 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and I'm gonna help you decide which class you should make your new dragon obsession by going over each and every variant of Dragonborn across the four different books. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you find that getting Smoky in the Dungeon does not provide you with the results you expected, feel free to play your games however you want. And real quick, I'd like to give a brief shoutout to my new patron this month. Nathan Western, thank you. Thank you for choosing to open your heart and your wallet to me. It is because of you that I can keep going. At night when I'm alone with my thoughts and I have nothing to ponder except for the degradation of our society and my personal YouTube channel. I think, is there anyone out there that still cares? That still cares about a lonely person adrift in this world, lost in the sea of emptiness and scared to leave their home for fear of both rejection and COVID. And then I see, I see the email. Nathan Western has pledged $10 per month and I feel hope again. Thank you Nathan for being my hope. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So starting out, the original Dragonborn is bad, like exceedingly so. It was widely regarded as the worst race in the game due to the fact that it only had two abilities and one of them was terrible. You pick a metal or a color and that gives you an element and it also shapes your breath weapon. You get resistance to that element, which is either decently useful if you picked fire or completely irrelevant if you picked one of the obscure elements like lightning. The breath weapon is comedically bad. You have to get real close to use it and it takes your entire action. So unless you're going for style points, you pretty much never use it. And that's all there is. The breath weapon and the damage resistance are all of the Dragonborn git, unless you're also counting the extra language, which I just tend to omit as superfluous knowledge. For a while, my solution to the underwhelming performance of what should be a really cool creature was to give it the feats from Xanathar's for free, namely the dragon hide and the dragon fear feats. But dirty little secret, dragon hide is bad too. Natural weapons almost never come up and since the claw attack is only 1d4, it's not worth using over any other weapon. And the AC bonus is useless on everybody except mages who can now save exactly one spell slot. That's why I've started giving dragon fear as well and I just take out the ASI from both of those feats. It's a fun ability to use in a pinch and 30 feet is wide enough that casters can still use it as a stay away from me button and we stand class versatility in this house. Still, if you're not using these homebrews, stay away from the base dragonborn and instead pick up one of the dragonborn from Fizban's treasury of dragons. They're all separated by type, so I can't call them sub races, they're each their own thing. What they have in common though is a new version of their breath weapon that by all accounts is way better than the old one. Technically, the OG dragonborn breath weapon does more damage at first, but that stops being the case as soon as level 5 hits and even then you can use the new breath weapon multiple times. And it only takes one of your attacks in the action, so it's just playing better in every way that matters. Gem and metallic dragonborn each get their breath weapons in a 15 foot cone, whereas chromatic dragonborn all do 30 foot line attacks, which I think is kind of weird, I would have made it an option that they could choose or left it up to the color. But as for the difference, I've always found the cone to be more useful because enemies like to stagger themselves, although the line could potentially hit enemies from further away. Gem dragonborn also have the added advantage that they get a bunch of weird elements to choose from, which show up less often and are therefore less likely to get resisted. Of course, since you'll end up with resistance to the same damage type that you breathe, it's kind of a question of whether you want to even pick something that'll come up less often. As for what class you should pick, since you're able to replace a single attack in your action with the breath weapon, obviously martial characters with multiple attacks will be more in tune with the skill. Monks especially love to get in close with a bunch of attacks, and they'd be losing the least by burning a punch, but it should be pointed out that the DC for the breath weapon scales with constitution, which everybody in the world wants to have, but the barbarian practically needs to have. And if you're using an ability that inherently puts you right in front of all the enemies, the barbarian is perfect. Casters aren't totally ripped off either, since the 30 foot range of the chromatic dragonborn will keep you just far away enough that you won't get beat up right after using it. Plus, the other two types have their own ways of keeping you alive, which brings me to the individual parts of the races. Chromatic dragonborn, in addition to the breath and the resistance, are so in tune with their element that they can become immune to it for a full minute, which is irritatingly difficult to make use of. Not only because elemental damage isn't super common, but because it also takes an action to put on, which means that you'll likely get hit by the damage, realize that it might be useful to become immune to it, spend an entire turn putting it on, and then your DM can just hit you with some other ability, because most things that do elemental damage still have hands to give you instead. A better use for this ability is as an environmental buffer, like in the off chance that you have to swim through lava for exactly one minute. I'd personally make this ability a bonus action, or better yet, a reaction, at which point it can be used by whatever class you want. As it stands, though, chromatics are best utilized by classes that have bonus actions to fall back on, and or by classes that don't necessarily want to be in direct combat, so that they can make use of the longer breath weapon. So rogues, bards, rangers, or casters with bonus action spells. Meanwhile, gem dragonborn are more versatile. I've already talked about their weird elements, but the other abilities include psychic communication and flight for a full minute. Everybody can use that. No class doesn't want to fly, it's fun to do, and it makes the breath weapon way better. Because if you're 15 feet up and aim the cone down, that becomes a 15 foot diameter both ways. And if you play something ranged like an archery focused fighter, then you can use your breath weapon and then use the rest of your multiple attacks to rain arrows down on whatever's left. But like I said, don't restrict yourself from the wonders of arping Trogdor, just because you're playing a class that doesn't really follow up on it. Lastly, the metallics get two special breath attacks that can replace the damage to either incapacitate or knockback and prone whoever gets caught in the radius. This doesn't use up one of your normal breath attacks, but it can only be used once per short rest. There are two ways that I see this ability getting used. Playing a melee character, you can incapacitate a group of enemies and then use the rest of your attacks and your party's attacks to unload a can of whoopass. Or you can play a ranged character and unleash the power of THOOM on a person who threatens you. The only downside to your ranged option is that it leaves the rest of your breath attacks sort of useless unless you get in close anyway. But it's not like there won't be times where against all the odds you manage to get caught in a bad position with no alternative except to breathe heavily. So think of it more as an excuse to not feel so bad about poor positioning. Now, besides the normal Dragonborn, those of you who bought the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount will have also found who more Dragon can just hang it out inside the world of Exandria, which is weird because Dragonborn don't actually have subclasses. To make up for this, Mr. Mercer winked at the camera and just called them variant options by taking away their elemental resistance, which is not the greatest thing to hear when talking about the least powerful race in the game. That said, Wildemount also came out way before Fizzbans did, so you could make the argument to your DM that maybe you could try and Frankenstein one of the new Dragonborn in instead. Or at the very least, just see if you can swap out the breath weapon, because that's really where the main issue lies. Regardless, the first option for the Exandrian scalese is called the Dragonblood, which is historic as the only canonical Dragonborn to have tails, and they trade in that elemental resistance for both dark vision and advantage on one role of either intimidation or persuasion for short rest. This swap will be way better for social campaigns where the threat of being set on fire is only found in a rat battle, but it's not going to affect the class you'll pick all that much. Maybe it leans more towards casters since they don't get hit as often and tend to be the ones with charisma stats, but it's not a big enough trade that you're going to feel a huge difference. Alternatively, if you want to swap out the damage resistance with something more combat based, you can pick the Ravenite Dragonborn to get dark vision and the ability to use your reaction once per short rest to attack a creature that hit you. Doing it only once per short rest means that its usefulness will kind of be dependent on how often the DM lets you stand in one place for an hour in the middle of a dungeon. But it's not like it's overtly bad, you're basically deciding whether you want to trade potential defense for a more available but scarce offense. In either case, you're really just weighing how often you're going to get that elemental resistance. Some campaigns are set in the Ice Cold Tundra where being a white dragonborn would be simultaneously the greatest thing ever because of all the resistance and the worst thing ever because your breath weapon now doesn't work on half of the populace. So it's a balancing act on trading that resistance out for something that might be more useful. Overall, the dragonborn got a really big boost when Fizzban came out, and if you're planning on playing the Descendants of the DE, I would suggest implementing at the very least the Fire Breath, because all of the other abilities are fun, but you know that the whole reason you pick this class is so that you can breathe hotness onto unsuspecting goblins. Buuuut, that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford to increase my lung capacity. But yeah, Davi out.