#charop

A tattoo covered elf saunters by, swaying unsteadily from side to side. Clothes in tatters; the smell of booze emanates so strongly from the elf that your eyes begin water.

The dingy tavern falls silent as the elf bumps into a mountainous half-orc, spilling his ale. The half-orc turns to face the elf and the tavern grows silent as a tomb.

Towering over the drunken elf, the half-orc bares his teeth and growls. He throws his cup to the floor with a loud CLUNK! and reaches for his weapon.

In a flash, the elf has got him: a single delicate hand around the half-orc’s throat. Almost without resistance, the hulking warrior gasps and collapses to the floor: dead. 

It was over so fast you barely saw the elf draw a single shiv from the folds of its tattered clothes. The single, fatal strike was so quick that, for just a second, you question if it was only your imagining.

As onlookers stare stoopified, the elf picks something off the body of the half-orc and disappears through the doors of the tavern.

  In yesterday’s article I explored how to build the best grappler. In today’s post I’m going to present “The Elven Shank” a build that uses grappling to be a highly potent force in combat.

Before we get into the specifics, I am going to use a dagger for this build purely out of flavor. There’s no reason you couldn’t use a rapier or other one-handed weapon for higher damage, but something about this build says “I’ve done hard time, and I’m going to shank you with my toothbrush.”

The Elven Shank

The elven shank has 4 elements that make up the build:

The Grappler feat

The Elven Accuracy feat

Multiple (at least 2) attacks

Race: any type of elf or Half-Elf (required by 2)

For the race, any type of elf will do though I’d recommend Wood Elf for the WIS and movement increase.

The core concept is pretty simple:

Use first attack to grapple an enemy. You now have advantage on attacks against that enemy (thanks to the Grappler feat).

Pump as much damage into the second attack as possible. You will not miss, you will crit. A LOT.

The Rogue class fills most of our need by itself; however, we will need to multiclass to get a second attack. Our options for that are:

Fighter (5 levels)

Bard – College of Swords or College of Valor (6 levels)

Barbarian (5 levels) 

Paladin (5 levels)

Cleric – War Priest (1 level)*

Warlock – Pact of the Blade with Thirsting Blade Invocation (5 levels)

Monk (5 levels)

*The War Priest allows a character to make a bonus action attack with a weapon as long as they use the Attack action. While grappling uses the Attack action, the limit on the bonus action attack is  once per WIS bonus per long rest and therefore is not very desirable

I decided on Fighter (Champion) 5/Rogue X

We’ll be starting with a DEX score of 17. At 4th level it will get bumped up to 18 when we take Elven Accuracy. 

Pick any Rogue sublcass you like. Assassin is nice for automatic crits in the first round of combat. Swashbuckler will make you into the best possible grappler with its 13th level feature to grant advantage on STR (Athletics) checks. The Scout, at 13th level, will get you (and your allys) advantage on all attacks against a single creature for the first round of combat.

All of them are good choices.

Let’s take a look at the build at  9th,15th, and 20th level:

9th level (Fighter 5/Rogue 4)

Core features: Improved Critical,  Attack(2), Expertise(Athletics), Elven Accuracy, Grappler, DEX 18, 2d6 Sneak Attack

Assuming a measly 13 in strength we have a +9 Grapple bonus. When we attack with advantage we have a 27.1% chance to land a critical, dealing 2d4 (shank damage)+ 4d6 (Sneak ATTACK!) + 4 (DEX) + 2 (Dueling FIghting Style) = 24 Damage.

While this isn’t great output for this level, it is output we can manage every single round, indefinitely since it uses no resources. If we find this output is too low we can still fallback making two attacks per round and using our allies to gain sneak attack damage.

The damage trade-off is not for nothing though: our Fighter features i.e. Second Wind and Action Surge make us significantly tougher than a typical rogue.

Let’s see how the build progresses:

15th level (Fighter 5/Rogue 10) 

Core features: (Everything from last time),  5d6 Sneak Attack, DEX 20

Now with our measly 13 STR we’re looking at a grapple bonus of +11, the same 27.1% chance for a crit on advantage and dealing 2d4 (shank) + 10d6 (sneak) +5 (DEX) + 2 (Dueling) = 41 damage, nearly double the damage output of our 9th level build.

20th level (Fighter 5/Rogue 15)

Core feautes: (Everything from last time, reliable talent, 8d6 Sneak Attack

Our grapple bonus is now up to + 13 and we can never roll lower than a 23 thanks to reliable talent. When we crit, which we will be doing at least every third round, we will be dealing a respectable 2d4 (shank) + 16d6 + 5 (DEX) + 2 (Duelling) = 59 damage.

Keep in mind that an enemy has to use its action to break our grapple and, thank’s to Reliable Talent, that is likely to never happen.

This frees us from having to make repeated grapple attempts and we can just focus on doing what the Elven Shank does best…shanking. We can even use our Action Surge to sneak in an additional two shanks per short rest.

There are certainly higher damage builds, but this one is pretty well rounded, having a nice mix of:

Durability

Fighter HD

Second Wind

Evasion

Uncanny Dodge

STR, CON, and WIS prof (thanks to Slippery Mind)

Fey Ancestry (Adv vs charmed, can’t be put to sleep)

Damage

Sneak Attack

Improved Critical

Elven Accuracy

Action Surge

Mobility/Utility

Cunning Action

Fleet of Foot

Proficiency in 6 skills (Perception, Athletics, +4 others)

Expertise in Athletics

Expertise in 3 other skills

Customizing /Improving the Elven Shank

What’s neat about this is that if you want to emphasize one category over another i.e. more durability, more damage, or mobility/utility you can swap out the 5 fighter levels for the following:

More Utility

Monk – Drunken Master/Open Hand/ Shadow will all increase your Mobility/Utility and get you access to the powerful Stunning Strike ability. You may be able to ditch armor entirely, but most importantly of all, the monk increases your shank damage to a d6. Very important. Also, the Drunken Master just fits the theme perfectly.

More Durability

Barbarian – Advantage on all Strength checks, and a little bit of extra damage while raging, is probably worth it alone. Path of the Zealot will add an extra 1d6 + 1/2 of Barbarian level to the first attack you make each round, increasing your average damage output. Meanwhile a Bear totem barbarian will have greatly increased durability thanks to having resisting to all damage, except psychic. 

Mostly just a Rogue

War Cleric – If you want to be mostly just a rogue who uses grappling as a fallback option, a single level of War Cleric will allow you pick up 10d6 sneak attack and the Elusive feature. This is a good option if you can almost always count on your allys to grant you sneak attack, but you want a back-up option just in case.

  Conclusion

While there are other grappling builds that can deal a lot of damage, most of those builds are even sillier than this one and require the use of strange items, high level spells, or a LOT of team-work with your casters.

If you’ve ever wanted to play a durable, shank-wielding, damage dealing elf who has probably done hard time, then this is the build for you. 

If you enjoyed this article you may also like A Fistful of Dice or the Eldritch Sniper.

There’s a lot low level abilities that grant limited range teleport effects in D&D5e. This got me wondering: how much short range teleport can we pack onto a single character?

Unfortunately, after doing the research, the most effective way is to achieve this is to be a Wizard or (Shadow) Sorcerer and use spell slots on teleportation spells.

But that’s boring, so I changed the goals a little bit and decided to build a character based loosely off Eliatropes from the show Wakfu.

If you play D&D, you should give the show a watch: it feels like watching a D&D party with some good chemistry and great improv skills.

That aside, I identified a few key Eliatrope traits from the show that I wanted to capture with the build (In order of importance):

Short range teleportation – a LOT of it

Laser – We need a laser

Speed – gotta be fast

Teleportation in D&D 5e

There’s a few different ways to add teleportation to a 5e character. This list isn’t comprehensive, but it’s pretty close:

Spells

Misty Step (level 2)

Blink (level 3, only sorta counts)

Dimension Door (level 4)

Teleportaion Circle (level 5)

Tree Stride (level 5)

Arcane Gate (level 6)

Transport via Plants (level 6)

Teleport (level 7)

Etherealness (level 7, only sorta counts)

Warlock Invocations

Relentless Hex

Feats

Fey Teleportation (Xan’s Guide, requires high-elf)

Classes

Warlock/Archfey Patron – Misty Escape (level 6, costs Reaction when taking damage teleport 60ft away)

Shadow Monk – Shadow Step (level 6, costs Bonus Action teleport 60ft from shadow to shadow)

Ranger/Horizon Walker – Ethereal Step (level 7, sorta counts, but not real teleportation)

Ranger/Horizon Walker – Distant Strike (level 11, teleport up to 10 feet before each attack)

Shadow Sorc – Shadow Walk (level 14, as Monk’s shadow step but range 120ft and no advantage on next attack)

Druid/Circ of Dreams – Hidden Path (level 10 teleport up to 60 ft as bonus action 1/WIS bonus per LR can also teleport others 30ft feet instead, but costs an action)

All in all, the list turned out to be significantly less than I was expecting. I have some hope that MORDENKAINEN’S TOME OF FOES will provide some more teleportation options, but I haven’t got my hands on it just yet.

  Mandatory Disclaimer

This build is not optimized for combat, merely for short range teleporting. It is a theory build and will not be top tier performant in combat.

  Putting It Together

Out of all the teleportation spells available to us, Misty Step fits the bill pretty well for what we want: it’s short range, low level (spammable), and it uses a bonus action so we can attack after using it.

If we start as a high elf, we can pick up a 1/short rest misty step via the Fey Teleportation feat. 

If we pick up 6 warlock levels we can Blink and Misty Step (2 spells on our list) and we gain the ability to use a reaction on taking damage to teleport up to 60 feet away and turn invisible (once per short rest).

To recap: with just 6 levels, the PHB and Xanath’s Guide to Everything we have:

A High elf

With the Fey Teleportation Feat

Who’s a level 6 Archfey Patron Warlock

Who can Misty step up to 3 times per short rest

With an additional, reaction triggered teleport per short rest

Use Relentless Hex to teleport to a target we’ve hexed

That’s not a bad start and we can also pick up the Eldritch Blast cantrip to add some lasers onto our eliatrope. At a basic level, we’re already mostly there.

If we want to take it father and go full eliatrope, we have a couple of options:

10 levels of Circle of Dreams Druid

This option gets us the best short range teleport ability in the game: we can teleport ourselves or other (willing) creatures 1/WIS bonus per long rest. In other words, we have an ability that is better than Misty Step (longer range and more versatily) and we can use it up to 5 times per long rest.

The downside is that combining it with High Elf (our race) and Warlock (our other class) has very little stat synergy. Add in the Fey Teleportation feat and we’re looking at a character whose stats are a hot mess. If we still go with it though, we have a character who can:

Misty step 3 times per short rest (from warlock and feat)

Misty step an additional 11 times per long rest (from Druid spell slots)

Hidden path Teleport 3-4 times per long rest (from lvl 10 Druid ability)

Reaction teleport 1 time per short rest

On top of that we can pick up Blink thanks to the Archfey Patron, and Tree Stride thanks to our Druid levels, giving us a variety of teleportation options.

At this point our build can teleport A LOT, shoot lasers, and pick up a few other cool tricks from the Druid spell list. It’s really good at short range teleportation and not much else.

We’re now level 16 and don’t really have anything to do with the last 4 levels except take more levels of druid to gain access to better spells.

We may be able to take 10 levels of druid instead of the warlock, but it becomes a little more difficult to retain the eliatrope flavor.

Instead of druid we could take:

7 Levels of Horizon Walker

 If we take 7 levels of Horizon Walker instead of druid, we can teleport up to 10 feat before each attack. This leaves us 7 more levels to fill in with 6 levels of  Shadow Monk and one final level of Ranger for the Ability Score Increase. We’re level 20, but we can:

Shoot lasers (pew,pew)

Misty Step (3 times per short rest)

Misty Step (3 more times per long rest)

Reaction Teleport

At will teleport in shadows

Teleport 10 feet before every attack

Use Etherealness without a spellslot once per long rest

Notably, this won’t make a very combat effective character due to how jumbled the stats are. But it certainly achieves a kind of anime feel, becoming the fighter archetype that zooms and teleports around the battlefield on a whim, punching things, hitting them weapons, or lasering them at will.

This could be a really fun character to play in a lower-power level game. Or even a fun antagonist: the PCs will have a difficult time pinning the character down, making them a great villain who doesn’t really engage so much as run from the PCs.

  If you enjoyed this article you may also like A Fistfull of Dice and The Eldritch Sniper.