A Poison-Based Damage Dealer: Yuan-Ti Hunter Conclave Ranger | D&D 5e Character Build

The Serpent Venom poison comes from a Giant Poisonous Snake, not just a poisonous snake, so finding one is going to be a lot harder. You could always go beast master ranger and pick a giant poisonous snake as your companion though.

Use the poison obtaining method to afford writing spells in your spell book, or use it to purchase armor for your party. Serpent venom sells for 200gp, so RAW you can sell it for 100gp which means if your say a druid you can cast conjure animals to summon 8 snakes milking them for effectively 800gp worth of venom which can be done twice per long rest at 5th level for 1600gp a day which means you can buy plate armor if so long as you shop around. Make sure to talk to the rogue to see if he knows anybody who'd buy the venom.

Maybe if you have druid in the party, and they could wild shape into the creatures for you to extract the poison

Just noticed something I never really gave much thought to before. The extra or bonus d8 damage for Colossus Slayer says it is once per turn (this can be like the Rogue's Sneak Attack feature) which means if you can make an attack when it isn't your turn you can do this damage again. Take the Sentinel feat and increase your chances of always getting an AoO.

Fun build, I like going to ideas that don't fit cookie cutter mold. Although I think that I would have gone drakewarden and lost more damage for the thematic ability of having a poison Dragon as a pet, and I would take magic initiate for catapult so I can fire a ball of poisonous snakes at someone, ridiculous I know but hilarious at least in my opinion

Love the build! The 'serpent poison weapon' trick looks like it applies to Conjure Volley too (as well as Conjure Barrage), which has a massive AOE. Also, if you fire non-magical ammo from a magic bow the attack counts as magical, which should apply to both spells.

Love the build. Ive worked on replicating it. 12 levels hunter ranger and 8 levels Trickery Domain Cleric. adds a little more poison damage and a few uses of a very good channel divinity along with some useful spells and proficiencies.

I saw a poison build a long time ago (forget the specifics) but was a multiclass conjuration wizard i believe, they had 1 vial of purple worm poison they brought, which they used so they could duplicate it. (temporarily) which was enough during combat or for quick cash.

Poison is interesting in 5e because there actually aren't that many creatures that resist poison damage, but many of them are just immune to it. Same with the condition (though that's true of most conditions). I might try to work with my DM, especially as a Ranger, if I were going a poisoner build if I could have a feature that downgrades immunity to resistance or advantage on the saving throw; even if only for my favored enemy(s).

Thanks for this, for some reason it didn't occur to me that you could poison weapons or arrows/bolts before combat, I was treating everything as lasting only 1 minute like basic poison. I wish the rules in d&d clearly stated what was allowed, there are many things you can do that aren't mentioned but can be inferred. Having a stockpile of arrows or other poisoned ammunition is mechanically as good as applying the poison as part of the attack. The downside is you can only recover half your arrows or bolts, and that's not even factoring shooting them 600 ft off a cliff from a long bow when you miss, potentially wasting more poison (although archery fighting style makes missing less likely). Where as poisoning a melee weapon you can only apply one dose of poison to that weapon? So you can only add one dose out of combat to each weapon before you need to use your action/bonus action to apply more poison during combat or juggle with switching weapons I suppose. But at least when you miss you still have the poisoned weapon to try again on your next attack. I'm not sure which I prefer, they have different use cases. Ranged you want lots of disposable poison, but if you have one dose of really strong poison better to deliver it through a melee weapon so you can keep attacking until you land the hit and not waste it, and if its a finesse weapon you can still use Dex as your main stat for both melee and ranged attacks. For the amount of doses that can be extracted from creatures, I'm toying with the idea of basing it on the creatures size. Tiny 1, Small 2, Medium 3, Large 4, Huge 5, Gargantuan 6 or more maybe. I'd also change the DC of the nature check to be the same as the poison.

I also wonder about a moon druid or a moon druid dip on this build… become the poisonous snake , donate posion to your in jars you put there prior to wildshape, rinse and repeat

Most DMs will not allow the party to tame multiple monster manual monsters. I have tried this while playing ranger and not seen anyone else really being allowed to tame several monsters freely. Really not seeing this being allowed often, but roleplaying this as flavor like having a small snake to flavor the poisoning of arrows etc really is good.

3x separate encounters to collect carrion crawler, wyvern, worm poison. Combine them and allow the player to have a singe use insta kill or some other ultimate use poison (or whatever). Perhaps one that can break* immunity?!

Would conjure barrage duplicate the special arrows from an arcane archer? If so you could have some fun with that, or if you go with battlemaster you could really get some nice effects added to your attacks, if you want to multiclass of course. Poison build remind me of an old idea i had years ago, a bard college centered around venom and i remember one of the later features was that your venom (bardic inspiration dice) counted immunity as resistance and ignored resistance. Maybe i should revisit that sometime.

You'd love Grim Hollows 'Green Reaper' Ranger subclass

This is where it would be wonderful if we would be allowed to dip bloodhunter since they get a blood curse that removes immunity for a round once per short rest.

I’d love to see a multi into alchemist for acid coverage

Hunter is the strongest because you can attack 2 at the same time.

Conjure Barrage, as written, duplicates the arrow but not something attached to the arrow. It is a cool idea and I would allow it with serpent poison, but purple worm poison is a different conversation. The arrow of slaying becomes a really strong magic item with this trick, interestingly, even if unlikely to be readily available.

Castor Morveer in Joe Abercrombies novel Best served Cold is a great poisoner character.