I realize GWM is the better feat "technically" but is Savage Attacker far off? Would Savage Attacker be more of a consistent damage increase? I'm honestly considering it over GWM... I have a level 7 Mountain Dwarf Bear Totem Barbarian that wields a +2 great axe, and is considered our tank but I tend to DPS more as our group is not crazy squishy.
Supposing the greataxe, which is the best weapon for savage attacker's bonus, your average roll would go from 6.5 to 8.48. So, roughly +2 DPR. But, if we account for chance to hit with your +2 greataxe, that'll go down to somewhere in the ballpark of 1.4-1.5 DPR gain.
I don't know what your STR mod is, but I'll guess 3. your DPR should be about 16 after accounting for a 70% chance to hit. with GWM, and adjusting for the bonuses and lesser accuracy, your DPR goes up to 19.3.
SO, savage attacker's increasing by 2 in the best case scenario while GWM is doing at least +3 to your DPR. However, if you attack recklessly to gain advantage, then your DPR with GWM shoots up to a whopping ~30 DPR. In situations where advantage occurs, GWM vastly outperforms savage attacker.
But anyways, I'd consider a half-feat if you don't feel like taking GWM. Barbarian can benefit from increasing DEX, CON, and STR. Got an odd score in STR? maybe take skill expert or squat nimbleness. Do you really hate dex saves? Get resilient DEX and possibly improve your AC, initiative, and synergy with Danger Sense.
Cgarciao is correct, the damage increase from Savage Attacker is minimal. Given a character with 18 Strength, a +2 Greataxe, attacking recklessly, and against a target with 16ac here is how much damage they can expect to do:
2( (1 - 0.3^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5) ) = 27.6575 DPR [one minus the miss chance squared gives us the probability at least one of the d20's in the advantage attack was a hit/crit. The damage is the average weapon damage plus Strength mod plus magic weapon bonus plus rage bonus]
So, what does this look like with Savage Attacker?
(1 - 0.3^2)(8.4891 + 4 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(8.4891) + (1 - 0.3^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5) = 29.6612 DPR [Savage Attacker can only be applied once a turn, so we apply it to the first attack and calculate the expected damage for each attack separately]
So this does increase your expected DPR by just over 2. The +2 weapon gives the character a high accuracy and ensures they get near the maximum possible boost to their DPR from Savage Attacker. But what if we just took an ASI and maxed the characters Strength out to 20, what does that look like?
So if possible simply boosting your Strength will yield better overall damage than Savage Attacker. If your strength is even lower than the example here then know that because of your reduced accuracy the benefit of Savage Attacker will be even less and the benefit of increasing your Strength will be even more. As Cgarciao says if you have an odd Strength score then seriously consider taking a half-feat to increase your modifier, this will get you all the benefits I outlined above in addition to whatever the feat does.
You can also look at something not damage focused, after all you already have a +2 weapon. Skill Expert is just always good and I am also a fan of Resilient Wisdom for Barbarians to help prevent being CCed the whole fight.
Awesome thank you! That info is very helpful and much appreciated. Prob go with GWM but now Skill Expert might be the smarter pick as my DM likes to antagonize us in creative ways looool.
The bonus action from GWM is often overlooked in the DPR calculations because its hard to factor. But if you're focusing your attacks on enemies that are weaker or already beaten down its not uncommon to get 1 to 3 bonus action attacks in a fight. Which is a lot, especially for a barb that doesn't have much for bonus actions after raging.
The bonus action from GWM is often overlooked in the DPR calculations because its hard to factor. But if you're focusing your attacks on enemies that are weaker or already beaten down its not uncommon to get 1 to 3 bonus action attacks in a fight. Which is a lot, especially for a barb that doesn't have much for bonus actions after raging.
It's not hard to factor at all. DPR calculations always assume at least one big target with infinite hp, so it's immaterial getting a bonus action attack from dropping a target, but the bonus action attack from critting should be included in any DPR calculation worth considering - if it doesn't include that and it's analyzing GWM, it's a bad analysis and you should disregard the calculation.
Usually the analysis is GWM+PAM, in which case the relevant math is that if at least one attack from the attack action critted, the bonus action attack deals 1d10 damage base rather than 1d4.
The bonus action from GWM is often overlooked in the DPR calculations because its hard to factor. But if you're focusing your attacks on enemies that are weaker or already beaten down its not uncommon to get 1 to 3 bonus action attacks in a fight. Which is a lot, especially for a barb that doesn't have much for bonus actions after raging.
It's not hard to factor at all. DPR calculations always assume at least one big target with infinite hp, so it's immaterial getting a bonus action attack from dropping a target, but the bonus action attack from critting should be included in any DPR calculation worth considering - if it doesn't include that and it's analyzing GWM, it's a bad analysis and you should disregard the calculation.
Usually the analysis is GWM+PAM, in which case the relevant math is that if at least one attack from the attack action critted, the bonus action attack deals 1d10 damage base rather than 1d4.
I don't know, maybe it isn't that hard. It just seems like I never see it taken into consideration when doing the math on DPR. Also, as I'm sure you know, its not just on a crit, if you kill an enemy too, so more valuable on lots of lower CR enemies than a few higher CR enemies.
The bonus action from GWM is often overlooked in the DPR calculations because its hard to factor. But if you're focusing your attacks on enemies that are weaker or already beaten down its not uncommon to get 1 to 3 bonus action attacks in a fight. Which is a lot, especially for a barb that doesn't have much for bonus actions after raging.
It's not hard to factor at all. DPR calculations always assume at least one big target with infinite hp, so it's immaterial getting a bonus action attack from dropping a target, but the bonus action attack from critting should be included in any DPR calculation worth considering - if it doesn't include that and it's analyzing GWM, it's a bad analysis and you should disregard the calculation.
Usually the analysis is GWM+PAM, in which case the relevant math is that if at least one attack from the attack action critted, the bonus action attack deals 1d10 damage base rather than 1d4.
I don't know, maybe it isn't that hard. It just seems like I never see it taken into consideration when doing the math on DPR. Also, as I'm sure you know, its not just on a crit, if you kill an enemy too, so more valuable on lots of lower CR enemies than a few higher CR enemies.
There are any number of ways to handle the DPR calculation. You can assume a bonus action rate based on your experience. Something like GWM feels like you get the bonus attack probably 25% of the time. Its not hard for that math to be added in. Like any DPR calculation, make your assumptions and work from there. For example its a bad assumption that a barbarian gets 3 attacks at level 5 with PAM, because he is generally raging in round 1. So you need to assume average encounter length, etc. Number of encounters per day. My barbarian spreadsheet is stupid complicated at this point, but it allows me to reasonably weigh different choices for my specific build.
There are any number of ways to handle the DPR calculation. You can assume a bonus action rate based on your experience. Something like GWM feels like you get the bonus attack probably 25% of the time. Its not hard for that math to be added in. Like any DPR calculation, make your assumptions and work from there. For example its a bad assumption that a barbarian gets 3 attacks at level 5 with PAM, because he is generally raging in round 1. So you need to assume average encounter length, etc. Number of encounters per day. My barbarian spreadsheet is stupid complicated at this point, but it allows me to reasonably weigh different choices for my specific build.
If you just want to factor in the chance that one of your Action attacks was a critical (thus triggering the GWM bonus action attack) the formula is: (1 - (chance to not crit, typically 0.95)^(number of d20's rolled during your action))
So for a typical level 5 barbarian using reckless attacks it is: (1-0.95^4) = 0.18549375 or approximately 18.55%. So 25% is a good off the cuff approximation.
If you assume you have a 60% (before accounting for GWM penalty) chance to hit the target, an 18 Strength, and are using a Great Axe then here is what your expected DPR is: 2((1 - 0.65^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 10) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5)) + (1 - 0.95^4)((1 - 0.65^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 10) + (1-0.95^2)(6.5)) = ~29.7828 DPR
Without GWM (Say they took Resilient(Wisdom) instead) the same barbarian has an expected DPR of: 2((1 - 0.4^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5)) = 22.2675
So without even considering the case where a creature dying also triggers a bonus action attack GWM results in a ~7.5153 DPR increase with 4.9875 coming from the -5/+10 trade off and the remaining ~2.5279 coming from the bonus action attack on crit.
If you want to factor in the bonus action attack on kill this is harder to model as it depends on the specific target stats as well as what your fellow party members are doing. I would suggest tracking how often you crit and how often you land a killing blow (without critting) over a few combats. Then you can take the ratio of (crits + killing blows) / crits to scale the probability of critting during your action to include an approximation of how often you get a killing blow.
If you have GWM and PAM then you just take 1 - your probability of getting the GWM bonus action attack and multiply it by your PAM bonus action attack expected damage. All in all the math itself isn't hard, it is just accurately accounting for all the various interactions that is the challenge. Learning statistics is helpful for deciding how to model something but these are generally simple probabilities and distributions and only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is required.
The bonus action from GWM is often overlooked in the DPR calculations because its hard to factor. But if you're focusing your attacks on enemies that are weaker or already beaten down its not uncommon to get 1 to 3 bonus action attacks in a fight. Which is a lot, especially for a barb that doesn't have much for bonus actions after raging.
It's not hard to factor at all. DPR calculations always assume at least one big target with infinite hp, so it's immaterial getting a bonus action attack from dropping a target, but the bonus action attack from critting should be included in any DPR calculation worth considering - if it doesn't include that and it's analyzing GWM, it's a bad analysis and you should disregard the calculation.
Usually the analysis is GWM+PAM, in which case the relevant math is that if at least one attack from the attack action critted, the bonus action attack deals 1d10 damage base rather than 1d4.
I don't know, maybe it isn't that hard. It just seems like I never see it taken into consideration when doing the math on DPR. Also, as I'm sure you know, its not just on a crit, if you kill an enemy too, so more valuable on lots of lower CR enemies than a few higher CR enemies.
this is one of those situations where it's a difference of "in theory vs. in practice."
I posted in another thread about what DPR I normally achieve with my zealot barbarian. In theory, with his flame tongue and GWM, he should be doing about 30 DPR or 47 while attacking recklessly. In practice, however, I target lower CR creatures much more frequently that I'm aware have lower AC, or ones that have taken a good bit of damage beforehand, plus I always attack recklessly . Due to this, I frequently proc the bonus action more often than I don't.
In practice, I frequently achieve ~100 DPR. But not everyone is going to make the same decisions I make, or have access to the same magic items I do (I also have a strength belt.) So, the theory part should act more as a "bare minimum" type of expectation. If you get more, cool! no one ever complains about doing more than what theory says they should. It's just a safe bet.
I would say that if you wanted to use both the Great Weapon Master and the Savage Attacker features, it's kind of a gamble by then because you can't really use both things at the same time. Here are the things that the two features give you:
Great Weapon Master:
Subtract 5 from the number you rolled from the d20. If it succeeds, you gain a +10 damage bonus on top of the number you rolled with the damage die, the rage bonus (if enraged), and your strength modifier.
Example: you rolled a natural 20 (not including your strength modifier and your proficiency bonus for the attack), you subtract 5 and get a 15 to hit. If it succeeds, you deal the damage, saying you rolled a natural 12 for the damage dealt from your great axe. You then get to add your +10 damage bonus on top of your strength modifier and your rage bonus (if your character is raging), dealing at least 24 points of damage to your target.
Savage Attacker:
It lets you roll twice, but you have to take the second roll
In my opinion, the Great Weapon Master feature would be the best option for you because it would be superb, especially for the barbarians. Just note that I'm not pressing this on you also.
I would say that if you wanted to use both the Great Weapon Master and the Savage Attacker features, it's kind of a gamble by then because you can't really use both things at the same time. Here are the things that the two features give you:
Great Weapon Master:
Subtract 5 from the number you rolled from the d20. If it succeeds, you gain a +10 damage bonus on top of the number you rolled with the damage die, the rage bonus (if enraged), and your strength modifier.
Example: you rolled a natural 20 (not including your strength modifier and your proficiency bonus for the attack), you subtract 5 and get a 15 to hit. If it succeeds, you deal the damage, saying you rolled a natural 12 for the damage dealt from your great axe. You then get to add your +10 damage bonus on top of your strength modifier and your rage bonus (if your character is raging), dealing at least 24 points of damage to your target.
Savage Attacker:
It lets you roll twice, but you have to take the second roll
In my opinion, the Great Weapon Master feature would be the best option for you because it would be superb, especially for the barbarians. Just note that I'm not pressing this on you also.
I think you are a little confused. Savage Attacker can absolutely work at the same time as Great Weapon Master. This is because Savage Attacker affects the damage dice and not the flat +10 damage bonus granted by Great Weapon Master.
Also Savage Attacker lets you use either damage roll. I think you mixed up Savage Attacker with the Great Weapon Fighting Style. Its the Fighting Style that forces you to use the 2nd damage roll.
But all that being said, Savage Attacker is not a feat I have ever taken on any characters I have played. Imo it just does not do enough to spend a valuable and limited ASI slot for it.
I see where you're coming from. I just couldn't remember a few things about the Savage Attacker with the Great Weapon Master because I didn't look in the phb (player's handbook).
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I realize GWM is the better feat "technically" but is Savage Attacker far off? Would Savage Attacker be more of a consistent damage increase? I'm honestly considering it over GWM... I have a level 7 Mountain Dwarf Bear Totem Barbarian that wields a +2 great axe, and is considered our tank but I tend to DPS more as our group is not crazy squishy.
Supposing the greataxe, which is the best weapon for savage attacker's bonus, your average roll would go from 6.5 to 8.48. So, roughly +2 DPR. But, if we account for chance to hit with your +2 greataxe, that'll go down to somewhere in the ballpark of 1.4-1.5 DPR gain.
I don't know what your STR mod is, but I'll guess 3. your DPR should be about 16 after accounting for a 70% chance to hit. with GWM, and adjusting for the bonuses and lesser accuracy, your DPR goes up to 19.3.
SO, savage attacker's increasing by 2 in the best case scenario while GWM is doing at least +3 to your DPR. However, if you attack recklessly to gain advantage, then your DPR with GWM shoots up to a whopping ~30 DPR. In situations where advantage occurs, GWM vastly outperforms savage attacker.
But anyways, I'd consider a half-feat if you don't feel like taking GWM. Barbarian can benefit from increasing DEX, CON, and STR. Got an odd score in STR? maybe take skill expert or squat nimbleness. Do you really hate dex saves? Get resilient DEX and possibly improve your AC, initiative, and synergy with Danger Sense.
Cgarciao is correct, the damage increase from Savage Attacker is minimal. Given a character with 18 Strength, a +2 Greataxe, attacking recklessly, and against a target with 16ac here is how much damage they can expect to do:
2( (1 - 0.3^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5) ) = 27.6575 DPR
[one minus the miss chance squared gives us the probability at least one of the d20's in the advantage attack was a hit/crit. The damage is the average weapon damage plus Strength mod plus magic weapon bonus plus rage bonus]
So, what does this look like with Savage Attacker?
(1 - 0.3^2)(8.4891 + 4 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(8.4891) + (1 - 0.3^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5) = 29.6612 DPR
[Savage Attacker can only be applied once a turn, so we apply it to the first attack and calculate the expected damage for each attack separately]
So this does increase your expected DPR by just over 2. The +2 weapon gives the character a high accuracy and ensures they get near the maximum possible boost to their DPR from Savage Attacker. But what if we just took an ASI and maxed the characters Strength out to 20, what does that look like?
2( (1 - 0.25^2)(6.5 + 5 + 2 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5) ) = 30.33 DPR
So if possible simply boosting your Strength will yield better overall damage than Savage Attacker. If your strength is even lower than the example here then know that because of your reduced accuracy the benefit of Savage Attacker will be even less and the benefit of increasing your Strength will be even more. As Cgarciao says if you have an odd Strength score then seriously consider taking a half-feat to increase your modifier, this will get you all the benefits I outlined above in addition to whatever the feat does.
You can also look at something not damage focused, after all you already have a +2 weapon. Skill Expert is just always good and I am also a fan of Resilient Wisdom for Barbarians to help prevent being CCed the whole fight.
Awesome thank you! That info is very helpful and much appreciated. Prob go with GWM but now Skill Expert might be the smarter pick as my DM likes to antagonize us in creative ways looool.
The bonus action from GWM is often overlooked in the DPR calculations because its hard to factor. But if you're focusing your attacks on enemies that are weaker or already beaten down its not uncommon to get 1 to 3 bonus action attacks in a fight. Which is a lot, especially for a barb that doesn't have much for bonus actions after raging.
It's not hard to factor at all. DPR calculations always assume at least one big target with infinite hp, so it's immaterial getting a bonus action attack from dropping a target, but the bonus action attack from critting should be included in any DPR calculation worth considering - if it doesn't include that and it's analyzing GWM, it's a bad analysis and you should disregard the calculation.
Usually the analysis is GWM+PAM, in which case the relevant math is that if at least one attack from the attack action critted, the bonus action attack deals 1d10 damage base rather than 1d4.
I don't know, maybe it isn't that hard. It just seems like I never see it taken into consideration when doing the math on DPR. Also, as I'm sure you know, its not just on a crit, if you kill an enemy too, so more valuable on lots of lower CR enemies than a few higher CR enemies.
There are any number of ways to handle the DPR calculation. You can assume a bonus action rate based on your experience. Something like GWM feels like you get the bonus attack probably 25% of the time. Its not hard for that math to be added in. Like any DPR calculation, make your assumptions and work from there.
For example its a bad assumption that a barbarian gets 3 attacks at level 5 with PAM, because he is generally raging in round 1. So you need to assume average encounter length, etc. Number of encounters per day. My barbarian spreadsheet is stupid complicated at this point, but it allows me to reasonably weigh different choices for my specific build.
If you just want to factor in the chance that one of your Action attacks was a critical (thus triggering the GWM bonus action attack) the formula is: (1 - (chance to not crit, typically 0.95)^(number of d20's rolled during your action))
So for a typical level 5 barbarian using reckless attacks it is: (1-0.95^4) = 0.18549375 or approximately 18.55%. So 25% is a good off the cuff approximation.
If you assume you have a 60% (before accounting for GWM penalty) chance to hit the target, an 18 Strength, and are using a Great Axe then here is what your expected DPR is:
2((1 - 0.65^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 10) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5)) + (1 - 0.95^4)((1 - 0.65^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2 + 10) + (1-0.95^2)(6.5)) = ~29.7828 DPR
Without GWM (Say they took Resilient(Wisdom) instead) the same barbarian has an expected DPR of:
2((1 - 0.4^2)(6.5 + 4 + 2) + (1 - 0.95^2)(6.5)) = 22.2675
So without even considering the case where a creature dying also triggers a bonus action attack GWM results in a ~7.5153 DPR increase with 4.9875 coming from the -5/+10 trade off and the remaining ~2.5279 coming from the bonus action attack on crit.
If you want to factor in the bonus action attack on kill this is harder to model as it depends on the specific target stats as well as what your fellow party members are doing. I would suggest tracking how often you crit and how often you land a killing blow (without critting) over a few combats. Then you can take the ratio of (crits + killing blows) / crits to scale the probability of critting during your action to include an approximation of how often you get a killing blow.
If you have GWM and PAM then you just take 1 - your probability of getting the GWM bonus action attack and multiply it by your PAM bonus action attack expected damage. All in all the math itself isn't hard, it is just accurately accounting for all the various interactions that is the challenge. Learning statistics is helpful for deciding how to model something but these are generally simple probabilities and distributions and only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division is required.
this is one of those situations where it's a difference of "in theory vs. in practice."
I posted in another thread about what DPR I normally achieve with my zealot barbarian. In theory, with his flame tongue and GWM, he should be doing about 30 DPR or 47 while attacking recklessly. In practice, however, I target lower CR creatures much more frequently that I'm aware have lower AC, or ones that have taken a good bit of damage beforehand, plus I always attack recklessly . Due to this, I frequently proc the bonus action more often than I don't.
In practice, I frequently achieve ~100 DPR. But not everyone is going to make the same decisions I make, or have access to the same magic items I do (I also have a strength belt.) So, the theory part should act more as a "bare minimum" type of expectation. If you get more, cool! no one ever complains about doing more than what theory says they should. It's just a safe bet.
I would say that if you wanted to use both the Great Weapon Master and the Savage Attacker features, it's kind of a gamble by then because you can't really use both things at the same time. Here are the things that the two features give you:
Great Weapon Master:
In my opinion, the Great Weapon Master feature would be the best option for you because it would be superb, especially for the barbarians. Just note that I'm not pressing this on you also.
I think you are a little confused. Savage Attacker can absolutely work at the same time as Great Weapon Master. This is because Savage Attacker affects the damage dice and not the flat +10 damage bonus granted by Great Weapon Master.
Also Savage Attacker lets you use either damage roll. I think you mixed up Savage Attacker with the Great Weapon Fighting Style. Its the Fighting Style that forces you to use the 2nd damage roll.
But all that being said, Savage Attacker is not a feat I have ever taken on any characters I have played. Imo it just does not do enough to spend a valuable and limited ASI slot for it.
I see where you're coming from. I just couldn't remember a few things about the Savage Attacker with the Great Weapon Master because I didn't look in the phb (player's handbook).