Hello magic casters of all shapes and sizes! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out 25th episode of our feat series. Today we’re going to be taking a look at heavy armor master feat dnd 5e which is perfect for you at tanks out there as well as a surprising other class that i will get into later.
Heavy armor master is found in the player’s handbook and is one of the more commonly picked feats out there, you will see why right away here. With all of that out of the way, let’s take a quick look at the description.
Description
First and foremost it might be worth noting that there is a prerequisite to this feat and that is that you have to be proficient with heavy armor. Some classes get it automatically if you don’t there’s a way to get it through feats or through a one level dip intake the forge cleric. That being said, the feat reads as followed.
You can use your armor to deflect strikes that would kill others. You gain the following benefits: Increase your Strength score by 1, to a maximum of 20. While you are wearing heavy armor, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage that you take from nonmagical weapons is reduced by 3.
Very cool stuff, let’s go through a quick walkthrough and break this down a little bit more.
Walkthrough
First and foremost that +1 to strength is a fairly self-explanatory. When it comes to the damage reduction by three… it’s pretty good. In all honesty something worth noting is it doesn’t say it has to be through weapon attacks. Meaning if you spring a trap that deals any these damages then you are also get that +3 damage reduction. Which is a very cool stuff in super effective. With that brief walkthrough out of the way let me get to my personal thoughts on this.
Thoughts
You know i think this is one of the best feats to pick early on. What i mean by that is in the beginning of most campaigns you’re not gonna run into a whole lot of magical weapons so the non-magical component really isn’t stressful. Also if you are something that has access to a way of enabling damage reduction already through resistances then this all but makes you essentially immortal.
So who benefits from this most! the obvious choice would be fighter. What i mean by that is they already get some pretty decent AC, they can already use heavy armor so it’s not really a huge stretch to pick it. I feel like the eldritch knight might actually gain the absolute most from this in terms of fighters just because they could combo this with a fancy little cantrip known as blade ward which would get them resistance to these damages plus the three damage reduction after the fact would make it pretty incredible.
In terms of another class that i hear a very little people talking about who would benefit greatly from this would in fact be the forged cleric. They get access to the heavy armor as part of their class features. In addition to that they have a lot of concentration spells, so this three damage reduction would greatly help with that.
Alternatively if you wanted to spend the two feat, your two feats on heavy armor proficiency as well as heavy armor master then you could effectively use it great with a hex blade warlock build essentially turning you into a pseudo eldritch knight.
Conclusion
I think these were probably the best classes for it. If you can think of any others or any other great builds or cool stories involving heavy armor master i’d really like to hear down in the comments beneath as well as your personal thoughts on it. With that being said, thank you so much for checking out guys and as always happy adventuring.