Warlord by KibblesTasty – D&D 5e Class Optimisation Guide

The warlord is a solid support martial that has enough about it to influence combat and enhance allies. However, it will struggle in smaller parties that need a proper martial.

At a glance

Warlord features

Battlefield presence (Lv1) – 4/5

This means essentially trading your own attack for an attack for someone else. The main question is whether someone else’s attack will be better enough than your own to make this worthwhile?

For example, a barbarian is probably going to hit harder than you are so could be a good option. The same might go for other martials with better magical weapons. A rogue might appreciate a second chance to land sneak attack and will become more adept as a result. You might also consider it for rangers using hunter’s mark or paladins using magic weapon (or some other damage enhancing spell).

You might also use this when you can’t reach an important enemy so might hand this to a monk when you’re out of range or sight of an enemy that they can reach. You might also use this when you’re somehow debuffed, say through the blinded or frightened condition.

It’s all very party dependant though. You rely on at least one martial with more powerful attacks to make this good. You also rely on allies that will make better use of another attack than you will. I’d coordinate builds with the group if you plan on taking a warlord. With planning, this can be a fairly substantial boost to damage output in the party, but in the wrong party, it can just mean trading similar damage from one party member to another.

Leadership dice (Lv2) – 5/5

3 great uses of bonus actions here. You’re either granting the help action at range, allowing reaction movement without attacks of opportunity (plus temporary hit points) or healing and damaging.

You get quite a lot of leadership dice and they’re replenished on a short or long rest so you quickly have quite a lot of uses so you should be fairly cavalier with them, maybe only saving them during minor encounters.

There’s some tactical decision making to be made, but it is excellent that you even have a healing option. Just be aware that your healing won’t help downed allies on 0HP.

Warlord’s expertise (Lv3) – 3/5

I’d aim to make one of these an expertise as it’s generally better to be excellent with a skill, but you can absolutely broaden your capabilities with a proficiency. Which you take will mainly depend on what ability score your subclass specialises in, but it’s most likely to be charisma and persuasion is always excellent for a party face. All these skills are decent though.

Extra attack (Lv5) – 5/5

An extra attack is always a really good feature, essentially doubling your damage output. Warlord’s have a bit more flexibility here too as you can use battlefield presence on 1 or both of your attacks (or neither). This means you can help the party barbarian and rogue, but how much this helps depends very much on your party composition.

Prepare for battle (Lv6) – 4/5

This is not too dissimilar to the inspiring leader feat. I’d say inspiring leader grants more temporary hit points as a general rule (though not by loads) and doesn’t expend resources, but this does only take a minute and you can also allow for some short rest style healing. I can see a decent number of situations where you can spare a minute to heal up, but not an hour.

The fact this can be used ahead of an encounter makes it really worthwhile too for the extra resilience and it scales quite nicely. Fortunately, you can’t abuse this by using it before a short rest and then replenishing your leadership dice as the temporary hit points will expire when you rest.

Press the attack (Lv9) – 5/5

For rallying mark, the economics of using this to heal someone else are quite good. Not only does your single bonus action spread it’s influence further, but you get half the impact of the initial dice used (up to 2 at this level) for the expense of one dice.

This means I probably wouldn’t use it when using 1 leadership dice, but probably would for 2. At level 11, you can use 3 leadership dice simultaneously, at which point you’re getting more than the 1 die you’re expending to target another ally.

With urgent orders, the situation is even better as you can expend a leadership dice to grant the full impact to additional creatures for just one extra die.

Expert instructions is solid for making sure important attacks actually land. It’s handy that you can see the roll before deciding to grant a boost.

Warlord’s intuition (Lv13) – 3/5

An automatic rolling of a 13+ for an ability check is pretty solid for checks you need to guarantee succeed. It’s only once per long rest though so you can’t influence loads of these ability checks. If you’re proficient in an ability, this will likely guarantee success for all but the most ridiculously challenging ability checks.

Shift the field (Lv14) – 3/5

You kind of already have a feature that does this through urgent orders and coordinated movements. In a way, this is cheaper on your leadership dice as it’s one for the whole party (at least for most parties), but it does require an action rather than a bonus action.

This could be great if you didn’t already have a similar feature, and it’s alright to be able to do this with an action for less leadership dice and do something else with your bonus action, but it does roughly replicate current capabilities.

Unbreakable will (Lv17) – 4/5

Frightened and charmed can be a pain and are fairly common conditions so immunity is a decent option. It might have been nice to gain advantage on this earlier in your progression, but this is helpful for resilience.

Tireless leader (Lv20) – 4/5

Now you can always be using leadership dice for things. You’ll always want to roll maximum d4s when using this option as these aren’t expended. You can also use it in place of leadership dice when the size of the die doesn’t matter (like helpful word).

I’d almost never be not using leadership dice for something at this stage, even if you want to be saving your main leadership dice for tougher encounters. The main issue is how many leadership dice you already have and how easily you replenish them may mean that you don’t need this as much.

How good is the warlord?

The warlord fills an interesting space as a martial support class. It’s primarily there to make their allies, especially other martials, perform better. I think in small parties, the class may struggle for the right kind of impact, partly because there may only be a couple of allies to buff, but also because there isn’t the right party composition to make a warlord effective enough. However, in larger parties, where you can spare a martial to provide support, the warlord can be quite solid.

When in that kind of party, they can manage to do a fair bit and buff quite a lot. They also do this in substantial ways that I think warrants their place in the group. Healing, maneuvering, sharing attacks and granting advantage will all do a fair bit to keep allies alive longer and hitting harder. Because of this, I think this is a solid class, but only in the right party.

4/5

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Optimising a warlord build

Optimising a warlord varies a lot by the subclass you choose. Some will favour strength, others dexterity and all 3 mental ability scores are represented by different subclasses. This can make it tricky to give recommendations across all 8 subclasses! But I’ll do my best to take them all into consideration.

Ability scores

This depends a huge amount on the subclass you take. I’ll try to indicate below which subclasses prefer which options.

Recommended options

• Strength: The base warlord isn’t proficient in heavy armor or martial weapons making strength challenging to invest in as you’ll need at least some dexterity. However, some warlord subclasses are better suited to a strength build like the commander’s presence, paragon’s presence and dreadlord’s presence because of their proficiency with heavy armor. A chieftains presence might also want to take advantage of two-handed martial weapons, though they lack the heavy armor proficiency to completely ignore dexterity.
• Dexterity: Any warlord can work as a dexterity build if you choose to use ranged or finesse weapons. This is especially the case for the packleader’s presence who relies on stealth and the dancer’s presence who relies on unarmored defense using their dexterity.
• Constitution: All warlords will benefit from more constitution to make them more resilient.
• Intelligence: Most warlord’s don’t need intelligence and can dump this, but the tactician’s presence does have features that rely heavily on a strong intelligence.
• Wisdom: Most warlord’s can dump wisdom if they want, but the commander’s presence and packleader’s presence both rely on wisdom for their features so should invest in this.
• Charisma: Quite a few subclasses rely on charisma for their features. This includes the chieftain’s presence, noble’s presence, paragon’s presence, dancer’s presence and dreadlord’s presence. Not only will this make their features work better, but they’ll make great party faces too.

Skills

Warlord’s happen to be pretty good with skills, gaining 3 proficiencies, an expertise (or a 4th proficiency) and the occasional almost guaranteed ability check success at level 13. However, your choices will largely be determined by the ability scores you invest in.

Recommended options

• Athletics: Decent on a strength build, less so on a dexterity build (which many warlords will be).
• Deception: Most warlord’s are quite charismatic and deception is a great face skill.
• Insight: Good option for a wisdom build which the commander’s presence and packleader’s presence will be.
• Intimidation: Decent face skills for a usually charismatic class.
• Persuasion: One of the more important face skills and important on the charisma subclasses.

Race/species

As a warlord, you’ll likely want your race to help you with certain aspects of your build including:

• Toughen up: Warlords can find themselves operating as a support martial due to their average resilience and solid capabilities with weapons. To survive at this, you may want a species that boosts your HP, AC, saving throws, resistances or helps you last longer in some other way.
• Evasiveness: Alternatively, you can take traits that aid evasiveness like flight to help you fight at range.
• Damage dealing: You also want to deal as much damage as possible meaning traits that can improve this will help.

Recommended options

• Aasimar: 2 resistances will help you toughen up and you get some light healing. Celestial revelation works well on a warlord as they usually have a decent charisma for necrotic shroud and can use flight for a ranged build or the other 2 options for a melee build.
• Autognome: Great on a dexterity build with AC that’s one better than studded leather. You also get more reliable d20 tests.
• Bugbear: Great on a support martial who can use the extra reach to stay out of trouble a little bit more, potentially using hit and run tactics. They can also deal more damage in the first round of combat and have improved stealth which is great for the many dexterity-based warlords.
• Changeling: Great on a charisma build as you get 2 more face skills and you can shapeshift to change your appearance. Works well if you want to deceive and impersonate.
• Dragonborn: A choice of a resistance and a breath weapon for some crowd control works great. Depending on your Dragonborn variant, you might also get something like flight, temporary damage type immunity or an additional breath weapon.
• Dwarf: Poison resilience will help with the durability side of things. A Hill Dwarf will be even more resilient with extra HP, but will be best with a wisdom build. Mountain Dwarf will be best on a strength build.
• Goblin: Great for an evasive build that wants to do more damage through bonus action disengage or hide and some damage boosts against larger creatures.
• Goliath: Lots of extra resilience with cold resistance and some damage reduction is good if you need to toughen up your warlord.
• Human: I’d suggest a variant Human. Warlord’s can be quite skillful so another proficiency is a good idea and a feat can help round out your capabilities.
• Shifter: I’d probably take beasthide for the extra resilience. Another skill works well for the skillful warlord.
• Warforged: Great for extra resilience. +1 AC and poison resilience are both good for this. You also get a skill proficiency.

Backgrounds

Much of the choice behind your background comes down to the proficiencies you want to take. With warlords being quite skill-oriented and being able to invest in any ability score, I’ve focused my recommendations around the more common charisma and dexterity builds but other builds may want to consider other backgrounds.

Name	Skill proficiencies	Tool proficiency	Languages	Equipment
Charlatan	Deception, sleight of hand	Disguise kit, forgery kit	None	Fine clothes, disguise kit, tools of the con of your choice and 15gp
Criminal/spy	Deception, stealth	One type of gaming set, thieves’ tools	None	Crowbar, dark clothing and 15gp
Guild artisan	Insight, persuasion	One type of artisan’s tools	One of your choice	A set of artisan’s tools, letter of introduction from your guild, traveler’s clothes and 15gp
Noble	History, persuasion	One type of gaming set	One of your choice	Fine clothes, signet ring, scroll of pedigree and 25gp
Sailor	Athletics, perception	Navigator’s tools, vehicles (water)	None	Belaying pin, 50ft of silk rope, lucky charm, common clothes 10gp
Soldier	Athletics, perception	One type of gaming set, vehicles (land)	None	Insignia of rank, trophy from a fallen enemy, bone dice or deck of cards, common clothes and 10gp
Urchin	Sleight of hand, stealth	Disguise kit, thieves’ tools	None	Small knife, city map, pet mouse, token to remember your parents by, common clothes, pouch containing 10gp

Choosing your subclass

At level 1, warlords get their subclass (known as a presence). There are 8 to choose from which are:

Feats

From level 4 (or at level 1 if you’re playing a Human) you can grab a feat in place of an ability score increase. I’d suggest the following are some of your better options for a warlord:

• Actor: Great for charisma builds, especially if you want to deceive and imitate others.
• Alert: Boosted initiative will allow you to marshal your party earlier in the encounter and you can ensure you aren’t surprised either.
• Defensive duelist: A lot of warlords may use dexterity and finesse weapons. If you do, this will increase your resilience a lot with increased AC against some melee attacks.
• Fighting initiate: Grab a fighting style to complement your combat mastery. Though whether you choose this depends on how often you’ll share your attacks with allies.
• Heavily armored: If you want a strength build without the dexterity investment, then you can grab this for a high AC and low Dex build.
• Heavy armor master: Great on a strength build and for subclasses that have heavy armor proficiency (specifically the commander’s presence, paragon’s presence and dreadlord’s presence) for even more resilience.
• Lucky: More reliable d20 tests is great for everyone.
• Tough: More hit points means more resilience, great for a melee martial, especially one lacking in the resilience department.

Weapons

This will vary a lot depending on your subclass, however, many warlords do best as a ranged option, making commands from the back or as a support martial that can slip in and out of melee. Some warlords are built to be a bit more resilient, but they aren’t really a tanky class.

If you’re going for a ranged build, a light crossbow is great until you gain extra attack at level 5. At that point, you’ll want a shortbow or a longbow if your subclass grants martial weapon proficiency.

For melee, if you want to use dexterity, many warlords may need to go for a dagger, but if you have martial weapon proficiency, then a rapier is your best option.

Melee strength builds can opt for something like a quarterstaff with javelins for ranged attacks. If you have martial weapon proficiency, then you have a lot of options. A sword and shield build might want to use a battleaxe or longsword while a two handed weapon build might want a greatsword or greataxe. You might also consider a reach weapon like a glaive or halberd with that kind of build. Reasonably heavy hitting, but with enough range to not be in direct line of attacks every round.

Armor

This depends on your build. For a pure dexterity build, you probably want to go for studded leather, especially if you want to engage in stealth. A mixed dexterity and strength build will want medium armor. Halfplate is best for AC, but will interrupt your stealth whereas a breastplate can keep you stealthy but for slightly less AC.

Some subclasses allow heavy armor too, in which case it will depend on what you can afford, but eventually, you’ll want access to plate (if you’re building for strength and dumping dexterity). These same subclasses will also have shield proficiency. You might want to use this to up your AC some more and make yourself more resilient as warlords generally aren’t that tough.

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