The 12 Days of Critmas: The Next 3

I was a day behind, and ranger and rogue turned out to be pretty simple, so I’ve decided to talk about rangers, rogues and sorcerers in one post. This one boils down to, what if everyone in the world had shadow touched?

The approach with the ranger is almost identical to that used with the paladin. Looking through the subclasses, a bunch do extra damage once on a turn, but the best of these is the hunter against an injured creature, or a gloom stalker on their first turn, which can both add 1d8 damage to one attack. The drakewarden and beast master use their bonus action to command their companion to deal damage, but this does less damage than inflict wounds. So, we have a variant human hunter with GWM, metamagic adept, and shadow touched, against someone marked with foe slayer. They take two greataxe attacks, then quicken inflict wounds, dealing 94 damage on their turn (1d12 +3 +10 +1d6 +1d8 +1d12 +3 +10 +3d10). With crits, this goes up to 132 damage.

For rogues, we’ll want to use sneak attack, ruling out heavy weapons- with a single attack, the 4d6 at level 8 will easily beat the +10 bonus and bigger damage die from using a greataxe and GWM. The only subclasses which offer meaningful damage improvements against one target are assassins, who can basically autocrit, soulknife rogues, who can do a bonus 1d4 on their bonus action, and arcane tricksters, who have access to the wizard spell list. Arcane tricksters can use their second level spell slots to have shadow blade running and to upcast inflict wounds, and their cantrip to deal an extra 1d8 damage using booming blade. A variant human arcane trickster with this set-up, martial adept, metamagic adept and shadow touched, will do 97 in a turn (2d8 +3 +4d6 +1d8 +1d6 +4d10), up to 191 if everything crits.

The best option for most sorcerer subclasses will be to polymorph into a t-rex the previous turn, then quicken blight as a bonus action, dealing a total of 119 damage (4d12 +7 +8d8). Storm sorcery and draconic bloodline allow you to add bonus damage to elemental damage rolls, but without an ASI, heart of the storm’s +4 at level 8 will be slightly more than the +cha from elemental adept. And even this can’t match the economy of having polymorph already running (eg. storm sphere up, then lightning bolt and the bonus action damage from storm sphere only totals to 86 points). However, if a draconic bloodline sorcerer is hasted, they can make two weapon attacks, one using green flame blade and thus getting bonus damage, then quicken blight, dealing 123 damage (1d12 +2 +10 +1d8 +3 +1d12 +2 +10 +8d8) on their turn. To do so, they need greataxe proficiency and GWM, using up their two feat slots. If they’re a variant human, they could also have martial adept, raising the total damage by a d6 to 129. But our current damage leader is a druid with some big bugs, so we need to consider wild magic. Their best option for damage is 81-82 on the wild magic surge table, which allows you to take another action. As long as you don’t cast a bonus action spell, you can therefore cast blight twice on your turn, taking damage up to 128. Then, the bonus action can be used to quicken green flame blade, with the same feat combination as before, and deal 36 more points (1d12 +2 +10 +1d8 +1d6), bringing the total to 164. The draconic sorcerer crits to do 147 damage in their turn. If they replace martial adept with shadow touched though, they can do 203, with the 120 point crit inflict wounds allows. Similarly, with crits and shadow touched as well, the wild magic sorcerer will deal 270 damage on their turn (12d10 +12d10 +1d12 +2 +10 +1d8).

Of course, your DM might let you roll wild magic again when you cast the second spell, and you might roll 81-82 again. Then you might roll again, for another 81-82. This could burn through all your spell slots, in the order blight, blight, fireball, fireball, fireball, shatter, shatter, shatter, thunderwave, thunderwave, thunderwave, thunderwave, for 408 damage. Or even, inflict wounds in every single one, if you’re boring, for 510, 1020 with crits.