Champion Fighter: D&D 2024 Optimisation Guide

Gladiatorial glory-seekers, champions hurl themselves into the fray, armed with extra powerful attacks and the ability to shrug off ordinarily fatal wounds.

What is a champion?

Glorious warriors that seek to attain physical perfection and the accolades of winning countless trials by combat. Champions are gladiators, known for their ability to strike down their foes swiftly and mercilessly with powerful attacks. They are also well-versed in the arts of survival, having emerged from battles against other, finely-honed warriors.

If you want to consistently land devastating blows against your enemies, then a champion could be a worthy option. They’re also great for beginners with a straightforward set of features that are easy to get to grips with.

He-Man and Xena are both champions. Thor also fits this bill well with attacks that strike powerful blows and a well-honed, martial approach. He also spent some time as a gladiator too.

Champions were available in the 2014 Player’s Handbook and have been refreshed for the 2024 version too. Below I’ve gone through how you can build and optimise one of these characters as well as tactics for playing them too.

At a glance

Highly skilled martial warriors
Strike with greater power than other fighters
Land critical hits more often than any other subclass
Increase your durability and accuracy with consistent uses of heroic inspiration

What’s changed in D&D 2024?

The essence of the champion remains the same in the revised version, but some tweaks simplify the abilities as well as a hugely powerful new feature in heroic warrior. Here’s what’s changed:

Heroic warrior gives you heroic inspiration every turn that you don’t already have it.
Remarkable athlete is simplified and probably improved. While it no longer includes all strength, dexterity and constitution checks, the athletics and initiative checks (which were the most important ones for you) gain advantage rather than half your proficiency bonus. This is better as you can stack benefits here with proficiency and it doesn’t become meaningless for your most important checks. You can also make extra movement after landing a critical rather just getting a longer jump (which wasn’t that useful).
Survivor now also gives you advantage on death saving throws.

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Champion features

Improved critical – Lv3

How it works

Your weapon attacks and unarmed strikes now cause a critical hit on a 19 or 20 to hit.

Tactics

Critical hits allow you to double the dice you roll for damage with that attack. This means a critical with a greatsword will do even more extra damage than a critical hit with a dagger. With the greater odds of landing a critical hit, it can be worth building around this by grabbing a two-handed weapon.
The other thing you should consider is how you up the odds of landing a critical hit further. You can do this with two weapon fighting and/or the nick property, but the trade off here is that your weapons do less damage (and so the impact of the critical hit is lowered).
The better way to tackle this is to try and get more rolls for attacks by having advantage. You’re essentially doubling the odds of landing a critical hit which is already now at 10% per roll (as opposed to the normal 5%). You can do this with things like flanking, having you (or your allies) knock enemies prone or using weapon mastery properties like topple or vex and a load of other ways too.

Remarkable athlete – Lv3

How it works

You have advantage on initiative and athletics rolls. You can also move up to half your speed after landing a critical hit without invoking opportunity attacks.

Tactics

You can expect to have your turn a bit earlier in the order of combat. Just be careful you don’t start getting in the way of AoE spells your wizard might want to cast in the first turn.
You can have both proficiency in athletics checks and advantage, making champions incredible grapplers if that’s a route you’d like to go.
Use your follow up movement after a critical hit for some tactical movement between enemies. And remember that you aren’t just limited by this movement. You can use any remaining movement to add to this too. You can even move, critical hit, use bonus movement, hit then move again if you really want to.

Additional fighting style – Lv7

How it works

You can choose another fighting style feat.

Tactics

Using 2 fighting styles simultaneously is excellent, but be aware that some fighting styles can’t be used at the same time.
While it could be useful to have something like archery and great weapon fighting for ranged and melee attacks, this still means not using one of these feats for most turns.
Even worse would be to to take 2 fighting styles that are even more incompatible like the two weapon fighting and great weapon fighting styles.
But some fighting styles can be used together like blindfighting or defense and any melee fighting style or dueling and interception and protection. So try to find fighting styles that complement one another, so you can always use both feats.

Heroic warrior – Lv10

How it works

Whenever you start your turn without heroic inspiration, you gain it.

Tactics

This is a hugely powerful feature that essentially gives you a reroll every turn.
Because this only comes if you don’t have any heroic inspiration, it’s worth using it whenever the opportunity arises.

Superior critical – Lv15

You now land a critical hit when you roll an 18, 19 or 20. This means you now have a 15% chance of landing a critical hit every time you make an attack.

Survivor – Lv18

You have advantage on death saving throws and an 18, 19 or 20 provides the same benefits of rolling a 20.

You also gain 5 hit points plus your constitution modifier every turn if you are bloodied and have at least 1 hit points.

Basically, you can enjoy being extra durable and great at surviving making you a more effective tank and melee warrior.

Building a champion

Champions are at their best in the heat of battle. Melee attacks generally cause more damage making you more effective here. Plus you’re tougher than your average fighter so capable of absorbing more blows.

Below, I’ve gone through how to build a well-optimised champion.

Ability scores

Recommended options

Strength: To make the most of your melee attacks, strength is your best option, though a dexterity build is viable, especially if you want to play a ranged warrior. However, a ranged fighter is a luxury for most parties and you’ll find you deal less damage than as a melee specialist. You’ll also make less use of your champion:s durability features too so not the best option for a champion.
Constitution: You’ll need the resilience from this as a frontline warrior.
Dexterity: You could invest a bit in dexterity to help your armor class for some medium armor, though if you’d prefer to focus your ability scores elsewhere you can just go for heavy armor. This does mean you’ll be poor at long ranged combat with bows, but you can use thrown weapons for the occasional mid-range combat you need to engage in. If you do choose to go for a dexterity build, you can afford to keep your strength fairly low but I’d argue champions are at their best as strength builds.

Options to avoid

Intelligence: You can dump this.
Wisdom: Only useful for skills and saving throws. A plausible option for some left over ability score points though.
Charisma: Only useful for face skills and saving throws. You could invest in this a bit if you want to get involved in social situations at the expense of some dexterity.

Ability score	Point Buy	Standard Array
Strength	15	15
Dexterity	15	13
Constitution	15	14
Intelligence	8	8
Wisdom	8	12
Charisma	8	10

Skills

Recommended options

Athletics: Remarkable athlete pushes you towards athletics proficiency (as you don’t need to be good at acrobatics as well). Proficiency and advantage could make you an incredible grappler.
History: A decent knowledge skill if you don’t have a wizard to specialise in this.
Intimidation: Talk to your DM. They may let you use your strength for intimidation checks (the rules do allow for flexibility in ability checks like this).
Insight: A good skill for social situations. You may pick up on things your companions don’t.
Perception: Important for anyone in the party and highly used.

Options to avoid

Survival: Used far too little to be of much use.
Animal handling: Used far too little to be of much use.
Acrobatics: You don’t need this and athletics. And you should almost certainly be going for athletics if you go for either of these.

Species/race

There are a couple of things to consider when choosing a species for a champion:

Resilience: Fighters often take a beating (champions even more than most) so any resilience traits are going to help you out.
Innate spellcasting: You can’t repeat cast spells and likely haven’t invested enough in relevant ability scores to be much good at this so often worth avoiding.
Damage dealing: You’re primarily there to deal a lot of damage to your targets making it handy to find more ways to deal damage.

Recommended options

Aasimar (2024): Resistance to necrotic and radiant damage increases your hardiness. For celestial revelation, I’d lean on inner radiance for the extra damage. Necrotic shroud requires decent charisma which you’ll struggle for. However, temporary flight is always useful. Expect to use this for accessing hard to reach places or enemies. A bit of healing is a decent emergency option too.
Dragonborn (2024): Dragon’s breath gives you some AoE damage not normally available to fighters and only replaces a single attack instead of using your whole action making it a very strong option for a fighter. Temporary flight again lets you get to hard to reach enemies. Plus there’s a resistance for better durability.
Dwarf (2024): An extra hit point per level is great for a frontline warrior. And for even more resilience, you have resistance against poison and advantage on saving throws against the poisoned condition.
Goliath (2024): Faster movement makes you even better at traversing the battlefield. Your giant ancestry grants some very useful options too. For a champion, the durability of the stone giants, knocking enemies prone with hill giant and extra damage from fire giants are all great options.
Orc (2024): A couple of great endurance features here with temporary hit points and relentless endurance to save you when knocked to 0HP. Great for a frontline melee warrior.

Options to avoid

Elf (2024): Too much focus on spells makes this difficult to make work well for a fighter.
Tiefling (2024): Too much focus on spells makes this difficult to make work well for a fighter.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are much more important now with D&D 2024 as the ability score increases previously tied to your race/species are now linked to your background. Remember that you can either choose to increase one of the ability score options from a background by 2 and the other by 1, or you can choose to increase all 3 ability scores by 1.

You also get an origin feat linked to your background too.

Primarily, you want to focus on increasing key ability scores with the associated origin feat being your next priority. As such, I’d suggest the below are your best backgrounds for a champion:

Name	Ability scores	Origin feat	Skill proficiencies	Tool proficiency
Artisan	Strength, dexterity, intelligence	Crafter	Investigation, persuasion	One kind of artisan’s tools
Criminal	Dexterity, constitution, intelligence	Alert	Sleight of hand, stealth	Thieves tools
Farmer	Strength, constitution, wisdom	Tough	Animal handling, nature	Carpenter’s tools
Soldier	Strength, dexterity, constitution	Savage attacker	Athletics, intimidation	One kind of gaming set

Farmer gives you the best spread of ability score increases with a top feat. Soldier does have better skills, but savage attacker is a sub-par feat in my opinion.

Feats

At 1st level, you can grab an origin feat through your background and from level 4, you can pick up a general feat (or another origin feat if you want) instead of an ability score increase.

General feats are all half feats now as they give an ability score increase and the traits of a feat. But you’ll only get +1 to an ability score rather than the +2 you’d get from increasing your ability score. Make sure you go with a feat with an appropriate ability score increase (usually strength or constitution).

Below are some good feats for a champion:

Origin feats

Alert – You can either ensure you’re almost always one of the first to take a turn, or pass on the benefits of remarkable athlete (and this) to an ally if you’re feeling very altruistic (or it just makes tactical sense).
Lucky – More ways to be reliable at important rolls is universally beneficial. This also stacks with all your heroic inspiration.
Musician – A universally great feat for dishing out heroic inspiration. You don’t need this though as you’ll always have heroic inspiration available so this is a selfless feat only.
Tough – You’ll likely be on the front lines so some extra resilience is very useful!

General feats

Crusher – Take advantage of your higher probability of landing critical hits with a critical that will grant advantage to subsequent attacks too. Only good if you plan on using bludgeoning weapons though.
Durable – There’s overlap with your features once you hit level 18, but before then, you’ll enjoy the extra durability. Bonus action heals are great for a subclass that won’t always have something to do with their bonus action and will need regular healing.
Grappler – A great option if you intend to do a lot of grappling.
Great weapon master – Extra damage each attack and an extra attack when you land a critical, which you’re extra reliable at doing means this works well for a champion.
Heavy armor master – Decent extra durability if you’re going to be wearing heavy armor. Also depends on what you expect to be facing, but the damage types are common enough to be consistently useful.
Mage slayer – Best against mages, but having what is practically legendary resistance is also great.
Mounted combatant – Great if you have access to a regular mount.
Piercer – Extra damage on criticals is great for a champion and your standard attacks have a chance of doing more damage too.
Polearm master – Great for getting in extra attacks with polearms, which also helps your odds of landing critical hits.
Resilient – Makes you a bit tougher which is handy.
Sentinel – Great for landing opportunity attacks more often and doing more with those attacks.
Shield master – Great for enhancing shield-wielding champions.
Slasher – Slow enemies down and gain further enhanced criticals.

Weapons

The weapons you choose will depend largely on how you want to fight and what weapon mastery properties you want to be using:

Pure damage: Go for two-handed weapons like a greatsword, greataxe, glaive, halberd or maul. These weapons will do the most damage when you land your critical hits.
Sword and shield: If you want to go heavier on defense, you’ll need a one handed weapon like a longsword, battleaxe, morningstar or warhammer.
Two weapon fighting: If you want to fight with two weapons for the extra offhand attack, you’ll need to use light weapons. Handaxes and scimitars are best for this. You sacrifice the extra impact of critical hits from weapons that do more damage but the trade off here is up to 2 extra chances to land a critical.
Ranged: Tridents and javelins can be thrown allowing you to make ranged attacks with your strength. If you’re a dexterity build, a longbow is your best option. However, each of these options is inferior to what you can accomplish with melee attacks so I’d stick to ranged attacks when you can’t get into melee.

A big part of your decision-making around weapons should come down to the weapon mastery properties you want to use too. This mainly depends on the tactics you want to employ, but you can check out my weapon mastery guide to work out how best to utilise these properties.

Armor

This will depend on how much you can invest in dexterity. If playing a dexterity build, then light armor will work well, with studded leather your best option (though this generally is the least optimal build for a champion and I’d definitely recommend leaning into strength).

If you’re a strength build, take heavy armor (plate mail is best if you can afford it) unless you decide to invest 14 in dexterity, in which case, you can go for medium armor (half plate being your best option).

If you want some extra protection, a shield is a good choice but it will diminish your damage output and I’d be tempted to focus on damage output as a champion and getting greater resilience from other sources (like feats and species traits).