"Knight" build

[Velkar]

Hi,

It's been a long time since I played Neverwinter Nights, I was thinking to try a stereotypical knight seeking fame, fortune, goodness, restore their House, something of that nature. Young and optimistic.

Could anyone help me out with some build suggestions? I see that there is a 'Knight' class but not sure about going into it from Paladin (I don't know if the character will be Lawful Good) or Fighter, or if there's something else.

If there's any kind of 'standard bearer' type class, that could be interesting too.

Thanks!

[Drowble Oh Seven]

Welcome back! I've got a knight build I'm using for a similar character at the moment.

Worth noting, you don't need to be mechanically the knight class to play a knight. It's a fairly flexible class that focuses on buffing allies and debuffing enemies, so if that's what you want your PC to do it's a fun pick. If that sounds like your sort of thing, read on! If you're more interested in riding horses, wearing armor, and hitting people extremely hard one of the cavalier / WM combos on the spreadsheet below might work for you too.

Or you can do something without cavalier at all. But then you're a knight without a horse and that's just shameful.

Disclaimer; the build below isn't optimal by any stretch and doesn't pretend to be. I've found it fun, playable without difficulty in PvE, and it accomplishes the knight fantasy without locking you into any alignment, but it's got glaring weaknesses too. If you're looking for some other, and probably better options - There's a community-maintained spreadsheet here.

Rogue (10) / Knight (10) / Cavalier (10)

Pros:

• Respectable HP at 570.
• Can hit extremely hard using cavalier charge, and even normal attacks will dish out some respectable damage with 5d6 sneak attack slapped on top of a strength build.
• A ludicrous number of ability buttons to debuff enemies (confuse or stun people using dirty fighting with your stupidly high intimidate score! unscrupulously blind jousting opponents with poisons!), support allies, and generally be a pest. With ESF: Intimidate, you actually manage some pretty decent DCs on all your push-buttons that can catch people by surprise.
• Cool horse on demand.
• A lot of skill points which let you up your individual utility or lean into the noble party leader role by grabbing leadership, intimidate, or both.
• Thanks to cavalier weapon proficiencies, you can swap pretty freely between two handed and sword-and-shield, if you go down the bastard sword (or polearm, via a spear!) route.
• Consistency. All your skills and buttons are on cooldowns rather than uses/day. Y'can just keep swinging forever, and pack your own 100+HP heals via last stand. Sure, they're weaker than a fighter's second wind, but you get three of them in the time a fighter gets one, and you share it with the whole party.

Cons:

• AC's a little below average compared to fighter-heavy builds. You don't get the AC on year gear that a purely brawly type'll get.
• Your saves are absolutely awful. Like, terrible. You will evaporate if anyone with a spell sneezes on you and enemies with mind-affecting spells will be your bane while out adventuring. Pack clarity potions.
• AB comes in at 48, which is a little low compared to the low-50s that other builds can hit. It's serviceable, but not exceptional.
• Jack of all trades, master of none. You hit hard but not as hard as a weapon master. You can buff allies but not as well as a bard. You can provide some healing but nothing like what a caster could.

Optimisation Points, if you decide to play this:

• You can leave CHA at 11 instead of sixteen if you're playing a knight variant other than valiant (or if you are, and you're happy just to drink a potion instead). I just put it at sixteen because I want the paladins to accept me. There's no mechanical reason to do this.
• You can swap out gruesome technique / signature weapon, for taste. I just really liked the fantasy of charging into people and scattering them, so built pretty heavily for intimidate. Signature weapon makes up for the AB you lose to rogue early on in the build. Crippling strike could also be entertaining to hamstring people.
• I used the free epic feat for ESF: Intimidate. There's nothing stopping you swapping it for something more appropriate to your character.

Build

Skills

• Largely up to you, once you've got the essentials for the build (Discipline, Tumble, Spellcraft, Ride).
• You'll want one of intimidate or leadership to get your PDK abilities online - I'd grab intimidate so that dirty fighting and gruesome techniques also benefit. But you've got enough points floating around to go far enough into leadership to hit that magic 50 mark (with gear) as well if you want to.
• 30 UMD will let you play with whatever swords you want, but you've got some very solid options in the one-handed cavalry sabre without going down this route. I went this way because I liked the notion, but you're mechanically better off leaving UMD at whatever gives you 15 after your CHA modifier's applied and pumping the points into Lore for scrolls.

[Velkar]

Hey, thank you for the welcome and for the advice. It looks fun!

For you or anybody else, would there be alternatives similar to this but with better saves? From what I remember of NwN, having low saves was quite damning and would lead to being CCed, debuffed, blown up, etc. very quickly when encountering a spellcaster.

What about without Cavalier, if I didn't want to use a horse? (No experience with the mount mechanics yet!)

Or without Rogue? I'm not sure having Rogue levels fits for RP purposes.

[Drowble Oh Seven]

You're more than welcome!

Low saves can definitely be a bad time. In PVE, you can play around it pretty consistently with consumables, but it's a vulnerability that tends to haunt non-divine mundane builds. Your high base-saves armor-and-shield- types are paladins and divine champions, which can be a lot fun but also dictate the character concept to a degree. You can also get around it to some extent with (high-end, very time consuming) gear enchantment.

If you're worried about saves but want something traditionally knight-like, perhaps something along the lines of a 17 Fighter / 10 Knight / 3 [Bard/Rogue/Specialist]? It's a fairly straightforward brawler, though doesn't really have a whole lot going on besides being generally solid. You're essentially trading a weapon master's damage for some party support.

You could use the bonus feats afforded by fighter to fetch save-boosting feats, and spend one of your two starting gifts on a boost to saves as well. If you play around with your level spread so that you're taking seven of those fighter levels in epics (so, pre-epic is 10 FTR 10 Knight), you could shore them up more with epic feats. Kalo's build calculator's fantastic if you feel like playing around with options.

As to class alternatives:

Cavalier's handy because it grants bonus feats the same way fighter does; so it gives a fair bit of build utility outside of the cool horse factor. You could go for something like fighter instead and keep the bonus feats. You'd also be able to grab weapon specialisation and epic weapon specialisation for an extra +4 damage, which isn't something to sneeze at.

You're likely to see a three-level dip in a lot of builds like this. It'll usually be rogue, bard, or specialist, since all these classes grant access to tumble, which'll give you three more AC than you'll get without it. The build above uses it since cavalier and knight are both prestige classes, so it had to start with something that had tumble if it was going to get the skill at all.

Rogue benefits high-save builds more, since evasion means that any reflex save you do make will result in no damage instead of the 1/2 damage that many spells get. Bard can take spellcraft, which'll net you +3 on your saves. Again, useful! Specialist gives access to a rogue's skill spread (locks! traps! spot!) and spellcraft, but you don't get evasion. You're not compelled to RP a sneaky, lurking-in-back-alleys type just for taking rogue. It's often just RP'd as variety in the character's experience.

There's some more builds here, if you search 'knight' on the page. They're a little outdated now (skill points and most of them rely on barbarian or divine classes, but it might help spark some ideas!

[bagindawud]

Greetings Friends. Want to ask about the Rog PDK Cav you posted...
How high AB and AC can it gets on-foot and mounted ?

If it reaches 54-56 AC on-foot and mounted,
Then your build is good enough and I'm willing to try it. Thank you for your answers and discussion.

[D4wN]

I personally adore my Knight build and while it may not be the strongest, it's a lot of fun and a huge amount of utility.

15 FTR / 10 Knight / 5 LM

This gives you decent enough AC and absolutely great support value between the Knight valiant abilities and the Loremaster Scroll strength. Not to mention you can pick 2 of the secrets for warding from scrying, scrying, teleport, illusions or yoink. Invest in UMD so you can also use Grimoires and everything is at your disposal from divine and arcane wands to the best scrolls and every Grimoire ability. Ping me on Discord for the build if you're interested ( thelightofdawn )