So, I have a player who took half-orc fighter as a race and class, which gives them Savage Attacks ("When you score a critical hit with a melee weapon attack, you can roll one of the weapon's damage dice one additional time and add it to the extra damage of the critical hit.") as a racial. But they also brought to me a custom feat dubbed "Javelin Master" that has the following, "If you score a critical hit with a melee javelin attack, you can reroll the damage dice. If you reroll the dice, you can use either result."
Does anyone feel that this is too much dice manipulation or if it is too strong, or would it be just fine? And how exactly would this work?
Javelin master probably needs a nerf. Not for this build, but a paladin with that feat would be nuts. Maybe change it to "reroll weapon damage dice." It is honestly fine on the fighter.
Javelin master probably needs a nerf. Not for this build, but a paladin with that feat would be nuts.
It's really nowhere near as great as it sounds, for the exact same reason Savage Attacker sucks: you're just picking between two average-looking numbers. As soon you roll more than 1 die, their sum is likely to be close to the average. The more dice you roll the more likely you are to get average results, so you're getting a smaller increase relative to the total. And critical hits happen rarely, so whatever edge you do get out of this is spread out over a large number of attacks. Let's put some numbers on this.
Now let's say you roll a lot of dice. The paladin has Savage Attacks, Improved Divine Smite, Banishing Smite is up and they use max level Divine Smite against an undead creature. That's 3d6 for the javelin, 2d8 for IDS, 10d10 for BS and 12d8 for DS. Without the feat your expected value is 128.5. With the feat, it's 135.75. So only 7.25 points of difference by the time you're expecting well over 100 points of damage.
You're just not going to get much extra damage out of this, and you're only going to get it on 5% to 9.75% of attacks, and it slows the game down. It'd be faster and better in most cases to just add +5 to the damage.
The only reason "reroll and pick the highest" works for advantage is because you're starting with only 1 die that has a really wide range of values, and getting even just 3 points more is a significant boost to your success rate.
So, I have a player who took half-orc fighter as a race and class, which gives them Savage Attacks ("When you score a critical hit with a melee weapon attack, you can roll one of the weapon's damage dice one additional time and add it to the extra damage of the critical hit.") as a racial. But they also brought to me a custom feat dubbed "Javelin Master" that has the following, "If you score a critical hit with a melee javelin attack, you can reroll the damage dice. If you reroll the dice, you can use either result."
Does anyone feel that this is too much dice manipulation or if it is too strong, or would it be just fine? And how exactly would this work?
Javelin master probably needs a nerf. Not for this build, but a paladin with that feat would be nuts. Maybe change it to "reroll weapon damage dice." It is honestly fine on the fighter.
Either way, how it works is:
It's really nowhere near as great as it sounds, for the exact same reason Savage Attacker sucks: you're just picking between two average-looking numbers. As soon you roll more than 1 die, their sum is likely to be close to the average. The more dice you roll the more likely you are to get average results, so you're getting a smaller increase relative to the total. And critical hits happen rarely, so whatever edge you do get out of this is spread out over a large number of attacks. Let's put some numbers on this.
The least number of dice you can roll is 2d6 (a simple javelin crit.) The expected value without the feat is 7; with the feat it's 8.37. That's only a difference of 1.37.
Now let's say you roll a lot of dice. The paladin has Savage Attacks, Improved Divine Smite, Banishing Smite is up and they use max level Divine Smite against an undead creature. That's 3d6 for the javelin, 2d8 for IDS, 10d10 for BS and 12d8 for DS. Without the feat your expected value is 128.5. With the feat, it's 135.75. So only 7.25 points of difference by the time you're expecting well over 100 points of damage.
You're just not going to get much extra damage out of this, and you're only going to get it on 5% to 9.75% of attacks, and it slows the game down. It'd be faster and better in most cases to just add +5 to the damage.
The only reason "reroll and pick the highest" works for advantage is because you're starting with only 1 die that has a really wide range of values, and getting even just 3 points more is a significant boost to your success rate.
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