Another day, another busted combo of abilities in the new Dungeons and Dragons 2024 rules. A Redditor in the r/DnD subreddit has invented a technique, dubbed the ‘peasant jackhammer’, that allows a level seven Druid supported by 20 peasant hirelings to deal 100 D8 damage in one round of combat.
We have Redditor u/Deathpacito-01 to thank – or blame – for this degenerate combo, which continues a long tradition of breaking Dungeons and Dragons’ game balance by inserting a few peasants into the initiative order. It also utilises a spell with an ‘emanation’ aura, a new type of DnD spell effect that’s at the root of many of the new edition’s most broken builds.
You can find Deathpacito’s original post over on Reddit if you want to see the discussion the peasant jackhammer has generated. Here’s how it works.
The spell ‘Conjure Woodland Beings’ is a fourth level spell, accessible to DnD 2024 Druids from seventh level (and Rangers a lot later). It projects an ‘emanation’ 10 feet around the Druid that lasts for 10 minutes, or until the Druid loses concentration. This emanation is filled with nature spirits that bite, claw, and otherwise deal 5D8 Force damage to creatures the Druid doesn’t like – though affected creatures get a Wisdom save to attempt to reduce the damage by half.
If the druid can see a creature and moves so that the emanation covers the creature’s space, that creature has to take the save. Likewise, if the creature moves into or ends its turn in the emanation, it needs to save. The damage triggers only once per turn, so the spellcaster can’t just wobble back and forth across the 10’ boundary to deal silly damage.
But there’s nothing to stop the Druid (or the target) being moved around on another character’s turn, such that the emanation clears a target and then covers it again. And it’s trivial for a friendly hireling to chuck a Druid around.
A friendly character – like a peasant you hired in the local tavern – can simply grapple the Druid with their action. Since the Druid can elect to fail the save to resist the grapple, this automatically succeeds. Once grabbled, the peasant can drag the Druid towards the unlucky target – say, an adult red dragon, or a purple worm – so that it’s caught in the emanation, and then back up again, depositing the Druid ready for the next peasant to repeat the process.
Let’s say the Druid has hired twenty willing peasants at the local tavern who are each going to wave the Druid in front of an adult red dragon. Assuming the Druid’s spell save DC is 15, and accounting for the dragno’s legendary resistances, it will fail an average of four saves to resist the Woodland Beings. In total it will suffer 20D8 + (80D8 / 2) damage, for an average 270 damage, rendering it convincingly dead.
Spells that produce emanations, at least as they’re printed in the DnD 2024 Player’s Handbook, seem to be ripe for this kind of exploit. The first broken build for the new edition gave an emanation spell to an extremely mobile character who could run around the battlefield sweeping it over multiple targets. YouTuber D&D Deep Dive used the Conjure Minor Elementals emanation to apply a ridiculous damage buff in a busted Bard build.
It’s always delightful to watch the evolution of busted builds for each of the DnD classes, DnD races, and the discovery of new exploits. And we can probably look forwards to a lot more of these kinds of shenanigans when the new magic items arrive along with the Dungeon Master’s Guide on next year’s DnD release schedule. We can’t wait!
Source: Wargamer
