I plan to build a D&D Gish, and want to document a good Eldritch Knight build. Here as ever are my notes and links. …

Some references

By CMCC Builds

This video runs an Eldritch Knight to level eleven, picks up two levels of Wizard, then another fighter level, and finishes as wizard. A war mage is recommended, but blade singer seen as an option. I might use an Abjurer. The levels of wizard allow spells from all schools, ritual casting, and the writing of scrolls.

Like most spell sword/gish builds, this relies on Shadow Blade and so Darkvision becomes important/useful, although it might be better get to Devil’s Sight via Eldritch Adept. Darkvision is a second level transmuter spell and so can be taken if one takes three levels of wizard.

Some more

  1. Fighter:eldritch-knight from dnd5w at wikidot
  2. Wizard:war-magic from dnd5w at wikidot
  3. Wizard:abjuration from dnd5w at wikidot
  4. https://dnd5e.wikidot.com
  5. Wizard from dnd5w at wikidot

Other takes

Another model build, this time at CBR. This build deals with each factor of the build as a chapter, rather than focus on levels. (I like this way of doing it.)

I found another video which had two good ideas at least one for another time. Firstly a wizard dip gives more cantrips and arcane recovery which given the cap on EK spells, is good.

The author of the above video, also proposed a fighter/sorcerer build, with two levels of fighter then six of sorcerer. He takes the PSI warrior as the fighter subclass and aberrant mind sorcerer as its subclass. He takes quicken meta magic feat and proposes spell /point swaps to keep allowing the use of the bonus action to cast spells as well as an attack. He then recommends talking some fighter levels. I need to read that with more care.

Treantmonk offers two videos, a generic spell focused guide, and a specific build guide., he also recommends a Bardlock as the ultimate Jack of All Trades. This is quite difficult to play, they have a lot of features and DnD beyond does not represent it all well. (I need more practice).

Things I have found

This gets so much better at 7th level. This is where war magic and 2nd level spells kicks in, thus making shadow blade available. Booming blade (& Green Flame blade) use an action and this prohibit the extra attack.

I wrote the following on a page first posted in 2018, but I suspect that this was written over a longer period.

Once I said, about Gishes

Thinking about characters has come on, obviously a gish but hard to do these days if you want sword, bow & spells, as you need multiple (3) prime attributes and then can be highly vulnerable to spell counter attacks. Nerdarchy talk about gishes on their youtube channel. They’re not really fans, mainly because of what I call the Aerie Syndrome, each character can only do one thing at a time, huge choice is not always good. However, when I started playing.

I document Treantmonk aks Chris’s youtube channel called Treantmonk’s Temple, where he has published a couple of videos on how to build a wizard by sub-class, and has a blade singer build, for which he publishes a character sheet., he repeated this when the rules were revised in Tasha’s.

He also published his ultimate gish on youtube, a Bard (17), Warlock (3) in three parts and an Eldritch Knight guide. I was also taken with his Evoker or blaster build, [ video | character sheet ], there’s some great insight in these builds.

Treantmonk’s Jack of All Trades

He documents it in the videos, he made it three parts, here is No.1; I have made some notes here as I build one to play. The Bard is a Swords Bard and the Warlock, a pact of the Blade, when I get there. The key to this is that the Warlock converts the PC into a single attribute dependency; both spells and melee depend on charisma, eventually. The swords bard means that the weapon acts as a material component for the spells and the flourishes can be used to add an inspiration dice to the damage caused.

The wikidot pages

Some notes I think worth remembering,

  • The Warlock spells slots refresh on a short rest, one slot at 1st level, and two at 2nd & 3rd.
  • Until third level Warlock, only one weapon uses Charisma as the enhancing attribute. One might best deal with this as three weapons if one wants bow and sword. i.e. sword, bow, and summoned weapon.
  • The Jack of all Trades feature says, starting at 2nd level Bard, you can add half your proficiency bonus, rounded down, to any ability check you make that doesn’t already include your proficiency bonus. So +1 until Bard level nine.
  • The Song of Rest is a Bard feature, not a subclass feature, its scale is independent of other things, i.e 1d6 to 8th level and then switches to 1d8 at 9th level, to 1d10 at 13th level, and to 1d12 at 17th level.

See also, https://davelevy.info/wiki/dungeons-dragons/, or not.


The featured image is from https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kDnYmn; the copyright claim is unclear, this picture is used for the normal reasons.

Dave Games , , ,

2 Replies

  1. On playing an eldritch knight, the advice is to boost, strength and con, as a fighter; I don’t like playing thick characters, and so took a higher INT. This left my CON & thus hit points quite low. He wasn’t an HP soak. i.e. he needed to be careful about getting stuck in combat.

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