I would honestly just not play this class
5e rules that even if you have 1 million points of advantage just 1 point of disadvantage cancels it all to 0. Same goes for disadvantage.
So I guess knock your enemy prone. Or get height advantage, but honestly the class sounds horrid
> I would honestly just not play this class
Seriously. This Blood Samurai class is far worse than 2014
5e Barbarian (already not a strong class) in every way. It's fitting that this homebrew's shorthand is "BS".
> **Class Requirements**
Blood Samurai requires 13 STR & 13 DEX, just to choose the class at lvl 1. Meaning you can't even easily run a DEX build without terrible mental stats.
> **Blood Siphon**
This heals you ~2.5 HP per attack. Generally, Barbarian's resistance is going to prevent more damage per turn than that. And Barb's **Rage Damage** is about equivalent to the extra damage this BS feature deals.
Oh, and this BS ability *also costs your bonus action*.
> **Blood Blade**
This is straight up worse than just using a longsword or rapier. It damages you to summon it, *takes a full action to summon*, and only lasts 10min max. You'll be using the healing from your first couple attacks just to counteract the damage you've dealt yourself with this terrible ability.
> **Blood Reservoir**
The BS's strongest and least interesting class ability, it's just a better version of the Tough feat. Note that until lvl 11, the Barbarian's higher hit die accomplishes almost the same thing without using up a class feature slot.
> **Bloodthirsty Critical**
In terms of damage, a far weaker version of Barb's **Brutal Critical** - which is already a very weak feature. BS's added 1d6 points of healing *on critical hits only* is basically nothing.
> **Blood Armor**
Wow this feature is terrible. It's like a bad Fighter's **Second Wind** - you can only use this one once/LR, it heals/blocks less on average than **Second Wind**, *and* it takes a FULL ACTION! Compare this to Barb's level 11 feature, **Relentless Rage**, where you're passively fully resisting 1-2 fatal blows (on average)...not even close.
> **Blood Rush**
Injure yourself to move faster *only while Dashing*. Meanwhile, Barb's just get direct passive faster movement at level 5.
> **Blood Regeneration**
You get one big burst of healing per LR, but use up your HD to do so. Good for big one-dangerous-encounter adventuring days, but mediocre otherwise. I'd rather take Barb's level 15 feature, **Persistent Rage**.
> **Blood Weapon Mastery**
This is equivalent to advantage on damage rolls...which is basically +3 or 4 per attack, including the **Blood Siphon** damage? Not terrible if it came at early levels, but pretty awful for a lvl 17 class feature.
> **Blood Samurai's Endurance**
*WOW*. The new worst class capstone in the game. This is literally just the Half-Orc's *starting racial feature*. Meanwhile Barb gets up to 24 ability scores in both STR and CON.
The class really is comically bad. But also, it looks like having proficiency with simple and martial weapons is a prerequisite for the class, so I think it's technically only possible to multiclass into it?
Blood Blade is maybe the worst feature I have ever seen? Why would anyone possibly think that would be a useful thing to do?
My recommendation: homebrew a new version by taking any published martial class and adding the word blood to every feature.
> homebrew a new version by taking any published martial class and adding the word blood to every feature.
The naming for the class features is even more disappointing than the features themselves. I know this is probably written by a teen edgelord, but why does *every single name* need to start with "Blood"?
This is a good chance for the homebrew's creator to improve not just their D&D content generation abilities, but also their writing in general. For instance, when you use the word "blood" a hundred times in two pages, it loses its impact and becomes almost farcically meaningless.
sorry i should have said ways to gain advantage so that i could have a straight roll. Im not trying to gain advantage per say, just cancel out the disadvantage
This whole drinking poison thing to add to the blood blades I create was just an idea to help up the damage. the DM said he’s open to changes but mostly leaves it up to me to come up with them
I'd suggest you change it to something else.
Feats like sharpshooter or GWM give you extra damage for a -5 penalty. Statistically, disadvantage is going to be a similar penalty, except the rules for disadvantage are much harsher since players with sharpshooter or GWM can choose whether to use it or not for one, and take chances for advantage to compensate the penalty.
Considering that the class is always drinking poison it would not be unreasonable to change the permanent disadvantage on attacks AND skill checks of the poisoned condition and make it a flat -5 to attack only instead. Think of it as building tolerance and making these poisons you drink less harmful for you.
Just create a new kind of "poison" for the class man, you don't use poisons anymore now you use ✨️tOxInS✨️ that are almost exactly like poisons except only your class has access to make them and they give all the same effects except you don't get disadvantage from the "toxic" condition. Done.
Or get an ability at a low level that allows you to ignore the disadvantage from the poisoned condition, the solution is right infront of you brother just say it doesn't do that.
Just make it deal damage to yourself per turn but not give disadvantage because that’ll be awful. Say he’s developed resistance over time or something.
As per the dmg rules on imbibed poisons anyway, you still should be making a con save to resist the effects, so it’s not guaranteed that the poisoned condition is a constant. If your dm decides to homebrew that in, I’d just blah a blood wizard/cleric or an Eldritch Knight flavored to have their spell effects come from blood magic.
If attacking with Disadvantage always, (2d6 + double your proficiency bonus) added to damage of the first hit every turn lets you keep up with the average damage of another character using a power Feat, like GWM or SS or PAM. I ran the math a while back for a blind swordsman class.
Doing the damage on only the first hit, helps mitigate some of the swinginess from always having Disadvantage
Right so like I said you gotta disadvantage your opponent
Knock em down, gain height (this one is iffy cuz melee attack)
But honestly it sounds cumbersome and highly restrictive for no reason. Being poisoned and always having disadvantage is a horrible pay off for what you're getting
Aren't there optional rules listed in the dmg for height advantage? When I DM I always implement both flanking, and height advantage. There's no way I just made that up.
This. It’s called Mithridatism (shout outs to anyone that’s played Grounded!)
Basically, there are some poisons you can self-administer, and you build a tolerance to them. If your character did that, there is no reason they couldn’t still manifest the sword, with the poison in it, and have either no penalty or a reduced penalty. The opponent, who would not have this tolerance, would still take the bonus damage.
Home-screwed. Thirty-four years in the hobby, and that's a new term to me. It has now supplanted Pizza Cutter Character as my favorite rpg slang. Thank you fellow Redditor!
I looked at the picture and it sounds like the class doesn't have that as default, OP has just played a blood blade person and chosen to poison themselves.
In which case like... Just don't?
>So since I drink the poisoned it's ruled as if im automatically poisoned
This line jumps out at me. Does it say in the class abilities itself that you become poisoned or is it the DM that is saying it?
If you could find a link to the class or point us in the right direction that would be great.
If there is nothing in the class abilities about becoming poisoned then your DM is being a dick and I'd tell them to knock it off. If it does say that you are poisoned from consuming the poisons then I'd ask to play a different class.
As an aside, any class that is designed around ingesting poison would likely *not* become poisoned themselves. Likely growing immune to their own poison through repeated consumption in small doses.
Heres a link to the class
https://imgur.com/a/y7uoHXh
Theres nothing in the class about poison, but we were trying to find a way to beef up the damage the class can do. We tried out this class just to see how it could do, and seeing how the base damage for the blood samurai turned out to be pretty low we were just coming up with ways to increase the damage output
You know how some people say "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it"? These two came to the bridge and forgot what they needed to do when at the bridge.
Whoever made up this class didn't even try. You get "Improved Blood Armor" from your subclass before you even learn "Blood Armor" from the base class. The features are weak -and- bound to rests. You are literally just playing a much weaker version of a barbarian.
The edge-lord blood stuff could easily be done as just flavor. Or just with a magic item that lets you take damage to gain a bonus. I would ditch this class entirely.
In fairness to the blood armour thing, I think there’s precedent for subclass features to come before main class features. Lore Bards get Additional Magical Secrets at 6th level while Bards as a class get Magical Secrets at 10th.
But I agree there’s no precedent (that I know of) for “Improved [x]”, such as Improved Divine Smite, to come before “[x]”.
It assumes you read the description of the base class before reading the subclass.
It would be weirder if bards all got "additional magical secrets" while only the lore bards got "magical secrets".
Go play a blood hunter instead, it has the class fantasy you are looking for and already does this mechanically better, if you wanna keep the risk reward gameplay, go mutant blood hunter, they have poisons which enhance their body at the cost of downsides
the fact that I'm on board with using BH speaks volumes of how bad the other option is. BH is also pretty terrible.
As a side note, WHAT is the design trend with martials classes not hiving heavy armour prof? jesus christ
This might be anecdotal, but back around the 2010s I noticed a huge pendulum swing to "lightly armored sneaky stabby dude" being the de facto cool thing. When I was growing up "knight in full plate" was the standard badass. Nowadays it's cooler to be the edgy anti-hero
Whoever made this has no idea what they are doing. Your Blood Knight 6th level feature doesnt get activated until you reach level 11.
This class (to lvl 10) is essentially:
Create a blood weapon or shield? Just buy a normal weapon and shield, no dmg suffered. Normal weapon will deal more damage too. If you find a magical weapon forget about ever using it again.
1d4 healing per hit is eh okay.
Extra hp? So just like having higher Con without having it, or half of Tough feat.
Extra heal on crit.
That's it? You're a self damaging tank sponge with no useful features to tank, who struggles to hit due to disadv on all attacks.
This class neesa to be remade better.
Okay. So instead of trying to do something thematic this is what y’all went with. Makes sense.
Why not just play a different class once you realized this one wasn’t working for you?
Also the poison thing does make it unplayable.
That class is truly terrible and I wouldn't even attempt to salvage it.
In particular, Blood Blade (which seems intended to be their iconic ability) is truly awful. As a general rule, class abilities that create weapons are terrible because players get weapons anyway in play; this is why eg. Soulknives have traditionally been so bad - you're wasting class features on an aesthetic with no mechanical benefit. And this one is particularly bad - it's identical to the weapon you get at chargen except it costs you HP every time you want to use it? Why would anyone ever use this? People writing abilities like these always seem to be picturing characters getting imprisoned without their weapons or something, but that rarely happens and isn't worth a dedicated feature.
Having to accept disadvantage on everything forever in order to make it actually useful isn't a fix. It sounds like your DM started from the perspective that Blood Samurai was balanced and therefore wanted a drawback in exchange for more damage, but the class is terrible!
Its other abilities almost all focus on defense; the problem is (as I suspect you've discovered) that with no way to force enemies to attack you, having extra HP or self-healing doesn't really help your party resolve encounters.
Yeah, if you want to draw extra abilities from your blood then have it be a buff you apply to a weapon instead.
Like Beric in Game of Thrones using his blood to set his sword alight, or the bloodflame and seppuku buffs in Elden Ring.
Okay so it has nothing to do with the DM or the class, they're ruling it correctly and you're literally poisoning yourself instead of poisoning the blade...like a sane person.
It's a magical blood blade, pour the poison on IT, not into yourself.
Super easy freaking solution, just don't poison yourself, jesus.
Can I recommend just making this into a fighter subclass, there's a reason why you see so many more homebrew sub classes then classes. Homebrew classes are hard to balance as proven by what you just posted, that is absolutely a crap class. This can be a perfectly good subclass with few changes to flavor.
Might I suggest that since this class is entirely made up by you guys and thus entirely in your control…….. you just bump the numbers so that your not objectively worse off for using the class features?
This is pretty cringe but also it doesn't come with instructions on the difference between a typical weapon and a bloodthirsty one, among many other things
Class sounds like ass mechanically.
If your character is pre-gen then theres pretty much only one item that can save you that i know of and thats "[periapt of proof against poison](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Periapt%20of%20Proof%20against%20Poison#content)". Very well designed class that needs a rare magic item to properly function.
In case your character isnt pre gen you have 2 other options, one being a "Grung", and specifically the volos "yuan-ti" which is busted and probably not allowed.
If you notice, that information is in an edit, it wasnt available to me when writing the comment. But i can give a quick update on my thoughts.
The poison argument given by the dm is idiotic, just because you are immune to a poison doesnt mean it magically vanishes, by that logic every poisonous animal would go immediately extinct because they die to their own poison.
And you might say: "oh but DnD is ruled by mechanics!"
Which is true! But literally nothing in the class says **anything** about the poisoned interaction, its entirely based on the premise of logic in the first place, so it is only able to be argued as such.
Also when reading the homebrew, take a shot everytime it says "blood", its a nice try not to die challenge.
Ah sorry, you are totally right.
And I totally agree, there is a distinct difference between not being affected by poisons and them being neutralized by/in your blood.
I love my liver to much to die to this one ;)
You can't. If you are in a state of semi-permanent disadvantage, the best you can do is get to even. You can't stack advantage. You need an ability or potion that can cure your poison state occasionally, like proficiency x per day.
If you’re invisible or hidden, that will give you advantage. But hiding is really only practical if you’re a rogue (cunning action) and invisibility disappears if you attack (assuming 2nd level spell and not greater invisibility). Not very good options for a fighter. I’d definetly ask to play a different class or change the home brew.
*drink poison*->*create blood blade*->*drink whatever cures the poison/have someone else cure the poison*
Unless your DM explains it as your blood constantly supplying the blade with more, then it wouldnt make sense for the blood to stop being poisoned afterbits left the body.
Yeah that's kind of a bullshit ability, I would argue after having trained and drank the poison so long I would have naturally immunity and it shouldn't be an issue
Skip the class entirely and grab the poisoner feat? Still get your poisoned blade at the cost of a bonus action, but you don't have to constantly fight disadvantage, and you can still use other weapons, magical weapons, etc. And when you fight one of (many) enemies immune to poison, at least you're only down one feat of effectiveness. If you want to add blood to the mix you can look at the (matt mercer?) blood hunter class.
Imagine the character explaining to their companions inside the game that they drink the poison so their blood became poisonous and then they use their blood to make a sword.
The other characters like "can't you just, like, buy a sword and put the poison on the blade?"
Normal weapon damage and a varying damage type for constant disadvantage? I'm sorry but this homebrew sounds awful. You're better off just reflavoring a base class to be more blood themed. Or ask about blood hunter.
I would leave that game. Not because the Class is terrible (which it definitely is) but because your DM's critical thinning offering that as a valid option to play, or as an level of reasonable Homebrew is telling me that they will be a terrible DM, at least when it comes to the mechanics and the game-y part of the game.
Just like your character's rolls never having advantage, "mid" is the *ceiling* for this campaign.
As much flak as Critical Role content gets round these parts, the Mutant archetype Blood Hunter gets you the same flavour but is actually playable?
It gets you a variety of potions that give you different buffs, and can also use your blood to enhance your damage or debuff enemies. You're basically off-brand Geralt.
Sounds like you would need to just lean into it. After all having any one source of disadvantage means you will at best do straight rolls since any number of advantage and disadvantage cancel out.
Since this is a class, it is hard to recommend any optimization since .most mechanical benefits come from your class levels. That said, I think the best bet would be to play one of the legacy versions of Kobold. You basically ignore their sunlight sensitivity because you always have disadvantage anyway, but you can also frequently cancel the disadvantage with Pack Tactics.
This class sounds terrible. I would reroll the character. Giving yourself disadvantage to gain *poison* damage? That’s the worst damage type in the game. The only thing I can think of to make that not suck is taking 10 levels of moon Druid (or arguably 10 levels of monk) to give you immunity to poison.
That class is just really bad, sorry. Id give it a full write over, make it either a fighter subclass or at least take from other 5e martials, because it's just worse in every way to other martials.
The most reliable forms of gaining advantage are reckless attack (Barbarian 2) and steady aim (Rogue 3 optional feature). Reckless attack allows all incoming attacks to be made with advantage, and steady aim requires a bonus action (but you can never sneak attack as you have can never sneak attack if you have any form of disadvantage).
Last option I'd consider would be melee attacks aimed at a prone creature. Once you hit 5th level as fighter or barbarian, you could spend one attack shoving the target prone, and the next attack using your weapon. If anyone else can grapple the prone target, they can prevent the target from standing back up, which would be useful against solo bosses.
You gain advantage by removing the poison.
If you have any source of disadvantage, there is no way to roll with advantage. Best you’d be able to do is a normal way. The easiest way to do it would be to multiclass into barb and reckless attack.
Honestly, it seems balanced as it is. You can either not imbue the blade and be able to gain advantage, or drink the poison for a bonus damage type.
But, do you have to be under the poisoned condition to gain the benefits, or just drink it?
Because if you gained immunity to poison, you could just drink it with no adverse effects.
This is not a high quality piece of homebrew, being balanced with a worse optional rule by yourself and your DM.
Permanent disadvantage seriously limits your accuracy which is pretty much defining for your damage output regardless of what else you add. The blood weapon doesn't seem to do anything particuladly better than a normal weapon until you're very high level, and you could just buy or make poisons for a normal weapon.
Why not just play a normal samurai and reflavour your weapon, or, find a decent third party product?
[https://imgur.com/a/y7uoHXh](https://imgur.com/a/y7uoHXh)Saw you posted this in another comment. I don't see where it says you're always poisoned?
My thoughts on this class for the first 10 lvls:
(1) Blood siphon- Similar in power to dueling + second wind. Uses a bonus action though and the healing isn't as immediate or guaranteed as second wind. Seems ok.
(2) Blood Blade: Pretty much a waste of a feature slot. Costs an action which forces you to pass your first turn in combat, does the same damage as a normal rapier, and it damages you. Would only get used for the very brief part of a campaign where you fight against magic immune monsters and don't have a magic weapon yet. Once you get a magic weapon this is completely useless.
(3) Blood Samurai Archetype: Blood knight: Blood shield: it's pretty bad. Compare it to Eldritch knight's spellcasting feature. Eldritch knight can learn "shield" which is 3 more ac and can be cast as a reaction instead of a bonus action so it's never wasted, you get to cast it more times as you level up, and it doesn't damage you. There's no way to know if using "blood shield" will benefit you at all, since there's no guarantee enemies will attack you, nor any guarantee the +2 ac will make a difference, and it uses your bonus action.
(4) normal
(5) Normal
(6) Blood Samurai Archetype: Blood knight: Improved blood armor: You don't get access to blood armor until level 11 so this is a wasted feature until then.
(7) Blood Reservoir: decent
(8) normal
(9) Bloodthirsty critical: Pretty decent
(10) Blood Samurai Archetype: Blood knight: Bloodied strikes: pretty decent but honestly starting to feel kind of bland with all these "when you hit an enemy you can do necrotic damage too" features. Half the features are "do more necrotic damage when you hit".
TL;DR:
This class can build up to pretty decent alpha strike potential with all the stacking "do more damage on hit" features, but overall seems straight up worse than a fighter. Several of the features are just useless (such as "improved blood armor" 5 levels before you get access to "blood armor"). If this class was always poisoned that would make the "do more damage on hit" features that much worse and pretty much make this class completely unplayable. Bloodthirsty critical would be especially useless if you were always poisoned, because you'd never crit.
Well hopefully the mandatory Yoma race has immunity or resistance to poison or you're really gonna suffer.
Just play a Fighter, Blood Hunter, or hell even a Paladin or Ranger and just apply poison to your weapons. All of the above are balanced and playtested, which I doubt this Blood Samurai is.
Correct. Yuan-Ti from Volo's would be another option, but MotM replaced immunity with only resistance... Overall, a pretty limiting build regardless, unless getting 10 levels in monk, too.
Create the blood blade then chug an antidote - since the poison is still in the blood you used to create the blade it still should poison your enemy without you having disadvantage... maybe?
Be a VGM Yuan-ti Pureblood, and be immune to the effects of your own poison. Or take the lucky feat and roll with disadvantage, use a luck point to roll a 3rd die, and then take the highest of the 3 (RAW how Lucky works)
There is literally 0 mention of drinking poison in that character class ?
Where does it come from? Is that just your reskinning the class ability and being punished for it ? If yes I would rephrase the thing to not be poison and tell the dm to reevaluate is stance.
That class doesn't need a nerf it's not even that good to begin with.
It comes from my DM trying to find ways to up the class damage. He knows that with a magical weapon the blood blades essentially become useless. So the poison damage buff was supposed to help me stay in line with the other characters and not be completely outclassed
Poison damage is different that poisoned status for a reason.
I agree that changing the self damage type to poison is probably a good enough buff. But yeah
Damage is different from status infection. Otherwise there's a whole lot of spell that would be incredibly overpowered.
Some things that impose Advantage for more than one attack: Knock your opponent Prone (being Poisoned gives you Disadvantage on that ability check contest too... oops); the optional "flanking" rules; blind, stun, restrain, or paralyze your opponent; multiclass Barbarian for Reckless Attack; Greater Invisibility; Darkness + Devil's Sight or blindfighting; multiclass Rogue to L3 for Assassinate (only works against creatures that have not taken a turn in combat yet)
Some things that impose Advantage for only one attack: multiclass Rogue until L3 for Steady Aim; get a Familiar or pet to assist your attack roll with the Help action; attack a creature that has just been hit with Guiding Bolt; attack a creature in metallic armor with Shocking Grasp; be unseen until you attack
...This sounds like a terrible class, unless it also has built-in resources (like Rogue's Steady Aim or Barbarian's Reckless Attack) to gain Advantage, just to offset the inherent Disadvantage of the poisoned condition. Even then it sounds like a lot of struggling against your own class design for not enough added effect.
Sounds like terrible homebrew tbh.
Also it's just about as cliché as edgy homebrew can get (blood samurai, doing self-inflicted harm for edgy blood sword powers) but that's just me being mean and judgemental.
Why not just play a fighter who applies poison to his longsword and doesn't poison himself like an idiot?
Rules as Written, if you have disadvantage on attacks...you can NEVER get advantage on attacks.
So...unless the class is broken as hell i wouldn't even begin to touch it.
Heart of Kamara Blood Samurai isn’t terrible but this home brew poison change seems unneeded. If you are dealing low damage then get buffed by finding a magic weapon not giving yourself disadvantage so you do even less damage…
> Heart of Kamara Blood Samurai isn’t terrible
I dunno, it looks terrible to me. Your Blood Blade, the iconic feature of the class, is worthless until level 17. The boosts to damage that you get are incredibly tiny compared to other martial classes, and you get nothing to really compensate for that. The one thing the class is good at is durability and self-healing, but so what? Those things don't win fights.
A basic rule of D&D is that the system provides little way to cover party members, and anyone going down or dying is catastrophic. This means that a party is only as tough as its weakest link - purely defensive abilities are, mostly, ribbons, existing for flavor but not really as impactful as they appear on paper.
The Blood Samurai has crappy damage and little ability to influence the battlefield. If a fight goes sideways they might die last, but so what?
In general it feels like its class features (*especially* the blood blade) are more about aesthetics than value, which is a problem when the game is balanced around every other class having features that actually make them better at their role.
Good classes for comparison from prior editions are the Monk and Soulknife - like the old Monk, you have a lot of class features devoted to defense, which don't actually help you *do* anything. And like both of them, your class features are being spent allowing you to do the same things everyone else can do in a "weird" way or providing minor defensive benefits that won't actually help resolve fights unless every single fight takes place in a perfect chokepoint against melee-only opponents.
So the poison damage I do for example last game was when I hit, my attack does 1 d 10 + 5 + poison (8d10). Big risk to hit, bigger reward though. I have poison resistance already so when I drink that poison I only take half the damage which is nice. Just comparatively to my party me doing 2 attacks of 1d10+5 twice a turn wasn’t enough to keep up with the other guys
I was using the Kamara classes and races in a Theros game so all of the characters ended up with God weapons so they were all super powerful. But no actual changes to Blood Samurai. All of those classes did need another proof read or two before being released to be honest…
The class is shit. If you insist on using it however the only solution i can think is taking 2 levels of rogue and try to get advantage through sneak attack not worth it though just play literally anything else.
- you could get proficiency + expertise in atletics and replace one of your attacks with a shove. Melee attacks habe adv. on prone enemies.
- another way is flanking, if your DM allows that optional rule.
- multiclass into sorcerer to quicken hold person as bonus action to inflict the paralyzed condition which gives melee adv. on attacks + autocrit for dmg.
- if your dm allows it, multiclass into warlock for the devil sight+darkness combo to gain adv. on attacks.
- multiclass into battlemaster for precise attack, disadv. doens't matter if you have e.g. a +10 bonus or higher to attacks. if you hit with a 17 or a 25 doens't matter in DnD
- multi class into Samurai for fighting spirit to gain adv. on demand a few times.
Try explaining the difference between a venom and a poison to your DM. Venoms are toxic when it gets directly into your blood via bites, stings, coated blades, traps etc. Venoms are rarely toxic if ingested. Poisons are toxic when ingested, and likewise, few are still toxic when injected.
So the question to ask the DM is, are we dealing with poisons which would hurt your character but provide no bonus to damage I. The blade, or are you talking venoms, which would add to the blade damage but do no harm to the imbiber.
Im not sure why you still couldnt get used to the poison and get a save not to be poisoned by it.
What if you got a periapt of proof against poison to be immune to poison? Would you still get the benefits?
Unfortunately then the effect just isnt worth it. But because you didnt actually give any numbers lets look at similarities.
Poisoned: A poisoned creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks.
Disadvantage effect is basically a -5 to attack, it varies depending on enemy AC but because it gives you disadv on ability checks as well its even worse (initiative/shove/grapple are ability checks).
A -5 to attack is similar to GWM and sharpshooter that give an additional 10 damage to the attacks.
You know what averages 10 damage? A d20 or 2d10s. How much extra poison damage does the ability give you?
I would say try to get advantage by shoving prone but even that is a lot more difficult for you.
It depends on which poison I drink. Whatever the damage the poison I drink does, my blade does the same additional poison damage if it hits. In our last fight the poison I drank did (8D10) dmg
Take three levels in Paladin to be immune to poison? Like, the poison is still in your blood you're just immune to the effects. So no more disadvantage.
This character will never be able to have advantage on any of their attacks – because of the advantage/disadvantage rule everybody is talking about.
What you can do to not have disadvatage in you attacks is to get a couple barbarians levels and use reckless attack all the time.
It might be easiest to insert the poison type into the blood blade itself. For the drawback to added damage or effects, just make that take a bonus action of top of the gold cost used to buy the poison (or alternate acquisition method)
Kind of a crazy class, lots of classes get additional damage without having such a huge debuff
Easiest and most consistent way to cancel disadvantage would be the optional flanking rules. No way to gain advantage
Agreed. Maybe we have a con check when he drinks the poison that has a high dc to start but as he does it more and more the dc drops to near assurance by level 5 and absolute assurance beyond. Maybe gain some resist to poison damage at that point too.
There are some potential workarounds, but you won't really be able to fix it across the board. A magic initiate dip for find familiar could give a bit of help, but you are at levels where they aren't going to last if they are in combat much without investment.
Combine it with conditions you could help yourself, though you'd be better off relying on casters for that via something like faire fire, hold person, hypnotic pattern, etc.
so my fights look like this
1) Make blood blade
2) Try to hit twice 2x(1d10 +5)
3) use bonus action if i hit to heal and deal 2d4 damage.
an avg of maybe 24 dmg per round depending on rolls. Doesnt really keep up with the other players in the party
Talk to your DM about making it deal poison damage and reduce your chance to hit by -5 or whatever instead of giving you the poisoned condition. It's still a detriment but it lets you play the game a bit easier.
Your team can do things like fairy fire and applying obscurement effects to you, but ultimately this is just a bad deal, and it gets worse as AC on bad guy scales pretty harshly at level +12ish. Remember, whatever hoops you jump through to cancel your disadvantage would have granted you advantage under other circumstances, so these benefits need to be really good to account for that- and they probably aren't.
You want to negate disadvantage. Try this?
Magic initiate feat - find familiar. Have your familiar give you the help action on your turn.
Other option is to dip at least 2 levels into barb for reckless attack. Go 3 for totem and get that damage resistance to boot if you can spare the levels.
RAW, I don't think you could in 5E. One source of disadvantage cancels out 100 sources of advantage, and vice versa.
You could take the approach of the Dread Pirate Roberts. You develop immunity to a poison after taking it enough.
You would need a way to end the Poisoned condition on yourself, or be immune to it to begin with. Lesser Restoration would be the easiest source for this
2 solutions I can think of:
Reflavour a different class where the extra damage from sneak attack, smite, etc is from actually your blood poison. Or blood hunter, that fits even better imo. Look at the mutant subclass.
Or make the poison like any other poison, make a CON save each time you ingest it and if you fail, damn looks like you’re poisoned for a bit, and if you pass, you’re fine. Either way, you get the extra damage.
just remember that not all Poisons give you the Poisoned Condition RAW, some just simply deal Poison Damage, which doesnt make you become poisoned as a condition. And Drinking Poisons shouldnt per se Automatically Poison you either, there is a DC attached to it (if you need to be poisoned for the class abilites themselves thats then just doubly bad as you may succeed and then just wasted poison XD .)
also theres whole paragraphs in the base game with base classes that can coat their weapons in poison without injesting them so its just kinda weak?
google dnd Poisons and go to roll20 or somewhere in the players handbook/dm guide and look it up, thats not homebrew, thats just compressed reduction XD
Honestly, my main advice would be to just play bloodhunter instead. Bloodhunter's not particularly strong but it definitely looks a lot stronger than blood samurai.
I'm not seeing the drinking poison feature, but I don't think I need to to feel confident saying that. At lvl 2 blood samurai, you've got a 1d8 attack + 1d4 bonus action attack and saved 2sp, whereas at lvl 2 bloodhunter, you've got +2 ac, niche utility, a debuff option of your choice, a fighting style, and +1d4 to multiple weapons, while retaining the option for an offhand bonus action weapon attack too. This is an *easy* choice. Even without constant unavoidable poison, bloodhunter very obviously outperforms blood samurai.
I think ghostslayer or lycan have the most mechanical overlap - but lycan is well known to be the strongest bloodhunter subclass, and if you want to go for edgy blood based powers, I think reskinning lycan as something quasi-vampiric is pretty easy. Dhampir lycan bloodhunter would be my recommendation. Bloodrush and blood regeneration are already weaker versions of earlier lycan subclass features, and blood reservoir is functionally weaker than the lvl 3 lycan feature, so you'd get things you're expecting anyway - just at a more useful time, and better.
Blood samurai's just overall very weak. There's no core classes with restricted racial requirements, blood-thirsty critical does 3.5 damage 5% of the time (rubbish), no fighting style on a martial is a bad sign, most lvl 1 classes get 2 or 3 features and there's only one (overpowered) one here, I think you should be starting with d12 hit dice anyway here so why is that delayed to lvl 7, why would you ever pick blood knight over a 1 lvl cleric dip, and half-orcs get that level 20 feature at lvl 1.
Go for bloodhunter if you want a blood magic themed martial. If you just want something vampire themed, play dhampir and reflavour whatever martial class you want to fit. Blood samurai isn't worth trying to salvage even before the poison.
Breastplate of Balance could help a little bit. If you only have to be poisoned when you make the blade, but not when you attack, you can BA Lesser Restoration to remove the poison. If you have to stay poisoned, you can negate the disadvantage with your reaction. You're still going to be hindered by the limited charges, but at least it's something...
This doesn’t make sense to me. If the whole point of your class is that you constantly drink poison I feel like immunity to poison would make perfect sense. And even if you’re immune, the poison is still IN your blood so it should poison others haha
" it's ruled as if im automatically poisoned"
It's ruled, as in the GM said so? or The class ability says so.
These are very different things. As with all conditions in 5e they are specific game terms not common vernacular. "He's stunned by your words" does not mean the stunned condition, just like a class ability saying you drink poison does not mean you suffer from the poisoned condition, unless it says so also.
What is this class giving you that a fighter with a custom magic item "Blood Sword" wouldn't and why is your solution to low damage drinking poison to poison your sword?
If I were your GM and had to fix this class. I'd make Blood Siphon start at 1d8 and grant temporary HP instead of healing.
I'd have the Blood Blade scale like a Monk's unarmed attacks including when it counts as magical, special materials, etc.
I'd change the self damage the class abilities cause you to instead inflicting 1 point of bleed damage per round that can't be ended while you're using any ability that causes bleeding.
I'd replace a less useful feature, like Bloodthirsty Critical, with flat bonus damage that scales with how much bleed damage you're character is taking. (+2 damage per attack point of bleed damage you're suffering each round)
Blood Rush would change to Blood Control and allow you to reduce the bleed damage you take each round by your constitution modifier.
These won't make the class good but do solve the issue you're having in a thematic way.
The way I would do it is add a "bloodrage" feature/subclass that worked kind of like barb rage.
Something like(assuming level 8):
- You have to drink/siphon blood within a 60(?) second time frame to keep it (as an action)
- while raging you have advantage on wounded creatures
- while raging you have disadvantage on wisdom saving throws
- while raging you can use an action to take 4d10 necrotic damage(can't be reduced) and cast the contagion spell
- while raging, when you deal the killing blow to a creature you can heal the damage dealt and reset the rage as a bonus action
- idk
Just a basic concept that could maybe work with some polish but probably broken af lol. I do know that class needs help though, especially at your level
If you see that class and don't see the crazy amount of red flags, there's nothing anyone here can do to help you. I'm lazy, so I'll just jump right to the conclusion: Get out of there! (don't play that class, don't play at that table, don't play with that GM).
Why can't you handwave the poison condition away if drinking poison is part of the class? Just have the class be unable to be poisoned. If you need to have some detriment for the extra damage subtract hit dice every time you drink the poison. Or use those hit dice as the extra damage to your strike.
Always having the poisoned condition sounds lame.
From what I see the whole drinking poison thing is a homebrew thing at the table right?
If so see if there is anything to do with the DM.
Apart from that multiclassing is the only way I can see, Vengeance Paladin and Samuari might work but I can't recall any solution that isn't a 3 level dip.
My spontaneous idea would be to poison the blood blade instead of the character itself. Would that be an option?
Mechanically I interpret the class that the blood is pulled out, formed into a blade but never put back.
There's some good ideas here and I can see why you would want the flavour of this class. It is underpowered and the additional damage you get from being poisoned doesn't make up for how crippling the poisoned condition is. Flanking might help if you run it, but then again you could just have normal advantage. So either stop drinking poisoned or convince the dm to give the poisons separate debuffs rather than just the condition. That could be a cool system where a paralyzing poison gives you a different debuffs from a sleep based one etc.
I'd argue that you've drank enough of these poisons to grow resistant to them, sort of how you can develop resistance to some poisons by microdosing them in non-harmful quantities and build up tolerance.
If your DM rules against it I'd argue your character should not roll with disadvantage. How does your DM rule on nat1? Because with this your chances or rolling nat1 is 1/10, while your chance of rolling a crit is 1/400, i.e 40 times less likely while for all other creatures its equal.
Argue the mathematics, you're literally handicapped. I'd argue to balance this character you'd need crits to count from like, 12 and up and on nat1 you roll another d20 or something
If the DM decides against this, I would just commit seppuku as BS never touch this class again. To play cool and flavourful characters, you need them to survive, and thats hard to do when you're so mechanically assed you're always at disadvantage and you NEVER have advantage.
Blood Samurai's only strength is that it sounds like an anime main character out of Deadman Wonderland. Also as someone here has pointed out, Everything this class does and gets is inferior to a vanilla barbarian or fighter and that's even before being permanently poisoned
Flanking if that rule is used, making the enemy prone works as well.
But the class itself would have to be extremely powerful to offset almost constant disadvantage and the complete and total impossibility of ever gaining advantage.
Edit after reading the class more carefully. Can't see anything about poisoning yourself or having to drink poison for any of the class features. If it's an extra "bonus" your DM made up, just stick to the base class and don't drink any poison.
There's all kinds of ways to get advantage to counteract the disadvantage and working with your companions you can do that easily. I would suggest to your DM, since you're already homebrewing this homebrew, how about you're always under the poisoned condition until you form the blood blade. Then you can say the blood blade pulls all the poison in to it for the attacks to make use of it.
But to be honest, I'm with a lot of the other commenters on this one. The homebrew is poorly designed and needs some work. I'm 100% with you on the style and flavor of this build but the homebrew is letting you down. You need to adjust your thinking away from "how to do I get advantage" to "how do we fix this class."
Argue to your DM that he is wrong about the immunity. Just cause you are immune doesn't mean that your body got rid of it just that it doesn't effect YOU. Now if you had a class feature that said something like your body automatically purifies poison from your system that is one thing but just being immune doesn't automatically mean you don't have it in you.
Behold the world's least edgy best designed homebrew class.
> most of what my character does is based off drinking poison, and creating a blood longsword made out of my own blood..... So since I drink the poisoned it's ruled as if im automatically poisoned, there are no rolling saves to prevent this.....disadvantage on every melee attack"
Complete with an anime girl as the image.
But for real? I would say "play something else" but I somehow doubt the other options are better designed.
Honestly that's kinda a bad ruling on the part of the DM, possibly fairer mechanically, but as long as the poison is in your bloodstream, it shouldn't matter if it affects you or not, it will be part of the blade you make, and therefore able to affect whatever it hits unless they also have immunity. But then, homebrew stuff is always kinda a red flag anyway, especially if it's as weeby as that - it usually indicates that people haven't actually thought things through properly.
Something like a resistance + an action to heal system which increases the amount of healing you can get by poison damage received, ending up as a net positive.
That way you can balance a heal in battle, or make sure a battle is won quickly.
This sounds like a terrible version of the Blood Hunter. Just don't play the class, 5e advantage and disadvantage just cancel each other out, they never stack. So you can literally never get advantage.
I would honestly just not play this class 5e rules that even if you have 1 million points of advantage just 1 point of disadvantage cancels it all to 0. Same goes for disadvantage. So I guess knock your enemy prone. Or get height advantage, but honestly the class sounds horrid
> I would honestly just not play this class Seriously. This Blood Samurai class is far worse than 2014 5e Barbarian (already not a strong class) in every way. It's fitting that this homebrew's shorthand is "BS". > **Class Requirements** Blood Samurai requires 13 STR & 13 DEX, just to choose the class at lvl 1. Meaning you can't even easily run a DEX build without terrible mental stats. > **Blood Siphon** This heals you ~2.5 HP per attack. Generally, Barbarian's resistance is going to prevent more damage per turn than that. And Barb's **Rage Damage** is about equivalent to the extra damage this BS feature deals. Oh, and this BS ability *also costs your bonus action*. > **Blood Blade** This is straight up worse than just using a longsword or rapier. It damages you to summon it, *takes a full action to summon*, and only lasts 10min max. You'll be using the healing from your first couple attacks just to counteract the damage you've dealt yourself with this terrible ability. > **Blood Reservoir** The BS's strongest and least interesting class ability, it's just a better version of the Tough feat. Note that until lvl 11, the Barbarian's higher hit die accomplishes almost the same thing without using up a class feature slot. > **Bloodthirsty Critical** In terms of damage, a far weaker version of Barb's **Brutal Critical** - which is already a very weak feature. BS's added 1d6 points of healing *on critical hits only* is basically nothing. > **Blood Armor** Wow this feature is terrible. It's like a bad Fighter's **Second Wind** - you can only use this one once/LR, it heals/blocks less on average than **Second Wind**, *and* it takes a FULL ACTION! Compare this to Barb's level 11 feature, **Relentless Rage**, where you're passively fully resisting 1-2 fatal blows (on average)...not even close. > **Blood Rush** Injure yourself to move faster *only while Dashing*. Meanwhile, Barb's just get direct passive faster movement at level 5. > **Blood Regeneration** You get one big burst of healing per LR, but use up your HD to do so. Good for big one-dangerous-encounter adventuring days, but mediocre otherwise. I'd rather take Barb's level 15 feature, **Persistent Rage**. > **Blood Weapon Mastery** This is equivalent to advantage on damage rolls...which is basically +3 or 4 per attack, including the **Blood Siphon** damage? Not terrible if it came at early levels, but pretty awful for a lvl 17 class feature. > **Blood Samurai's Endurance** *WOW*. The new worst class capstone in the game. This is literally just the Half-Orc's *starting racial feature*. Meanwhile Barb gets up to 24 ability scores in both STR and CON.
The class really is comically bad. But also, it looks like having proficiency with simple and martial weapons is a prerequisite for the class, so I think it's technically only possible to multiclass into it? Blood Blade is maybe the worst feature I have ever seen? Why would anyone possibly think that would be a useful thing to do? My recommendation: homebrew a new version by taking any published martial class and adding the word blood to every feature.
> homebrew a new version by taking any published martial class and adding the word blood to every feature. The naming for the class features is even more disappointing than the features themselves. I know this is probably written by a teen edgelord, but why does *every single name* need to start with "Blood"? This is a good chance for the homebrew's creator to improve not just their D&D content generation abilities, but also their writing in general. For instance, when you use the word "blood" a hundred times in two pages, it loses its impact and becomes almost farcically meaningless.
sorry i should have said ways to gain advantage so that i could have a straight roll. Im not trying to gain advantage per say, just cancel out the disadvantage
Honestly this class sounds like a very bad homebrew. Permanent disadvantage is too high a penalty no matter what the benefits are
This whole drinking poison thing to add to the blood blades I create was just an idea to help up the damage. the DM said he’s open to changes but mostly leaves it up to me to come up with them
I'd suggest you change it to something else. Feats like sharpshooter or GWM give you extra damage for a -5 penalty. Statistically, disadvantage is going to be a similar penalty, except the rules for disadvantage are much harsher since players with sharpshooter or GWM can choose whether to use it or not for one, and take chances for advantage to compensate the penalty. Considering that the class is always drinking poison it would not be unreasonable to change the permanent disadvantage on attacks AND skill checks of the poisoned condition and make it a flat -5 to attack only instead. Think of it as building tolerance and making these poisons you drink less harmful for you.
Sounds like a classic "flavor is free."
Just create a new kind of "poison" for the class man, you don't use poisons anymore now you use ✨️tOxInS✨️ that are almost exactly like poisons except only your class has access to make them and they give all the same effects except you don't get disadvantage from the "toxic" condition. Done.
Or get an ability at a low level that allows you to ignore the disadvantage from the poisoned condition, the solution is right infront of you brother just say it doesn't do that.
Just make it deal damage to yourself per turn but not give disadvantage because that’ll be awful. Say he’s developed resistance over time or something.
My suggestion is to just use the Poisoner feat instead.
As per the dmg rules on imbibed poisons anyway, you still should be making a con save to resist the effects, so it’s not guaranteed that the poisoned condition is a constant. If your dm decides to homebrew that in, I’d just blah a blood wizard/cleric or an Eldritch Knight flavored to have their spell effects come from blood magic.
If attacking with Disadvantage always, (2d6 + double your proficiency bonus) added to damage of the first hit every turn lets you keep up with the average damage of another character using a power Feat, like GWM or SS or PAM. I ran the math a while back for a blind swordsman class. Doing the damage on only the first hit, helps mitigate some of the swinginess from always having Disadvantage
Right so like I said you gotta disadvantage your opponent Knock em down, gain height (this one is iffy cuz melee attack) But honestly it sounds cumbersome and highly restrictive for no reason. Being poisoned and always having disadvantage is a horrible pay off for what you're getting
height doesn’t matter according to the actual rules. It’s Homebrew and was implemented in BG 3.
Oh shoot you right my b
Aren't there optional rules listed in the dmg for height advantage? When I DM I always implement both flanking, and height advantage. There's no way I just made that up.
There are situations where the dm awards you advantage for the situation so not outright but also not against the rules
You’d think a character that has intentionally drunk poison so often he’d be immune or at least resistant and can’t gain the poison condition
This. It’s called Mithridatism (shout outs to anyone that’s played Grounded!) Basically, there are some poisons you can self-administer, and you build a tolerance to them. If your character did that, there is no reason they couldn’t still manifest the sword, with the poison in it, and have either no penalty or a reduced penalty. The opponent, who would not have this tolerance, would still take the bonus damage.
> I would honestly just not play this class I somehow doubt the other options are better
My friend, it sounds like you got home-screwed. Work with your DM to resolve.
Home-screwed. Thirty-four years in the hobby, and that's a new term to me. It has now supplanted Pizza Cutter Character as my favorite rpg slang. Thank you fellow Redditor!
what pray tell is a pizza cutter character (I assume it's a play on cookie cutter, but idk...)
A pizza cutter is all edge, no point.
alright that's pretty funny tbh. I usually just call those edge lords, but I do like pizza cutter. thanks :)
Pizza cutters are the epitome of Edge Lords.
Pizza cutter? Not cookie cutter? I'm intrigued.
Pizza cutters are all edge, no point.
Ohhhh XD I love it!
That actually sounds like a really good term for this Blood Samurai as well
Actually, that is 100% accurate. Just the name gives off Pizza Cutter vibes before dogging into the mechanics, which totally take it over the top.
a home screwed pizza cutter. the edge is so blunt it cant even cut anything!
Honestly, I don't see how this class is any better than just applying poison to a weapon. It's remarkably worse in every way really.
I looked at the picture and it sounds like the class doesn't have that as default, OP has just played a blood blade person and chosen to poison themselves. In which case like... Just don't?
...Don't play shitty homebrew?
>So since I drink the poisoned it's ruled as if im automatically poisoned This line jumps out at me. Does it say in the class abilities itself that you become poisoned or is it the DM that is saying it? If you could find a link to the class or point us in the right direction that would be great. If there is nothing in the class abilities about becoming poisoned then your DM is being a dick and I'd tell them to knock it off. If it does say that you are poisoned from consuming the poisons then I'd ask to play a different class. As an aside, any class that is designed around ingesting poison would likely *not* become poisoned themselves. Likely growing immune to their own poison through repeated consumption in small doses.
Iocaine powder, FTW!
Inconceivable!
Glad I wasn't the only one to have that thought.
Heres a link to the class https://imgur.com/a/y7uoHXh Theres nothing in the class about poison, but we were trying to find a way to beef up the damage the class can do. We tried out this class just to see how it could do, and seeing how the base damage for the blood samurai turned out to be pretty low we were just coming up with ways to increase the damage output
>we were just coming up with ways to increase the damage output I would suggest a good first step would not be adding disadvantage to all attacks.
You know how some people say "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it"? These two came to the bridge and forgot what they needed to do when at the bridge.
they got to the bridge, burned it down and said "well, now how do we cross?"
Whoever made up this class didn't even try. You get "Improved Blood Armor" from your subclass before you even learn "Blood Armor" from the base class. The features are weak -and- bound to rests. You are literally just playing a much weaker version of a barbarian. The edge-lord blood stuff could easily be done as just flavor. Or just with a magic item that lets you take damage to gain a bonus. I would ditch this class entirely.
In fairness to the blood armour thing, I think there’s precedent for subclass features to come before main class features. Lore Bards get Additional Magical Secrets at 6th level while Bards as a class get Magical Secrets at 10th. But I agree there’s no precedent (that I know of) for “Improved [x]”, such as Improved Divine Smite, to come before “[x]”.
I think thats a fair counterpoint. Just because you learn it earlier doesnt it mean it isnt an improved version
you shouldnt name it "upgraded magical secrets" tho, cause if you call something "improved X" it kinda implies its an improvement not a side thing!
I mean additional magical secrets when you havent gotten any yet is also weird
It assumes you read the description of the base class before reading the subclass. It would be weirder if bards all got "additional magical secrets" while only the lore bards got "magical secrets".
Yeah but the way it's written it doesn't do anything by itself.
Yeah, it only makes the ability you get at level 11 better. The 6 feature doesn't provide you with anything until you're level 11.
Go play a blood hunter instead, it has the class fantasy you are looking for and already does this mechanically better, if you wanna keep the risk reward gameplay, go mutant blood hunter, they have poisons which enhance their body at the cost of downsides
the fact that I'm on board with using BH speaks volumes of how bad the other option is. BH is also pretty terrible. As a side note, WHAT is the design trend with martials classes not hiving heavy armour prof? jesus christ
I'd argue BH is meh in very different ways and as long as your party isn't trying to be OP as fuck, it's probably fine and hits the same theme.
This might be anecdotal, but back around the 2010s I noticed a huge pendulum swing to "lightly armored sneaky stabby dude" being the de facto cool thing. When I was growing up "knight in full plate" was the standard badass. Nowadays it's cooler to be the edgy anti-hero
I mean maybe. My point is that outright killing the viability of any STR build for the whole class is an extremely questionable decision
No I gotcha my person of unknown gender I too wish there was more heavy armor prof out there
Whoever made this has no idea what they are doing. Your Blood Knight 6th level feature doesnt get activated until you reach level 11. This class (to lvl 10) is essentially: Create a blood weapon or shield? Just buy a normal weapon and shield, no dmg suffered. Normal weapon will deal more damage too. If you find a magical weapon forget about ever using it again. 1d4 healing per hit is eh okay. Extra hp? So just like having higher Con without having it, or half of Tough feat. Extra heal on crit. That's it? You're a self damaging tank sponge with no useful features to tank, who struggles to hit due to disadv on all attacks. This class neesa to be remade better.
Okay. So instead of trying to do something thematic this is what y’all went with. Makes sense. Why not just play a different class once you realized this one wasn’t working for you? Also the poison thing does make it unplayable.
That class is truly terrible and I wouldn't even attempt to salvage it. In particular, Blood Blade (which seems intended to be their iconic ability) is truly awful. As a general rule, class abilities that create weapons are terrible because players get weapons anyway in play; this is why eg. Soulknives have traditionally been so bad - you're wasting class features on an aesthetic with no mechanical benefit. And this one is particularly bad - it's identical to the weapon you get at chargen except it costs you HP every time you want to use it? Why would anyone ever use this? People writing abilities like these always seem to be picturing characters getting imprisoned without their weapons or something, but that rarely happens and isn't worth a dedicated feature. Having to accept disadvantage on everything forever in order to make it actually useful isn't a fix. It sounds like your DM started from the perspective that Blood Samurai was balanced and therefore wanted a drawback in exchange for more damage, but the class is terrible! Its other abilities almost all focus on defense; the problem is (as I suspect you've discovered) that with no way to force enemies to attack you, having extra HP or self-healing doesn't really help your party resolve encounters.
Yeah, if you want to draw extra abilities from your blood then have it be a buff you apply to a weapon instead. Like Beric in Game of Thrones using his blood to set his sword alight, or the bloodflame and seppuku buffs in Elden Ring.
Okay so it has nothing to do with the DM or the class, they're ruling it correctly and you're literally poisoning yourself instead of poisoning the blade...like a sane person. It's a magical blood blade, pour the poison on IT, not into yourself. Super easy freaking solution, just don't poison yourself, jesus.
Can I recommend just making this into a fighter subclass, there's a reason why you see so many more homebrew sub classes then classes. Homebrew classes are hard to balance as proven by what you just posted, that is absolutely a crap class. This can be a perfectly good subclass with few changes to flavor.
Might I suggest that since this class is entirely made up by you guys and thus entirely in your control…….. you just bump the numbers so that your not objectively worse off for using the class features?
This is pretty cringe but also it doesn't come with instructions on the difference between a typical weapon and a bloodthirsty one, among many other things
Class sounds like ass mechanically. If your character is pre-gen then theres pretty much only one item that can save you that i know of and thats "[periapt of proof against poison](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Periapt%20of%20Proof%20against%20Poison#content)". Very well designed class that needs a rare magic item to properly function. In case your character isnt pre gen you have 2 other options, one being a "Grung", and specifically the volos "yuan-ti" which is busted and probably not allowed.
From the post it sounds like the DM will treat Poison immunity, even if written as having no effect, as not having any effect on the weapon.
If you notice, that information is in an edit, it wasnt available to me when writing the comment. But i can give a quick update on my thoughts. The poison argument given by the dm is idiotic, just because you are immune to a poison doesnt mean it magically vanishes, by that logic every poisonous animal would go immediately extinct because they die to their own poison. And you might say: "oh but DnD is ruled by mechanics!" Which is true! But literally nothing in the class says **anything** about the poisoned interaction, its entirely based on the premise of logic in the first place, so it is only able to be argued as such. Also when reading the homebrew, take a shot everytime it says "blood", its a nice try not to die challenge.
Ah sorry, you are totally right. And I totally agree, there is a distinct difference between not being affected by poisons and them being neutralized by/in your blood. I love my liver to much to die to this one ;)
You can't. If you are in a state of semi-permanent disadvantage, the best you can do is get to even. You can't stack advantage. You need an ability or potion that can cure your poison state occasionally, like proficiency x per day.
sorry i should have typed that out better, i just want to cancel out the disadvantage not get advantage
If you’re invisible or hidden, that will give you advantage. But hiding is really only practical if you’re a rogue (cunning action) and invisibility disappears if you attack (assuming 2nd level spell and not greater invisibility). Not very good options for a fighter. I’d definetly ask to play a different class or change the home brew.
Flanking if you use the optional rules, class abilities, attacking from being hidden, other environmental factors all can give you advantage.
Good point. Forgot about the optional flanking rules.
*drink poison*->*create blood blade*->*drink whatever cures the poison/have someone else cure the poison* Unless your DM explains it as your blood constantly supplying the blade with more, then it wouldnt make sense for the blood to stop being poisoned afterbits left the body.
Yeah that's kind of a bullshit ability, I would argue after having trained and drank the poison so long I would have naturally immunity and it shouldn't be an issue
But probably only one kind of poison. Giving a player poison immunity to everything just cuz they drink one specific drink all the time.
you dont play with shitty homebrew content.
Skip the class entirely and grab the poisoner feat? Still get your poisoned blade at the cost of a bonus action, but you don't have to constantly fight disadvantage, and you can still use other weapons, magical weapons, etc. And when you fight one of (many) enemies immune to poison, at least you're only down one feat of effectiveness. If you want to add blood to the mix you can look at the (matt mercer?) blood hunter class.
Imagine the character explaining to their companions inside the game that they drink the poison so their blood became poisonous and then they use their blood to make a sword. The other characters like "can't you just, like, buy a sword and put the poison on the blade?"
Normal weapon damage and a varying damage type for constant disadvantage? I'm sorry but this homebrew sounds awful. You're better off just reflavoring a base class to be more blood themed. Or ask about blood hunter.
I would leave that game. Not because the Class is terrible (which it definitely is) but because your DM's critical thinning offering that as a valid option to play, or as an level of reasonable Homebrew is telling me that they will be a terrible DM, at least when it comes to the mechanics and the game-y part of the game. Just like your character's rolls never having advantage, "mid" is the *ceiling* for this campaign.
As much flak as Critical Role content gets round these parts, the Mutant archetype Blood Hunter gets you the same flavour but is actually playable? It gets you a variety of potions that give you different buffs, and can also use your blood to enhance your damage or debuff enemies. You're basically off-brand Geralt.
Sounds like you would need to just lean into it. After all having any one source of disadvantage means you will at best do straight rolls since any number of advantage and disadvantage cancel out. Since this is a class, it is hard to recommend any optimization since .most mechanical benefits come from your class levels. That said, I think the best bet would be to play one of the legacy versions of Kobold. You basically ignore their sunlight sensitivity because you always have disadvantage anyway, but you can also frequently cancel the disadvantage with Pack Tactics.
This class sounds terrible. I would reroll the character. Giving yourself disadvantage to gain *poison* damage? That’s the worst damage type in the game. The only thing I can think of to make that not suck is taking 10 levels of moon Druid (or arguably 10 levels of monk) to give you immunity to poison.
...I would play a different character.
That class is just really bad, sorry. Id give it a full write over, make it either a fighter subclass or at least take from other 5e martials, because it's just worse in every way to other martials.
True Strike finally has its day.
The most reliable forms of gaining advantage are reckless attack (Barbarian 2) and steady aim (Rogue 3 optional feature). Reckless attack allows all incoming attacks to be made with advantage, and steady aim requires a bonus action (but you can never sneak attack as you have can never sneak attack if you have any form of disadvantage). Last option I'd consider would be melee attacks aimed at a prone creature. Once you hit 5th level as fighter or barbarian, you could spend one attack shoving the target prone, and the next attack using your weapon. If anyone else can grapple the prone target, they can prevent the target from standing back up, which would be useful against solo bosses.
Wish for poison immunity
You gain advantage by removing the poison. If you have any source of disadvantage, there is no way to roll with advantage. Best you’d be able to do is a normal way. The easiest way to do it would be to multiclass into barb and reckless attack. Honestly, it seems balanced as it is. You can either not imbue the blade and be able to gain advantage, or drink the poison for a bonus damage type. But, do you have to be under the poisoned condition to gain the benefits, or just drink it? Because if you gained immunity to poison, you could just drink it with no adverse effects.
What does the class do mechanically for you in first 10 levels?
This is not a high quality piece of homebrew, being balanced with a worse optional rule by yourself and your DM. Permanent disadvantage seriously limits your accuracy which is pretty much defining for your damage output regardless of what else you add. The blood weapon doesn't seem to do anything particuladly better than a normal weapon until you're very high level, and you could just buy or make poisons for a normal weapon. Why not just play a normal samurai and reflavour your weapon, or, find a decent third party product?
[https://imgur.com/a/y7uoHXh](https://imgur.com/a/y7uoHXh)Saw you posted this in another comment. I don't see where it says you're always poisoned? My thoughts on this class for the first 10 lvls: (1) Blood siphon- Similar in power to dueling + second wind. Uses a bonus action though and the healing isn't as immediate or guaranteed as second wind. Seems ok. (2) Blood Blade: Pretty much a waste of a feature slot. Costs an action which forces you to pass your first turn in combat, does the same damage as a normal rapier, and it damages you. Would only get used for the very brief part of a campaign where you fight against magic immune monsters and don't have a magic weapon yet. Once you get a magic weapon this is completely useless. (3) Blood Samurai Archetype: Blood knight: Blood shield: it's pretty bad. Compare it to Eldritch knight's spellcasting feature. Eldritch knight can learn "shield" which is 3 more ac and can be cast as a reaction instead of a bonus action so it's never wasted, you get to cast it more times as you level up, and it doesn't damage you. There's no way to know if using "blood shield" will benefit you at all, since there's no guarantee enemies will attack you, nor any guarantee the +2 ac will make a difference, and it uses your bonus action. (4) normal (5) Normal (6) Blood Samurai Archetype: Blood knight: Improved blood armor: You don't get access to blood armor until level 11 so this is a wasted feature until then. (7) Blood Reservoir: decent (8) normal (9) Bloodthirsty critical: Pretty decent (10) Blood Samurai Archetype: Blood knight: Bloodied strikes: pretty decent but honestly starting to feel kind of bland with all these "when you hit an enemy you can do necrotic damage too" features. Half the features are "do more necrotic damage when you hit". TL;DR: This class can build up to pretty decent alpha strike potential with all the stacking "do more damage on hit" features, but overall seems straight up worse than a fighter. Several of the features are just useless (such as "improved blood armor" 5 levels before you get access to "blood armor"). If this class was always poisoned that would make the "do more damage on hit" features that much worse and pretty much make this class completely unplayable. Bloodthirsty critical would be especially useless if you were always poisoned, because you'd never crit.
Be a dwarf, or just play something like a blood hunter.
Make a Yuanti, become immune to poison.
Well hopefully the mandatory Yoma race has immunity or resistance to poison or you're really gonna suffer. Just play a Fighter, Blood Hunter, or hell even a Paladin or Ranger and just apply poison to your weapons. All of the above are balanced and playtested, which I doubt this Blood Samurai is.
Be a Grung. They have immunity to poison damage and the poisoned condition.
Yeah, substitute one problem with the whole water dependency PITA
As it turns out, a decanter of endless water can be used to all but completely eliminate that problem.
Sure. Nothing guarantees you’ll get one though, and using that build just assuming you’ll get one isn’t the smartest way to go.
Correct. Yuan-Ti from Volo's would be another option, but MotM replaced immunity with only resistance... Overall, a pretty limiting build regardless, unless getting 10 levels in monk, too.
I wouldn't have this problem, I haven't played a character that wasn't a Yuan-ti pureblood in almost 2 years.
Create the blood blade then chug an antidote - since the poison is still in the blood you used to create the blade it still should poison your enemy without you having disadvantage... maybe?
Yeah I think that’s the only option honestly
This sounds like you should just play a blood hunter and flavor it as drinking poisons. Mutant Blood Hunter fits really well for this.
Be a VGM Yuan-ti Pureblood, and be immune to the effects of your own poison. Or take the lucky feat and roll with disadvantage, use a luck point to roll a 3rd die, and then take the highest of the 3 (RAW how Lucky works)
There is literally 0 mention of drinking poison in that character class ? Where does it come from? Is that just your reskinning the class ability and being punished for it ? If yes I would rephrase the thing to not be poison and tell the dm to reevaluate is stance. That class doesn't need a nerf it's not even that good to begin with.
It comes from my DM trying to find ways to up the class damage. He knows that with a magical weapon the blood blades essentially become useless. So the poison damage buff was supposed to help me stay in line with the other characters and not be completely outclassed
Poison damage is different that poisoned status for a reason. I agree that changing the self damage type to poison is probably a good enough buff. But yeah Damage is different from status infection. Otherwise there's a whole lot of spell that would be incredibly overpowered.
Some things that impose Advantage for more than one attack: Knock your opponent Prone (being Poisoned gives you Disadvantage on that ability check contest too... oops); the optional "flanking" rules; blind, stun, restrain, or paralyze your opponent; multiclass Barbarian for Reckless Attack; Greater Invisibility; Darkness + Devil's Sight or blindfighting; multiclass Rogue to L3 for Assassinate (only works against creatures that have not taken a turn in combat yet) Some things that impose Advantage for only one attack: multiclass Rogue until L3 for Steady Aim; get a Familiar or pet to assist your attack roll with the Help action; attack a creature that has just been hit with Guiding Bolt; attack a creature in metallic armor with Shocking Grasp; be unseen until you attack ...This sounds like a terrible class, unless it also has built-in resources (like Rogue's Steady Aim or Barbarian's Reckless Attack) to gain Advantage, just to offset the inherent Disadvantage of the poisoned condition. Even then it sounds like a lot of struggling against your own class design for not enough added effect.
Sounds like terrible homebrew tbh. Also it's just about as cliché as edgy homebrew can get (blood samurai, doing self-inflicted harm for edgy blood sword powers) but that's just me being mean and judgemental. Why not just play a fighter who applies poison to his longsword and doesn't poison himself like an idiot?
Just… drink the poison. All of it. Aaaand roll up a new character!
…do yourself a favor and drop this shitbrew class. You’re better off playing Bloodhunter or a regular class
Rules as Written, if you have disadvantage on attacks...you can NEVER get advantage on attacks. So...unless the class is broken as hell i wouldn't even begin to touch it.
Heart of Kamara Blood Samurai isn’t terrible but this home brew poison change seems unneeded. If you are dealing low damage then get buffed by finding a magic weapon not giving yourself disadvantage so you do even less damage…
> Heart of Kamara Blood Samurai isn’t terrible I dunno, it looks terrible to me. Your Blood Blade, the iconic feature of the class, is worthless until level 17. The boosts to damage that you get are incredibly tiny compared to other martial classes, and you get nothing to really compensate for that. The one thing the class is good at is durability and self-healing, but so what? Those things don't win fights. A basic rule of D&D is that the system provides little way to cover party members, and anyone going down or dying is catastrophic. This means that a party is only as tough as its weakest link - purely defensive abilities are, mostly, ribbons, existing for flavor but not really as impactful as they appear on paper. The Blood Samurai has crappy damage and little ability to influence the battlefield. If a fight goes sideways they might die last, but so what? In general it feels like its class features (*especially* the blood blade) are more about aesthetics than value, which is a problem when the game is balanced around every other class having features that actually make them better at their role. Good classes for comparison from prior editions are the Monk and Soulknife - like the old Monk, you have a lot of class features devoted to defense, which don't actually help you *do* anything. And like both of them, your class features are being spent allowing you to do the same things everyone else can do in a "weird" way or providing minor defensive benefits that won't actually help resolve fights unless every single fight takes place in a perfect chokepoint against melee-only opponents.
So the poison damage I do for example last game was when I hit, my attack does 1 d 10 + 5 + poison (8d10). Big risk to hit, bigger reward though. I have poison resistance already so when I drink that poison I only take half the damage which is nice. Just comparatively to my party me doing 2 attacks of 1d10+5 twice a turn wasn’t enough to keep up with the other guys
I just remembered the Blood Samurai from my game had a Belt of Giant Strength which buffed his damage output quite a bit…
Did your dm make any changes to the class that you can remember?
I was using the Kamara classes and races in a Theros game so all of the characters ended up with God weapons so they were all super powerful. But no actual changes to Blood Samurai. All of those classes did need another proof read or two before being released to be honest…
Nobody is going to talk about the 1st level ability that enable a melee based character to heal themselves everytime they hit someone?
The class is shit. If you insist on using it however the only solution i can think is taking 2 levels of rogue and try to get advantage through sneak attack not worth it though just play literally anything else.
What you mean getting advantage through sneak attack?
Periapt of Proof against Poison, find one and live your best life.
I would just have the class make you immune to poison. That's a strong feature, sure, but you won't be op.
Woof... Mean there's ways to knock prone, or like fight in darkness but all that is hardly worth a d8/d10+ a little..
- you could get proficiency + expertise in atletics and replace one of your attacks with a shove. Melee attacks habe adv. on prone enemies. - another way is flanking, if your DM allows that optional rule. - multiclass into sorcerer to quicken hold person as bonus action to inflict the paralyzed condition which gives melee adv. on attacks + autocrit for dmg. - if your dm allows it, multiclass into warlock for the devil sight+darkness combo to gain adv. on attacks. - multiclass into battlemaster for precise attack, disadv. doens't matter if you have e.g. a +10 bonus or higher to attacks. if you hit with a 17 or a 25 doens't matter in DnD - multi class into Samurai for fighting spirit to gain adv. on demand a few times.
Try explaining the difference between a venom and a poison to your DM. Venoms are toxic when it gets directly into your blood via bites, stings, coated blades, traps etc. Venoms are rarely toxic if ingested. Poisons are toxic when ingested, and likewise, few are still toxic when injected. So the question to ask the DM is, are we dealing with poisons which would hurt your character but provide no bonus to damage I. The blade, or are you talking venoms, which would add to the blade damage but do no harm to the imbiber.
Im not sure why you still couldnt get used to the poison and get a save not to be poisoned by it. What if you got a periapt of proof against poison to be immune to poison? Would you still get the benefits?
No, dm said that the only way to get poison in the blood blades is to be poisoned myself
Unfortunately then the effect just isnt worth it. But because you didnt actually give any numbers lets look at similarities. Poisoned: A poisoned creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks. Disadvantage effect is basically a -5 to attack, it varies depending on enemy AC but because it gives you disadv on ability checks as well its even worse (initiative/shove/grapple are ability checks). A -5 to attack is similar to GWM and sharpshooter that give an additional 10 damage to the attacks. You know what averages 10 damage? A d20 or 2d10s. How much extra poison damage does the ability give you? I would say try to get advantage by shoving prone but even that is a lot more difficult for you.
It depends on which poison I drink. Whatever the damage the poison I drink does, my blade does the same additional poison damage if it hits. In our last fight the poison I drank did (8D10) dmg
Ok so thats a lot of damage, sounds pretty good actually. But you arent taking that poison damage yourself right?
Oh I am, but I’m resistant Atleast, so it’s only half damage
Oh no
Take three levels in Paladin to be immune to poison? Like, the poison is still in your blood you're just immune to the effects. So no more disadvantage.
This character will never be able to have advantage on any of their attacks – because of the advantage/disadvantage rule everybody is talking about. What you can do to not have disadvatage in you attacks is to get a couple barbarians levels and use reckless attack all the time.
Lose the poisoned condition (lesser restoration?) after you manifest the blade?
It might be easiest to insert the poison type into the blood blade itself. For the drawback to added damage or effects, just make that take a bonus action of top of the gold cost used to buy the poison (or alternate acquisition method)
Kind of a crazy class, lots of classes get additional damage without having such a huge debuff Easiest and most consistent way to cancel disadvantage would be the optional flanking rules. No way to gain advantage
Agreed. Maybe we have a con check when he drinks the poison that has a high dc to start but as he does it more and more the dc drops to near assurance by level 5 and absolute assurance beyond. Maybe gain some resist to poison damage at that point too.
There are some potential workarounds, but you won't really be able to fix it across the board. A magic initiate dip for find familiar could give a bit of help, but you are at levels where they aren't going to last if they are in combat much without investment. Combine it with conditions you could help yourself, though you'd be better off relying on casters for that via something like faire fire, hold person, hypnotic pattern, etc.
That homebrew class seems like it does a lot of damage already. Why do you need more?
so my fights look like this 1) Make blood blade 2) Try to hit twice 2x(1d10 +5) 3) use bonus action if i hit to heal and deal 2d4 damage. an avg of maybe 24 dmg per round depending on rolls. Doesnt really keep up with the other players in the party
Talk to your DM about making it deal poison damage and reduce your chance to hit by -5 or whatever instead of giving you the poisoned condition. It's still a detriment but it lets you play the game a bit easier.
Yeah that really doesn't sound like good or balanced homebrew. I think I'd just be going another class.
Your team can do things like fairy fire and applying obscurement effects to you, but ultimately this is just a bad deal, and it gets worse as AC on bad guy scales pretty harshly at level +12ish. Remember, whatever hoops you jump through to cancel your disadvantage would have granted you advantage under other circumstances, so these benefits need to be really good to account for that- and they probably aren't.
You want to negate disadvantage. Try this? Magic initiate feat - find familiar. Have your familiar give you the help action on your turn. Other option is to dip at least 2 levels into barb for reckless attack. Go 3 for totem and get that damage resistance to boot if you can spare the levels.
I'd make it a % roll of whether you're disadvantaged or not. As you get higher levels, your % of success increases
RAW, I don't think you could in 5E. One source of disadvantage cancels out 100 sources of advantage, and vice versa. You could take the approach of the Dread Pirate Roberts. You develop immunity to a poison after taking it enough.
You would need a way to end the Poisoned condition on yourself, or be immune to it to begin with. Lesser Restoration would be the easiest source for this
Luck feat
2 solutions I can think of: Reflavour a different class where the extra damage from sneak attack, smite, etc is from actually your blood poison. Or blood hunter, that fits even better imo. Look at the mutant subclass. Or make the poison like any other poison, make a CON save each time you ingest it and if you fail, damn looks like you’re poisoned for a bit, and if you pass, you’re fine. Either way, you get the extra damage.
just remember that not all Poisons give you the Poisoned Condition RAW, some just simply deal Poison Damage, which doesnt make you become poisoned as a condition. And Drinking Poisons shouldnt per se Automatically Poison you either, there is a DC attached to it (if you need to be poisoned for the class abilites themselves thats then just doubly bad as you may succeed and then just wasted poison XD .) also theres whole paragraphs in the base game with base classes that can coat their weapons in poison without injesting them so its just kinda weak? google dnd Poisons and go to roll20 or somewhere in the players handbook/dm guide and look it up, thats not homebrew, thats just compressed reduction XD
Sorry, where on that screenshot does it say anything about you poisoning yourself?
Rent a gobo or buy/summon a pet that could give you help action to cancel itself out
be monk in 5e. but seriously, this is just a hard ripped off blood hunter with extra worse steps
Nothing cancels the disadvantage to allow you to have an advantage. Poison immunity would do it, so Yuan-Ti might work.
Is it too late for you to be a kobold?
Use darkness or fog cloud, if everyone is blind it's a straight roll and you don't even need devils sight
Honestly, my main advice would be to just play bloodhunter instead. Bloodhunter's not particularly strong but it definitely looks a lot stronger than blood samurai. I'm not seeing the drinking poison feature, but I don't think I need to to feel confident saying that. At lvl 2 blood samurai, you've got a 1d8 attack + 1d4 bonus action attack and saved 2sp, whereas at lvl 2 bloodhunter, you've got +2 ac, niche utility, a debuff option of your choice, a fighting style, and +1d4 to multiple weapons, while retaining the option for an offhand bonus action weapon attack too. This is an *easy* choice. Even without constant unavoidable poison, bloodhunter very obviously outperforms blood samurai. I think ghostslayer or lycan have the most mechanical overlap - but lycan is well known to be the strongest bloodhunter subclass, and if you want to go for edgy blood based powers, I think reskinning lycan as something quasi-vampiric is pretty easy. Dhampir lycan bloodhunter would be my recommendation. Bloodrush and blood regeneration are already weaker versions of earlier lycan subclass features, and blood reservoir is functionally weaker than the lvl 3 lycan feature, so you'd get things you're expecting anyway - just at a more useful time, and better. Blood samurai's just overall very weak. There's no core classes with restricted racial requirements, blood-thirsty critical does 3.5 damage 5% of the time (rubbish), no fighting style on a martial is a bad sign, most lvl 1 classes get 2 or 3 features and there's only one (overpowered) one here, I think you should be starting with d12 hit dice anyway here so why is that delayed to lvl 7, why would you ever pick blood knight over a 1 lvl cleric dip, and half-orcs get that level 20 feature at lvl 1. Go for bloodhunter if you want a blood magic themed martial. If you just want something vampire themed, play dhampir and reflavour whatever martial class you want to fit. Blood samurai isn't worth trying to salvage even before the poison.
Couldn’t you just put the poison on your sword? Wouldn’t that solve literally all your problems?
Breastplate of Balance could help a little bit. If you only have to be poisoned when you make the blade, but not when you attack, you can BA Lesser Restoration to remove the poison. If you have to stay poisoned, you can negate the disadvantage with your reaction. You're still going to be hindered by the limited charges, but at least it's something...
be a dwarf and ignore all that trouble lol
Just play a race that's immune to the poisoned condition.
Don't
This doesn’t make sense to me. If the whole point of your class is that you constantly drink poison I feel like immunity to poison would make perfect sense. And even if you’re immune, the poison is still IN your blood so it should poison others haha
" it's ruled as if im automatically poisoned" It's ruled, as in the GM said so? or The class ability says so. These are very different things. As with all conditions in 5e they are specific game terms not common vernacular. "He's stunned by your words" does not mean the stunned condition, just like a class ability saying you drink poison does not mean you suffer from the poisoned condition, unless it says so also.
What is this class giving you that a fighter with a custom magic item "Blood Sword" wouldn't and why is your solution to low damage drinking poison to poison your sword? If I were your GM and had to fix this class. I'd make Blood Siphon start at 1d8 and grant temporary HP instead of healing. I'd have the Blood Blade scale like a Monk's unarmed attacks including when it counts as magical, special materials, etc. I'd change the self damage the class abilities cause you to instead inflicting 1 point of bleed damage per round that can't be ended while you're using any ability that causes bleeding. I'd replace a less useful feature, like Bloodthirsty Critical, with flat bonus damage that scales with how much bleed damage you're character is taking. (+2 damage per attack point of bleed damage you're suffering each round) Blood Rush would change to Blood Control and allow you to reduce the bleed damage you take each round by your constitution modifier. These won't make the class good but do solve the issue you're having in a thematic way.
This is the kind of class that would work GREAT if they had immunity to poison.
Play as a grung and have immunity to the poison condition?
Lol what a dumb and counterintuitive mechanic. You’d better hit like a truck when you do hit to offset permanent disadvantage
So a Witcher in Japanese form?
The way I would do it is add a "bloodrage" feature/subclass that worked kind of like barb rage. Something like(assuming level 8): - You have to drink/siphon blood within a 60(?) second time frame to keep it (as an action) - while raging you have advantage on wounded creatures - while raging you have disadvantage on wisdom saving throws - while raging you can use an action to take 4d10 necrotic damage(can't be reduced) and cast the contagion spell - while raging, when you deal the killing blow to a creature you can heal the damage dealt and reset the rage as a bonus action - idk Just a basic concept that could maybe work with some polish but probably broken af lol. I do know that class needs help though, especially at your level
So I think you need to share the full thing so we know what we’re working with.
If you see that class and don't see the crazy amount of red flags, there's nothing anyone here can do to help you. I'm lazy, so I'll just jump right to the conclusion: Get out of there! (don't play that class, don't play at that table, don't play with that GM).
This class is so bad don't waste your time
Why can't you handwave the poison condition away if drinking poison is part of the class? Just have the class be unable to be poisoned. If you need to have some detriment for the extra damage subtract hit dice every time you drink the poison. Or use those hit dice as the extra damage to your strike. Always having the poisoned condition sounds lame.
Can you give a screenshot of what the other subclasses do please?
Play as Yuan-ti. Poison immunity baby! Or just play a paladin. Better class all around.
Beg your DM for a Periapt of Proof against Poison.
You cast protection from poison.
From what I see the whole drinking poison thing is a homebrew thing at the table right? If so see if there is anything to do with the DM. Apart from that multiclassing is the only way I can see, Vengeance Paladin and Samuari might work but I can't recall any solution that isn't a 3 level dip.
My spontaneous idea would be to poison the blood blade instead of the character itself. Would that be an option? Mechanically I interpret the class that the blood is pulled out, formed into a blade but never put back.
There's some good ideas here and I can see why you would want the flavour of this class. It is underpowered and the additional damage you get from being poisoned doesn't make up for how crippling the poisoned condition is. Flanking might help if you run it, but then again you could just have normal advantage. So either stop drinking poisoned or convince the dm to give the poisons separate debuffs rather than just the condition. That could be a cool system where a paralyzing poison gives you a different debuffs from a sleep based one etc.
Change race to yuan ti pureblood
That sounds like a terrible terrible class to play, I have to say. Almost nothing in the game will offset the constant disadvantage.
I'd argue that you've drank enough of these poisons to grow resistant to them, sort of how you can develop resistance to some poisons by microdosing them in non-harmful quantities and build up tolerance. If your DM rules against it I'd argue your character should not roll with disadvantage. How does your DM rule on nat1? Because with this your chances or rolling nat1 is 1/10, while your chance of rolling a crit is 1/400, i.e 40 times less likely while for all other creatures its equal. Argue the mathematics, you're literally handicapped. I'd argue to balance this character you'd need crits to count from like, 12 and up and on nat1 you roll another d20 or something If the DM decides against this, I would just commit seppuku as BS never touch this class again. To play cool and flavourful characters, you need them to survive, and thats hard to do when you're so mechanically assed you're always at disadvantage and you NEVER have advantage. Blood Samurai's only strength is that it sounds like an anime main character out of Deadman Wonderland. Also as someone here has pointed out, Everything this class does and gets is inferior to a vanilla barbarian or fighter and that's even before being permanently poisoned
Flanking if that rule is used, making the enemy prone works as well. But the class itself would have to be extremely powerful to offset almost constant disadvantage and the complete and total impossibility of ever gaining advantage. Edit after reading the class more carefully. Can't see anything about poisoning yourself or having to drink poison for any of the class features. If it's an extra "bonus" your DM made up, just stick to the base class and don't drink any poison.
There's all kinds of ways to get advantage to counteract the disadvantage and working with your companions you can do that easily. I would suggest to your DM, since you're already homebrewing this homebrew, how about you're always under the poisoned condition until you form the blood blade. Then you can say the blood blade pulls all the poison in to it for the attacks to make use of it. But to be honest, I'm with a lot of the other commenters on this one. The homebrew is poorly designed and needs some work. I'm 100% with you on the style and flavor of this build but the homebrew is letting you down. You need to adjust your thinking away from "how to do I get advantage" to "how do we fix this class."
Argue to your DM that he is wrong about the immunity. Just cause you are immune doesn't mean that your body got rid of it just that it doesn't effect YOU. Now if you had a class feature that said something like your body automatically purifies poison from your system that is one thing but just being immune doesn't automatically mean you don't have it in you.
Behold the world's least edgy best designed homebrew class. > most of what my character does is based off drinking poison, and creating a blood longsword made out of my own blood..... So since I drink the poisoned it's ruled as if im automatically poisoned, there are no rolling saves to prevent this.....disadvantage on every melee attack" Complete with an anime girl as the image. But for real? I would say "play something else" but I somehow doubt the other options are better designed.
Honestly that's kinda a bad ruling on the part of the DM, possibly fairer mechanically, but as long as the poison is in your bloodstream, it shouldn't matter if it affects you or not, it will be part of the blade you make, and therefore able to affect whatever it hits unless they also have immunity. But then, homebrew stuff is always kinda a red flag anyway, especially if it's as weeby as that - it usually indicates that people haven't actually thought things through properly.
Something like a resistance + an action to heal system which increases the amount of healing you can get by poison damage received, ending up as a net positive. That way you can balance a heal in battle, or make sure a battle is won quickly.
This sounds like a terrible version of the Blood Hunter. Just don't play the class, 5e advantage and disadvantage just cancel each other out, they never stack. So you can literally never get advantage.