Originally Posted by
Coeruleum Blue
Those feel like the only ones that are strong at all imo. I did say other classes work as a 1-3 level dip though, so like paladin/sorcerer is pretty great, but as a paladin, your entire class is based around smiting, and as a paladin/sorcerer, you can both smite much more than as a straight paladin, and potentially get 9th-level spells (this is why I cap out the dips at 3 levels, because 17th level is when you get 9th-level spells for every single class in 5e.) So if you want to stick with the regular holy warrior theme, go for paladin/divine soul sorcerer bloodline. Or if you just want a lot of damage, go for paladin/shadow sorcerer (damage is really the only thing shadow is good for imo, if you thematically want to be a shadow sorcerer, use aberrant mind sorcerer or lunar sorcery.) If you like the tank part, go for paladin/clockwork soul. Bard also works really well for paladins, but I wouldn't touch warlock as a paladin because you get 1-4 spell slots per day usually as a warlock since no one uses 2-hour "short rests," but you still get lots of significant things from warlock that aren't eldritch blast so warlock is still great. Warlocks still get 9th-level spells if you take at least 17 levels in warlock, they just go under mystic arcanum and don't use a spell slot. Basically any warlock patron other than undying or archfey is really good, but I think noble genie and great old one are probably somewhat better than the other ones, just not so much better at everything the other ones aren't worth taking.
Great old one is pretty underrated, but I think it can get better utility than a wizard if you pick the right invocations, because you can get permanent mind control of NPCs or your fellow PCs who you don't like with no save if you're at a really high level, plus a good spell list you can still actually use, plus your damage is from eldritch blasts and probably also Hunger of Hadar/Evard's Black Tentacles which are generally better than wizard spells if you aren't trying to do the "god wizard" thing and give other people flying, and all the eldritch invocations are at-will spells that don't have any verbal, somatic, or material components to begin with, go get Pact of the Tome and Gift of the Protectors can make you functionally immortal, but most of those invocations including this one are available to any warlock patron. The noble genie spell lists and features are great too, you can get things like Creation, Greater Invisibility, and Wish (though I don't think Wish is strictly better than True Polymorph or Gate in 5e so I don't rank noble genie patron as completely better on that alone) and you can get your own genie lamp as well as basically the only version of Limited Wish/Bend/Anyspell from other editions that any class gets at all before 17th level. Celestial patron can make you the best healer, fathomless is probably the best damage, fiend is the best tank, undead (not undying) is still good because it makes you probably a better necromancer than any other class, literally just don't pick archfey or undying, pick great old one, fathomless, or genie and say your patron is a faerie if you want it to be a fey and pick undead or celestial if you want the undying theme.
As for bards, college of swords bard is basically the best martial-type class in the game and college of lore is the best skill monkey plus better at doing the wizard theme than actual wizards if you aren't trying to get psychic powers/componentless spells or lots of class features that aren't your bardic inspiration or martial abilities. Bards can pick literally any spell in the game from their bardic inspiration and you don't have to sing or play an instrument in 5e, so just pick college of lore bard or whatever sorcerer bloodline you want that isn't solely focused on damage and the feat that gives you a spellbook or pact of the tome warlock and say you're a wizard if you want to be all scholarly, even though the casting stat for all of those is charisma unless you get your DM to change it. 5e is complete jank imo, way worse than Pathfinder's Spheres of Jank (Spheres of Power/Spheres of Might, Spheres of Jank is not the official name) because what you're doing just doesn't make much thematic sense. Like if you want to be Hercules in 5e your best option isn't to be a fighter, it's to be a sorcerer with metamagic and just metamagic all your spells so when you're doing things like pushing the river into the Augean stables you're not chanting and waving your hands around, you just "grab" the river and move it.
5e is really bad at emulating basically any concept from mythology, folklore, or pulp fantasy you could want, and is literally good at doing one thing, being a stereotypical modern D&D universe, even though I've explicitly started a conversation with End on the Random Thought Thread about how different modern D&D universes are from the original one. Luckily for us, WotC itself seems to be going more old-school. They're seeking to get more deals with companies to make D&D games in their worlds, which the Stranger Things and Rick and Morty crossovers are about, and they did that with their own franchise with the Magic: the Gathering crossover. Likewise, in Magic: the Gathering, half the cards they make are things like psionic gith monks or Farideh with her diabolical pact fighting in the Neverwinter gang wars, and none of the bards have been horny or drunk. WotC recognizes that the real reason D&D was considered Satanic by people who opposed it in the 80's while it's considered dorky by people who oppose it now is probably because of actual changes that happened to the game and they're working on changing it back so we have more Conan and heavy metal, and less Dragonlance and ren-faire minstrel songs. Getting the actual licenses is what TSR should've done back in the day when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson still owned it to begin with. The whole reason you don't have old pulp fiction in D&D books is TSR tried to publish it without having the rights and another company, Chaosium, which did have the rights, sued them, so they had to take out all the Cthulhu, Conan, and Elric stuff. But Call of Cthulhu is still not exactly the setting you want if you're trying to play Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath from Lovecraft, which is literally just an adventure story like Conan and Elric. So eventually TSR started publishing the Dragonlance stuff, which is extremely low-quality writing in my opinion, and that was actually what literally drove them out of business and got Wizards of the Coast to buy up Dungeons and Dragons, which was also after Wizards of the Coast bought Magic: the Gathering.
The reason Magic has been way more popular all this time is because lots more people like Conan and heavy metal than Dragonlance and renaissance faire music and that's literally all there is to it in my opinion, but there's still a loyalist base for the current D&D brand which WotC has to fight really hard against, probably like what Games Workshop has to fight against whenever they want to change anything in the Warhammer canon, even though they used to change it all the time in the 80s as well. This loyalist base is absolutely not "grognards," really old-school D&D was full of space aliens, robots, psionics, escaped laboratory experiments (e.g, owlbears, displacer beasts, etc.,) and artifacts mined from the cores of dying stars, and the setting itself was largely based on Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. The closest popular parallel to Dying Earth would be something like Dune or Canticle for Leibowitz, it takes place in the far future but people just act medieval because the society is basically post-apocalyptic and dystopian, and all the "magic" is basically technology that isn't understood anymore. Most of the Cthulhu, Conan, and later Elric and Fafhrd the Grey Mouser stuff was literally like that too, "Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of," and all that. I am always disappointed at the fantasy community for moving really strongly in this renfaire, get-drunk-at-the-tavern-and-sleep-around-while-worshipping-Wiccan-gods direction instead of the more pulpy sci-fi-and-comics direction. That stuff is an inspiration to me despite the fact barely anyone actually reads it and more people meme it, which makes it kind of like any other classic such as Shakespeare, "a classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read," as Mark Twain called them.
This has been my über-professional academic essay on sci-fi, comics, pulp fiction, D&D, Magic: the Gathering, and Warhammer. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Cleric, Druids, Wizards, and Sorcerers
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