The Clockwork Sorcerer Tank: d4 #90 

Sames. I like the videos, but then feel like I’m hanging with a friend, not just power gaming

Recently while watching back some old eps I came to the realization that Colby and this show have become my comfort watch.

I thought I was the only one

Yes!

@@bossarugamer felt that lol

They are DnD's Oogway

Me every week ^

Yep

I’m pretty excited. A little late to the party

lol! *furiously begins writing some crazy slash fiction*

@@DnDDeepDive My body is ready.

You shall have your spotlight, brother!

@@oathboundhero1782 right now the only magic ive gotten to work is message, so im the teams walkie talkie while we try to take care of that dampener lol. Im taking all the credit i can

Tortle is also very cool flavor-wise for this kind of build because you can integrate stuff like armor plating or clockwork elements into your shell.

The 2-level dip in Paladin and investment in STR can be replaced with 1 level in Hexblade Warlock instead. In exchange for the burst damage of Smite, you can use your CHA modifier for attack and damage rolls. You still get the (one-handed) martial weapon and shield proficiencies, too. Once you get War Caster (or ideally, you start this character at 5th level+), you can swap out your staff for a one-handed martial weapon like a warhammer for better damage. The only downsides I can think of is that you don't get the +1 AC from the Defense fighting style, so you only get a max AC of 19 instead of 20 after the dip, and you lose the Paladin features.

But your taunt requires INT to attack, I don't think 14 is enough unless you take one level on hexblade

Bro, this is fantastic story

Could be a Modron as well

Love it!

That sounds a lot like Dissociative Identity Disorder, if you replace "personality" with "identity" or "alter" Good story tho I like it

@@paigemackie8942 except it's not a disorder, but real case of multiple personalities. I'm not familiar with the correct terms, because I'm not native english, i just tried to deliver my idea as best i could.

Name: Flavander Flavius

@@evannewell7985 Seriously underrated reply

I’ve always called it “SCAM” spell casting ability modifier, for that reason.

Bloodwell vial

@@0_Body gave that to my Con based sorcerer. Very good item.

Wither and Bloom is another fantastic option. It is not race specific and is a decent 2nd level spell instead of a feat tax.

@@rg6637 Also you don't want to take the Dodge action during combat as a tank because the enemy lose its incentive to attack you, so Wither and Bloom is a nice alternative.

Yay!

Thanks! Same here :).

Count me for this fan train! N7 Day is also my Bday!

It is SOOO GOOD!!!

My lips are sealed! :)

My girl has orderly ocd. Everything needs to go in 3s or divisible by 3. So she uses dancing light cantrip all the time in party of 4 (summoning 2 dancing light fairy like shapes and calling them tinker and Belle, insisting they are real :)

@@Lucky_Luke486 love it!

Enhanced Armor would go on your shield :). I'm confident this is just something that D&D Beyond needs to fix, but I could be wrong!

I’m torn on this. Yes, DDB does not do this because the Infusion feature looks for items in your inventory. The Gauntlets are just an added attack action. I would probably rule the Gauntlets are magical since they are part of the Arcane Armor feature. Edit: and upon further research, I changed my mind. The armor is not magical and can be infused. 😝

@@kaneofmars Ha ha that's what the vast majority seem to think and rule at their tables. Obviously it'd be one to double check with your DM before hand!

Yes! This plus Blade Ward, and a 2 level Abjuration Wizard dip makes the AoA tHPs last sooooooooo much longer.

This is a straight up better race to take. Both this and Earth Genasi use a bonus action to get resistances, but the shadar kai resistance is much more comprehensive and is usable just as many times.

​@@ClintonJohnson1and the shadar kai is not casting a spell with his bonus action so you can teleport and cast a spell on the same turn

is that considering turning high level slots into tons of sorcery points in order to quicken blade ward, basically substituting the genasi's feature?

This is why we say "at that rate of damage you'd survive for x rounds." It's not really an attempt to calculate how long we'd actually survive (because who needs to survive for that long anyway? It's silly), but how much taking *that* much damage would actually hurt us, based on our current total potential HP. I should probably rename the thing :).

I tend to agree that some effort should be made to predict when resources will be expended. If not, it makes every class with resources to expend wildly inflated in the metrics when maybe the average performance of such a class is the same as one who is consistently durable. I appreciate that sort of detail on Treantmonk’s builds, for example. He pre-defines his adventuring day so that resource expenditure can be factored in. Sure, his adventuring day is on the extreme end, but it does make it consistent at least.

Yeah, I mean, in reality you would survive for 1000 years for this character if they played an elf instead of the 100 from being an earth genasi, heck we would also be able to reincarnate with an immortal elven soul if we just wanted to live forever why not play that immortal warforged this is comparing tankiness to the other tanks from this channel, none of this is universal and you cannot take the numbers and compare them with other channels, but it does allow this channel to have a ranking system clearly, the more resources you have for defence, the more tanky the character is, and out of all the builds on this channel it clearly has the most defensive resources, most combats are around 4 rounds long, so using bladeward every turn isn't a stretch, if the rounds to die is 50, this just means the combat would take up 8% of your hp if you focused every single one of your resources on defense alone, once you run out of that resource, suddenly your rounds to die increases, as you begin to take damage at a faster rate, but if the enemy is dealing damage at a lower rate as they thin out, as they die one by one, the rounds to die roughly decreases linearly as the rounds progress, which is as expected mathematically speaking, it's a very simple model, which actually works really well for how simple it is in practice

edit, but I disagree with saying portent is equivalent, because there are not only fewer uses, but also they only apply once per round, but we don't just have 3 or 4 blade wards by level 10, we have sorcery points for extra blade wards if necessary, taking it to 5 or 6 if we were desperate, but not just that, we could take the stoneskin spell and for an hour with concentration, have the bladeward bonus, that's an entire hour, if we also use the 17th character level ability to always roll at least a 10, concentration would not be easy to break at all in a fight, though possible how often do we get all these spells? well we could take arcana proficiency, with our +3 intelligence we could have a +7 arcana by character level 10, have stone skin, bladeward, and keep in mind it's a cantrip, if we forgo any attacks, we can still cast it does that affect the calculations of survivability? no I mean we could have just taken the dodge action each turn and now we absolutely survive for sure, actually much more effectively than with bladeward, and if hasted while dodging we can still dish out soft taunts, but now enemies won't attack us whatsoever, and if we lose concentration we lose a turn and definitely don't have resistance now the game is complex, but those same factors affect other characters just as much as does us, the barbarian can run out of rages, sure they last a minute but pretty much just burn away if the barbarian is say paralysed and left to cool off, and this character has dumped wisdom, the most important defence, heck, you could just cast dominate person with a spell-like ability from a demon lord, and have the tank taunt the rest of the party to protect its new demon master instead, at the end of the day this character was just built to annoy dms like mine who love damaging party members, and to feel helpful in a way besides dealing damage or crowd control, (which a clockwork soul could also be insany good at) you also forgot to mention that bladeward doesn't affect all damage, what if you are fighting someone with a shadow blade? or a liches necrotic like touch? you don't have resistance against radiant or psychic damage either but a limited use resistance to weapon attacks, or to non magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing does come up, and at least should be considered as an ability I think, with your ac, any hits would be highly likely to be crits anyway, oh we also have limited spell slots for shield, certainly not 50 of those, should we ignore the ac bonus of shield too perhaps? sure its only expended when you know it will be used, we have alot of them, and we *always* have a free reaction no matter what right? it's not like we have anything like counterspell that might occasionally take up that reaction, nor that there are spells and effects like slow that can remove actions and reactions from a pc

Thanks! Great meeting you too!

drawing aggro is a defining feature of a tank so pretty necessary, how else would you make an enemy attack you and not your allies? there are some paladin things you can do to limit movement (crown, conquest) but if you have an ally near you, they can just attack your friends

I haven't done character sheets for the builds yet. I *do* put out written “cheat sheets” for the builds, but it *is* actually the one thing I give as a benefit to members of the channel - here’s a little video I did explaining why if you’re at all interested - I’d love to have you as a member! (it’s pretty cheap : ) ) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-op_QNygYv3E.html