Roguish Archetype: Scout 5e
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Rangers typically get to live the Scout fantasy just by existing. They’re scouts, with magic! Rogues live the Scout archetype a bit differently, leveraging bonus Expertise and their Cunning Action Dash to be the speediest characters on the map. They shoot and move, have skill excellence for heightened perception and stealth alongside free expertise in Nature and Survival, and ultimately deliver on the fantasy they promise. It isn’t revolutionary, nor is it something you couldn’t do with the base rogue class, but if you want a more natural rogue that doesn’t use magic for some reason, Scout is here for you.
See Also: Best Feats for Scout Rogue
3rd Level: Skirmisher and Survivalist
Skirmisher defines what Scouts want to do: move. Getting a reaction move makes it incredibly difficult for anything with a speed close to yours to ever pin you down, as not only do you get a reaction move from Skirmisher that doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity, Cunning Action gives you a bonus action Dash and Disengage. Rogues are already difficult to pin down: Scouts even more so. It's a bit overkill, but reactions are hard to come by, and this reaction does something useful you’ll happily use round after round.
Survivalist is so clunky to me, but Expertise is great, and this is two more Expertise skills. To get the most out of it you have to commit to having no proficiency in either skills to get both here, which then spontaneously also doubles it. Any 3rd level rogue can have seven skills, four with Expertise. You probably don’t need that many skills, but hey, you’ve got four instances of expertise, meaning you can be the default skill check-maker in most parties.
This overlap can step on a ranger’s toes, so I’d look to play this in a group lacking a ranger, or in a setting where multiple people will be needing to make survival checks for the whole party to thrive.
9th Level: Superior Mobility
A 10 ft. speed increase isn’t normally all that exciting, but in rogue, it’s kind of like a 20-foot speed increase. Skirmisher gives you 5 extra as part of your Skirmisher reaction, making it so you go fast. A human rogue scout has a base speed of 40, and with bonus action dash and action dash can cover 120 feet in a single round. Skirmisher can extend that an extra 20 feet to 140, with no other considerations.
Do you need to go that fast? Eh, usually not. But it does feel great to be able to be wherever you want on a battlemap.
13th Level: Ambush Master
Ambush Master is “fixed” Assassinate. Advantage on initiative helps you act first, but crucially, regardless of surprise, the first creature you hit during the first round of combat is debuffed granting every other creature’s attack against it advantage.
As long as you aren’t surprised, you can use this feature every fight. Once per fight giving everyone advantage on attack rolls is excellent, and can make quick work of a single problematic threat.
17th Level: Sudden Strike
Like Abumsh Master is to Assassinate, Sudden Strike compares easily to Assassin’s Death Strike. The consistency is so much higher with Sudden Strike; Death Strike suffers from needing the creature to both be surprised and fail a save to deal double damage, and when it works, can remove a single high health enemy from a fight altogether. Sudden Strike fixes every one of my complaints with Death Strike; you can use it each round, with no limitation in uses, deals “double damage” by giving you the ability to Sneak Attack twice a turn, and has to be used against different creatures, making the damage distribution easier to manage.
This is within the scope of how powerful I expect 17th level features to be. Doubling your Sneak Attack damage is within the scope of 9th level spell power, and the condition rewards spreading out damage and fighting slightly differently, which is really interesting.
All Together
I would recommend Scout to a new player that wants to play a ranger-like character but doesn’t want to deal with spells. It scales great, with excellent combat features at 13th and 17th level. It does lack in exciting new ways to explore environments, which is a bummer for a subclass themed around nature exploration and scouting ahead. I’d be head over heels in love with this if it got the Arcane Trickster treatment but for druid spells, but where it is now if you want an ambuscade-style rogue getting the drop on enemies and weaponizing ambushes consistently, this is a great route to go.
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