With Extra Attack (1) at 5 and conventional ability score progression choices, that goes up to a 8.25+4, 8.25+4 (24.5) damage per turn. The TWF guy is doing 3.5+4, 3.5+4, 3.5+4 (22.5) per turn. About the same.
Right. So long as no one casts Haste, neither of them ever use Action Surge, the TWF guy doesn't need his bonus action for anything else, there's no opportunity attacks, we're not worried about magic weapons, and none of them ever need a spare hand to cast spells, it's a wash. But you'd think the guy that needs to give up his bonus action would be ahead, not behind. And a Dueling fighter would deal (4.5 + 2 + 4) * 2 = 21 damage, which is even closer to the TWF setup than the TWF setup is to the 2H setup. So if 2 points of damage is close enough, why would you go TWF over the setup that lets you keep your bonus action, gives you stronger opportunity attacks, better Action Surge and Haste damage, and +2 AC?
At level 8, Greatsword guy takes GWM, while TWF guy takes Dual Wielder
+10 damage, -25% to hit (-25% damage is easy enough way to approximate). That's 8.25+5+10, 8.25+5+10, -25%, 34.75 damage per turn.
The math gets really tedious here, so I don't fault you for trying to streamline it at all. But I don't think this is a very good estimate:
The -5 hit rate is only a 25% damage drop if your hit rate is at 100% (well, 95% I guess). The relative drop in your damage depends on what your starting hit rate was.
Advantage will immediately mess with any assumptions you make here because the way it changes the probabilities is weird and non-linear, and
You'd also have to convert the +10 damage into a relative % change to keep things even.
I happen to have been working on this exact same problem in my spare time, so I already have a spreadsheet that'll test a build against all the possible AC values, only using the GWM bonus if the tradeoff is advantageous, and it weighs the results based on how prevalent each AC value is (so if monsters with 6 AC only make up 2% of all monsters, GWM's broken-ness there only accounts for 2% of the total.) That gives a sort of average performance for the build if you assume a rational player that understands when to use GWM, and the distribution of ACs in your games is close enough to how they're distributed in the Monster Manual and similar books. It also accounts for critical hits (including GWM bonus attacks) and hitting the minimum/maximum hit rates. This is the most objective measure I could come up with, since it accounts for all scenarios and not just some arbitrarily chosen AC.
Greatsword, 20 STR, +3 PB, Great Weapon FS, GWM feat, 9.75% chance of a bonus attack: weighted average of 24.15 damage per round over all ACs.
Longsword x2, 20 STR, +3 PB, TWF FS, Dual Wielder: weighted average of 21.07 damage per round over all ACs.
The Greatsword build is still up 14.7% without factoring in Action Surge, opportunity attacks, buffs like Haste, or the bonus attacks from killing enemies. If you add Advantage from something like Faerie Fire or a buddy with a grapple and shove build:
Greatsword, same as above but 18.55% chance of bonus attack: weighted average of 37.40 damage per round over all ACs.
Longsword x2, same as above: weighted average of 26.91 damage per round over all ACs.
Now Greatsword guy is up 39%. And remember, this is the average across all scenarios; the actual gap in specific encounters where monsters don't have great AC can be much larger.
This will probably be incomprehensibly complicated and messy for the average viewer but for the sake of transparency, here's the spreadsheet. All the interesting bits happened in sheets "Level 8" and "Level 8, Advantage", with the final results being in "Level 8 Totals" and "Level 8 Totals, Advantage" respectively.
At level 11, greatsword guy starts to take off, picking up another adjusted 17.5 swing, while the TWF guy only picks up a 9.5 swing. If greatsword guy becomes PAM halberd guy instead, that gap widens further (despite the smaller weapon damage dice, since those don't really matter anyway).
Again, at this point even a Dueling build matches non-Dual Wielder TWF. That's how far behind TWF falls. The problem is absolutely not Great Weapon Fighting Style, it's the fact that Two-Weapon Fighting and TWFS don't scale.
Never seen a fighter/melee character "break" the game.
I have. But to clarify what I mean:
Their power level is well out of line compared to other feats or an ASI. In the case of tier 1 gameplay, they're well out of line compared to pretty much any other racial traits you could've gained instead, and they put characters with these feats in a different league from the ones that don't.
They produce dominant, degenerate strategies. Sharpshooter + Crossbow Expert gives you a one-size-fits-all approach to winning combat encounters and removes all the usual counterplays to ranged attacks (e.g. cover, moving in for melee.) In any situation where you can get advantage, Sharpshooting the enemy to death is the obvious winning move.
They don't have any meaningful narrative reason for being the way they are. Spellcasters altering reality serves a narrative purpose. Feats like Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert are just the result of the developers grasping at rules they can allow the players to break to justify the existence of a feat.
Can the DM play around it? Yeah, sure. The DM can theoretically work around anything. That doesn't mean these things aren't disproportionally, unintentionally effective. And when multiple characters are using disproportionally powerful features, the DM needs to make similarly drastic adjustments to the way the game is normally played. And in the case of some of these, they actually make the game less interesting by removing factors that would force you to make varied decisions (e.g. cover.)
A fighter (the only class which really breaks GWM egregiously) has no meaningful bonus actions available to a 2H user. The additional action economy “cost” of TWF is only a cost if the 2H fighter can otherwise also use and benefit from it every round. They can’t.
I’ll check your spreadsheet out later, but I think converting % +/- to hit into a % damage adjustment is “close enough” to reflect the wide range of AC vs. hit bonus curves, but if there’s a better formula that can be used intuitively without a spreadsheet, I’m all ears.
A duelist doing 1d8+7 twice (23) vs. TWF doing 1d8+5 three times (28) is meaningfully different in the favor of the TWF, but the duelist does also have better AC from a shield or Spellcasting. You’re right that at 11 on, they’re picking up 11.5 swings while the TWF picks up 9.5 swings, so in T3 and T4, TWF slips, like I mentioned already vs. 2H.
([Fighter is] the only class which really breaks GWM egregiously)has no meaningful bonus actions available to a 2H user.
Barbarians are almost as bad because they're self-sufficient (Reckless Attack + Rage) and the big difference between them and a fighter won't really manifest much until 11+. Yes, they don't get a Fighting Style, but Great Weapon Fighting provides the smallest absolute and relative per-hit bonus (greatsword goes from 7 damage to 8.33), and Barbarians have Rage.
The additional action economy “cost” of TWF is only a cost if the 2H fighter can otherwise also use and benefit from it every round. They can’t.
They can*, and it doesn't matter if it's every round or not. TWF is already falling behind under unrealistic conditions where no one ever gets opportunity attacks. If you have to miss out additional damage even just one round out of a 5 round combat, that can't be disregarded.
Here's a bunch of things a Fighter could use their Bonus Action for:
Shield Master* (2H weapons isn't the only thing TWF is competing against.)
GWM bonus attack: If you're making 3-6 attacks, the odds that one of them will be a crit starts to add up. And you don't need to use a two-handed weapon to use the bonus action; Dueling users can use this too.
Second Wind. Yes, I know it drops off in effectiveness, but the players don't control when the DM is going to beat the heck out of them. Sometimes you just need to use it.
Battle Master: Commander's Strike, Feinting Attack, Grappling Strike, Quick Toss* (this is basically a free BA attack, even for 2H weapon users), Rally. All of these are available to other fighters through the feat or fighting style or both.
Cavalier: Unwavering Mark. This is like half of their kit.
Echo Knight: activate Manifest Echo, switch places with your echo
Psi Knight: Psi-Powered Leap (7+), Bulwark of Force (15+)
Rune Knight: Frost Rune, Hill Rune, Storm Rune, Giant's Might.
Samurai: Fighting Spirit.
These obviously have value, so the fact that TWF users have to choose between losing a big chunk of their already lagging damage or using their class features is a problem.
I’ll check your spreadsheet out later, but I think converting % +/- to hit into a % damage adjustment is “close enough” to reflect the wide range of AC vs. hit bonus curves, but if there’s a better formula that can be used intuitively without a spreadsheet, I’m all ears.
I can't think of a good one. The naive thing to do would be to use 15 AC (which is mean AC for all monsters), so that's sort of representative, but it doesn't account for super low AC monsters wherre you can go beyond 95% hit ate, and it doesn't account for super high AC monsters where you wouldn't use GWM at all, and you can't disregard that 2 attacks with advantage gives you an almost 20% chance of scoring a crit and therefore getting an extra attack. This stuff is complicated, and it's easy to draw any conclusion you want if you fudge the right numbers.
If you want a precise answer you have to calculate the damage for a specific AC with and without GWM's trade-off, pick the number that's higher, account for critical hits, and also account for the probability that a GWM user will get at least 1 crit during their turn. And that only gives you results for that particular AC value, which is why I decided to do the math for all the AC values and weigh them against how often that AC occurs. Anything else can either be off by a significant amount or is only valid for monsters with that AC value.
EDIT: I just checked my results for 15 AC specifically and the damage accounting for literally everything else against that AC was 23 vs the total of 24 for all AC values. With advantage I got 37.34 for 15 AC vs 37.40 when I do things the hard way. So I guess there's a good chance 15 AC is pretty accurate, though I couldn't have known that up front, and I can't say for sure that'll continue to be true as attack bonus goes up further.
I wanted to do one more example to illustrate how quickly GWM and Sharpshooter get out of hand with modest improvements to your attack bonus. Same setup as before, except the characters are now level 9 (so Proficiency Bonus goes up from +3 to +4), both characters have +1 weapons (a fair assumption for level 9 characters, I think), and there's a cleric using Bless. This raises their average attack bonus from +8 to +12.5 over the previous scenario, and allows them to achieve >95% hit rate against any enemy with 18 AC or less once advantage is factored in.
Greatsword +1, no advantage: 36.16 damage
Longsword +1 x2, no advantage: 28.53 damage
Greatsword guy is now beating TWF guy by 27% because their higher attack bonus allows them to capitalize on GWM on a wider range of ACs. A Sharpshooter/CE build would likely fare even better, since they have an additional +2 from Archery FS and a guaranteed bonus attack. Now with advantage:
Greatsword +1, advantage: 48.75 damage
Longsword +1 x2, advantage: 32.13 damage
Greatsword guy is now 52% ahead of the TWF guy and has an average damage per round high enough to take off 1/4th of a CR 9 monster's HP without Action Surge or Haste, you just need two first level spells.
If you give them 3 attacks the TWF damage goes up to 42.84 (which doesn't even catch up to the 2 greatsword attacks from before) while the GS + GWM damage goes up to 72.83 (+70%). A CE + SS build would do 74.29 with a 60 foot range once they max their DEX at 12th level. I've been in a group that had a 15th level CE+SS Arcane Archer (the DM bent the rules to let them use crossbows) and Bless + Faerie Fire + Action Surge would destroy just about anything. I personally think Faerie Fire is also OP because of how strong advantage for a whole minute is, but even if you only had 1 round of advantage (e.g. Ensnaring Strike, Stunning Fist), that'd still be more than enough for a pair of GWM/SS fighters to demolish a monster.
I wanted to do one more example to illustrate how quickly GWM and Sharpshooter get out of hand with modest improvements to your attack bonus. Same setup as before, except the characters are now level 9 (so Proficiency Bonus goes up from +3 to +4), both characters have +1 weapons (a fair assumption for level 9 characters, I think), and there's a cleric using Bless. This raises their average attack bonus from +8 to +12.5 over the previous scenario, and allows them to achieve >95% hit rate against any enemy with 18 AC or less once advantage is factored in.
Greatsword +1, no advantage: 36.16 damage
Longsword +1 x2, no advantage: 28.53 damage
Greatsword guy is now beating TWF guy by 27% because their higher attack bonus allows them to capitalize on GWM on a wider range of ACs. A Sharpshooter/CE build would likely fare even better, since they have an additional +2 from Archery FS and a guaranteed bonus attack. Now with advantage:
Greatsword +1, advantage: 48.75 damage
Longsword +1 x2, advantage: 32.13 damage
Greatsword guy is now 52% ahead of the TWF guy and has an average damage per round high enough to take off 1/4th of a CR 9 monster's HP without Action Surge or Haste, you just need two first level spells.
If you give them 3 attacks the TWF damage goes up to 42.84 (which doesn't even catch up to the 2 greatsword attacks from before) while the GS + GWM damage goes up to 72.83 (+70%). A CE + SS build would do 74.29 with a 60 foot range once they max their DEX at 12th level. I've been in a group that had a 15th level CE+SS Arcane Archer (the DM bent the rules to let them use crossbows) and Bless + Faerie Fire + Action Surge would destroy just about anything. I personally think Faerie Fire is also OP because of how strong advantage for a whole minute is, but even if you only had 1 round of advantage (e.g. Ensnaring Strike, Stunning Fist), that'd still be more than enough for a pair of GWM/SS fighters to demolish a monster.
Yeah once you start including the GWM/SS feats its game over for TWF in general even with the feats in place.
There are too many ways to mitigate the -5 for it to be a meaningful consequence for the majority of builds that will benefit from the feat. Hell the Archery fighting style alone with its +2 to hit mitigates almost half of the penalty which is why the ranged numbers are so good for DPR.
TWF fix for me is you get to take the extra off hand attack as part of the Attack Action. This leaves your BA open for what ever you need and works extremely well with the Hunter's mark build as you are no longer burning your BA attack to move your mark.
the other strategy is to allow the TWF to use a reaction to increase their AC. For the duel wielder feat I remove the +1 to AC and instead allow them to use a reaction to increase their AC by proficiency bonus similar to the defensive duelist feat.
If someone wants to take the defensive duelist feat I have the same rider but if the AC increases causes an attack to miss they can make a melee attack as part of the same reaction...the ol parry and thrust!
Actually, I think I think the problem with C_C’s approach is using all values not scaled to hit. The “on a hit” damage has no meaningful scaling with to-hit penalties.
But the penalty for a -1 to hit is effectively -0.05*(on a hit damage), so -5 is effectively 25% of the on a hit damage. But you have to subtract that from something else that is scaled to hit.
I think part of the issue with GWM and SS is the fact that Advantage is really easy to get and completely negates the -5 to the attack roll. Add that to fact that many of the monsters you want to do extra damage to also tend to have lower Armor Classes while monsters with a higher AC have fewer HP. Choosing whether to use the Feats or not is kind of a no brainer. I don't personally have an issue with the extra damage the characters dish out, I just wish TWF was offered an equivalent option. I still have plenty of players that go TWF because they like the fantasy even if the mechanics sub par compared to other options.
Actually, I think I think the problem with C_C’s approach is using all values not scaled to hit. The “on a hit” damage has no meaningful scaling with to-hit penalties.
But the penalty for a -1 to hit is effectively -0.05*(on a hit damage), so -5 is effectively 25% of the on a hit damage. But you have to subtract that from something else that is scaled to hit.
Hence why any really valuable DPR calculations have to include an AC spectrum to understand how the build will interact with high/low AC enemies as the damage will differ drastically.
OK but no they don’t. When I say that the average damage on a hit for a long sword is 9.5, whatever you scale that up or down to based on the actual monsters Armor class is the true value (10, 7, whatever). The Greatsword‘s percentage get scaled by the same amount, so 9.5 is to 17.5 as longsword2 is to Greatsword2.
The actual numbers rolled are relevant nobody ever rolls 4.5 damage on a D8 anyway. The point is to establish roughly the proportion of how far ahead or behind different weapons are, disregarding Armor class for the moment. A great sword hit with great weapon master adjusted to hit 25% less often than longsword is a little less than twice as much per hit as a two weapon Fighter and longsword hit (17.5 vs 9.5). Armor class is irrelevant when we talk about the overall strength of the weapons if we for sure we’re trying to do damage analysis against the specific armor class 12 enemy then obviously we would use that but we can’t when we were talking about the entire scope of a fighters adventuring career.
OK but no they don’t. When I say that the average damage on a hit for a long sword is 9.5, whatever you scale that up or down to based on the actual monsters Armor class is the true value (10, 7, whatever). The Greatsword‘s percentage get scaled by the same amount, so 9.5 is to 17.5 as longsword2 is to Greatsword2.
The actual numbers rolled are relevant nobody ever rolls 4.5 damage on a D8 anyway. The point is to establish roughly the proportion of how far ahead or behind different weapons are, disregarding Armor class for the moment. A great sword hit with great weapon master adjusted to hit 25% less often than longsword is a little less than twice as much per hit as a two weapon Fighter and longsword hit (17.5 vs 9.5). Armor class is irrelevant when we talk about the overall strength of the weapons if we for sure we’re trying to do damage analysis against the specific armor class 12 enemy then obviously we would use that but we can’t when we were talking about the entire scope of a fighters adventuring career.
No AC is incredibly important for any discussions when it comes to DPR. You can use spreadsheets to make it a lot easier but its very much impacted by the ACs you are facing if a build is mathematically lower in DPR than another across a spectrum or where you could forsee the builds evening out.
In this case you would be looking at ACs of 18+ for the TWF to start to draw even as at that point you are starting to see the -5 impact the DPR so much its not really worth using at that point.
Also it matters because of the expected CR and AC balances for a DM....if you have a CR 4 creature that normally has an AC of 14 but you want to "challenge" the players and increase it to 18 you have messed with the defensive CR calculations and you are more likely making them face a CR6 or CR7 creature depending on other factors.
Some DMs are good at winging it and ending a fight at the right time fudging some HP numbers to make it close but not crazy but some are not....hence why the advice to just increase AC is a bad idea in general unless you are VERY comfortable making adjustments on the fly.
In this case the TWF builds just fall behind so much due to the fact you have to eat so much into Action Economy to get your DPR in the same arena as the builds who do not have to do it at all....or if they do (SS+CBE build) they are burning ahead hard from the TWF.
So when making a feat you need to think of what you want the feature to do for the build....do you want it to do more damage? Sure then you need to consider what you are comparing it to and make it more or less competative.
Where they went wrong was overvaluing what +1 AC means to a TWF build and what 1 point of damage per swing does to overall DPR compared to GWM/SS especially with the relatively easy ways to mitigate the -5 in those builds so their damage output (even across the expected AC spectrum) is just heads and away better than what a TWF could even hope to accomplish.
Currently there is only one reason to play a TWF Build: Flavor.
Currently there is only one reason to play a TWF Build: Flavor.
There is no other real reason to do it.
This why I would prefer they add a few more Feats. The cat is already out of the bag so to speak since GWM and SS already exist and have since the start of 5e. Add a few Feats to make other options equally viable is easier than trying to put the cat back in the bag after all this time.
Edit: I am also in favor of Martial builds getting a buff over all so more Feats for them would help
Currently there is only one reason to play a TWF Build: Flavor.
There is no other real reason to do it.
This why I would prefer they add a few more Feats. The cat is already out of the bag so to speak since GWM and SS already exist and have since the start of 5e. Add a few Feats to make other options equally viable is easier than trying to put the cat back in the bag after all this time.
Edit: I am also in favor of Martial builds getting a buff over all so more Feats for them would help
Fully agree....I would even like them to modify the dual wielder feat to make it more competitive by either making it more defensive (parry mechanic) or offensive (let you use off hand attack with attack action)
No AC is incredibly important for any discussions when it comes to DPR. You can use spreadsheets to make it a lot easier but its very much impacted by the ACs you are facing if a build is mathematically lower in DPR than another across a spectrum or where you could forsee the builds evening out.
In this case you would be looking at ACs of 18+ for the TWF to start to draw even as at that point you are starting to see the -5 impact the DPR so much its not really worth using at that point.
No one would accuse me of being good at math, but I have a hard time believing the differences are big enough to justify "we can't talk about this without a spreadsheet" hand wringing.
Ok, hypothetical: One attack ("A") that deals an average 100 damage in a vacuum, and one ("B") that deals 135 damage in a vacuum, but has a -5 to-hit malus over A. 135-25% is close enough to 100, I'm trying to test my general "treat % hit as % damage" hypo with this, not the specific longsword vs greatsword ratio. Lets leave crits out, but keep in that 20 always hits and 1 always misses.
If A hits 95% of the time (2-20), it deals average 95. B will hit 70% * 135 = 94.5. Math has held up.
If A hits 75% of the time (6-20), it deals average 75. B will hit 50% * 135 = 67.5. Oof math failed a bit....
If A hits 50% of the time (11-20), it deals average 50. B will hit 25% * 135 = 33.75 :(
If A hits 30% of the time (15-20), it deals average 30. B will hit 5% * 135 = 6.75 :( :( :(
Okay, I surrender. I guess that "-5 to hit is -25% damage" doesn't actually work, like, at all. We truly live in the worst of all possible worlds, and there is no safe shorthand for GWM math apart from using a DPR calculator spreadsheet for specific ACs and PBs. I am awash in a sea of uncertainty.
The penalty is static: Let’s say a GWM hit gets you 2d6+5+10 = 22. The -5 penalty costs you 0.25*(22) = 5.5 (exactly as you intuited, C_C). But that penalty of 5.5 damage is not scaled by AC. You lose 5.5 points of damage from that penalty no matter what.
But AC scales the rest of that damage. If you only hit 70% of the time without the penalty, your potential average is only 0.7*22 = 15.4. But applying the GWM to hit penalty still results in losing 5.5 damage (0.45*22 = 9.9), and losing 5.5 damage from that potential is worse than losing 5.5 damage from 22. It’s more than 1/3 of your potential average.
If you scale for AC after you apply the 25% penalty, you are effectively reducing the impact of that penalty arbitrarily.
Note: I am only accounting for the to hit penalty in this example.
To that end, C_C, you’ll notice that your result for B is always whatever you’d have gotten by taking 135*(A’s chance to hit) and then subtracting 33.25.
This is why balancing the game is harder than people think...but its also not impossible.
I feel like the approach they took (and sadly still take) is don't think about it too hard and just give an option. They seem to weigh things in a vaccum without thinking about how it impacts other aspects or combos with other aspects of the game.
Archery style and Sharpshooter alone shows they didn't really think that one through....you are giving a fighting style to all the classes who will most benefit from this feat a way to functionally reduce the penalty for this massive damage increase by half...for no real cost.
Then they give them a way to get a full extra attack as a bonus action with another feat and with both these feats activated they have created a ranged character who no longer worries about shooting at 5ft within an enemy (no more DIS thanks to CBE), mitigates half the penalty (Fighty style), ignores all but full cover, and distance limitations (Sharpshooter)
Then they give TWF...+1 AC and a d8 weapon instead of a d6.
This is why balancing the game is harder than people think...but its also not impossible.
I feel like the approach they took (and sadly still take) is don't think about it too hard and just give an option. They seem to weigh things in a vaccum without thinking about how it impacts other aspects or combos with other aspects of the game.
Archery style and Sharpshooter alone shows they didn't really think that one through....you are giving a fighting style to all the classes who will most benefit from this feat a way to functionally reduce the penalty for this massive damage increase by half...for no real cost.
Then they give them a way to get a full extra attack as a bonus action with another feat and with both these feats activated they have created a ranged character who no longer worries about shooting at 5ft within an enemy (no more DIS thanks to CBE), mitigates half the penalty (Fighty style), ignores all but full cover, and distance limitations (Sharpshooter)
Then they give TWF...+1 AC and a d8 weapon instead of a d6.
Its hilariously one sided.
Agreed. They also didn't take into account how some Feats would synergize with the features of some classes or subclasses.
Barbs can do Reckless Attack. Their AC is crap so they're going to get hit anyway so why not?
Samurai Fighters can do the same thing for three rounds (and most fights don't last much longer than that) with no drawbacks.
There are piles of ways to get Advantage to offset the -5 penalty for the added damage and many of those don't just grant Advantage to the person using GWM or SS but to the whole party.
The Bless Spell grants a +1D4 on the to-hit roll which counters half the penalty anyway and that's a low-level spell that can be kept up for the whole fight.
Many of the troublesome combos wouldn't be so bad taken by themselves. But Fighters and Rogues get so many ASIs that they can have multiple Feats and still max out at least one stat. V Humans can start the game with a Feat at lvl 1 which completely overbalances everything!
Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter are overpowered feats. It's too east to reach +10 to hit with bonus abilities like Precision Attack or Reckless Attack that offset the penalty. This is the main problem. Next time I start a new campaign, I'll be banning both, as well as Pole Weapon Master, Elven Accuracy, Slasher, Piercer and Crusher.
Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter are overpowered feats. It's too east to reach +10 to hit with bonus abilities like Precision Attack or Reckless Attack that offset the penalty. This is the main problem. Next time I start a new campaign, I'll be banning both, as well as Pole Weapon Master, Elven Accuracy, Slasher, Piercer and Crusher.
Id prefer not to hard ban any feats if I have to, but I agree GWM and Sharpshooter can be a bit much once you get into Tiers 2 and above. I wish there was an elegant way to split Sharpshooter into two half feats instead (where you can get the full benefit, but it takes longer and you have to invest one more ASI) where each half feat could also still be beneficial on its own.
I think that the ability to not have disadvantage on long range attacks coupled with the ability to ignore most cover is enough to be its own feat.
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Right. So long as no one casts Haste, neither of them ever use Action Surge, the TWF guy doesn't need his bonus action for anything else, there's no opportunity attacks, we're not worried about magic weapons, and none of them ever need a spare hand to cast spells, it's a wash. But you'd think the guy that needs to give up his bonus action would be ahead, not behind. And a Dueling fighter would deal (4.5 + 2 + 4) * 2 = 21 damage, which is even closer to the TWF setup than the TWF setup is to the 2H setup. So if 2 points of damage is close enough, why would you go TWF over the setup that lets you keep your bonus action, gives you stronger opportunity attacks, better Action Surge and Haste damage, and +2 AC?
The math gets really tedious here, so I don't fault you for trying to streamline it at all. But I don't think this is a very good estimate:
I happen to have been working on this exact same problem in my spare time, so I already have a spreadsheet that'll test a build against all the possible AC values, only using the GWM bonus if the tradeoff is advantageous, and it weighs the results based on how prevalent each AC value is (so if monsters with 6 AC only make up 2% of all monsters, GWM's broken-ness there only accounts for 2% of the total.) That gives a sort of average performance for the build if you assume a rational player that understands when to use GWM, and the distribution of ACs in your games is close enough to how they're distributed in the Monster Manual and similar books. It also accounts for critical hits (including GWM bonus attacks) and hitting the minimum/maximum hit rates. This is the most objective measure I could come up with, since it accounts for all scenarios and not just some arbitrarily chosen AC.
The Greatsword build is still up 14.7% without factoring in Action Surge, opportunity attacks, buffs like Haste, or the bonus attacks from killing enemies. If you add Advantage from something like Faerie Fire or a buddy with a grapple and shove build:
Now Greatsword guy is up 39%. And remember, this is the average across all scenarios; the actual gap in specific encounters where monsters don't have great AC can be much larger.
This will probably be incomprehensibly complicated and messy for the average viewer but for the sake of transparency, here's the spreadsheet. All the interesting bits happened in sheets "Level 8" and "Level 8, Advantage", with the final results being in "Level 8 Totals" and "Level 8 Totals, Advantage" respectively.
Again, at this point even a Dueling build matches non-Dual Wielder TWF. That's how far behind TWF falls. The problem is absolutely not Great Weapon Fighting Style, it's the fact that Two-Weapon Fighting and TWFS don't scale.
I have. But to clarify what I mean:
Can the DM play around it? Yeah, sure. The DM can theoretically work around anything. That doesn't mean these things aren't disproportionally, unintentionally effective. And when multiple characters are using disproportionally powerful features, the DM needs to make similarly drastic adjustments to the way the game is normally played. And in the case of some of these, they actually make the game less interesting by removing factors that would force you to make varied decisions (e.g. cover.)
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A fighter (the only class which really breaks GWM egregiously) has no meaningful bonus actions available to a 2H user. The additional action economy “cost” of TWF is only a cost if the 2H fighter can otherwise also use and benefit from it every round. They can’t.
I’ll check your spreadsheet out later, but I think converting % +/- to hit into a % damage adjustment is “close enough” to reflect the wide range of AC vs. hit bonus curves, but if there’s a better formula that can be used intuitively without a spreadsheet, I’m all ears.
A duelist doing 1d8+7 twice (23) vs. TWF doing 1d8+5 three times (28) is meaningfully different in the favor of the TWF, but the duelist does also have better AC from a shield or Spellcasting. You’re right that at 11 on, they’re picking up 11.5 swings while the TWF picks up 9.5 swings, so in T3 and T4, TWF slips, like I mentioned already vs. 2H.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Barbarians are almost as bad because they're self-sufficient (Reckless Attack + Rage) and the big difference between them and a fighter won't really manifest much until 11+. Yes, they don't get a Fighting Style, but Great Weapon Fighting provides the smallest absolute and relative per-hit bonus (greatsword goes from 7 damage to 8.33), and Barbarians have Rage.
They can*, and it doesn't matter if it's every round or not. TWF is already falling behind under unrealistic conditions where no one ever gets opportunity attacks. If you have to miss out additional damage even just one round out of a 5 round combat, that can't be disregarded.
Here's a bunch of things a Fighter could use their Bonus Action for:
These obviously have value, so the fact that TWF users have to choose between losing a big chunk of their already lagging damage or using their class features is a problem.
I can't think of a good one. The naive thing to do would be to use 15 AC (which is mean AC for all monsters), so that's sort of representative, but it doesn't account for super low AC monsters wherre you can go beyond 95% hit ate, and it doesn't account for super high AC monsters where you wouldn't use GWM at all, and you can't disregard that 2 attacks with advantage gives you an almost 20% chance of scoring a crit and therefore getting an extra attack. This stuff is complicated, and it's easy to draw any conclusion you want if you fudge the right numbers.
If you want a precise answer you have to calculate the damage for a specific AC with and without GWM's trade-off, pick the number that's higher, account for critical hits, and also account for the probability that a GWM user will get at least 1 crit during their turn. And that only gives you results for that particular AC value, which is why I decided to do the math for all the AC values and weigh them against how often that AC occurs. Anything else can either be off by a significant amount or is only valid for monsters with that AC value.
EDIT: I just checked my results for 15 AC specifically and the damage accounting for literally everything else against that AC was 23 vs the total of 24 for all AC values. With advantage I got 37.34 for 15 AC vs 37.40 when I do things the hard way. So I guess there's a good chance 15 AC is pretty accurate, though I couldn't have known that up front, and I can't say for sure that'll continue to be true as attack bonus goes up further.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
I wanted to do one more example to illustrate how quickly GWM and Sharpshooter get out of hand with modest improvements to your attack bonus. Same setup as before, except the characters are now level 9 (so Proficiency Bonus goes up from +3 to +4), both characters have +1 weapons (a fair assumption for level 9 characters, I think), and there's a cleric using Bless. This raises their average attack bonus from +8 to +12.5 over the previous scenario, and allows them to achieve >95% hit rate against any enemy with 18 AC or less once advantage is factored in.
Greatsword guy is now beating TWF guy by 27% because their higher attack bonus allows them to capitalize on GWM on a wider range of ACs. A Sharpshooter/CE build would likely fare even better, since they have an additional +2 from Archery FS and a guaranteed bonus attack. Now with advantage:
Greatsword guy is now 52% ahead of the TWF guy and has an average damage per round high enough to take off 1/4th of a CR 9 monster's HP without Action Surge or Haste, you just need two first level spells.
If you give them 3 attacks the TWF damage goes up to 42.84 (which doesn't even catch up to the 2 greatsword attacks from before) while the GS + GWM damage goes up to 72.83 (+70%). A CE + SS build would do 74.29 with a 60 foot range once they max their DEX at 12th level. I've been in a group that had a 15th level CE+SS Arcane Archer (the DM bent the rules to let them use crossbows) and Bless + Faerie Fire + Action Surge would destroy just about anything. I personally think Faerie Fire is also OP because of how strong advantage for a whole minute is, but even if you only had 1 round of advantage (e.g. Ensnaring Strike, Stunning Fist), that'd still be more than enough for a pair of GWM/SS fighters to demolish a monster.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
Yeah once you start including the GWM/SS feats its game over for TWF in general even with the feats in place.
There are too many ways to mitigate the -5 for it to be a meaningful consequence for the majority of builds that will benefit from the feat. Hell the Archery fighting style alone with its +2 to hit mitigates almost half of the penalty which is why the ranged numbers are so good for DPR.
TWF fix for me is you get to take the extra off hand attack as part of the Attack Action. This leaves your BA open for what ever you need and works extremely well with the Hunter's mark build as you are no longer burning your BA attack to move your mark.
the other strategy is to allow the TWF to use a reaction to increase their AC. For the duel wielder feat I remove the +1 to AC and instead allow them to use a reaction to increase their AC by proficiency bonus similar to the defensive duelist feat.
If someone wants to take the defensive duelist feat I have the same rider but if the AC increases causes an attack to miss they can make a melee attack as part of the same reaction...the ol parry and thrust!
Actually, I think I think the problem with C_C’s approach is using all values not scaled to hit. The “on a hit” damage has no meaningful scaling with to-hit penalties.
But the penalty for a -1 to hit is effectively -0.05*(on a hit damage), so -5 is effectively 25% of the on a hit damage. But you have to subtract that from something else that is scaled to hit.
I think part of the issue with GWM and SS is the fact that Advantage is really easy to get and completely negates the -5 to the attack roll. Add that to fact that many of the monsters you want to do extra damage to also tend to have lower Armor Classes while monsters with a higher AC have fewer HP. Choosing whether to use the Feats or not is kind of a no brainer. I don't personally have an issue with the extra damage the characters dish out, I just wish TWF was offered an equivalent option. I still have plenty of players that go TWF because they like the fantasy even if the mechanics sub par compared to other options.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Hence why any really valuable DPR calculations have to include an AC spectrum to understand how the build will interact with high/low AC enemies as the damage will differ drastically.
OK but no they don’t. When I say that the average damage on a hit for a long sword is 9.5, whatever you scale that up or down to based on the actual monsters Armor class is the true value (10, 7, whatever). The Greatsword‘s percentage get scaled by the same amount, so 9.5 is to 17.5 as longsword2 is to Greatsword2.
The actual numbers rolled are relevant nobody ever rolls 4.5 damage on a D8 anyway. The point is to establish roughly the proportion of how far ahead or behind different weapons are, disregarding Armor class for the moment. A great sword hit with great weapon master adjusted to hit 25% less often than longsword is a little less than twice as much per hit as a two weapon Fighter and longsword hit (17.5 vs 9.5). Armor class is irrelevant when we talk about the overall strength of the weapons if we for sure we’re trying to do damage analysis against the specific armor class 12 enemy then obviously we would use that but we can’t when we were talking about the entire scope of a fighters adventuring career.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
No AC is incredibly important for any discussions when it comes to DPR. You can use spreadsheets to make it a lot easier but its very much impacted by the ACs you are facing if a build is mathematically lower in DPR than another across a spectrum or where you could forsee the builds evening out.
In this case you would be looking at ACs of 18+ for the TWF to start to draw even as at that point you are starting to see the -5 impact the DPR so much its not really worth using at that point.
Also it matters because of the expected CR and AC balances for a DM....if you have a CR 4 creature that normally has an AC of 14 but you want to "challenge" the players and increase it to 18 you have messed with the defensive CR calculations and you are more likely making them face a CR6 or CR7 creature depending on other factors.
Some DMs are good at winging it and ending a fight at the right time fudging some HP numbers to make it close but not crazy but some are not....hence why the advice to just increase AC is a bad idea in general unless you are VERY comfortable making adjustments on the fly.
In this case the TWF builds just fall behind so much due to the fact you have to eat so much into Action Economy to get your DPR in the same arena as the builds who do not have to do it at all....or if they do (SS+CBE build) they are burning ahead hard from the TWF.
So when making a feat you need to think of what you want the feature to do for the build....do you want it to do more damage? Sure then you need to consider what you are comparing it to and make it more or less competative.
Where they went wrong was overvaluing what +1 AC means to a TWF build and what 1 point of damage per swing does to overall DPR compared to GWM/SS especially with the relatively easy ways to mitigate the -5 in those builds so their damage output (even across the expected AC spectrum) is just heads and away better than what a TWF could even hope to accomplish.
Currently there is only one reason to play a TWF Build: Flavor.
There is no other real reason to do it.
This why I would prefer they add a few more Feats. The cat is already out of the bag so to speak since GWM and SS already exist and have since the start of 5e. Add a few Feats to make other options equally viable is easier than trying to put the cat back in the bag after all this time.
Edit: I am also in favor of Martial builds getting a buff over all so more Feats for them would help
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Fully agree....I would even like them to modify the dual wielder feat to make it more competitive by either making it more defensive (parry mechanic) or offensive (let you use off hand attack with attack action)
No one would accuse me of being good at math, but I have a hard time believing the differences are big enough to justify "we can't talk about this without a spreadsheet" hand wringing.
Ok, hypothetical: One attack ("A") that deals an average 100 damage in a vacuum, and one ("B") that deals 135 damage in a vacuum, but has a -5 to-hit malus over A. 135-25% is close enough to 100, I'm trying to test my general "treat % hit as % damage" hypo with this, not the specific longsword vs greatsword ratio. Lets leave crits out, but keep in that 20 always hits and 1 always misses.
Okay, I surrender. I guess that "-5 to hit is -25% damage" doesn't actually work, like, at all. We truly live in the worst of all possible worlds, and there is no safe shorthand for GWM math apart from using a DPR calculator spreadsheet for specific ACs and PBs. I am awash in a sea of uncertainty.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
The penalty is static: Let’s say a GWM hit gets you 2d6+5+10 = 22. The -5 penalty costs you 0.25*(22) = 5.5 (exactly as you intuited, C_C). But that penalty of 5.5 damage is not scaled by AC. You lose 5.5 points of damage from that penalty no matter what.
But AC scales the rest of that damage. If you only hit 70% of the time without the penalty, your potential average is only 0.7*22 = 15.4. But applying the GWM to hit penalty still results in losing 5.5 damage (0.45*22 = 9.9), and losing 5.5 damage from that potential is worse than losing 5.5 damage from 22. It’s more than 1/3 of your potential average.
If you scale for AC after you apply the 25% penalty, you are effectively reducing the impact of that penalty arbitrarily.
Note: I am only accounting for the to hit penalty in this example.
To that end, C_C, you’ll notice that your result for B is always whatever you’d have gotten by taking 135*(A’s chance to hit) and then subtracting 33.25.
This is why balancing the game is harder than people think...but its also not impossible.
I feel like the approach they took (and sadly still take) is don't think about it too hard and just give an option. They seem to weigh things in a vaccum without thinking about how it impacts other aspects or combos with other aspects of the game.
Archery style and Sharpshooter alone shows they didn't really think that one through....you are giving a fighting style to all the classes who will most benefit from this feat a way to functionally reduce the penalty for this massive damage increase by half...for no real cost.
Then they give them a way to get a full extra attack as a bonus action with another feat and with both these feats activated they have created a ranged character who no longer worries about shooting at 5ft within an enemy (no more DIS thanks to CBE), mitigates half the penalty (Fighty style), ignores all but full cover, and distance limitations (Sharpshooter)
Then they give TWF...+1 AC and a d8 weapon instead of a d6.
Its hilariously one sided.
Agreed. They also didn't take into account how some Feats would synergize with the features of some classes or subclasses.
Barbs can do Reckless Attack. Their AC is crap so they're going to get hit anyway so why not?
Samurai Fighters can do the same thing for three rounds (and most fights don't last much longer than that) with no drawbacks.
There are piles of ways to get Advantage to offset the -5 penalty for the added damage and many of those don't just grant Advantage to the person using GWM or SS but to the whole party.
The Bless Spell grants a +1D4 on the to-hit roll which counters half the penalty anyway and that's a low-level spell that can be kept up for the whole fight.
Many of the troublesome combos wouldn't be so bad taken by themselves. But Fighters and Rogues get so many ASIs that they can have multiple Feats and still max out at least one stat. V Humans can start the game with a Feat at lvl 1 which completely overbalances everything!
It's power creep, plain and simple.
Well, it isn't really power creep if is part of the game from day one.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Fair Point.
Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter are overpowered feats. It's too east to reach +10 to hit with bonus abilities like Precision Attack or Reckless Attack that offset the penalty. This is the main problem. Next time I start a new campaign, I'll be banning both, as well as Pole Weapon Master, Elven Accuracy, Slasher, Piercer and Crusher.
Id prefer not to hard ban any feats if I have to, but I agree GWM and Sharpshooter can be a bit much once you get into Tiers 2 and above. I wish there was an elegant way to split Sharpshooter into two half feats instead (where you can get the full benefit, but it takes longer and you have to invest one more ASI) where each half feat could also still be beneficial on its own.
I think that the ability to not have disadvantage on long range attacks coupled with the ability to ignore most cover is enough to be its own feat.
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