D&D: Critical Role’s New Subclass Breaks The Game…And It’s Kind Of Awesome
Echo Knights are a brand new fighter subclass that give martial classes some creative ways to break the rules. Here are a few tricks up their sleeves.
The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is a fantastic D&D book that hides some of its best content in plain sight. Dunamancy is perhaps the best addition to come to D&D 5th Edition in a long time, and one of the classes that draws upon it doesn’t even cast spells.
But what they lack in spellcasting, they more than make up for with shenanigans. I’m talking about the Echo Knight, the newest fighter subclass. Echo Knights break the game in the most unexpected ways. It all comes down to a couple of details that fly under the radar. Take a look.
You can use a bonus action to magically manifest an echo of yourself in an unoccupied space you can see within 15 feet of you. This echo is a magical, translucent, gray image of you that lasts until it is destroyed, until you dismiss it as a bonus action, until you manifest another echo, or until you’re incapacitated.
Your echo has AC 14 + your proficiency bonus, 1 hit point, and immunity to all conditions. If it has to make a saving throw if uses your saving throw bonus for the rules. It is the same size as you, and it occupies its space. On your turn, you can mentally command the echo to move up to 30 feet in any direction (no action required). If your echo is ever more than 30 feet from you at the end of your turn, it is destroyed.
Did you catch it? It’s hard to notice that it’s there–especially because it isn’t. The Echo Knight’s echo isn’t a creature. Here’s Jeremy Crawford confirming this reading of the rules:
If you're an Echo Knight in D&D, the magical echo you create is an image of yourself that occupies its space. It isn't a creature.
AdvertisementIf this translucent, gray image were meant to be a creature, the rule would say so. #DnD https://t.co/ox6pxE8rY7
— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) March 19, 2020
And something not being a creature means something, mechanically. For starters, your echo can’t be targeted by spells that specify that they target a creature–meaning your 1hp Echo Knight can’t be off-handedly killed by a spare bolt from a magic missile, or walk through a wall of fire unharmed for instance. But that’s only the beginning of what it means to not be a creature. Take a look at the rules for Attacks of Opportunity, emphasis mine.
You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach. To make the opportunity attack, you use your reaction to make one melee attack against the provoking creature. The attack occurs right before the creature leaves your reach.
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As you might expect, this means a magical echo doesn’t provoke an attack of opportunity if it leaves a creature’s threatened space. So you can have it run up, attack a creature, and run off consequence free. And since you can swap places with it, if you’re both engaged in melee, the Echo Knight can flee and you can teleport to its location to escape.
The next cool trick requires a little bit of magic–but if an Echo Knight can cast Find Familiar possibly because of the magic initiate feat, or a multiclass combo, you can use the ability to see through the eyes of your familiar to summon your echo. Remember the echo only has to be within 15 feet of you–as long as you can see the space. So sneak your familiar inside a building, use your action to see through its eyes, and your bonus action to summon your echo wherever you can, then you can teleport inside.
Echo Knights can do a lot more than that though. Once summoned, your echo only needs to remain within 30 ft. of you, but it can move in some unexpected ways, not being bound by time or space.
The echo created by an Echo Knight doesn't have a speed, and the knight can move the echo in any direction, including into the air. The echo can hang out wherever you move it. #DnD https://t.co/ccAThFieug
Advertisement— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) March 23, 2020
So it can hover and attack creatures that are flying. Remember it moves in any direction you direct it (which doesn’t take your action). It’s an unexpected benefit, but one that opens up aerial movements to otherwise earthbound creatures. And if your echo is destroyed–well, you’re still safe and sound.
It also gives fighters an effective range of 45 feet with whatever weapon they have, as they can summon it up to 15 feet away, then move it another 30 feet on their turn, so long as they’re willing to move up to keep it within 30 feet.
And that’s without noting that you can make an extra attack anytime you take the attack action, so 3rd level fighters with a high constitution modifier can potentially make four attacks in a single round, or five if you are wielding two weapons, though it does take most of your juice for the day.
Anyway, that’s just some of what you can get up to with Echo Knights, and why we hope that everyone enjoys the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount.
What tricks will you pull off? What do you think of these rules? Cheesy or giving fighters some extra oomph? Let us know in the comments!
