try to activate it before you have taken any damage in combat / be able to attack on the same turn. And boy does it suck to be a barbarian when you aren't raging :D You can still recklessly attack but at that point you are getting toasted really hard if doing so. With the mentioned build you can't even take a turn to dodge to wait for a heal or try to get someone else take some of the heat because that's when the rage drops and you are again using BA to get it up. I'm playing a battlerager and I have found it to be extra good to be able to attack with bonus action without taking the attack action so the rage can keep going. Ending this rant, but just wanted to raise some awareness that the rages are also a limited resource.

I was playing a high level game, where the players were after items with "god power." My character was one of the ones who ended up getting one of these items To get the item, i had to go through a skill challenge. With an 18 str barbarian, (and a few buffs from my party) i had to pull not only my party, but a boulder they were standing on in a race against the keeper of the item. As part of the Skill Challenge, we came up to a wall. GM asks: How do you get over it. I go: I'm going through it. GM: How? Me: I grab the chain tethering me to the boulder, and i hurl it at the wall without breaking stride. We rolled it out, the party making dex saves all around to stay on, and I busted through the wall, shortly after gaining my God Item. Once we had these God Items, we were instructed to make a level 20 version of our characters (in a level comp we intended to follow) I took Eagle Totem Barbarian 10, Champion Fighter 3, Kensei Monk 7 I was a dual wielder as well. Come the final boss fight vs a guy who had like 3 or 4 of these God Items. Fight starts, I rage, activate my God Item (turns me into a Glabrezu while keeping my class abilities) and charge the 20 feet to him with my stupidly high movement speed. I grapple him and succeed easily. GM tries to move to the next person and I tell him I still have the rest of my movement and my bonus action. I continue running with him in my hand, dragging him along the ground, using my eagle totem to dash. GM tells me there's a wall before the end of my movement. I slam him into the wall and change direction to use the rest of my movement dragging him along the wall. This dealt something like 70ish damage total. On his turn he shapeshifts to one of his God Forms and translocates 40 ft into the air and starts casting spells. When my turn came back around, I was allowed to leap into the air, vaulting off some nearby terrain, and grab him by the wings with another grapple. Another 60 or so damage. On the way down I slammed him into the ground with all my strength on impact. I took no fall damage due to my monk levels. He translocates and changes his form again next round (this time on the ground). I charge him and use the Gore Attack of the Glabrezu. Natural 19, a crit from my fighter levels. With Brutal Critical, I was rolling 21d10. 130 damage and change. I use my second attack and flurry. Another 80 damage or so. The rest of the party downed him before he got another turn with me dealing about 1/3 of the total damage dealt to the boss. I felt super powerful after that combat, though because of the circumstances of the campaign my level was reduced to 10 after that, and i sadly had to leave that group due to a move across the US after that session. Still miss that group.

You didn’t talk about the ability to re roll 1s and 2s for fighter and paladin I played a war cleric 1 fighter 4 str 18 with great weapon fighter so for early levels re rolling the 2d6 helps a lot

Before i watch this episode, during 2019 i wrote a quite long essay on how to maximize the damage over an infinite number of rounds for a melee character in dungeons and dragons 5e. What i ended up with was that three levels into fighter (champion) to then go 17 levels into arcane tricster (for the hand advantage) was what would deal most damage. according to my calculations the average damage of this build was 44.9 damage with a standard deviation of 15.7. the "large" deviation is caused by critical hits bein in the calculation. My calculations also accounted for among other things a lvl 20 barbarian zealot (37.8 dmg, standard deviation of 17.5), and 3 levels of fighter champion and 17 levels of barbarian zealot (42.7 dmg, standard deviation 25.3), lvl 20 fighter champion (36.7 dmg, and std of 12.7), and lvl 20 rouge trickster (43.3 dmg and std of 13.2). My calculations include miss chance, cits, critical miss, class features. It does not account for AC, modifiers (all modifiers are set to 0 unless you are a barbarian and get +4 strength at a certain level), it does neither account for feats or ability score improvements. Since most of the modifiers added by all these things are static modifiers you can simply add the modifier to the damage without changing the standard deviation. edit: if anyone is wondering, yes the calculations are purely mathematical, not a single die was rolled. The spread sheet used an area of 109 368 squares.

My Minotaur Barbarian joined the bar fight by flipping the table, it was fantastic.

Barbarian: *attack many times with a greatsword and deal 40 damages.* Rogue just say “Okay” and deal 50 damages with one small dagger

Oooh this couldn't be timed better. Thanks boys.

During social distancing, I convinced my wife to try DnD in a solo campaign that I'm creating for her. When I asked what she wanted to play she basically said "I want to be small and cute and able to beat the snot out of things while wearing a nice dress". Then she rolled insanely well for stats, so I helped her build a stout halfling barbarian with 18 strength and unarmored AC of 16, two-handing a warhammer. She recently got lvl3 and picked sea storm soul, so now she's basically a tiny Thor. Not the absolute highest damage output, but she's definitely dangerous. I'm having so much fun playing with her!

Is a similar comparison in the cards for spell damage and physical ranged damage?

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but you have just theory crafted Zhang Fei (barbarian) and Guan Yu (fighter) and I love you for it.

I started a one-shot with a Halberd fighter at level 9... he is obscene. If your DM will let you take Tunnel Fighter (from Unearthed Arcana I believe), and you grab the feats Polearm Master, Great Weapon Fighting and Sentinel, then you get opportunity attacks on anyone that enters your 10 foot radius (due to Polearm Master), all of which don't cost your reaction (due to Tunnel Fighter), and each hit sets your enemy's movement to zero (thanks to Sentinel). This means you can get rushed by pretty much any number of weak mobs and just stop them all dead in their tracks, and when your turn comes up you just do your attacks (plus using your bonus action as an attack thanks to Polearm Master, and adding 10 damage to attacks with Great Weapon Fighter) and move back five feet and it all happens again. If you're getting rushed by trash mobs, get ready to roll about 10 attacks in your turn. And finally, if that isn't dirty enough for you, you can take Bugbear as your race and extend your reach an ADDITIONAL five feet.

My favorite melee combatant that I've ever made was a Lizardfolk Path of the Beast Barbarian. I literally fought tooth and nail, and I took a 2 level dip in Rogue to get expertise in athletic to make an insanely reliable grappler. The most fun thing about him was the 40ft movement speed regardless of swimming or climbing so I could really use the terrain to my advantage and be a feral monster on the field.

Currently, I am running my Barbarian in a game. I dipped 3 of his 4 levels into Fighter because I wanted Champion's 19/20 crit range. Now I am going full Barbarian. I played this guy back in Pathfinder and 1 shot a boss... pissed that DM off.

Anytime I think about strength in conjunction with roleplaying games, I'm reminded of the Bardic Broadcast classic "look at the MUSCULARITYYYY"

For the ultimate tank, go with heavy armor master at level 1. 60% of the time, it works every time.

In my current group we have: an aarocokra long death monk, a bugbear frenzy barbarian, a krynn eldritch knight, and a half-elf vengeance paladin(me). The damage we do is pretty insane. Both the players and the dm crit often and roll high. Combat is pretty intense. Double and triple crits are rare, but not unheard of

We had a funny feat of strength in our last one-shot, where I play a Minotaur Barbarian. There was a Giantz Lizard Race going on and our two teams of three players each were sponsored by one of the townsfolk. That meant we needed to be the first ones to cross the Finish line. Each team had a big riding lizard which fit 3 people: 1 "driver" and 2 attackers, which could hinder the other teams. No lizards were allowed to be harmed. Our teams were in front after a while, but the last enemy team was closing in, so I said "win it guys!", jumped in the way of the big lizard and tried to stop it in its tracks! It took a few Athletic checks, but in the end it worked and not only did that lizard's respect for my barbarian's strength rise, I just really like the image of the Minotaur standing in the way, spreading his arms and shout "Come, try to pass me!" and then stopping a gigantic komodo dragon in front of a filled stadium. Too bad it's just a one-shot... I really want to play with that barbarian a bit more ^^

"Didn't Joe start a bar fight by throwing a table at a guy?" Sounds like my sister.

I've been playing dnd for a little under a year. But I find myself delving deeper into the lore and and the opinions of characters and classes and spells from people who have played for years. I really enjoy your videos and I'm watching through them all now. Thank you

You guys aren't talking about "Min/Maxing". You're talking about "Max/Maxing". You're maxing out your damage by maxing out your weaknesses as well.

When they forget Hexblade Pact of the Blade Warlock

Hexblade can also do good Melee damage. Especially with Eldritch Smites, Devil's/Sight + Darkness and Hexblade curse.

Not making a point, just sharing a cool thing that happened: I once was playing a 5th level paladin and our party came about one of the BBEG'S main hench men who was a vampire. It was supposed to be a long battle for all 5 of us, untill i ended up finishing him off in 3 rounds by dealing 80-90 damage per round😀

I think a big draw for the fighter and also the paladin for that matter is fighting style for great weapons. Rerolling on 1s and 2s is a pretty big increase to average damage output.

The campaign that I run started with 3 players as a Fighter, Paladin and Barbarian lol

Holy crap, amazing video! I haven't played very much 5th edition, but after watching this I feel that I know much more. It will certainly help if/when I do build a character. Thank you so much! :)

I have a Copper Dragon Oathbreaker Paladin player character i made today who's a strength based combatant

The Barbarian is the one that shouts, "LEROY JENKINS!!!!" and runs in.

iv been in the barbarian paladin and fighter fight. we got alot of damage.

If you’re using a flame tongue great sword against enemies that are not resistant to fire damage then the penalty for great weapon master hit to get +10 damage drops off around 14/15 AC (or in other words, is almost never worth it)

i play a level 16 goliath (12 berserker barb, 4 champ fighter) in dungeon of the mad mage in adventure league, frozen at 16 until we hit tier 4 floors... with +3 greatsword, great weapon fighting and great weapon master i consistently do about 30 damage a hit +/-... crits in the low-mid 40's with 50+ being possible if i get mostly 6's lol. Last night managed to get the Strength manual to boost my strength to 22... so i have +9 to hit with great weapon master. I prefer greatsword over greataxe for a better average damage over the slightly bigger top end crits. probably the easiest character i've ever had to play but a tonne of fun haha. our party has built around me and i regularly get haste / bless / enlarged and make our DM's life difficult.

Had a party with all three. It got crazy. When we fought single enemies we would just run circles around the poor thing to give each other advantage. Add in a twin spell haste and resources and even the big bads went down easy

I'm glad I watched this video. I am currently building a Protector Aasimar that is going to be a Zealot Barbarian/Devotion Paladin using a Glaive. So I will defendantly be making sure to grab GWM and Polearm Master feats. The idea of the character came from the Angels in Diablo 3.

4:00 "You can be that guy" I'm like I am that guy XD. I'm a Half-Orc Paladin Oath of the Dragon Knight with 25 Str.

Currently playing a Horizon Walker Ranger in a friends campaign, absolutely loving the role-play abilities of it and the damage is pretty decent too. So I was pretty keen to see a one of your many fantastic videos like this one! Keep up the good work dudes!

I play a Dwarf Barbarian named Daniel Devicho (based off Danny Devito) who loves alcohol so much he worships the god Dionysus. He drinks when he enters rage which can give him certain powers while he’s raging and he’s super super fun to play. I also love role playing with him and doing his accent. The personality and backstory comes from a bit of his character in Always Sunny in Philadelphia and in Hercules

I like a hexblade 1-5, paladin 2, whisper bard3 build. Hexblade 1+ means cha is my primary combat stat and spell ability, hexblade 3+ lets me use 2h weapons. All three can access a type of smite that stack. No ASI/Feat buff though ;D

I feel as though the Samurai Fighter was slept on in this video. One of their first abilities gives them three rounds of advantage attacks with only a bonus action, and combined with the temp hp gained it can really help keep your output up and running.

I hope none of my players ever see this video... Great job!

Doesn't raise the average damage, or even the maximum damage, but giving the fighter the Sentinel feat instead of maxing out strength would be a hilarious way to boost damage while preventing melee enemies from reaching the fighter.

I kinda feel like not including the fighters ability’s and using the barbarians will skew the result

God, I wish more people would watch this video! I'm constantly defending Paladins from people yammering on about how "OP" they are. In truth, they have Divine Smite... ONE offensive ability that CAN hit very hard under the right circumstances. The DPR is much lower, yet the misconception that Paladins are some broken class on their damage dealing is hard to shake. It really drives me nuts!!!

FWIW, I used live not too far away from Dwarven Forge HQ and have run into some of those folks every now and then. They've always been really nice and seemed like the kind of people you want to game with.

Step One, Be a Paladin, Step Two, Critfish.

I’m surprised they didn’t look at a high dex rogue with a rapier

I'm going to be in a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign with a zealot barbarian, battlemaster fighter, unspecified paladin (all with two handed weapons), warlock, and tempest cleric. We're just going to blow through fights.

Eldritch Knight optimized for Shadow Blade is arguably a stronger melee character, though it comes online late (starting 7th).

Multi-class: Barbarian/Paladin. He goes nuts for his God!! Blasphemy and expressing lack of faith triggers his RAGE, smiting all nonbelievers in the area as he shouts prayers to his god!! LOL Not a very good wing-man for the tavern.

Update: The strength Ranger is good for big damage now. Taking the Crusher feat and a maul instead of polearm master can really make Horde Breaker sing. This makes sense because Rangers already have a bunch of good uses for their bonus action. If you did want bonus action attacks, a one level dip into War Cleric gives you a limited number of those (again that's fine because you usually have other cool things to do with a bonus action) and heavy armour, as well as a bunch of great spells.

Great weapon master battlemaster lvl 5 with sweeping attack and berserker lvl 3 will do 10 attacks against more then 1 enemy with bonus attack action surge and sweeping strike You paint the room with blood

Trying out a Fighter Champion atm, using a lance on foot, and went with the piercer feat, which lets you add an extra damage die on a crit, so I can crit on a 19 or 20, and when I hit I can roll 3d12 plus strength, so far so good, though there's something to be said for using a pike and getting polearm and/or great weapon master.

Barbarian Zealot 3/Fighter 2/Paladin 15 (any subclass) can be terrifying. I got lucky with a few crits, smite, action surge, repeat, and did over 300 damage on my turn. Now granted, my int and wis sucked...

Not mentioned is a Paladin of Crown awesome ability to use Spirit Guardians. In a game with almost no auras it stands out as guaranteed DPM. Also a Paladin can have Bless on tap, which allows your attacks to hit more and makes GWM more useable.

Hey guys do the same video but with ranged combat characters!

This video has given me a plethora of linebackers at my disposal so that I can safely continue pretending to be Zhuge Liang in the back. Thank you for your service.

We don't want heavy weapons or shields. We want dual-wielding - 2 longswords. We don't want Dragon Age 2-4, we want Dragon Age Origins that had dual-wielding fighters. Wizards of the Coast killed/ nerfed fighters with no THAC0 system. Sad. Little incentive to play fighter nowadays. Keep your pole arms and great swords. No thanks. 2nd edition barbarians were afraid of magic (items) - no thanks. Been there, done that, just because it was new to play a class from the then-new, now-old D&D cartoon. 1st edition please. Keep your book du jour. Rogues do twice as much damage as fighters in 5e. Pathetic.

Hulk=Barbarian Thor=Fighter Captain America=Paladin Black widow=Rogue Hawk eye=Ranger Iron man=Sorcerer

I’m not saying that they aren’t correct, they are BUT with specific stipulations! You NEED to rage, and you need the great weapon master feat. In order to do that damage. Also I’m not liking the downside of enemies having advantage on you as well. I’d still pick battle master fighter.

When you wear a Roots sweater you auto roll 20s 😜

Enjoyed the video, but your insights based on this spreadsheet spread a false narrative. The spreadsheet you guys used was dubious at best, filled with assumptions and logical leaps. The Barbarian showing that kind of dpr is based mostly on if you we're to pick a berserker. A subclass which is hard to argue in favor for, and they sacrifice a great deal to have that possible dpr. I also find the spreadsheets biased against paladins quite staggeringly. Not accounting for hardly any class features or spells which boost their damage, I.E improved divine smite, and leaving smite at a measly 50% usage rate.

I would love to see a video on the most effective Gish build. Paladin/Cleric, EK/Bladesinger? There are so many options but there isn’t as much of an obvious build like the optimized damage dealers, imo.

"Might be feeling a little bit left in the dust", aka that feeling when big bad fighter Pluto sees lil kitty Veo score insane amounts of damage

Nothing is more satisfying playing my whip-based fighter.

I like playing support characters. If I were to play a Barbarian I'd probably go Totem Warrior with the Wolf Totem, granting advantage to my allies - this would give the Fighter and Paladin the boost they need to devastate the enemy.