Fight as a pack as you charge into battle with this charismatic warlord from 3rd party creator KibblesTasty.
Chieftain’s rule by sheer force of personality and often some serious combat prowess too. Their warcry can rally allies to feats of unbelievable endurance while striking terror into their foes.
Chieftains work best as part of a pack, coordinating attacks against a single target and charging into the fray as a unit. Their biggest boon is being able to deal out lots of temporary hit points to ensure the party stays standing for longer.
The warlord class and it’s subclasses will be releasing on D&D Beyond on 1st December 2026. It’s been created by 3rd party creator, KibblesTasty and is also available as a PDF from their website. It includes the full class and 8 subclasses. This article focuses on the chieftain’s presence subclass for which I’ve evaluated every feature, given some advice on using them and reviewed the subclass.
At a glance
- Support martial that enhances allies
- Can grant loads of temporary hit points to yourself and allies
- Works best as part of a pack, enhancing damage against a single target
3/5 – The chieftain’s presence is best at making the party more resilient. They grant a lot of temporary hit points and have some decent damage dealing capabilities, though not so much to put you off using battlefield presence a fair bit. A few features do fall flat though where they’re either a bit fiddly or just require compromises that diminish rather than enhance effectiveness. For this reason, the chieftain only has an average score, even if there are some really interesting mechanics on display here.
Chieftain’s presence features
Chieftain’s proficiency (Lv1) – 3/5
Proficiency in martial weapons opens up some higher damage weapons while shield proficiency gives you some extra durability, especially if you want to be using melee attacks a fair bit. A strength build is possible, but without heavy armor proficiency, you’ll still need at least some investment in dexterity to go with medium armor making this hard to build for. This is especially the case later when light weapons become a better option, making it harder to justify a strength build.
This means sticking to finesse weapons which you can combine with a shield for more durability. You could also go for a ranged build (though will want ranged and melee options).
Intimidation proficiency is a decent face skills and means you’re best investing in charisma, especially as later features also rely on charisma.
Wolfpack rush (Lv1) – 2/5
This is a potentially useful early repositioning feature for combat, but it has some challenging limitations. Characters must be within 20ft of you and stay within that radius. They also have to move in the same direction as the triggering character.
There are ways to manipulate this in your favour like having alert on a martial who is more likely to need the extra movement and allies can charge in with them. Your chieftain’s positioning could also help by keeping them near allies when encounters might be possible. I still think that this is unfortunately, a little fiddly, but at least sometimes good.
Warcry (Lv3) – 4/5
This has the potential to grant quite a lot of temporary hit points, but the range isn’t big so you rely on being close to at least a couple of allies to make good use of this. It affects yourself too so that’s worth factoring in. While it requires an action, from level 5, this can just require 1 attack instead of both attacks.
The fact you can throw in an attack with your bonus action when you use this could mean you still get 2 attacks in the turn, but it’s best made with a light weapon which can be limiting. A scimitar or shortsword is probably your best bet and despite your martial proficiency, you probably want to be wielding a finesse weapon anyway so you can invest solely in dexterity rather than strength as well.
I wouldn’t bother dual wielding either, I’d just grab a shield, not only will you need the extra resilience, but you’ve got so much going on with your bonus action that dual wielding isn’t really worth it.
One alternative might be a hand crossbow or dagger as these can be shot/thrown and are light weapons if you’d prefer a ranged build. It’s probably not a bad idea to have these spare anyway, just be aware the hand crossbow has the loading property so can only be shot once per turn. That may not be a problem depending on how you’re using your other actions.
Savage momentum (Lv3) – 3/5
Advantage after using leadership dice is decent. You’ll be using them a lot and if you really want to wield a bigger weapon, could compensate for the disadvantage on your bonus action attack from warcry when not using a light weapon. Still a light weapon will mean advantage each time which is probably better.
Reckless assault (Lv7) – 2/5
I don’t think the trade off is great here. You deal half the damage of the hit points expended is possibly only good if you know you need to kill off an enemy and know a certain amount of damage will finish the job. Problem is, you never know how much damage you need to deal so I’m not convinced this is a good trade off. It could be fun if you’d rather just smash than survive, but those temporary hit points are usually worth more defensively than offensively in this case.
Wolfpack tactics (Lv11) – 4/5
Quite a decent amount of extra damage and since focus fire is usually a good tactic, you should be able to engineer this most turns. Chieftain’s don’t have hard hitting attacks (except for one enhanced with the d12 from this feature) so once you’ve landed that damage, you’ll usually want to use battlefield presence to hand an attack to an ally who now gets an extra d4 damage which isn’t loads, but it’s still useful as you’d have likely done this anyway.
Booming shout (Lv15) – 4/5
Applying frightened and loads of temporary hit points is great if you can get in the midst of enemies and allies. The fact warcry now has 40ft range now makes this much easier to coordinate. You’ll need your charisma high to make this properly effective. Longer range for your other leadership dice effects is great too.
Bloody victory (Lv18) – 4/5
A free warcry with a reaction is decent and knocking creatures to 0HP shouldn’t be rare even if the timing can be unreliable. It’s also kind on your leadership dice numbers.
How good is the chieftain’s presence?
The chieftain’s presence isn’t quite the rock solid secondary martial that the commander’s presence is. Instead they more hop in and out at the fringes of combat. They have a little less to give themselves in terms of damage and resilience, but mostly make up for that in enhancements to allies.
It’s in the temporary hit points they grant that chieftains really excel. There are quite a lot of these and they’ll keep allies standing a fair bit longer. Some extra damage when fighting with allies at level 11 is also a big boost.
However, some lacklustre features like savage assault where the math really isn’t mathing (it’s hard to justify dropping temporary hit points for half their value in damage). Wolfpack rush is also a little too fiddly to make reliably effective. But there are definitely some interesting ideas here and a decent enough warlord subclass.
3/5
Optimising a chieftain’s presence warlord build
The chieftain’s presence can be built like many warlords. I’d focus on dexterity over strength, grab a shield for resilience, enhance your charisma, use them as a party face and grab light weapons with the finesse or ranged properties.
With these particulars in mind, you can use my main warlord guide to help you build your chieftain’s presence which you can find in the link below.
