Champion Fighter Build Guide – The Crit Master – 2024 Update
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Article Disclaimers
For all D&D guides on Nat1gaming, they only use the main sourcebooks (Player’s Handbook, Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) as well as Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos (mostly for Silvery Barbs) as those tend to be the most commonly used books at tables. Always be sure that if you’re following a guide that you’re adhering to your tables rules about what sourcebooks you are allowed to follow.
Any spell, class, feature, or other game item that is linkable on this website is covered by the 5th edition Open Games License and will be in the Player’s Handbook, but not everything in the Player’s Handbook will be linked to. All other materials that aren’t linked to are from other sourcebooks or aren’t allowed to be linked to per the 5th Edition Open Games License, so please refer to the appropriate sourcebooks for that information.
For the purposes of this guide, it will be assumed that you would not be multiclassing. While multiclassing can be excellent for many of these, this is for those who want to play the build all the way through in the same class. Guides that use multiclassing will be separate from these.
For spellcasters, you may notice substantial overlap between the spell lists of builds with the same base class. This is due to each guide utilizing a generically good spell list and not considering extenuating factors that will influence how you particularly sculpt your spell list. When creating your own spell list, you should take into account the campaign setting, what spells any other party members are capable of casting, potential overlap (ritual spells tend to overlap so it’s rare you need multiple people capable of casting them), or potential shortcomings in the parties total spell list. While this guide can definitely help point you in the right direction for crafting a spell list, you should use your judgement and preferences to figure out what spells make the most sense for your character.
To that end, please refer to the Spell List and Spell Tier list for any substitutions you’d want to make to the build.
Why Champion Fighter?
Champion Fighters are really unique that they can be a “crit fishing” build which can be really fun for players. Being able to get a bunch of critical hits in a combat can be really exciting, and obviously, quite strong. Lastly, the Champion Fighter was always an unplayable class, and with the changes, is actually a very reasonable option for your average campaign!
Champion Fighter Abilities Ranked
Improved Critical (Level 3) – D Tier – While an awesome ability and the main draw to this class, the math doesn’t favor this ability. To make the most of this ability, you incentivized to make as many attacks as possible which favors Dual Wielding, but the doubling the damage on something like a Scimitar is neat, but not super impactful. You could go for something like a Greatsword instead for maximizing the damage potential, but you’re getting a 5% increased chance of getting the average of 2d6 damage which is 7. To put that into perspective, not accounting for advantage or disadvantage (which does affect the math, generally positively), this ability gives you an additional 0.35 damage to your average damage over the course of however many attacks you make. Again, while this ability is super cool, just getting a +1 to your damage, mathematically, would serve you better in the long run. Still, if you have many ways to gain advantage so you’re rolling twice the number of attack dice, you will get critical hits more often, but even still, the math doesn’t favor you. All that said, this ability isn’t bad or anything as it’s still extra damage and hitting a critical is always a dopamine rush, so no complaints there.
Remarkable Athlete (Level 3) – B Tier – If nothing else, advantage on initiative rolls is really good. The advantage on Athletics won’t matter often, and the extra movement after a critical hit is a nice little feature that may or may not be relevant.
Additional Fighting Style (Level 7) – C+ Tier – A free feat is a free feat, even if Fighting Styles are much weaker than your average feat.
Heroic Warrior (Level 10) – A- Tier – Having Inspiration every turn is really good. Being able to reroll dice in a dice game is a strong ability!
Superior Critical (Level 15) – D Tier – See Improved Critical as everything I said applies here as well. That said, now having a 15% chance of nabbing a critical hit on any roll is relatively solid odds if you are fighting with Two Weapons with a Scimitar (for the Nick property) and Dual Wielder (for the extra attack) as you’ll get 5 attacks a turn and you’ll be somewhat close to nabbing a critical each round or statistically likely for doing so if all of your attacks are at advantage. Critical hits are always fun!
Survivor (Level 18) –