Best Feats for Champion Fighter 5e
by Prince Phantom
Here it is, we’re finally at it. The bottom of the barrel. The last pick on the schoolyard. The rotten apple that ruins the whole bunch. My personal least favorite subclass, and my vote for the worst subclass in the game. There are worse overall characters like the Four Elements Monk, but that’s because the Monk is so bad as a base class. I say Champion is the worst as a subclass because it adds the least to its base class. That alone wouldn’t make it my least favorite however, the reason for that is its impact on 5e as a whole.
The Champion is marketed as a very simple subclass, perfect for beginners. Well, that first point is correct, but why would you give the beginner the most boring and underpowered option possible? How does being the weakest character in the party with the least cool stuff encourage them to continue playing D&D? If this horrible fate has been placed upon you and you are a new player seeking ways to make your character actually interesting to play, I’m here to help you as best I can. First, talk to your DM about changing your subclass. Rules for this were outlined in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, so this is perfectly RAW as long as you get your DM’s permission. Failing that, take the following feats and maybe watch a few videos on roleplaying in combat to keep yourself actually engaged and interested in fights.
Best Feats for Champion Fighter 5e
Crossbow Expert/Sharpshooter (ASAP): I’m assuming that you must be pretty new to this game if you’re reading this, so let me just take a moment to welcome you to this wonderful game and hobby. I apologize that your friends recommended this as your first character. I’m sure they meant very well and are great people, but they did set you up for failure. I’m here to help you turn your character into something stronger than any of theirs (at least at single target damage). First, play a Human. This lets you get a feat at level 1. Pick Crossbow Expert and grab a hand crossbow at character creation. This feat allows us to attack once with our action and then again with our bonus action if we use the hand crossbow to attack. This gives us two attacks per turn when the rest of our party probably only has one, doubling our damage output. Once you reach level 4, select Sharpshooter. This allows us to take a -5 penalty to our hit roll in exchange for a massive +10 damage, and we can do this on all of our attacks. If you hadn’t taken the Archery fighting style at 1st level, retrain to that now (there’s a rule that allows you to do that at 4th level). This helps with that -5 and makes us hit much more often. Generally speaking, I recommend you use Sharpshooter whenever you are fighting something with low to mid AC, and attack normally if something has like a 20 AC. As you get to higher levels, you can use Sharpshooter against higher AC because your chance to hit will continue to get better as you level up. Now, why ranged combat instead of melee? Ranged combat provides a ton of advantages over melee. We are able to attack whoever we want, whenever we want, regardless of whether or not we can reach them with our movement this turn. We stay away from enemies, and in 5e, enemies are much more dangerous on average in melee than at range, and many have no ranged options at all. There are other advantages, but those are the biggest, and I promise you will have a much better chance of survival at range.
Resilient Wisdom (Lv 6): At character creation, I recommend you put your highest stat in Dexterity as that powers your attacks, next highest in Constitution as that provides your hit points, and third highest in Wisdom. The reason for this is that Wisdom is one of the most common saving throws for your enemies to target, especially as you get to higher levels. This feat gives us a boost to our Wisdom saves and helps us pass them much more consistently. Even better, it gives us a +1 to our Wisdom. If your Wisdom was an odd number before you took this feat, this will round it out to an even number and increase our modifier by 1, further increasing our saving throws. I really recommend you do this, as failing a Wisdom save frequently means we can’t participate in the fight anymore because we we are stunned or frightened or even attacking our friends at worst.
Ritual Caster (Lv 12): I recommend that you increase your Dexterity at level 8, hopefully to a 20. If your Dexterity was already a 20 somehow, go ahead and take this at level 8 instead of 12. We have to have at least a Wisdom of 13 to take this, and we shouldn’t have any trouble with that if we took Resilient for Wisdom at level 6. This feat introduces us to spellcasting in an easy to digest way, perfect for a new player who maybe is interested in playing a spellcaster as their next character. Ritual Caster allows us to learn 2 spells with the ritual tag and cast them as rituals. I’d recommend Find Familiar and Dispel Magic as your first two picks. Additionally, talk to your DM about allowing you to find ritual spells in scrolls or books along the adventure that you can copy down into your new spellbook. Ritual casting allows you to cast the spells in your book an unlimited number of time, as long as you spend an extra 10 minutes in the casting of the spell. This means you won’t be casting in combat, but out of combat you gain a ton of utility. You can even pre cast some spells to use in combat like Phantom Steed.
Lucky (Lv 14): Lucky is a feat that’s great for everyone, so it’s perfect for these high level selections where we have everything we absolutely need for our character. It gives us 3 luck points that we can spend to reroll a failed attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, or we can force an enemy to reroll an attack that they are making against us. You should primarily use this to pass very important saving throws, as those can be crippling if you fail them, and to force an enemy to reroll a natural 20 so we at least don’t get critically hit, saving us a ton of HP. Don’t be afraid to be picky with how we spend these, we only get 3 per day, so don’t blow them all on pointless ability checks and standard attack rolls, unless you are sure that this attack will kill your target and you need them very dead right this second because they are next in initiative and are about to cave your skull in.
Tough (Lv 16): You’re probably finding that monsters are doing big chunks of damage at this level, and despite staying at range and your good AC, you’re still going down occasionally. Tough helps us out, allowing us to survive a few more blows than we normally can. We get 32 more max hp at this level, and 2 more for the remainder of our levels, for a total of 40 at level 20. Your DM might throw a spell called Meteor Swarm at you at these high levels, and while I won’t spoil exactly what it does, I’ll say that you’ll be very happy to have the extra HP when it does get cast.
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