Building a Legal Dragoon in 5e

Kain Highwind, Final Fantasy IV

FF4 was the first Final Fantasy I REALLY got into, and the character of Kain Highwind made a huge impact on me. Since then, I’ve always loved the idea of the “Dragoon,” a dragon knight, and the associated stuff that they could do in the Final Fantasy games.

The core traits of a Dragoon are that they wear heavy armour (Kain and FF4 main protagonist Cecil can both wear the same armour), use polearms, and their special ability is to Jump. In FF4 this amounts to Kain going offscreen for a turn or so and then coming down and hitting the enemy for massive damage.

Unfortunately there’s no good way to do this in 5e…or is there? Sure, there’s plenty of homebrew Dragoon classes out there, and some of them probably will fulfill that fantasy. But at my tables, we don’t really use homebrew classes, with rare exception, and probably aren’t inclined to just use someone’s stuff off the Internet.

So, much like when I sat around and built a 4e Warlord (oh wait, I never posted that here…) I’m going to build a FF4 Dragoon with *legal* 5e official content!

Ricard Highwind from Final Fantasy II

For this build, we’re going to be multiclassing Fighter and Monk. I know what you’re thinking–Monk?! Yes, and it’ll become clear in a moment.

You can theoretically choose any Background for this character, but most likely you’ll want to choose the Knight background. If you’re in a group that likes to use UA or doesn’t care about setting specific mechanics, I highly recommend the Knight of Solamnia Background from the recent Heroes of Krynn Revisited UA. This will give you a new feat, the Squire of Solamnia, for free, which gives you a d6 Battlemaster die and a choice of some Battlemaster manuevers, plus a benefit to mounting speed if you’re playing a game that that’s gonna matter on.

Any race could be a Dragoon, so don’t feel tied down to something. If you choose one of the newer Dragonborn, though, some of this build may become redundant. You can also choose Variant Human for the free feat, but we’ll talk about feats down there.

Everyone uses different stat generation but strictly speaking you’ll need at least a 13 in Dex and Wisdom to multiclass both Fighter and Monk. Since the Dragoon traditionally uses polearms (which are almost all two handed in 5e) you will also need your Strength to be high. If you’re playing with a flexible DM, ask if you can waive the multiclass requirements since you aren’t strictly speaking going to be using some of these features.

Class Levels

We’re gonna go Fighter 2/Monk 6, and then Fighter or Monk X per your own choices, plus a bonus at the end.

Start as a Fighter for 2 levels, to get the necessary proficiencies and Action Surge. This will keep you viable while the delayed progression from multiclassing happens. I chose to start with a Lance and a Glaive for my weapons; fighters also can start with a crossbow or 2 handaxes for range. I recommend switching out the handaxes for a pack of javelins at the earliest gameable opportunity, or if you’re creating at a higher level, just ask to swap them out. Javelins are good thrown weapons and perfectly flavoured for the spear-wielding Dragoon. You can choose any Fighting Style you like at Fighter 2; Dueling is a good choice, as is some of the new ones in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

Now take 3 levels in Monk. The first level is going to suck because you will basically not be using either Unarmoured Defense OR Martial Arts…ever. In fact you won’t be using a LOT of the monk features, but we’ll see in a moment exactly how viable and cool this can become. Second level will also give you the unfortunately useless Unarmoured Movement. Second level does, however, unlock Ki points. Let’s run the Monk techniques down for how we’ll be using them:

• Flurry of Blows is pretty useless because you can exclusively use it for unarmed strikes, which is not a thing we’ll be doing.
• Patient Defense is solid, but we have other things we’ll be using our bonus action on.
• Step of the Wind is what we’re really after! 1 ki point will allow you to take the Disengage or Dodge action as a bonus action, and double your jump distance. What this means it that you can use a Ki point to Dash for extra movement and then do a big, cool jump. Dragoons always jump, so this is a good step towards fulfilling that at the lower level. Speak with your DM about the character concept and fantasy, and see if they’ll be nice and give you advantage on attack rolls made while jumping. After all, your entire Monk level 1 was a dead level…
• Ki-Fueled Attack is basically useless too, since it only applies to unarmed strikes and monk weapons. Even if we were using a weapon that could be considered a monk weapon through TCoE’s Dedicated Weapon feature (which the thematic heavy polearms don’t qualify for), you can’t use monk weapons while wearing armour.
• Quickened Healing is useful and can sub in for the later Dragoons’ Lancet ability, which could drain HP and MP from enemies and heal the Dragoon.
• Focused Aim will let you pump Ki points into your attack rolls (1 ki point for +2 to hit), which is a useful fallback if you find you aren’t using your Ki points very much. It can also help compensate for lower to hit bonuses if you choose to take all the feats we need.

When you reach Monk 3 choose the Way of the Ascendant Dragon from Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. This gives you the Breath of the Dragon feature which is similar to a technique Freya Crescent from FF9 had. You’ll also get Deflect Missiles, and nothing about the feature technically says that the deflection must be done bare-handed, meaning in theory the Dragoon can use their big-ass polearm to swipe away enemy projectiles. You need a free hand to catch the projectile and throw it back, which is possible, but I don’t think it’s thematically appropriate for the Dragoon (though using the polearm to deflect missiles totally is!).

Freya Crescent from Final Fantasy IX

From here, stay with Monk at levels 4 (ASI, Slow Fall) and 5 (Extra Attack, Stunning Strike). Slow Fall is super cool for the Dragoon given everything we’re doing in the air. Stunning Strike does not specify that you must use a Monk weapon to use it, meaning it will be VERY powerful on a dude with a reach weapon like us. The DC will only be 12 until you reach combined level 10 though, unless you use an ASI to make your Wisdom go up.

Take your 6th level in Monk for Wings Unfurled, which gives you fly speed when you use Step of the Wind. Now THAT’S some Dragoon shit!

From here you have a few options. 7th level Monk will give you Evasion which is never bad. 8th level is an ASI. Or, you can switch back to Fighter and pick up a subclass that you like (Champion oddly works well, Purple Dragon Knight is thematic as hell and can give your allies extra health, Battlemaster never hurts), let level 5 be the dead level, and pick up another ASI at level 6. If you are playing with a really generous GM who understands what you’re going for, they might even let you stack Extra Attack in this manner, since your combined level will be 8, but don’t be surprised if they say no.

From there, let’s look at the feats.

Dragoon Trueblood from Final Fantasy XIV. Seriously, how badly do I want to play this guy?

Feats

There are lots of options. The first thing you’re probably gonna want is Polearm Master, for the cool bonus action d4 attack but mostly for the opportunity attack when they enter your reach. With the Monk’s Stunning Strike feature, you can essentially poke an enemy before they come within melee distance of you and prevent them from doing anything for a whole turn.

If that wasn’t enough, you can pick up the usual Sentinel feat which will, among other things, stop movement speed for creatures you hit with an opportunity attack, and provoke opportunity attacks on creatures even if they take the Disengage action. Polearm Master + Sentinel is a pretty common feat combo, but it’s especially cool on a Dragoon.

In my homebrew world, Aerda, I use the term Purple Dragon Knights to basically refer to Dragoons, and made them the Elite Guard of Steelhaven, the largest city in my setting (and basically my version of Greyhawk). They all get this Polearm Master + Sentinel combo, which makes them really cool NPC allies and a complete monster for the players to have to fight–which is exactly what happened when Kalarel the Vile, the evil necromancer trying to summon Orcus, ended up going on a rampage through Steelhaven, killing one of the Purple Dragon Knights and resurrecting him as an undead…who could stab the players from 10 feet away, and stop their movement, meaning they couldn’t move any closer to attack him! It was a pretty crazy fight.

You can take the Variant Human race to get a free feat at level 1 and I recommend either of these, probably starting with Polearm Master first. If your group gives out a free feat at level 1, and lets you stack that with Variant Human, then you can start out the gate pretty strong, and it will carry you through the dead levels of Monk 1 and Fighter 5 nicely. My group gives out a feat and an ASI at level 4 but bans Variant Human. The thing you don’t want to do is have your Strength be too low, so keep an eye on that. If you’re in a game where you get to roll stats, maybe you’ll luck out!

The other feat that will help out is Great Weapon Master. Since all the weapons we’re using are two handed, we can take the -5 penalty for +10 damage all day long. This is gonna be super crazy when we’re doing stuff like our reaction attack from Polearm Master, and doing Stunning Strike.

Bonus: Drakewarden

Dragoon from Final Fantasy XI

Later games in the series made having a pet baby dragon (or wyvern) a core part of the class in the late game. While this isn’t a part of my core Dragoon fantasy from the older games, it isn’t a bad idea and thankfully Fizban’s gives us a great option for that in the Drakewarden Ranger.

The earliest you can start taking this is level 10, because IMO you need those 2 levels of Fighter and at least 6 levels of Monk, and should get another ASI (the fastest way is to take 2 more levels of Monk for Fighter 2/Monk 8). From there you want to take Ranger for 3 levels, and use this optional features from Tasha’s:

• Favoured Foe will give you an extra d4 damage for some of your attacks. You get to use it basically in as many encounters per long rest as you have proficiency bonus, so that’s 4 at level 10. Considering we are making two attacks, possibly a bonus action attack, and likely our Polearm Master reaction, that’s a potential extra 4d4 damage per round. Not bad.

At level 2 you’ll get spellcasting; I recommend the spell Hunter’s Mark if you want to increase the damage to d6 and have something to fall back on if you run out of Favoured Foe. If you make it to Ranger 5, you will finally have access to 2nd level spells and be able to cast Jump, which will triple your jump distance. Not sure how useful that is when we’ve been able to fly since level 8, but it’s there.

But the real thing is the Drake companion. Now, we have to use our bonus action to command it, which means our bonus action economy is starting to get a little clouded–between Step of the Wind for our jump flight, possible Polearm Master bonus attacks, and now commanding the Drake, there’s a lot of options but we’re not gonna be able to do everything at once. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re a player who can weigh their options well, and there are limited resources for some of these (Step of the Wind is tied to our Ki, the Drake can only be summoned once per long rest or if we use our spell slots to do so), so there’s a lot of options for what we want to do.

The Drake doesn’t fully come online to flying until you reach Ranger level 7, which will essentially be our level 17. Unfortunately the level cap is 20, so we won’t be able to get to level 11 for the Drake’s fire breath–a real shame. If you sacrifice those last 2 levels of Monk for a Fighter 2/Monk 6/Ranger 12, then you will be able to get the fire breath–but you’ve been able to have your own fire breath for a lot of levels now, so maybe that’s not so cool. Maybe the DM will be nice and let you use your fire breath out of the Drake?

I hope this was interesting, fun and cool. I don’t do a lot of “builds,” I prefer to simply make characters, but this was fun to type up. Have fun gaming.

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