Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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You forgot Conjure Minor Elementals for +2d8 damage. =D
So the fact that Dual Wielder explicitly allows for a non-Light weapon is also too much? Seems quite harsh tbh.
Rapier and Main Gauche (Dagger I guess?) was a common two-weapon dueling combination. While it is strange to model it with leading with the off hand weapon (main gauche means "left hand" and was wielded in the off hand), it is still a valid combo in the RAW that your house rule changes for ... reasons?
Know the rules before you change them.
Are you casting a spell with your Bonus Action or attacking? You can't combine Dual Wielder with Hex or Hunter's Mark, at least not on turn 1. Either way, you're shifting the goal posts. This is a conversation Two-weapon Fighting with a shield. Dual Wielder is relevant. Hex and Hunters Mark are not.
How to add Tooltips.
My houserulings.
You ask this like it is some trick question but it really isn't. Yes it is strange that they don't require you to wield the weapons simultaneously but as it stands neither Light or Dual Wielder does.
We should also remember that the player making that "single attack" you mention gets to use a weapon with a bigger damage die and still gets to pick a weapon mastery, a fighting style feat and a general feat to augment that single attack (or give them other benefits).
I go with a requirement that for any light/nick/dual attack to trigger the additional attack you must be holding a one-handed weapon in another hand during the triggering attack. Holding a versatile weapon is fine.
The player is then free to pull whatever weapon swap shenanigans to maximise damage/mastery effect output they want, but the underlying intent of a multi-way fighting style is maintained.
Then the dual wielder feat becomes trash. You also hurt rogues who want to use light weapons by taking away their cunning action.
You also make the light weapon fighters drop behind the heavy weapon fighters, who are all using big weapons and Great Weapon Mastery. And probably the pole arm master fighters.
The reference fighter for light/nick/DW is not the feat-less sword and shield fighters. It's the other fighters who are building for damage. The sword-and-shield fighter is presumably building for something else, or just doesn't care. (Or there's another feat I'm forgetting, which is possible. Dueling helps them some, but I believe they do lag behind.) TWF isn't overpowered, unless you consider any focussed fighting style build overpowered.
But it's not easy to change things without knock-on effects like that. (Similarly, trying to ban using the light/nick/DW complex one-handed is an unnecessary nerf to anybody trying to do a throwing build.)
Now, you can still do it, and nobody except your players can stop you, but it's not the clean fix to the supposed problem you're making it out to be.
Almost every player I've ever seen using a sword and board style does it for the fantasy of playing the classic heroic archetype. Sometimes they use a spear. For extra sucking. LOL.
Apart from the look of it, there isn't really a defined archetype for what a sword and board fighter actually does, and dueling is also supposed to subsume the even more mechanically challenged fantasy archetype of a one-handed sword duelist that doesn't wield a weapon in the off hand, but also doesn't use a shield.
Having said that, the fantasy of just rapidly swapping weapons during a fight for no discernible reason just doesn't exist, so this is purely an optimizer's sort of thing, and hashing out agreements on the level of optimization in a game is just a thing you do in Session Zero. Most reasonable optimizers who can see the level of efficacy the rest of the team is bringing can tone it down or try their hand at optimizing a particularly challenging premise (see: one-handed duelist) instead of blowing out encounters on their own and ruining the table for everyone.
Doing it this way is cleaner and clearer than messing with the Light or the Nick property, IMO. Most people simply won't try to do this anyway, and most reasonable optimizers can be made to not do it if it's obviously going to be disruptive. Moreover, it allows a bit of flex in that you can just allow folks who are lagging behind a bit to play this trick for a bit with a wink and a nudge just until you can do something a bit more permanent to square things off. It really depends on the table and the dynamics of the group.
The Mastery properties and the Light and Nick rules are in enough places in the ruleset that I personally don't want to meddle with it too much. As mentioned, the amount of damage gained is kind of meh anyway. It just looks kinda stupid.
This isn't quite correct. The DPR estimate as standardized seems on the up and up, but the only difference between what's going on here and what a standard TWF would have achieved is AC. So a standard TWF estimate here is higher, regardless. You're just really talking about +2 AC.
Damage estimates are off because you're not accounting for Mastery properties on the other weapons. Putting Graze on the Reach weapon makes up the damage difference, and you have a Reach Advantage. You could also take Great Weapon Master instead of PAM at level 5. You get +3 per attack, so the damage goes up the same as with PAM, but you get to use your Bonus Action more freely, which is a fairly substantial advantage, on top of Reach.
Battle Axe on the One Handed Weapon allows you to Prone your opponents, and that advantage is difficult to quantify mathematically. You could also get Sap and force nearby opponents to make their next attack with Disadvantage, which is a great defensive option. Both of these would nerf the damage calc a bit, as Duelist only adds +4, not +6. I am not sure how we're using PAM with a d8 on a sword and board build, because the only weapons that can be wielded like that and accept PAM are quarterstaff and spear, and they're both d6 damage.
That's why sheathing a weapon should actually be an action (like doffing a shield), since scabbards don't come with funnels.
Nah, having to lose a round of doing things just because your target switches range or similar was really boring in the 2014 rules. The changes to drawing/stowing weapons are an improvement. The issues that people have in this thread comes not from switching weapons but from them screwing up and not requiring dual wielding play styles to actually dual wield the weapons like it used to.
It is? But you're skewing the comparison to make it worse. Like, everything you said about the situation would be just as true without this interaction. The TWF guy's AC would just be 2 AC worse. That's it. That doesn't mean no one would do anything else. For one thing, this idea is frickin' stupid and no one but optimizers would enjoy that. Other kinds of players would hate this with such a passion that even if they knew about it, they just wouldn't do it on principle, even if the DM allowed it. It's not true that there wouldn't be a reason to play anything else.
I disagree that it should be an action to unequip a weapon and think its fine with the Utilize action, your Free Item Interaction or an attack with the Attack action.
You can disagree, but have you ever sheathed a blade yourself? The only way how to unequip a weapon as a free action, or part as of an attack action should be to simply drop it.
Rules Aren’t Physics. The rules of the game are meant to provide a fun game experience, not to describe the laws of physics in the worlds of D&D, let alone the real world.
Yes. People play thri-kreen because they want to play telepathic bug people. Four arms is part of their deal, just like elves get some freebie magic spells, and humans get a free feat. If they're playing a thri-kreen who's quad-wielding two scimitars, a rapier, and a shield, is that because they're munchkining, or because "swashbuckling mantis pirate" sounded like a cool idea to them? (To be fair, it totally is a cool idea. I have a heavily-aquatic campaign idea on the back burner and I'm now sad because thri-kreen pirates just don't fit the rest of the world.)
Will people choose species and feats because they enable a specific thing? Sometimes, but it's at least as often going to be "I have this cool-but-janky barbarian/warlock idea, and I need to be a variant human to get the stats up", rather than "if I play a thri-kreen, I can be slightly more effective in combat."
The D&D you talk about, where players are trying to exploit the rules for every mechanical advantage, and the DM must take steps to stop them, well, I'm not going to say it doesn't exist at all, but it's very far out of the norm. Your average D&D player not only is not going to change their character idea to get the most plusses, they would never think of going to the work to figure out what the most plusses are. It's the world of character optimizers, which is a real hobby that people enjoy, but it has little to do with how people, probably including most of the optimizers, actually play. (But if a group wants to go all-out on the character optimization, more power to them. Their fun is not my fun, but their fun is ok.)
If you're going to try arguing by DPR between different fighting styles, the necessary calculations get a lot more complex. Hit percentage matters when Graze weapons enter the fray. Critical chance has to be factored in once your dice change. Etc. And, of course, you shouldn't be comparing a well-chosen light/nick setup with a less-optimal other weapon setup. (Not to mention the hard-to-calculate intangibles. What's the advantage of reach weapons worth? What about archery? And so on, and so forth.)
And yes, I can't be bothered, but I've seen the calculations done by the people who can be, and the damage numbers are pretty close. Light is not the clear winner. It may not even be the leader. (But, of course, these things aren't consistent across all levels. IIRC, it edges out the others at some points, but not consistently.)
You don't need the dual welder feat. (The feat would be one reason I'd argue against the common and more likely interpretation for drawing/showing weapons)
At least not for drawing/stowing weapons. That portion of the feat doesn't provide a benefit other than letting you draw/stow two weapons at once. But you can draw/stow a weapon with each attack.
I would have to refer you to build libraries done by our very own Treantmonk and Colby post 2024. They don't just do a bit of basic math at level 5. They putting together full builds and statting them up from level 1 to 20. It is true that a TWF Ranger or Dex Paladin or Fighter does extremely well at Tier 1 and early Tier 2. It's not a clear winner, though, and adding +2 AC doesn't do anything for your DPR.
It does mean that everyone should dual wield and use a shield or use a two handed weapon.
It eliminates any reason to use a single sword/shield.
I will refer you to what I said earlier. The first is that not everyone is an optimizer. So that alone gives plenty of people reason not to do this. Because it looks and plays stupid.
But really, this IS a sword and shield build. You have a shield and you're just swapping swords. It directly competes with TWF builds where you wield one weapon in each hand.
Well, in this particular discussion, you might want to say what the valuation of defense to offense is or something to that effect. This was notably absent when you put in Nick to make a case for TWF being broken, but didn't mock up similar advantages for competing options. Honestly, I really don't this weapon swapping meta going on at virtually any table I'm seeing or playing on. In fact, this specific thread is the first time I've ever seen anyone seriously advocating for this to be played anywhere, let alone saying that no one would play anything else. Literally, everyone I'm seeing is playing everything else EXCEPT for this.
So you might want to characterize this loophole as exploitable, messy, sloppy, or mildly advantageous. It is absolutely not the mad TWF meta we saw in 2e.
I haven't seen anyone here saying they would do this weapon-swapping nonsense as something their character would do, or even as some kind of iconic fantasy archetype. It's just silly, and I'd just ban it on any table where I'm DM just on that basis. It's the wrong vibe.
I DID NOT even say that it doesn't unbalance the game. Please reread what I've been saying.
I said there are reasons people would choose not to play this, even if they were aware of it.
And frankly, apart from modestly boosting the AC of TWFing builds, it's not game breaking. This ain't Conjure Minor Elementals, friend, and some folks even argue that the original version of that spell also wasn't broken.