Best Feats for Samurai Fighter 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Samurai is one of the most interesting to optimize Fighter subclasses. Our main feature gives us advantage on all attacks for a turn, but consumes our bonus action, and we only get to use it 3 times per day.
Our other features are pretty nice too, our 7th level feature saves us from having to take Resilient Wisdom, and our 15th level feature incentivizes us to find a way to have advantage on at least one attack every turn. What we end up with is a build that wants to get advantage and gain more benefits than usual from that advantage. Let’s see how feats can help us accomplish this.
Best Feats for Samurai Fighter 5e
Great Weapon Master/Polearm Master or Crossbow Expert/Sharpshooter (ASAP): It’s a real shame that the common samurai trope of a man and his katana is so bad in 5e. If we want to deal proper martial damage, we have to go for ranged combat or heavy weapons. Granted, actual history tells us that real samurai used a wide variety of weapons, so running into combat with a Greatsword isn’t entirely inaccurate, just flavor it as a very long katana and play One Winged Angel whenever you activate fighting spirit. For melee, on a normal turn we will attack with our Polearm of choice, gaining the benefits of the bonus action attack and dealing as much damage as possible. When we use Fighting Spirit, we will drop our Polearm and grab a 2d6 or d12 weapon to maximize our damage since our bonus action is already spoken for. We’ll also use our Action Surge to maximize how many attacks we get at advantage. This provides a very slight damage increase before level 5, but becomes a big damage increase past that and only gets better as we get more attacks. You can use the same strategy if you want to play ranged, just replace the feats with Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter and use a hand crossbow on normal turns and a heavy crossbow on Fighting Spirit turns. I recommend ranged because we can more easily switch targets if our initial target dies (which is likely), we stay out of threat range of many enemies, and it helps us use the next feat on this list. Melee builds do have some advantages as well though, so both will serve you just fine.
Elven Accuracy (Lv 8): If we do go for a ranged build and are willing to play an elf or half elf, our attacks work with this feat. Rolling super advantage means we will basically never miss when we have advantage, along with passively increasing our crit chances. Don’t get too excited about that last part, crit fishing builds are bad and you should stay away from them. Take crits for what they are; a nice bonus to damage every once in awhile. As for how to get advantage on turns we aren’t using Fighting Spirit, that’s a bit tougher, and one of the advantages of melee builds, as they can more easily gain advantage through flanking.
Magic Initiate (Lv 6): A familiar is one way we can get advantage on at least one attack per turn, which we really want to secure before level 15 (assuming your campaign will get that far). A few utility cantrips can also help us have more to do outside of combat, but I’d like to give special mention to Minor Illusion. The spell lets us create a 5x5ft illusion, plenty big enough for us to hunker down inside. This makes us concealed, and as a hidden attacker, we gain advantage on our attacks. Granted, this only works for one attack, as once they see an arrow pass through our illusion it becomes transparent, but if we can set this up before combat begins, we will have automatic advantage on our first attack of the fight.
Gunner (Lv 6): Did you know that real life Samurai used guns? Probably, because we’re all big nerds here. If guns are allowed at your table, using them for our Fighting Spirit rounds will increase our total damage, potentially by a lot depending on what guns we are allowed to use.
Gift of the Chromatic Dragon (Lv 10): This is not normally a feat I recommend, as the bonus action to activate it usually isn’t worth it when we could be making another attack. However, if we can manage to activate this just before combat begins, this could be quite a large increase in total damage, especially during our Fighting Spirit rounds. The defensive bonus is also nice to help our survivability.
Ritual Caster/Mounted Combatant (Lv 12, 14): If you are a melee build, grabbing Ritual Caster gives us access to Phantom Steed. Mounted Combatant gives advantage to all melee attacks against medium creatures, just in time for our 15th level ability to take advantage of. This might seem like doing a lot, but it is a very large payoff, and the other benefits from these feats are also very nice. We get a ton of utility from ritual spells, and Mounted Combatant helps protect our frail Phantom Steed. Notably, the Phantom Steed has 100ft speed and can disengage every turn, so we can now play a very effective hit and run playstyle.
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