What fighter class pairs well with Rogue\Soulknife? Right now, I'm Fighter2\Rogue1, just looking for something out of the ordinary that might be fun. Would Soulknife\Echo knight be a viable build?
Battlemaster pairs with anything well since it's bascially just an extension of what the class is supposed to do to begin with.
Also before you walk into that trap, Psi Warrior unfortunately doesn't gel very well with Soulknife. Despite sharing the same theme their mechanics have practically zero synergy. You'd be playing half of a Psi Warrior and half of a Soulknife instead of a proper multiclass.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I've never encountered a forum where I got this many "talking to a wall" impressions as this one...
Personally I feel Champion pairs well with any Rogue mix. Crit fishing to an extent by expanding the range is not a bad thing. Otherwise EK might be an option if your Int is high enough. Add some magic into your repertoire and open options, Battlemaster, as pointed out already, pairs well with most other martial classes too.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Crit fishing builds are one of the few things I consider an actual trap build in 5e. Sure it's nice to get a crit and having twice the chance to get one sounds awesome on paper, however your average damage barely increases since most of your attacks simply won't be crits after all.
Battle Master is easily one of the best Fighter subclass to pair with a Rogue multiclass. The maneuvers can do a number of things beneficial to a Rogue including help you land your important Sneak Attack (Precision Attack), granting advantage to trigger your Sneak Attack if no allies are within range (Feinting Attack) and granting additional Sneak Attacks outside your turn (Brace and Riposte).
If you are fine with triggering your Sneak Attack there are also a multitude of fun options available to mess with the enemy with things like Disarming Attack and Menacing Attack.
What fighter class pairs well with Rogue\Soulknife? Right now, I'm Fighter2\Rogue1, just looking for something out of the ordinary that might be fun. Would Soulknife\Echo knight be a viable build?
I generally ignore Echo Knight as it's such a mess of word salad rules that I assume it'll be underpowered or overpowered on any possible table. Are you asking about a Fighter with a Soulknife dip or a Soulknife with a Fighter dip? I'm going to assume for now you want to be a Soulknife with a Fighter dip.
To first cover the suggestions already in this thread:
Champion is nearly completely indistinguishable from not having a subclass; 100% of all possible Champion builds are better with some other subclass. Do not pick Champion.
Eldritch Knight has some genuine issues with you: you can't use your Weapon Bond on your blades and you don't have that much use for 2 spells per day of Absorb Elements and Shield. You do have genuine use for a Familiar, so you can reliably Sneak Attack, but you have no use at all for Booming Blade or Green-flame Blade, as they won't work with your blades, either.
Psi Warrior has some synergy with Soulknife for certain; the bigger problem is that Psi Warrior was apparently deliberately built to be a bad subclass for unclear reasons. As soon as you take Psi Warrior 3, you'll get this:
Your total number of Psionic Energy dice doubles.
You get 3 new ways to use said dice:
Protective Field: Reduction 1d6..12+Int Mod as a reaction protecting yourself or an ally within 30 feet. This is the best of the lot, because it works on any damage - most abilities you get at levels this low only work on certain kinds of damage, like how the Parry maneuver only works on melee attack damage and the Interception fighting style only works on attack damage. However, it scales with your Int, which you might be dump-statting.
Psionic Strike: Easily the worst of the lot, this deals non-additional (i.e. it can't crit) damage 1/turn (as a Soulknife, you generally expect to sometimes hit twice in one turn) within 30' (as a Soulknife your ordinarily engagement range is 60'). If you take Psi Warrior don't expect to spend any dice at all on this - it's significantly worse than Protective Field.
Telekinetic Movement: you get a free use of this and it ignores the size of your dice, both of which are nice, and it provides forced movement (which is very nice) in any direction (which is excellent). One issue is that for object targeting, it can't target "loose" objects, which is Tasha's word salad: see e.g. shatter for the normal 5E way to discuss unattended objects. For no apparent reason you can't target yourself, which means you have to ask your DM to define "loose" before we can sanely discuss you standing on an object and then moving the object in order to move yourself, and without that definition it's impossible to determine how useful this ability is (note that you can RAW mount a creature and move that creature and by necessity you'll be moved with it, which is why it's so bizarre you can't simply move yourself directly). We also have no clean rules in 5E for the mechanics of dropping a Large rock onto your enemies from 30 feet up - the Tasha's rules for dropping a creature onto a creature have almost no correlation with the DMG rules for falling rocks (the former has the Dex save DC be a constant and deals damage per falling creature while ignoring weight but accounting for creature velocity like the falling rules do; the latter has variable Dex saves with no explanation for why and deals 1 lump amount of damage without clarifying how fall distance should matter, although some minimal effort is made to convey that heavier rocks hurt more). If this ability is nerfed all the way down to genuinely only move party members who aren't you and nothing else, you'll basically never ever use it, since you can't use it to reposition yourself and because it takes an action moving an ally over to help you means losing both of your 2 attacks.
So as you can see the really big seller is doubling your dice pool, which at Soulknife 3 is only really useful for your self-targeted Bardic Inspiration, where it genuinely addresses one of the multitude of ways your ability is worse than real Bardic Inspiration: using L5 as our example, a standard issue Bard's 4d8/rest (per the DMG assumptions, this is 12d8 per day) is way better than your 6d8/long rest + 1/rest (which the DMG claims should be 9d8 per day), so doubling that to (for a Psi Warrior 3/Soulknife 5 to keep the dice the same size) 12d8/long rest + 2/rest is excellent.
Battle Master will genuinely improve your Psychic Blades: you'll get 4d8/rest (that's Bardic Inspiration quantity, although it'll fall behind at higher levels) spendable on, in practice, the usual go-to standards of Precision Attack (which will stack with Homing Strikes if you reach Soulknife 9), Menacing Attack, or Trip Attack. The downside here is that you're leaning into murder and Soulknives are bad at murder. You play a Soulknife for obnoxiously good ability checks.
I did take a quick glance at Echo Knight, per your request, and I can tell you that one example of lack of synergy between Soulknife and Echo Knight is that the word salad in Psychic Blades genuinely appears intended to limit you to 1 Blade per attack action, so Manifest Echo would be extra bad on you.
Bearing in mind the discussion above, I suspect the best Fighter subclass for you is Rune Knight (the most skill-based Fighter subclass) . Rune Knight 3 (assuming you're Con 16) will get you this at level 6 (so Rune Knight 3/Soul Knife 3) but you'll need Extra Attack or to use your Action Surge to make it really shine:
3/long rest as a bonus action you can pop Giant's Might which for 1 minute will get you:
Advantage on Str saves, which doesn't matter.
1/turn crittable 1d6 damage, which is like a Sneak Attack die without prereqs. Works on your blades just fine.
Being Large, which matters for the next bullet.
Advantage on Athletics checks, which hopefully you grabbed Expertise in from Rogue. This will make you a shockingly potent Shove threat, and you can Sneak Attack an opponent you've Shoved prone without issue. If you don't have Extra Attack, this means your nova may be best spent getting Large and then doing a grapple+shove prone on your target so you can lock them prone and start shiving them on your next go.
Fire Rune: Expertise on Thieves' Tools, and 1/rest you can attach this rider to your psychic blade: the target takes 2d6 crittable fire damage and must make a DC 14 Strength save or become restrained (which is better for you than prone, by a lot); at the end of each of its turns it repeats the save, taking the damage again on a failure and ending the effect on a success. That's fantastic.
Cloud Rune: Permanent advantage on Deception checks and 1/rest as a reaction you can Sneak Attack an ally (e.g. by having them shut their eyes) and bounce the Sneak Attack to an enemy within 30', or you can consume the same ability to bounce an enemy's attack onto another enemy (generally not as useful), or you can consume it to bounce an ally's attack instead of your own.
And if you climb all the way to Rune Knight 7, Storm Rune has massive synergy with any Rogue.
Unfortunately you don't double your pool of Psionic Dice at all though. Both features explicitly tell you that you can use the dice for the options listed in that subclass. They are named the same but they are completely separate. This got confirmed by Sage Advice as well.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I've never encountered a forum where I got this many "talking to a wall" impressions as this one...
Battlemaster is always solid for a versatile fighter kind of build.
Rune knight would be goofy, but it also has some strong abilities that could be interesting. I could imagine flavoring the runes as tattoos in thieves cant.
Samurai would be the lame but optimal choice, for getting advantage when you really need it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
What fighter class pairs well with Rogue\Soulknife? Right now, I'm Fighter2\Rogue1, just looking for something out of the ordinary that might be fun. Would Soulknife\Echo knight be a viable build?
Battlemaster pairs with anything well since it's bascially just an extension of what the class is supposed to do to begin with.
Also before you walk into that trap, Psi Warrior unfortunately doesn't gel very well with Soulknife. Despite sharing the same theme their mechanics have practically zero synergy. You'd be playing half of a Psi Warrior and half of a Soulknife instead of a proper multiclass.
I've never encountered a forum where I got this many "talking to a wall" impressions as this one...
Personally I feel Champion pairs well with any Rogue mix. Crit fishing to an extent by expanding the range is not a bad thing. Otherwise EK might be an option if your Int is high enough. Add some magic into your repertoire and open options, Battlemaster, as pointed out already, pairs well with most other martial classes too.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
Crit fishing builds are one of the few things I consider an actual trap build in 5e. Sure it's nice to get a crit and having twice the chance to get one sounds awesome on paper, however your average damage barely increases since most of your attacks simply won't be crits after all.
I've never encountered a forum where I got this many "talking to a wall" impressions as this one...
Battle Master is easily one of the best Fighter subclass to pair with a Rogue multiclass. The maneuvers can do a number of things beneficial to a Rogue including help you land your important Sneak Attack (Precision Attack), granting advantage to trigger your Sneak Attack if no allies are within range (Feinting Attack) and granting additional Sneak Attacks outside your turn (Brace and Riposte).
If you are fine with triggering your Sneak Attack there are also a multitude of fun options available to mess with the enemy with things like Disarming Attack and Menacing Attack.
I generally ignore Echo Knight as it's such a mess of word salad rules that I assume it'll be underpowered or overpowered on any possible table. Are you asking about a Fighter with a Soulknife dip or a Soulknife with a Fighter dip? I'm going to assume for now you want to be a Soulknife with a Fighter dip.
To first cover the suggestions already in this thread:
I did take a quick glance at Echo Knight, per your request, and I can tell you that one example of lack of synergy between Soulknife and Echo Knight is that the word salad in Psychic Blades genuinely appears intended to limit you to 1 Blade per attack action, so Manifest Echo would be extra bad on you.
Bearing in mind the discussion above, I suspect the best Fighter subclass for you is Rune Knight (the most skill-based Fighter subclass) . Rune Knight 3 (assuming you're Con 16) will get you this at level 6 (so Rune Knight 3/Soul Knife 3) but you'll need Extra Attack or to use your Action Surge to make it really shine:
And if you climb all the way to Rune Knight 7, Storm Rune has massive synergy with any Rogue.
Unfortunately you don't double your pool of Psionic Dice at all though. Both features explicitly tell you that you can use the dice for the options listed in that subclass. They are named the same but they are completely separate. This got confirmed by Sage Advice as well.
I've never encountered a forum where I got this many "talking to a wall" impressions as this one...
It is possible to make an absolutely bonkers grappling build with rune knight and soul knife.
Battlemaster is always solid for a versatile fighter kind of build.
Rune knight would be goofy, but it also has some strong abilities that could be interesting. I could imagine flavoring the runes as tattoos in thieves cant.
Samurai would be the lame but optimal choice, for getting advantage when you really need it.