Introduction
I recently joined an obscure group on Facebook called, D&D 5e Character Optimization, its an interesting group which seems to spend most of the time sharing ideas of how to build one type of character or another. It got me thinking though. If I wanted the most optimal character build in D&D 5e…what would it be? I’m certain there have been thousands, even tens of thousands, of discussions and debates around gaming tables and message boards, and plenty within the Character Optimization group – but I’m not interested in conjecture, or theories, or opinions…I want to know for a fact!
Given I’m a professional programmer and hold a PhD in data analytics, I thought, certainly there must be a way for science and technology to help me get to the bottom of this all important matter. So with some spare time on my hands, I did what any responsible adult and D&D player would do. I spent an unreasonable amount of time, creating a D&D 5e combat simulation environment, randomly generated 5000 characters, from one of four classes: Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and simulated about 6 million battles – 5,920,374 to be exact. Here are the results.