Spells: whatever you want, but hold person is absolutely necessary
Now you can stick a 4th-level Divine Smite (5d8) and 9d6 Sneak Attack damage onto an attack, which auto-crits because of hold person. Piercer adds another 1d8. If the target has fewer than 100 HP, they have to make a DC 15 CON save or straight-up die. And Elven Accuracy makes it so you're basically guaranteed a hit (+13 to hit with double advantage? Easy.).
You need at least 13 Charisma to have a multiclass wiith Paladin but it is easy enough to reduce wisdom to 8 .
I know it is themeful you make critical attacks while not being able ot take them butI don't think it is worth taking medium armor master and geting admantne half plate. A rogue with disadvantage to stealth is just wrong, and with Dex 20 you would have the same Ac in +1 (or glamoured) studded leather.
It is very MAD, you need 13 Str and Cha for the multiclass, need high int for hold person to stick dex is your main attacking stat and everyone needs high con. You can dump wis but it is risky failing wis saves can be nasty.
At level 20 you are very unlikely to be facing humanoids so hold person will rarely be an option. If you do face a humanoid they will need to fail the wis save twice for you to get an attack whle they are paralysed (once when you cast it on your turn once at the end of their turn). With an Int of 14 your DC will be 16 (without magic items) so they will usually shrugg off your spell (they may also have magic resistances). So the mostly likely course of events is round 1 cast hold person fail, round 2 cast hold person suceed but they get out of it on their turn, round 3 .....
For that sort of build I would go towards a Fighter 2 Paladin 18 with the can do the following:
Starting stats 13/15+1/12+1/8/8/15+2
ASI/Feats Fey Touched (Cha, taking hold person), Elven Accuracy (dex), ASI +1Dex/+1Con + ASI +2 Dex
Final Ability scores 13/20/14/8/8/18
Cast Hold person
if it suceeds action Surge to make 2 attacks at "double" advantage with a 4th level smite so on a hit on top of the weapons normal damage they do 5d8 (doubled to 10d8) divine smite and 1d8 (doubled to 2d8) improved divine smite,
It has the following advantages which far outweigh the slightly lower damage due to lack of piercer and the lack of adamantine armor.
You can inflict the damage on your first turn in combat
The enemy only needs to fail the save on the hold person once
It is less MAD as you can use charisma for your hold person DC so can dump Int and Wis, resulting in a higher save DC for the hold person
The first hit will do an average of 70 damage so the nine lives slealer is likely to kick in on the second attack if the opponents max HP is less than about 170.
Having said that this is a very specific build to fight humanoid, probably without help (otherwise get the wizard to cast hold person) it might potentially be useful in some sort of 1v1 arena battle but I wouldn't use it for a campaign.
Yeah, it was more of a theoretical "Let's try to stack a maxed smite onto high-level sneak attack." I know it's definitely not optimized, I was just having fun realizing it could be done. Also, yeah, the optimal thing is to get your wizard friend to cast hold monster, so having hold person yourself is basically a backup in case the wizard can't or won't for some reason.
If you're adding allies in, though... have a grave cleric. Your average damage goes from 128.5 to 257. Still not amazing. (I've seen a few of the builds on the highest-damage-attack threads....)
Also minor thing, you can't get hold person from Fey Touched; it has to be a first-level spell.
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Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
Building up a crit user in order to kill victims of Hold Person seems ... a poor use of resources.
I would rather do the more tranditional build that includes things like:
Play an elf
Use a Finesseable weapon
Get Elven Accuracy so you get 3 rolls when you have advantage, using a Dex based weapon.
Fighter (Champion) to crit on a 19-20 and eventually 18-20
Feat Mounted Combat and riding a large or bigger mount to get advantage.
Eventually get TWF, getting an extra attack
Normal combat, without spells goes like this:
At level 3: When fighting a Medium sized or smaller monster, you roll 3d20. If any of them are an 19-20, you crit. Effectively that is critting 30% of the time. If you use TWF, that is more than half of all rounds you crit at least once.
At level 20: By now, you should be riding a Huge creature. So when fighting a Large sized or smaller monster, you roll 3d20, critting on 18-20, and you have 4 attacks every round (5 with TWF). With TWF, you are rolling are rolling 15d20, and criting on 18,19, or 20. You should be critting EVERY round.
Spells: whatever you want, but hold person is absolutely necessary
Now you can stick a 4th-level Divine Smite (5d8) and 9d6 Sneak Attack damage onto an attack, which auto-crits because of hold person. Piercer adds another 1d8. If the target has fewer than 100 HP, they have to make a DC 15 CON save or straight-up die. And Elven Accuracy makes it so you're basically guaranteed a hit (+13 to hit with double advantage? Easy.).
Thoughts?
An alternative would be the Sorcadin.
Using your Half Elf Template I came up with this:
STR 13 DEX 16 (15+1) CON 14 (13+1) INT 8 WIS 9 CHA 16 (14+2)
Paladin 8 Sorcerer 12
ASIs: DEX x4, CHA x4, Elven Accuracy (WIS)
Quicken Spell Hold Person/Monster. Now you can attack twice to drop 2 autocritting smites. You lose 18 average damage but your enemy only gets 1 save and you are not restricted to Humanoid targets. You also get a lovely +5 to all saving throws.
ASIs: Elven Accuracy (CHA), CHA x2, Metamagic Adept (picking up Quicken Spell)
Same as before: you Quicken your Hold Person/Monster and hit them up with a guaranteed crit Divine Smite and instead of Sneak Attack we have Psychic Blades. You only lose out 1d6 damage compared to Sneak Attack (or 2d6 since its a crit). But more importantly the enemy only gets 1 save against a higher spellcasting DC compared to the Arcane Trickster. And again you are not hampered to only pulling it off against humanoids that the Arcane Trickster/Paladin build suffers from.
ASIs: Elven Accuracy (CHA), CHA x2, Metamagic Adept (picking up Quicken Spell)
Same as before: you Quicken your Hold Person/Monster and hit them up with a guaranteed crit Divine Smite and instead of Sneak Attack we have Psychic Blades. You only lose out 1d6 damage compared to Sneak Attack (or 2d6 since its a crit). But more importantly the enemy only gets 1 save against a higher spellcasting DC compared to the Arcane Trickster. And again you are not hampered to only pulling it off against humanoids that the Arcane Trickster/Paladin build suffers from.
Hmm... nice.
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Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
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Okay, so what if you could stack high level Divine Smites and Sneak Attacks onto the same attack? Well... you can. Here's the build:
Now you can stick a 4th-level Divine Smite (5d8) and 9d6 Sneak Attack damage onto an attack, which auto-crits because of hold person. Piercer adds another 1d8. If the target has fewer than 100 HP, they have to make a DC 15 CON save or straight-up die. And Elven Accuracy makes it so you're basically guaranteed a hit (+13 to hit with double advantage? Easy.).
Thoughts?
Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
For that sort of build I would go towards a Fighter 2 Paladin 18 with the can do the following:
It has the following advantages which far outweigh the slightly lower damage due to lack of piercer and the lack of adamantine armor.
Having said that this is a very specific build to fight humanoid, probably without help (otherwise get the wizard to cast hold person) it might potentially be useful in some sort of 1v1 arena battle but I wouldn't use it for a campaign.
Yeah, it was more of a theoretical "Let's try to stack a maxed smite onto high-level sneak attack." I know it's definitely not optimized, I was just having fun realizing it could be done. Also, yeah, the optimal thing is to get your wizard friend to cast hold monster, so having hold person yourself is basically a backup in case the wizard can't or won't for some reason.
If you're adding allies in, though... have a grave cleric. Your average damage goes from 128.5 to 257. Still not amazing. (I've seen a few of the builds on the highest-damage-attack threads....)
Also minor thing, you can't get hold person from Fey Touched; it has to be a first-level spell.
Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
Building up a crit user in order to kill victims of Hold Person seems ... a poor use of resources.
I would rather do the more tranditional build that includes things like:
Normal combat, without spells goes like this:
At level 3: When fighting a Medium sized or smaller monster, you roll 3d20. If any of them are an 19-20, you crit. Effectively that is critting 30% of the time. If you use TWF, that is more than half of all rounds you crit at least once.
At level 20: By now, you should be riding a Huge creature. So when fighting a Large sized or smaller monster, you roll 3d20, critting on 18-20, and you have 4 attacks every round (5 with TWF). With TWF, you are rolling are rolling 15d20, and criting on 18,19, or 20. You should be critting EVERY round.
An alternative would be the Sorcadin.
Using your Half Elf Template I came up with this:
STR 13 DEX 16 (15+1) CON 14 (13+1) INT 8 WIS 9 CHA 16 (14+2)
Paladin 8 Sorcerer 12
ASIs: DEX x4, CHA x4, Elven Accuracy (WIS)
Quicken Spell Hold Person/Monster. Now you can attack twice to drop 2 autocritting smites. You lose 18 average damage but your enemy only gets 1 save and you are not restricted to Humanoid targets. You also get a lovely +5 to all saving throws.
Oh, yeah, hehe... forgot to mention that it's specifically designed for a single attack.... Oops.
Thanks for the replies, though. I appreciate it.
Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
Hmm single attack. I can tweak the build a little bit to something like this:
Half Elf
STR 15 (14+1) DEX 10 CON 14 (13+1) INT 10 WIS 10 CHA 17 (15+2)
2 Paladin 2 Sorcerer 1 Warlock (Hexblade) 15 Bard (Whispers)
ASIs: Elven Accuracy (CHA), CHA x2, Metamagic Adept (picking up Quicken Spell)
Same as before: you Quicken your Hold Person/Monster and hit them up with a guaranteed crit Divine Smite and instead of Sneak Attack we have Psychic Blades. You only lose out 1d6 damage compared to Sneak Attack (or 2d6 since its a crit). But more importantly the enemy only gets 1 save against a higher spellcasting DC compared to the Arcane Trickster. And again you are not hampered to only pulling it off against humanoids that the Arcane Trickster/Paladin build suffers from.
Hmm... nice.
Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.