DnD 2024 Champion Fighter Subclass Guide

Introduction

Likely the single easiest-to-play subclass in the game, the Champion Fighter exists to crit things and chew bubble gum, and bubble gum hasn’t been invented yet. There is exactly one decision point and it’s hard to go wrong with it (the additional Fighting Style), and otherwise you just keep powercreeping your way until level 18 where you suddenly also become intensely hard to kill.

The lack of complexity that still produces a good amount of power if handled well makes the Champion a natural choice for new players, but there’s still a good amount of optimization to be had. The subclass is definitely tailored to be a Striker, so picking the right items and feats to lean into that role is where the optimization separates a pretty good Champion build from a great Champion build.

This guide is for the 2024 Champion Fighter. For help with the 2014 rules, see our 2014 Champion Fighter Subclass Guide.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Disclaimer
• Champion Features
• Champion Backgrounds
• Champion Species
• Champion Ability Scores
• Champion Feats
• Champion Weapons
• Champion Armor
• Champion Multiclassing
• Example Champion Build – Lord Forestwalk, v2.0
  • Ability Scores
  • Background
  • Species
  • Skill and Tool Proficiencies
  • Feats and Ability Score Increases
  • Levels

Disclaimer

RPGBOT uses the color coding scheme which has become common among Pathfinder build handbooks, which is simple to understand and easy to read at a glance.

• Red: Bad, useless options, or options which are extremely situational. Nearly never useful.
• Orange: OK options, or useful options that only apply in rare circumstances. Useful sometimes.
• Green: Good options. Useful often.
• Blue: Fantastic options, often essential to the function of your character. Useful very frequently.

We will not include 3rd-party content, including content from DMs Guild, in handbooks for official content because we can’t assume that your game will allow 3rd-party content or homebrew. We also won’t cover Unearthed Arcana content because it’s not finalized, and we can’t guarantee that it will be available to you in your games.

The advice offered below is based on the current State of the Character Optimization Meta as of when the article was last updated. Keep in mind that the state of the meta periodically changes as new source materials are released, and the article will be updated accordingly as time allows.

Champion Features

3. Improved Critical: Twice as many crits (before we talk about Advantage). Not much else to say. As a nice bit of quality of life, this now works with Unarmed Strikes which it didn’t in the previous rules set.
3. Remarkable Athlete: On the one hand, advantage on Strength (Athletics) will hardly ever matter, especially with the changes to grappling in this rules set. On the other hand, Advantage on Initiative is awesome, and the rider on crits is fun.
7. Additional Fighting Style: The worst this will ever be is +1 AC or 10 feet of Blindsight, both of which are pretty decent on any build. Some builds may actually want two fighting styles and choose something else.
10. Heroic Warrior: Free Heroic Advantage once per turn is awesome. It is a little weirdly anti-synergistic with the changes to the Heroic Advantage mechanic itself, though, because you now roll after seeing your first roll and must accept the new roll, so you can’t use it to fish for crits if you’ve already hit because you risk turning your hit into a miss. If you’re doing it right, this is mostly present to help you pass saves and do well in non-combat situations.
15. Superior Critical: 50% more crits if you don’t have Advantage.
18. Survivor: Between this and all of the extra sources of Temporary Hit Points in the game, a well-support Champion is nigh-immortal.

Champion Backgrounds

No different than most Fighters, although we care a little more about one Origin feat than you might expect if you’re looking to abuse the Vex weapon property.

• Wayfarer ^(PHB): If you plan on leaning into Advantage, this is the only Background that offers Lucky and a stat that can natively be used with weapons.

For information and advice regarding Origin Feats, including those granted by your Background, see the Champion Feats section, below.

Champion Species

No different from other Fighters.

Champion Ability Scores

Str: Likely your primary attack stat.

Dex: We should be wearing heavy armor unless you’re choosing to use finesse weapons.

Con: Dying is suboptimal.

Int: Dump.

Wis: The most commonly targeted mental save. Give it whatever you have left over.

Cha: Dump.

	Point Buy	Standard Array
Str	15	15
Dex	10	12
Con	15	14
Int	10	10
Wis	13	13
Cha	8	8

Champion Feats

No different from most Fighters, though the focus on Critical hits means you should be taking an extra look at Crusher, Piercer, and Slasher to see if any of them fit the playstyle of your intended character.

Additionally, as you’ll see below, Elven Accuracy (already one of the most broken feats in the game) interacts very well with an increased critical hit range.

Champion Weapons

Vex weapons are going to do a lot of work since the whole idea is to fish for critical hits. To that end, the Rapier and Pistol are going to be your go-to weapons as soon as you can afford a Pistol (or stick to a hand crossbow if you can’t find one).

Champion Armor

No different than other Fighters.

Champion Multiclassing

This section briefly details some obvious and enticing multiclass options, but doesn’t fully explore the broad range of multiclassing combinations. For more on multiclassing, see our Practical Guide to Multiclassing.

No different than other Fighters. Many non-Fighter builds will take three levels of champion to crit more, but, unless you want to pick up Reckless Attack from Barbarian, there isn’t much other classes have to offer.

Example Champion Build – Lord Forestwalk, v2.0

It turns out that being an Elf is still a great way to crit more. Let’s see how much better it got.

Ability Scores

As described above, except we’re going to be using Finesse weapons so we focus on Dexterity. We also put some points into Strength to make sure Remarkable Athlete gets some support when we use its Athletics feature.

	Base	Adjusted	Level 20
Str	12	12	12
Dex	15	17	20
Con	15	15	18
Int	8	8	8
Wis	13	14	14
Cha	8	8	8

Background

This build desperately wants the Lucky Origin Feat. Only one background provides that and a Dex bonus, so we’re locked into Wayfarer. We’d prefer that our +1 go into Con, but we put it into Wisdom because we have to.

Species

We need to be some kind of Elf for Elven Accuracy. Wood Elf is decent if you’re limited to the PHB, but we’re going to take Shadar Kai because free teleports and Resistance is great, especially once we start doubling the value of all that free healing we’re doing.

Skill and Tool Proficiencies

Wayfarer gives us Insight, Stealth, and Thieves’ tools, ideal for the Scout role we’re poised to fulfill. We’ll also pick up Acrobatics and Athletics from our class and Perception from our Species, rounding us out into a decently balanced character.

Feats and Ability Score Increases

At level 1 we get Lucky from our Background.

At level 4 we’ll take Elven Accuracy.

At level 6 we’ll take Piercer.

At level 8 we’ll take Defensive Duelist.

At level 12 we’ll take Chef.

At level 14 we’ll take Resilient (Wisdom).

At level 16 we’ll take an ASI and increase Wisdom to 16 and Con to 17.

At level 19 for our Epic Boon we take Boon of Fortitude.

Levels

Level	Feat(s) and Features	Notes and Tactics
1	Fighting Style: – Dueling Second Wind Weapon Mastery: – Rapier – Hand Crossbow – Pistol	As a low level Fighter, our job is to stab things and not die. We have a couple tools to accomplish those. For gear, choose package C on both Fighter and Wayfarer and spend 145 of the gold on a Rapier, a Hand Crossbow, and Studded Leather. Save the remaining 60 gold, add the first 190 gold you get to the pile and buy a pistol. Then buy more pistols later. We’ll get there.
2	Action Surge Tactical Mind	No tactics worth noting yet.
3	Fighter Subclass: Champion	We crit twice as often! All of our weapons are Vex weapons, meaning that, as soon as we hit once, we start rolling every attack after with Advantage as long as we keep hitting the same creature. I bet you can see where this is going. With Advantage, we crit on 19% of our attacks. That’s nearly 1 in 5 attacks.
4	Feat: Elven Accuracy (Dex 17 -> 18) Second Wind Uses 2 -> 3	Spoilers: this is where it’s going. We expect to have up to three fights per long rest if we’re using the sane version of an adventuring day rather than the pacing suggested in the 2014 DMG that I’ve never seen a group use. Our proficiency Bonus is currently +2, but increases to +3 at next level, meaning, starting at next level, we’ll have enough Luck Points to give ourselves real Advantage (not Heroic Advantage) on the first Attack Roll per encounter, thus turning it into Super Advantage and giving us a less than 5% chance to miss and a 27.1% chance to crit. Once we hit, we keep having that benefit thanks to Vex. This does mean our DPR will drop any time we need to target swap, but, as Luck Points increase with our Proficiency Bonus, it will give us a bit of a buffer to deal with that.
5	Extra Attack Tactical Shift	Whack, whack. Tactical Shift is a great rider on a feature that got a huge buff in the 2024 rules update. Buy a second pistol. Loading weapons weirdly no longer require free hands to load, they just can’t be shot more than once per any type of action. Walk around holding a pistol and your Rapier. When combat starts, shoot the drawn pistol, then drop it and draw and fire your second pistol. Move 30 feet closer. Next round, move 30 feet closer again and get to stabbing. DPR assuming we start every fight with a Luck Point Advantage attack and never miss with our Rapier going forward: 22.5, nearly at High DPR.
6	Feat: Piercer (Dex 18 -> 19)	This feat increases our DPR by 15%, up to 26, inching ever closer to High DPR while still being a highly durable melee presence.
7	Additional Fighting Style: Blind Fighting	Don’t get foiled by magical darkness.
8	Feat: Defensive Duelist (Dex 19 -> 20)	This is why we didn’t bother taking Defense for our additional Fighting Style. Our AC in melee is now permanently 20, or 21 at next level (unless we feel the need to stab something running past us). Weirdly, there is no listed time it takes for donning a shield in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. Between that fact and the way you can draw one weapon per attack (that you don’t have to use), I would actually say that you can draw your shield as part of your first attack that doesn’t need a pistol shot and get that AC up to 22. That’s a little interpretive, but I expect you’d be able to convince a DM of the sense of it.
9	Indomitable Tactical Master	Rerolling a save with a +9 is already a nearly-guaranteed success and it will only get better as we keep leveling. We don’t really want to replace the Vex property, so Tactical Master won’t matter unless we decide that maybe making something Prone is more important than always having super Advantage. Of course, if they’re Prone we’ll have advantage on melee attacks, so that might be a good idea, but it gambles guaranteed advantage for advantage if they fail a Con save which is, statistically, the highest save for monsters in the game.
10	Heroic Warrior Second Wind Uses 3 -> 4	Free Heroic Advantage every turn would be great on most martials, but we’re not most martials. As is, it’s mostly a defensive tool for us, although, if we somehow manage to botch an attack roll with super Advantage, it can still come through with one more reroll, making missing largely impossible.
11	Two Extra Attacks	Checking back in on DPR, we’re at 41.3, now 5% over High. Instead of doing more things with pistols, we can now comfortably just teleport any time we start a fight too far away from something now that our Proficiency Bonus has scaled enough that our pool of Shadar-Kai teleportation is a bit bigger. Action surge for a Dash if you really have to.
12	Feats: Chef (Con 15 -> 16)	So, let’s start leaning into our defensive capacities. This gives us something to reliably do with our Bonus Actions that isn’t burning a Second Wind or teleporting and helps the team when we Short Rest.
13	Indomitable (2 uses) Studied Attacks	Gain Hexproof twice per day. Studied attacks means our combo isn’t broken even if we miss any attack other than the first, but we miss so rarely it’s not worth trying to calculate.
14	Feat: Resilient (Wisdom 14 -> 15)	More than anything, Wisdom Saves are likely to take us out of a fight. Let’s get a +5 on all of them.
15	Superior Critical	This is only a DPR increase of 3 thanks to the power of Elven Accuracy. It does feel good though, and our chance to crit goes from 27% (just over 1 in 4) to 38.6% (just over 1 in 3).
16	ASI: Wisdom 15 -> 16, Con 16 -> 17	Round up Wisdom and set up Con for our Epic Boon.
17	Action Surge (2 uses) Indomitable (3 uses)	More.
18	Survivor	Healing 5 points per turn is incredible, especially on top of the temp HP we can get from eating a Bonus Snaction from Chef.
19	Epic Boon: Fortitude (Con 17 -> 18)	Let’s check in on our defenses now. With a shield and Defensive Duelist, our AC in melee is 25. We have 234 HP, and, when below 117 of them, we regenerate 9 HP per turn. We can also spend a Bonus Action to get 6 temp HP, 25ish real HP, or resistance to all damage, a total number of times per day that means we can easily do one of them every round. Our common saves are +5/+10/+9 and we can reroll one of them per round forever thanks to free Heroic Advantage, and try again if that still fails with an Indomitable. If something does manage to drop us anyway, we have Advantage on Death Saves and stand up on an 18 or higher. I pity anything that tries to kill us.
20	Three Extra Attacks	Ending our career at roughly 59 DPR, we finish as an incredible threat for how extremely hard to kill we are.