Fighter Martial Archetype: Echo Knight 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Back to back, the knight and their clone stave off the horde of clawed, fleshy demons lunging in. In perfect synchronization, they swing their blades, cleaving through the masses like a perfectly choreographed dance, each step a deliberate placement entirely aware of where the other figure will be moving, blocking for one another and ripping apart each oncoming threat one blow at a time.

Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is Critical Roll’s official WotC release, offering a well of awesome new abilities into the game in the form of subclasses and spells. Echo Knight is one such piece of new content added, and it comes packing heat. You get a clone-like echo you can swap spaces with, attack from, and sense from that upgrades over time, growing in power and potential. It's a blast.

3rd Level: Manifest Echo and Unleash Incarnation

Manifest Echo is the basic defining feature the entire subclass revolves around. You get the ability to manifest an echo as a bonus action that lasts until you do it again anywhere within 15 feet of you. It has a solid AC, 1 hitpoint, and is immune to all conditions. It's not really a creature in this way, but more of an object you can attack from and use in some cool ways.

One such way lets you swap places with your echo for 15 feet of movement and your bonus action. This paired with your ability to freely move it about makes it so you have outrageous movement potential. While it will be destroyed if you’re ever more than 30 feet away at the end of the turn, prior to that you can freely move up to 15 feet and send it 30 additional feet, swap spots, then summon a new one with your bonus action the subsequent turn.

Another option you have from your echo is to attack from its position as if you were there, which extends the feeling that this option gives you the best positioning you could ask for. It even threatens opportunity attacks from that space, giving your echo the basic power to eat creature attacks or threaten free attacks from you.

Unleash Incarnation enhances it further by giving you your Constitution modifier bonus attacks from your echo’s location each long rest, which while limited, sells the idea of having two threatening positions and using them both to their fullest. Two to three extra attacks a long rest at 3rd level can be an absolute beating.

7th Level: Echo Avatar

Echo Avatar enhances your echo by turning it into a scouting tool that can be up to 1,000 feet from you as long as you’re directly controlling it and using its senses instead of your own. This will feel similar to Find Familiar, and with unlimited uses, can become a pretty standard tool you can leverage to safely scout out areas.
Where this expands beyond reconnaissance is when you pair it with your ability to swap places with it; for a bonus action while you’re using the sense swap, you can swap physical positions, letting this act as an infiltration tool alongside reconnaissance. This is undoubtedly really freaking cool, even if it isn’t necessarily all that practical. I love the option, though, and it expands out the base concept really well.

10th Level: Shadow Martyr

Shadow Martyr gives you a once per short rest means of defensively consuming an echo to block an attack, which is pretty novel. Not the most impressive defensive ability ever made, especially given that it happens before you get to know if the attack would hit, but for how powerful the prior abilities have been, this feels like a fine bit of extra defense.

15th Level: Reclaim Potential

Reclaim Potential opens up another defensive option for you, letting you take the Shadow Martyr and defensive placements that eat an attack or two and transform them into free temporary hit points. 2d6+ Con mod isn’t the most hit points in the world, and you aren’t always going to be in a situation where your Echo is taking hits the way you’d like, but again, with how robust the lower level options are, this weak defensive feature is a fine expansion. I really wish it opened up their utility further, but echos does already contain a boatload of utility.

18th Level: Legion of One

Legion of One feels like the natural capstone feature to this option: you get MORE echoes! Getting a bonus attack in every initiative from Unleash Incarnation is pretty reasonable, and honestly having two echoes isn’t that much better than one that I’m crazy about Legion of One. I wish it doubled the functionality of Unleash Incarnation and the other features, because as is, you’re just expanding out your options and not really empowering any of your prior abilities by that much.

All Together

Echo Knight is an incredibly rich option to pick up, but with the middling power from the 10th through 18th level features, you really want to consider multiclassing with this. Getting to 5th level for extra attack then dipping into some magical classes like Trickery Domain Cleric can transform your character into the master of duplications.

Manifest Echo has the bulk of its power baked into its features available out the gate. Echo Avatar is the kind of expansion I want for this kind of subclass, and Shadow Martyr and Reclaim Potential don’t really enhance it further in this way. I want bigger rangers to swap between and more rewards for jumping around between echos. I want more echos in Legion of One, but I want to be able to use them all simultaneously. Echo Knight probably would benefit from being a bit weaker out the gate, and moving that power into expanding the upper tier features. Still, if the fantasy appeals to you, I highly recommend trying it out. Echo Knights are sweet.

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