Battle Master Fighter: D&D 2024 Optimisation Guide - Dungeon Mister (2024)

Students of swordsmanship, battle masters use battle manoeuvres to enhance their attacks and aid their allies.

At a glance

What’s changed in D&D 2024?

Not a huge amount and if you played a battle master in D&D 2014, you’ll likely find them very familiar in the updated version too. However, there are some small changes to be aware of:

• Gain extra maneuvers from the options in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.
• Some battle maneuvers have been tweaked a little.
• Know your enemy doesn’t require 1 minute of observation anymore (it’s instantaneous) but also only reveals resistances, immunities and vulnerabilities.
• Relentless presence no longer expends a superiority dice.

Battle master features

Combat superiority – Lv3

How it works

You learn maneuvers that enhance your attacks. You can pick 3 now and more as you level up. They are fuelled by your superiority dice which are d8s (becoming bigger dice as you gain levels). You get 4 uses which recharge every short and long rest and get more uses as you level up.

Tactics

• Superiority dice are easy to recharge so you might as well use as many as you can each encounter.
• You get a choice of a bunch of battle maneuvers. I’ve popped a few tactics and recommendations for these below.
• For maneuvers that will do more damage, distracting strike is an OK way to help your allies out with advantage, though I’d recommend trip attack as knocking an enemy prone can give yourself and melee allies advantage on multiple attacks. Menacing strike is good for disabling an opponent for a turn. Precision attack will ensure you turn a miss into a hit. Pushing attack can knock enemies off ledges, and could even be combined with the push weapon mastery for a mega push! Riposte is a great way to get a whole extra attack in and is probably your highest damage option for a battle maneuver alongside sweeping attack which allows you to hit an adjacent enemy with the same attack. Commander’s strike is a great option for certain parties if you want to leverage a high damage ally for an extra attack (like a rogue landing an extra sneak attack).
• If you’re looking for more defensive options, evasive footwork and bait and switch makes you or an ally really hard to hit. Goading attack is great for keeping your allies safe, as is maneuvering attack and rally can give an ally temporary hit points to keep them in the fight longer. I’d avoid parry though as it only works against one attack, requires your reaction and only reduces damage rather than prevents it altogether like evasive footwork and bait and switch can do.

Student of war – Lv3

Gain proficiency in a skill and an artisan’s tools of your choice. Not a huge feature, but I’d just suggest picking from skills and tools that party members aren’t already proficient in.

Know your enemy – Lv7

How it works

Once per long rest, you can discern the resistances, immunities and vulnerabilities of an enemy. You can also expend a superiority dice to use this again.

Tactics

• This is mostly useful against unusual creatures where their immunities and resistances might be unexpected.
• For example, celestials are often resistant to radiant damage while undead are often resistant to necrotic damage. You could just avoid using these damage types rather than using this feature and saving it for a more obscure creature.

Improved combat superiority – Lv10

Your superiority dice are now d10s.

Relentless – Lv15

How it works

Once per turn, you can use a d8 for a battle maneuver in place of using your normal superiority die.

Tactics

• This guarantees at least one battle maneuer per turn.
• As such, it’s worth just using battle maneuvers every turn you make an attack.

Ultimate combat superiority – Lv18

Your superiority die is now a d12.

Building a battle master

Battle masters are melee specialists with incredible skill with the sword as exemplified by their battle maneuvers. While there are options to use these outside of combat, such things are best left to other party members for the most part with you focusing on being a combat specialist. With that in mind, below is some advice on how to build a battle master.

Ability scores

Recommended options

• Strength: To make the most of your melee attacks, strength is your best option, though a dexterity build is a viable option, 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.
• 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.

Options to avoid

• Imtelligence: 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.

Skills

Recommended options

• Acrobatics/athletics: Take this or athletics but not both as they tend to overlap. Go with whichever one you have the best ability score for.
• 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.

Species/race

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

• Resilience: Fighters often take a beating 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 battle master, 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 battle master:

Farmer gives you the best spread of ability score increases with a top feat. Criminal is your best option if you’re going for a dexterity build.

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. Greatswords and glaives have the graze weapon mastery which is generally inferior in my opinion so I’d go with other options.
• 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. You could also go for a scimitar for less damage per attack but an extra attack from the nick property. This works nicely at lower levels, but you can only use this property once per turn so will quickly be outperformed by other weapon mastery properties.
• 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. Again, this can be effective at low levels, but diminishes in value as you gain more attacks and sacrifice using a more powerful weapon so not the best option for a fighter subclass.
• 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.

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.

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.

Other class guides

Not sure an battle master is for you. Not to worry. Why not check out one of our other D&D 2024 class and subclass guides.

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Published by Ben Lawrance

Ben is the creator of Dungeon Mister and is an experienced dungeon master who's been immersed in the D&D universe for over 20 years.View more posts