Dungeons & Dragons: 10 Ways To Be The Best Support

There are tons of ways to build a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons and Dragons character. But, for whatever reason, one of the most is anything having to do with a support role. You might be liable to say, "Hey, now! Many of my parties have had a consistent healer!" and that may be true. But a support character and a healer are not one and the ♋same.

Where healers focus on restoring hit points and keeping the party alive, support characters function as more of a jack of all trades. A good support makes decisions on the fly, scrambling to provide the best help they can against whatever threat the party is currently facing. This help takes the form of pretty much any action in the game, from buffing allies to weakening enemies to dealing a finis🐈hing blow, as the following tips will reveal.

10 Embolden Your Allies ꩵ

If a support always bases their action on what the situation calls for, what do you do when you roll the highest initiative? Nothing's really happened yet, so it's hard to know where you're needed most. In cases like these, you can rely on the closest thing supports have to a bread and butter action: buffing their allies. There are many spells and abilities in the game that bolster your teammates' combat effectiveness. Whichever one you choose, your party will be thankful to have you as a result. If you're looking for inspiration, here are a couple of examples: bless, enlarge/reduce, haste🀅, bardic inspiration, shield of faith, and aid.

9 ꦇ Weake♐n Your Foes

The flip side of the coin of buffing your allies is weakening your enemies. At the end of the day, whichever action you choose to take has the same effect: the party ends up stronger than their enemies. But, in our experience, your fellow players will all be much more appreciative of actions that make them more powerful than actions tha🅺t make the enemy weaker. Just some food for thought. That being said, weakening the enemy is another great opener to any combat. Some examples of spells and actions that fulfill this function are bane, slow, and the shove action.

8 Off Healing ▨

Okay, so we said supports aren't healers but now you're telling me I need healing? What's the deal here? A support isn't a dedicated healer, but, when possible, you should still have healing somewhere in your toolkit. After all, your role in the party is to do what needs to be done when it needs to be d🦩one. That includes healing.

Sometimes, that means reviving the party's healer from the brink of death after he got 🌱one-shotted by a monster. You're going to have a hard time accomplishing such a task without any healing in your kit. At the very least, pick up a couple of health potions for these kinds of scenarios.

7 Crowd Control ꦏ ౠ

Another great way to help out your party is by instantly taking enemies out of the fight. Actions that impose status conditions such as incapacitated, stunned, charmed, paralyzed, frightened, and so on all fall under the umbrella of what's known in the online gaming community as crowd control. You can also consider the transformation of passable terrain into difficult, or better yet impassable, terrain as crowd control. Crowd control is great for buying your party time to deal with threat💮s one by one as opposed to all at once. Examples include wall of fire, plant growth, hold person, cause fear, and sleep.

6 ❀ ✃ The Help Action

While certainly not the best action, the help action can come in handy in the 𝓰right situation. For those of you unaware, when you take the help action you aid an ally in attacking a target within 5 feet of you. Your ally's attack roll is then made with advantage. Advantage on one attack might not seem like a big deal, but giving a rogue or paladin advantage to increase their chances of landing a big sneak attack or smite is quite powerful. Furthermore, advantage on the attack doubles your ally's chance to critically strike.

5 💟 🐈 Jack Of All Trades

gnome d&d — Druid NPC image, from Wizards of the Coast

To spell it out again, your role as the support is to not have a role. You're going to be doing everythi𝄹ng, so having a bit of skill at many things is going to serve you better than a ton of skill at a couple. For this reason, skill junkie cl𝕴asses like bards and rogues make for great supports outside of battle. But the jack of all trades mantra applies to combat as well.

As you can see in the previous tips, you want access to spells that have a wide variety of effects. For example, who knows wh𝔍en your party is going to encounter a dangerous fall. But when they do, it's your responsibility to have a spell like feather fall prepared and ready.

4 Play A Druid 💟 ꧃

Speaking of being a jack of all trades, the druౠid class might just fulfill the support role better than any other class. If the party needs someone to soak up damage or scout, you can wild shape. If they need buffs on themselves or debuffs on the enemy, you have acc♚ess to a wide range of unique spells like entangle and pass without trace. If they need healing, you've got healing word. Whatever the situation might call for, you can bet somewhere in the druid class kit lies an answer. If you're thinking about rolling a support character, there's no better place to start than with druid. Not circle of the moon subclass though. That's better reserved for the tank role.

3 🎃 Know The Lore

Remember when we mentioned the importance of sk▨ill checks? While lore related skills might receive a lot less action than a skill🔯 like athletics or acrobatics, they're also the source of incredibly useful information. Lore related skills include skills like animal handling, history, religion, and survival.

Leave the spotlight skills like perception checks to one of your allies. As the support your lore related skill checks mi♐ght not happen as often, but when they do you stand to serve as a fount of information.

2 ⛦ 🦩 Know Magic

Magic pervades most Dungeons and Dragons worlds like water in a stream. It's everywhere, completely unavoidable, and if you don't know how to swim you're probably going to drown. In order to be capable🔯 of stepping up to the plate in every cap🔯acity, you're going to need to know some magic. This might mean picking up the arcane trickster subclass in rogue or learning a feat like magic initiate. However you do it, learn some magic or your ability as a support will be compromised.

1 Back Player Decisions ☂ ꦆ

It might just be this aspect of the support class that results in such a small amount of the player base rolling a support character. The support is there to stand by his allies: through thick and thin. Another player might not make the most tactical decision. Regardless, it's still your job to back him up. When you're playing a support, it's not about calling the shots. But that's no cause for lament. Trust us, you'll be having too much fun saving your friends from their terrible decisions to care🐠 anything at all for the spotlight.

NEXT: Dungeons And Dragons: 10 Magic Items For A Mid-Level Par𝓰ty