Fighter Martial Archetype: Battle Master 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

A warrior trained in swordplay who strives to prove their prowess in combat is a Battle Master; so is the ruffian throwing flour in the kitchen at the chef to discombobulate them while making off with their precious pastries. Battle Masters fit a massive quantity of character types in their umbrella thanks to the massive depth offered by their maneuvers, a mechanic I am convinced to this day deserved to be baked into the base fighter. As it stands, if you want to do cool tricks in combat that disarm enemies, bolster allies, or hit like a truck, Battle Master delivers.

3rd Level: Student of War and Combat Superiority

Student of War is a flavorful tool expansion that expands on your character’s ambitions beyond the realm of fighting. It's not much, but a much appreciated expansion that assists the option in taking in a wide swath of fantasies within its features. Want to be a blacksmith who’s gained combat prowess through rigorous training with their own blades? How about the quiet poet who has been forced to violence after tragedy? Want to be a cobbler that's really good at throwing shoes at people? Student of War gives you the easiest on ramp you could ask for with a bonus tool proficiency to help sell your background.

Combat Superiority is the bulk of this subclass. You learn three maneuvers from a list of twenty-three possible options, and get four d8 dice to power them that come back every short rest. As you get additional subclass features, you also learn more maneuvers to power these dice with more dice to spend on your ever growing pool of maneuvers. Since its release, the Superior Technique fighting style and Martial Adept feat have been added to the game to give you ample opportunity to expand out your resource well as you go should you want more options and uses per rest. That’s to say there is no shortage of ways to get as much out of these maneuvers as you want.

Four dice per short rest will vary in usability table to table, but even with just one fight between long rests, getting four dice in the fight just feels good. Most of your attacks in the low tiers are getting some powerful advantage. At tables with more encounters, spacing out two per fight over four encounters with one short rest is a bit more taxing, but will still feel impactful when they land.

Scaling up the number of dice absolutely helps the option scale in the game on its own, too. Getting your fifth and sixth maneuver per short rest is excellent, and with the fighting style and feat, you can develop a character who is just full of combat tricks ready to embarrass the competition.

Maneuvers are the core of the option; below is how I like to think about them, and my recommendations for building your own Battle Master.

The maneuvers can be largely broken down into five categories: skill, defense, extra attacks, allied support, and attack enhancer. I’d recommend trying to have access to one from most of these categories as they give you a broader toolbox for approaching the game.

Skill maneuvers include Ambush, Commanding Presence, and Tactical Assessment, and give you a way to add your superiority dice to skill rolls. These are kind of like Expertise for the Battle Master that can scale with Expertise if multiclassing is something you want to be doing. Ambush does double duty in also being a tool to help you act faster in initiative, while Commanding Presence and Tactical Assessment are more aimed at making your character the character within the group to make one of their bolster skill checks.

Defense maneuvers include Bait and Switch, Evasive Footwork, and Parry, each aimed at improving your defensive options. Of the three, Evasive Footwork feels worst to use, as disengaging isn’t so much of a cost you won’t do it when you absolutely need to. Bait and Switch can play pretty well in coordinated groups with a frontline ally alongside you, but doesn’t end up selling the bait and switch fantasy the name implies, and more acts like a preemptive use of the Shield spell for one of you or your monk or paladin teammate. Parry is a fine ability to have access to, as reducing lethal damage by 1d8-1d12 can be the difference between life and death, but beyond that case isn’t often going to feel like it's worth using over taking proactive action with other maneuvers.

Extra Attack maneuvers are some of the most critical to empowering your character, especially in the early tiers when you’re only making one or two attacks each round normally. Brace slots easily into builds going towards Sentinel before they get it, and plays great on sheets where you aren’t going that route as well as just another tool to engage enemies with defensively. Quick Toss is criminally underrated, as it's a no strings attached bonus action draw and throw a thrown weapon that can go on characters wielding two handed weapons with little to no drawbacks. Riposte is the most common option I’ve seen of the bunch, as its like Brace, but usually more consistent at giving you more opportunities to make reaction attacks in the middle of fights. All three are hugely beneficial to have access to, though, and I’d recommend at least one on basically every Battle Master out there.

Allied Support maneuvers offer some level of additional support to a fight without needing to specifically attack yourself; the two that qualify are Commander’s Strike and Rally. Commander’s Strike plays particularly well in groups with rogues looking to get the rogue’s Sneak Attack feature used more than once a round, as it's a once per turn ability, making Commander’s Strike an easy way to double up that damage that’s normally reserved for just the rogue’s turn. Beyond that, its a hard sell to forgo one of your own attacks (as a character built to attack) to give somebody else a swing, but at least it empowers the hit's damage with the superiority dice should it hit. Rally is a mediocre feature, offering you a bonus action 1d8-1d12 + Charisma modifier temporary hit points to an ally, and that’s just difficult to justify using over taking proactive measures.

Attack Enhancing maneuvers make up the bulk of the martial maneuvers, as you’d expect the class built for making their attacks better. They are Disarming Attack, Distracting Strike, Feinting Attack, Goading Attack, Grappling Strike, Lunging Attack, Maneuvering Attack, Menacing Attack, Precision Attack, Pushing Attack, Sweeping Attack, and Trip Attack. All but Grappling Strike, Precision Attack, and Sweeping Attack add the die to the attack's damage, and also give you some kind of advantage against the creature.

The standout options to me are Maneuvering Attack, acting as a way to give allies a reaction disengage paired with a small move, and Trip Attack, which can set up all subsequent blows made against the prone target before its next turn.

Of these, Sweeping Attack is probably the worst, only offering you the bonus die of damage to another target and offering otherwise no meaningful advantages. Lunging is also relatively niche; you’re likely better off with other options that do a bit more for the dice than just give a weapon reach for a round.

I’d recommend taking one of these for sure, but not more than two out the gate. They all do a similar enough effect: make a creature have a worse time with some bonus damage. You don’t need a ton of redundancy here, and are likely better off in expanding out your characters abilities beyond empowering their attacks once you can already empower strikes well enough.

7th Level: Know Your Enemy

Know Your Enemy is the given ability you get alongside the bonus learned maneuvers and extra die at 7th level, so it doesn’t need to be massively impactful given the expansion you’re already getting. This is a bit too little for me, though. It basically acts as a reconnaissance tool to try to help you get a gauge on something’s innate statistics which always feels awkward to me as a DM, and not all that helpful as a player. AC is almost always the first and most important question to learn about, as that can help characters in your group figure out if they shouldn’t be trying to hit it with weapons and instead impose saves on it instead, but beyond that, there is little you can learn with this feature that actually will change how you engage. It all being comparative to you makes what little information you get vague; sure, you checked the Ogre and found out it has a high Con than you, but that could be anywhere from 1 higher with no additional modifier changes to 4-6 higher with a +2/+3 bonus over your score.

I like the concept of Know Your Enemy, but its execution misses the mark majorly. Thankfully, a new dice per short rest alongside two new maneuvers makes up for this enough I’m willing to keep going in the class.

10th Level: Improved Combat Superiority

Improved Combat Superiority upgrades your dice size alongside getting two new maneuvers to use with them, but no new bonus die, which is a bit of a bummer. Going from a d8 to a d10 for all of your abilities isn’t a massive change or majorly empowering option, nor at this point are two more maneuvers to share the pool of five dice you have.

This is a feature you begrudgingly get as you wait to get your third attack; it's a fine passive improvement that feels like it should be entirely baked into Combat Superiority. It doesn’t feel like a brand new feature that expands out your characters capabilities in any meaningful way, but a minor quality of life upgrade taking up your 10th level feature slot.

15th Level: Relentless

Relentless takes any semblance of desire to conserve superiority dice and throws that idea out the window, and for that, I hate it. This form of recharge mechanic encourages you to spend all of your dice as fast as you can to get as many dice as possible per long rest. Otherwise, it does nothing. If you’ve got a boss coming up you know about, and a pair of encounters between it and now with knowledge that a short rest isn’t likely going to happen, you have to either ignore this feature and balance out your uses between the fights so you have more than one die when you get to the boss or accept having less for the big climax so Relentless does something.

The only reason I’d want to get here is for the sixth dice per short rest, which is a much bigger deal. Both together still don’t make a 15th level feature I’m super crazy about, though.

18th Level: NO NEW FEATURE

Battle Masters were the first fighter subclass to get literally no 18th level feature. Both Eldritch Knights and Champions get huge improvements, one in a bonus action attack when they cast spells, and the other with a regeneration like effect passively on them. Battle Masters passively get an improvement to their dice size up from d10s to d12s, and that isn’t nearly enough. That’s helping you keep up, not giving you a capstone exciting feature that competes with other classes' top tier options.

This, to me, is the ultimate reason to dip out of Battle Master past 11th level. With no capstone to look forward and d10s absolutely good enough for your maneuvers, unless you need a second action surge, you should probably be dipping into another class or two for their higher impact low level features like Cunning Action, Eldritch Invocations, Expertise, Spellcasting, and Divine Smite.

All Together

Battle Master comes out the gate swinging. I desperately am hoping the next edition maneuvers are just baked into the base fighter class with subclasses getting fancy special bonus optional maneuvers unique to each and scaling that doesn’t cost you new, exciting features. As is, prior to 11th level I think you can get a lot of mileage just on Battle Master alone, but the upper tier features really struggle to keep me invested. Relentless feels like a non-feature at a lot of tables where there aren’t a lot of encounters between long rests, and at tables with a larger quantity of fights with a short rest or two spaced out in between, if you don’t fully commit to using all of your dice in the first fight, Relentless isn’t going to actually act as a feature that meaningfully empowers your character.

With four dice out the gate and extra attack opened up at 5th level and a bonus die option at 7th, you can very easily dip as deep as you’d like in Battle Master and go elsewhere the moment you’re content with your combat prowess. Battle Master is probably the most interesting martial option presented, and I’d recommend it to basically anyone looking to play an extra attacking character for the first time, but I’d probably steer them away from committing to 20 levels in it.

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Fighter 5e