I was recently spurred on by a thread I read that asked: why are Hand Crossbows were always picked over Longbows? One of the responses I read mentioned Elven Samurai archers, and it got me to thinking, just how good are Elven Samurai archers? I did some testing with the wonderful website anydice on just how many accurate attacks you can get off in a turn. Throw in some other feats, and we can try to push this to the limit.
Edit: I later recognized and acknowledged that Elven Accuracy does not require the use of bows, which I first believed when I wrote this. Re-reading this, the intro seems a bit misleading. This strategy is possible with Heavy Crossbows (and, indeed, is now officially recommended in this original post) during "Burst turns" and Hand Crossbows on "Off turns", assuming your DM allows you the ability to switch between the two without inhibiting your action economy. With that out of the way, let's get to the post.
Accuracy
As it turns out, right at about level 4 there's an opportunity to mix Elven Accuracy with Fighting Spirit. In case you're unfamiliar with either, Fighting Spirit is a Samurai ability earned at level 3 (initially possible 3 times per long rest) which allows for advantage on all attack rolls made that turn. Elven Accuracy is triggered on attacks with advantage, which is now all your attacks on a fighting spirit "burst", allowing you to reroll one of the dice once. This is essentially triple advantage - and this is how the build is meant to shine. If you're building an Elf Fighter, you should be starting with 17 (+3) Dex with the Archery fighting style. This gives you a grand total of +7 on attack rolls at level 1 and +8 at level 4, when things start getting interesting.
So, let's compare the math of no Elven Accuracy versus Elven Accuracy taken at Level 4 for a Fighting Spirit (or any guaranteed advantage) round. (https://anydice.com/program/1c755) The average increase doesn't look so great early on, as we're only seeing +1.67 per roll. However, those math majors out there will notice a quadratic increase here instead of a linear one, which highlights how the triple advantage makes higher attack rolls much more accessible. You'll also notice the standard deviation drops from 4.71 to 3.87 - which I think is significant and I'll show you why. Let's do this by putting this to the test and actually try this out against some AC values. (https://anydice.com/program/1c758) Here we test out the likelihood of rolling damage against an enemy with AC18 - which at level 4 I would consider to be a pretty high-end test of accuracy. The likelihood of rolling damage jumps from 75% to 87.5%, which I think is fairly significant. If we bump the AC up to 20 for an even tougher test (you can mimic this by switching out the 18 with 20 on the output lines in the anydice link) then we get a leap of 64% to 79.4%, which makes you all the more reliable for bursts of needed damage for tough spots. Notice here how when talking about higher ACs (18 vs 20) the increase in chance to hit actually increases. We see a 12.5% better chance to hit increase to a 15.4% better chance to hit when the AC jumps up by 2. This is the aforementioned reliability, as Fighting Spirit/Elven Accuracy makes you the most reliable damage dealer in the game (I THINK) against high AC opponents.
The numbers are available in the first link. A single d20 gives a flat 5% to crit, advantage on the roll ups that to 9.75%, while Elven Accuracy advantage gives a whopping 14.26% to crit. This means at level 4, during a burst round, you're nearly on par with a Level 15 Champion with Superior Critical who has a flat 15% to crit every attack.
You can continue to increase these numbers as you'd like to simulate higher levels (a 20 Dex Samurai when you get your 3rd attack, at level 11 for example, averages a roll of 26.49 on a burst round, and has nearly a 40% chance to roll 29 or over.)
Now let's talk about sharpshooter - which would be a necessity for damage and a requirement for any fighter archer. In exchange for 5 off your attack roll, you have the opportunity to do 10 extra damage. You can simulate this by increasing the AC in anyroll - so the same calculations made for 20AC above would apply for a 15AC monster. You still have a 79.4% to hit and get that sweet +10 per hit. In my opinion, at level 4, this beats out the flat +1 to hit/damage you'd get from bumping up DEX to 20. Now - If we're dealing with the 20AC high-water-mark test again (virtually 25AC), we're still looking at a 38.69% to hit versus the 27.75% your sharpshooting crossbow fighter would get if they selected Crossbow Master over Elven Accuracy.
Damage
Now let's move on to the damage. We're making consistent connections with even the hardiest foes, sure, but how much damage are we really doing? While I'm not here to compare statistical values of the most min/maxed strikers available to this build, hopefully I can arm you with some dazzling numbers nonetheless.
The damage rolls here are pretty standard but I included a reference just for the purposes of investigating potential rolls. (https://anydice.com/program/1c75c)
Early on the damage is straighforward - a d8 rolls an average of 4.5 and you'd double that amount on crits, and on action surges (though you get double the dex dmg bonus). A level 5 action surge (4 attacks + 4 dmg per) averages out at 26 dmg per turn, which is not terrible for an archer sitting up to 150ft away from the action.
One more level and things get interesting with sharpshooter. We already covered the -5 to the attack, and at a level 6 action surge with Elven Accuracy and Fighting Spirit you'd have a 39.74% (79.4%^4) to hit all 4 shots on a 15AC enemy. That averages out to 74 damage a round. At level 6, a burst round has a 40% change to do 74 damage at (up to) 600ft. If that doesn't give you the right to brag day and night to your Oath of Redemption, Divine Smiting, Melee-Attack-Taking Paladin buddy I don't know what will. And if you hit a 15% crit, which in addition to 3 other hits is about 7.5% (.794^3*.1496), you get to add another 4.5 to your average damage for a whopping 78.5 in a round. To be fair, you only get one of these short rest.
Conclusion
If you have any additions, comments, or questions feel free to post them. If you've seen me mess up any of my math PLEASE let me know. All in all, I've never seen a ranged fighter at a table - and those I've seen theorycrafting ranged fighters seem to favor Hand Crossbow picks. I wanted to delve into a longbow-only build and see just how viable it was. Elven Accuracy gives an incredible amount of accuracy, and maximizing its affects with several attacks gives incredibly high chances for high damage output. Hopefully you can take some of this info to your next campaign and get some good burst turns in with an Elven Samurai.
Haven’t had a chance to review your math, but jumping the gun to just +1 that elven samurai shapshooters have tremendous damage potential. That said, the DPR is coming from the static +10 from sharpshooter and the +Dex, not the weapon damage due, so whatever a longbow samurai produces without a bonus action attack, a Xbow expert samurai will do slightly better (though from less range). I get that the bonus attack conflicts with the fighting spirit bonus action, but against targets where triple-advantage is giving you less than a (10%? Just guessing) bonus chance to hit, the xbow expert bonus is probably more of a dpr enhancement.
I got really excited reading this but then i realized that nothing here gives you another bonus action. I was drooling at the idea of having 4-6 attacks at advantage with sharpshooter. But having a level 5 Human Variant fighter with xbow expert and sharpshooter is still pretty dope.
Samurai does turn out a lot of attacks, one you unlock Rapid Strikes at 15, and then even moreso with Strength Before Death at 18.
At 15, when you have 3 attacks per Attack Action, your 'Big Turn' rotation with a Longbow can look like (140 dmg):
Bonus: Fighting Spirit (Advantage on all attacks)
Attack Action: (1d10+5+10, avg. 20) x 3 with advantage
Action Surge: (avg. 20) x 2 with advantage, then spend advantage on last attack for an extra (avg. 20) x 2 without advantage.
At 20, when you have 4 attacks per Attack Action, your 'Big Turn' rotation with a Longbow can look like (340 dmg):
Bonus: Fighting Spirit (Advantage on all attacks)
Attack Action: (avg. 20) x 4 with advantage
Action Surge: (avg. 20) x 3 with advantage, then spend advantage on last attack for an extra (avg. 20) x 2 without advantage
Kill yourself! (requires some creative setup to be able to do this with your move and caltrops, or your DM may let you just use an attack to seppuku or something with one of the above attacks)
Attack Action: (avg. 20) x 4 without advantage
Action Surge: (avg. 20) x 4 without advantage
Bonus Action: Second Wind (avg. 25 healing) to save yourself
This is a little better than Xbow Expert will do with a Hand Crossbow, no doubt, since it will do about 2 less damage per hit (though, they could always pull out a heavy crossbow for that alpha strike round and do Longbow-level damage) and their bonus actions are already spoken for. The issue is, on turns where you aren't using Action Surge and Fighting Spirit (the other 90% of the adventuring day), and thus have your Bonus Action free, Xbow Expert will do more with a Hand Crossbow because of that extra fifth attack.
Longbow is avg. 80 from (1d10+5+10) x 4
Xbow Expert is avg 90 from (1d6+5+10) x 5
Elven Samurai with Sharpshooter is definitely worth it as a build, it just will perform slightly better using Xbow Expert than it will with a Longbow.
People tend to be seduced by Elven Accuracy. It is a good feat, but not a great feat. As you mentioned extra hits is a rather small amount of extra damage. The only real benefit is the greater chance of criticals.
To make full use of it you need to focus on criticals. Being a Champion makes sense, as do weapons like a Sword of Sharpness that have special abilities on a Crit.
A crit on 20 is like a 5% chance, with advantage like 9.75%, and with EA like... 14%? A samurai with EA gets like 8-16 attacks with that 14% crit chance at high level. Not only that, while a roll ordinarily has a 50% chance rolling 11 or higher, with three d20s that becomes an 87.5% chance, important for a Sharpshooter or GWM who is taking a -5 to hit on their attacks.
A crit range on 18-20 is a 15% chance, only slightly better than EA. A Champion gets no more than 8 attacks with that at high level. And their chance to roll 11 or higher is only 50%, causing them to miss much more often.
A samurai with EA will make more attacks, which are more accurate, with a virtually equal crit chance than a same-level Champion. IF the Champion could guarantee attacks with advantage, yes, they would get more benefit from EA than the samurai... but short of Shoving their target prone (only works for melee GWM champion, costs an attack, not guaranteed to succeed or be size-allowed), Champion has nothing in their kit to create advantage.
Hands down, a Samurai gets more out of EA than a Champion. However, you are right that the bulk of the DPR comes from strength and sharpshooter/GWM static modifiers, not damage dice (at least, not without assuming a helpful buff spell or magic weapon), so the main edge that EA is giving the samurai is that 87.5% chance to roll 11 or better to hit.
Not that hard to get advantage. And you are loving that 1/round effect, when battles tend to last at least 4 rounds. Faerie Fire works great - Drow/half drow, Magic Initiate Feat or 1 level of bard/druid. I like to hit 20th level, so I prefer Magic Initiate Feat, especially as I can get some cantrips Taking 3 levels of Samurai just to get the Advantage 3x a day (+ 1/init later on) is a big investment for comparatively little return.
And the Champion will NOT very often because most fighter types above level 5 or so will hit on a rolled 6 or higher because they concentrate on strength etc. Unless you are fighting the BBG, in which case, your crits become even more important than the normal hits and you will quickly use up your at most 3 auto advantages per the longer battle with the BBG,
Now, I love Samurai, but the Elven Accuracy is all about the crits, not trying to get advantage. Especially as you are not considering:
Two weapon fighting - if you are going after more attack rolls (and you are), then more attacks count. Use it.
WASTING your 15th level ability Rapid Strike (Gonna give up 1 attack with 3 d20 rolls for 2 attacks with 1d20?)
What it comes down to is this:
Your EA build Samurai gets these combat abilities (excluding the silly Rapid Strike that gives up your Elven Accuracy entirely - and 3 chances for a crit for a single extra attack)
Fighting Spirit
Tireless Spirit
Strength Before Death
My EA Build Druid Champion gets:
Improved Crit
Additional Fighting Style (TWF and either Defense or Archery)
Superior Crit
Survivor
So a 20th level Magic Initiate/Faerie Fire) Champion, going all out on the BBEG for a five round battle and spending the initial "approach round" to Faerie Fire, rather than attacking, gets:
Faerie Fire
Action Surge for 9 attacks
Action Surge for 9 attacks
5 attacks
5 attacks
That is a total of 28 attack rolls, all 3d20 = for 84 d20 rolls, with a crit on 3 chances out of 20,
You on the other hand get:
7 attacks with advantage + 2 without advantage
7 attacks with advantage, + 2 without advantage
3 attacks advantage + 2 without
4 attacks without advantage
4 attacks without advantage
You get a total of 17 attacks with triple advantage plus 14 normal rolls = 65 d20 rolls spread over 31 attacks, and your 65 rolls only crit once out of 20.
In my 5 rounds, I got exactly THREE less attack roll than you despite using my first round for faerie fire. But I get an extra 19 d20s, from the Faerie Fire giving me advantage for most if not all of the battle. Which means a LOT more chances to hit my crit range especially as it is 3x your size.
I will take my 84 d20 chances to get an 18-20 over your 65 chances to get a natural 20. The odds say I will get around 10 crits , while you should be getting only about 3 of them.
18-20 crit range is far more important than a 3 turns a day + 1 per battle after the first ability to get advantage.
The situation gets even BETTER for my Faerie Fire Champion if the battle goes on for more than 5 rounds, as the faerie fire lasts for 10 rounds or until I lose concentration. Among other things, I do not fight alone and I can always get my handy wizard to cast Greater invisibility on me.
I got really excited reading this but then i realized that nothing here gives you another bonus action. I was drooling at the idea of having 4-6 attacks at advantage with sharpshooter. But having a level 5 Human Variant fighter with xbow expert and sharpshooter is still pretty dope.
Nothing in the game that I am aware of gives you an extra bonus action. Maybe one of the rogue subclasses, I vaguely remember giving you something like a full extra turn at very high levels, but I'm not 100% certain.
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I have seen that on reddit that someone posted that it doesn't say that the extra attack from Rapid Strikes cannot have advantage. It just says you "make an additional weapon attack", which would presumably be at advantage from Fighting Spirit. You're sacrificing advantage from the original attack, not sacrificing the advantage from the additional attack. Might be wrong on that though.
Mog_Dracov is still right though, this build is not made for crit-fishing. I don't think Fighter's benefit enough from crits for it to really be worth it, a crit for a longbow sharpshooter is only a average damage increase of ~18% (24.5 since longbows do 1d8 not 1d10 iirc, to 29). As shown in the charts of the OP, EA is mainly here to increase chances of hitting high AC targets, since sniping Samurais only rely on DEX (maybe some CON if you worried about not having a sniper's nest/ambushes), and the person couldn't think of a better feat.
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if I edit a message, most of the time it's because of grammar. The rest of the time I'll put "Edit:" at the bottom.
Mog, I don't really understand what you've typed out. I''m not sure how many druid vs champion levels youve taken, but I think I'm gathering that you're talking about a Two Weapon Fighting Champion 18/Druid 2 if anything? Druid splash (Spore Druid for the extra 1d6 on melee hits?) doesn't seem worth it, and requires wasting ANOTHER round using your action for something that isn't attacking... so I'm just gonna ignore that and assume you're actually talking about a Champion 20 two-weapon fighting with finesse weapons?
d8 rapier+5 dex is an average of 9.5 (let's call it 10) damage per hit. With your four attacks per attack action, and a bonus attack, that's 50 damage per turn on a normal turn not accounting for crits. You're critting (2d8+5, average of 14) 15% of the time normally, so we'll say (10*.85)+(14*.15)=10.6 (let's call it 11) damage per hit without advantage, bringing that up to 55 damage per turn on a normal non-advantage turn. If you do manage to give yourself advantage (by skipping an entire round of attacks, and your targets failing their saves) with EA that bumps up to a 38.6% chance to crit, so well say on rounds where you've set that up (14*.386)+(10*.614)=11.5 (let's call it 12). So on a "good" round where you've set up having advantage, you're doing about 60 damage per turn. With Action Surge giving 4 more attacks, that could come up to about 108 per turn! Over 5 rounds of combat, we have:
Rounds 2-5 if they passed their saves (2 rounds of 55 damage, 2 action surge rounds of 99 damage)=308
Rounds 2-5if they failed their saves (2 rounds of 60 damage, 2 action surge rounds of 108 damage)=336.
All together, your Two-Weapon-Fighting EA Champion relying on Faerie Fire has done 336 damage over five rounds if it worked, or 308 damage over five rounds if they passed their saves.
d10 longbow (heavy xbow, whoops thought longbows did more, oh well fighters have feats to spare for xbow expert!)+10 sharpshooter+5 dex is an average of 20.5 (let's call it 21) damage per hit. With four attacks per attack action, that's 84 damage per turn on a normal turn not accounting for crits. You're critting (2d10+10+5, average of 26) 5% of the time normally, so we'll say (21*.95)+(26*.05)=21.25 (let's still call it 21, you're right, crits don't do much for a sharpshooter), still about 84 damage per turn on a normal non-advantage turn. With advantage (by using a bonus action three turns per long rest, with no risk of failure), with EA that bumps up to a 14.2% chance to crit... crits don't really affect damage per hit that much, but being able to throw away advantage on one attack will earn an extra attack, 21 avg x 5 attacks =105 damage per turn on an advantage round. With Action surge giving 4 more attacks, that would be 189 on that turn! Over 5 rounds of combat, we have:
Rounds 1 and 2: Fighting Spirit/Rapid Strike + Action Surge, 2 rounds of 189 damage=378
Round 3: Fighting Spirit/Rapid Strike, 1 round of 105 damage=105
Rounds 4 and 5: 2 rounds of 84 damage.=168
All together (not even using Strength Before Death to squeeze a sixth round into five rounds), the Sharpshooter EA Samurai has done 651 damage.
The samurai over five rounds of combat has done more than twice as much damage as the crit-fishing champion, even though crits help her very little. The addition of a magic weapon would probably change the math somewhat in the Champion's favor, but it's unlikely to be enough to turn this on its head. Both characters are very unlikely to miss when they have advantage, though the Champion does have a slight edge on that front... but then again, the Samurai has a 600 400 foot attack radius to make attacks in, so quite likely they'll be able to pick better targets and make more attacks more consistently than the Champion.
You're just wrong. The Samurai does more damage, and gets quite a lot out of EA (mitigating the -5 to hit from Sharpshooter). Just because a Champion and a Sharpshooter Samurai use EA differently, doesn't mean that EA isn't "for" the Samurai.
I have seen that on reddit that someone posted that it doesn't say that the extra attack from Rapid Strikes cannot have advantage. It just says you "make an additional weapon attack", which would presumably be at advantage from Fighting Spirit. You're sacrificing advantage from the original attack, not sacrificing the advantage from the additional attack. Might be wrong on that though.
Mog_Dracov is still right though, this build is not made for crit-fishing. I don't think Fighter's benefit enough from crits for it to really be worth it, a crit for a longbow sharpshooter is only a average damage increase of ~18% (24.5 since longbows do 1d8 not 1d10 iirc, to 29). As shown in the charts of the OP, EA is mainly here to increase chances of hitting high AC targets, since sniping Samurais only rely on DEX (maybe some CON if you worried about not having a sniper's nest/ambushes), and the person couldn't think of a better feat.
I think to put it in perspective, it helps to break things down like this:
Sharpshooter (or GWM) add +10 damage on every single hit. No setup rounds, no spell slots, no limited abilities.... the only cost is -5 to hit.
A crit adds somewhere between 2-5 damage per die. It takes a crit with a 3d6 weapon (or a 2d10, or various other mixtures) to equal the damage added by a sharpshooter/GWM hit. Even if you could guarantee critting on every single attack every round, you'd need to be wielding a 3d6ish weapon for that to equal the round-to-round damage output of a Sharpshooter/GWM. While there's plenty of builds that can stack up a lot of weapon dice in theory (usually by using magic items, spells, divine smite, or several prep rounds to buff), in practice you aren't walking around making 5 or more 3d6 attacks every single round, and you're not critting on every one of those attacks.
Sharpshooter/GWM builds do more damage than crit fishers. Their only drawback is accuracy. Sharpshooter is the stronger of the two, because Archery fighting style partially mitigates that. Giving yourself advantage on all of your attacks (some Paladin Channel Divinity Options, Samurai Fighting Spirit, Battlemaster Trip Attack, or Mounted Combatant are the most straightforward that I can think of) partially mitigates that. Having super advantage from EA mitigates it even further.
GWM/Sharpshooter is all about landing attacks, mitigating your -5 to hit malus. EA helps with that, and Fighters have feats to spare, so I don't know why you wouldn't take it if you have room for it.
So a 20th level Magic Initiate/Faerie Fire) Champion, going all out on the BBEG for a five round battle and spending the initial "approach round" to Faerie Fire, rather than attacking, gets:
Faerie Fire
Action Surge for 9 attacks
Action Surge for 9 attacks
5 attacks
5 attacks
This would work great in a vacuum against a big block of tofu. In a real BBEG battle it might work maybe... 15% of the time? Maybe less.
The assumptions here are:
Your Faerie Fire lands on a BBEG with BBEG defenses (I could do a whole separate rant about how people here talk about FF like it's 100% guaranteed advantage)
If it lands, the fresh, round 1, made-to-fight-level-20-PCs BBEG has no way to get rid of it
You don't lose concentration (some high level bosses have more ways to do this than just hitting you)
You aren't otherwise blinded, paralyzed, stunned, dominated, etc. before your second turn
Even if you pass 1 -3 and 4 only delays you one turn, you've lost your advantage and it's round 3 and your guy specifically made to deal damage has dealt 0 damage in a key fight.
Now I'm not saying a Samurai can't get wrecked too but at least it gets off a nova round first. The reliability of Fighting Spirit is huge.
I think to put it in perspective, it helps to break things down like this:
Sharpshooter (or GWM) add +10 damage on every single hit. No setup rounds, no spell slots, no limited abilities.... the only cost is -5 to hit.
A crit adds somewhere between 2-5 damage per die. It takes a crit with a 3d6 weapon (or a 2d10, or various other mixtures) to equal the damage added by a sharpshooter/GWM hit. Even if you could guarantee critting on every single attack every round, you'd need to be wielding a 3d6ish weapon for that to equal the round-to-round damage output of a Sharpshooter/GWM. While there's plenty of builds that can stack up a lot of weapon dice in theory (usually by using magic items, spells, divine smite, or several prep rounds to buff), in practice you aren't walking around making 5 or more 3d6 attacks every single round, and you're not critting on every one of those attacks.
Sharpshooter/GWM builds do more damage than crit fishers. Their only drawback is accuracy. Sharpshooter is the stronger of the two, because Archery fighting style partially mitigates that. Giving yourself advantage on all of your attacks (some Paladin Channel Divinity Options, Samurai Fighting Spirit, Battlemaster Trip Attack, or Mounted Combatant are the most straightforward that I can think of) partially mitigates that. Having super advantage from EA mitigates it even further.
GWM/Sharpshooter is all about landing attacks, mitigating your -5 to hit malus. EA helps with that, and Fighters have feats to spare, so I don't know why you wouldn't take it if you have room for it.
Great points here. Crits are something cool that happens occasionally, and are generally overrated. Rolling additional die to increase your chances of /not missing/ is way better than critting, particularly when you're dropping +10 bombs on people with sharpshooter.
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I was completely under the impression that EA required the use of a bow (I read it somewhere in a forum post and never noticed it didn't agree with the feat's text). I believe that heavy crossbows would be the best bet here for the burst rounds, then a swap (so long as the DM permits an interpretation of allowing this) to hand crossbows for standard damage (range considerations aside).
I think to put it in perspective, it helps to break things down like this:
Sharpshooter (or GWM) add +10 damage on every single hit. No setup rounds, no spell slots, no limited abilities.... the only cost is -5 to hit.
A crit adds somewhere between 2-5 damage per die. It takes a crit with a 3d6 weapon (or a 2d10, or various other mixtures) to equal the damage added by a sharpshooter/GWM hit. Even if you could guarantee critting on every single attack every round, you'd need to be wielding a 3d6ish weapon for that to equal the round-to-round damage output of a Sharpshooter/GWM. While there's plenty of builds that can stack up a lot of weapon dice in theory (usually by using magic items, spells, divine smite, or several prep rounds to buff), in practice you aren't walking around making 5 or more 3d6 attacks every single round, and you're not critting on every one of those attacks.
Sharpshooter/GWM builds do more damage than crit fishers. Their only drawback is accuracy. Sharpshooter is the stronger of the two, because Archery fighting style partially mitigates that. Giving yourself advantage on all of your attacks (some Paladin Channel Divinity Options, Samurai Fighting Spirit, Battlemaster Trip Attack, or Mounted Combatant are the most straightforward that I can think of) partially mitigates that. Having super advantage from EA mitigates it even further.
GWM/Sharpshooter is all about landing attacks, mitigating your -5 to hit malus. EA helps with that, and Fighters have feats to spare, so I don't know why you wouldn't take it if you have room for it.
Great points here. Crits are something cool that happens occasionally, and are generally overrated. Rolling additional die to increase your chances of /not missing/ is way better than critting, particularly when you're dropping +10 bombs on people with sharpshooter.
Crits can be good if you combine it with sneak attack, smites or flame tongue weapon. However, the builds that have those also less attacks in general, and might not be even able to smite at range. So, sharpshooter mostly outpaces crit fisher builds.
EA with sharpshooter is more like a hit-fisher. You're looking to minimize misses.
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It never makes sense to me why so many people test at level 20 for the 'my build is better than yours' size comparison. Most games rarely ever actually get that far, most seem to get to around 15/16 at best. Why not show your build tests at levels where they are likely to be played - such as in the level 8 - 12 range? At least that way it will be relevant to much more of the player base.
Partly, it's because the order that things can be taken in can be pretty subjective, even when you ultimately agree on what the list of things to take by 20 is. By showing what the build looks like at 20, most folks interested in replicating that build can work backwards to see what was taken when, or can make their own decisions about what they want first. But it is a valid criticism leveled at highly specialized multi-multi-multi-class builds, where it may look ok at 20 but be a complete mess at every other level up until then. For detailed build analysis, it can be good practice to give short snapshots for levels 5, 11, 17, and 20 to show all tiers of play.
It never makes sense to me why so many people test at level 20 for the 'my build is better than yours' size comparison. Most games rarely ever actually get that far, most seem to get to around 15/16 at best. Why not show your build tests at levels where they are likely to be played - such as in the level 8 - 12 range? At least that way it will be relevant to much more of the player base.
Only a few posts here actually are solely looking at builds at level 20; the thread is predominantly a discussion of a Level 6+ Samurai as a general build. Very little of my original post is dedicated to looking at what a level 20 build would look like. In fact, there is no discussion in my original post of the use of the 17th level Samurai perk and it's potential uses. Chicken_Champ breaks down possible numbers of an offensive use of Strength before Death might look like, but a careful look at the synergy between Samurai and the aforementioned feats allows one to extrapolate the output of later levels without explicitly needing to explain it.
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I was recently spurred on by a thread I read that asked: why are Hand Crossbows were always picked over Longbows? One of the responses I read mentioned Elven Samurai archers, and it got me to thinking, just how good are Elven Samurai archers? I did some testing with the wonderful website anydice on just how many accurate attacks you can get off in a turn. Throw in some other feats, and we can try to push this to the limit.
Edit: I later recognized and acknowledged that Elven Accuracy does not require the use of bows, which I first believed when I wrote this. Re-reading this, the intro seems a bit misleading. This strategy is possible with Heavy Crossbows (and, indeed, is now officially recommended in this original post) during "Burst turns" and Hand Crossbows on "Off turns", assuming your DM allows you the ability to switch between the two without inhibiting your action economy. With that out of the way, let's get to the post.
Accuracy
As it turns out, right at about level 4 there's an opportunity to mix Elven Accuracy with Fighting Spirit. In case you're unfamiliar with either, Fighting Spirit is a Samurai ability earned at level 3 (initially possible 3 times per long rest) which allows for advantage on all attack rolls made that turn. Elven Accuracy is triggered on attacks with advantage, which is now all your attacks on a fighting spirit "burst", allowing you to reroll one of the dice once. This is essentially triple advantage - and this is how the build is meant to shine. If you're building an Elf Fighter, you should be starting with 17 (+3) Dex with the Archery fighting style. This gives you a grand total of +7 on attack rolls at level 1 and +8 at level 4, when things start getting interesting.
So, let's compare the math of no Elven Accuracy versus Elven Accuracy taken at Level 4 for a Fighting Spirit (or any guaranteed advantage) round. (https://anydice.com/program/1c755)
The average increase doesn't look so great early on, as we're only seeing +1.67 per roll. However, those math majors out there will notice a quadratic increase here instead of a linear one, which highlights how the triple advantage makes higher attack rolls much more accessible. You'll also notice the standard deviation drops from 4.71 to 3.87 - which I think is significant and I'll show you why. Let's do this by putting this to the test and actually try this out against some AC values. (https://anydice.com/program/1c758)
Here we test out the likelihood of rolling damage against an enemy with AC18 - which at level 4 I would consider to be a pretty high-end test of accuracy. The likelihood of rolling damage jumps from 75% to 87.5%, which I think is fairly significant. If we bump the AC up to 20 for an even tougher test (you can mimic this by switching out the 18 with 20 on the output lines in the anydice link) then we get a leap of 64% to 79.4%, which makes you all the more reliable for bursts of needed damage for tough spots. Notice here how when talking about higher ACs (18 vs 20) the increase in chance to hit actually increases. We see a 12.5% better chance to hit increase to a 15.4% better chance to hit when the AC jumps up by 2. This is the aforementioned reliability, as Fighting Spirit/Elven Accuracy makes you the most reliable damage dealer in the game (I THINK) against high AC opponents.
The numbers are available in the first link. A single d20 gives a flat 5% to crit, advantage on the roll ups that to 9.75%, while Elven Accuracy advantage gives a whopping 14.26% to crit. This means at level 4, during a burst round, you're nearly on par with a Level 15 Champion with Superior Critical who has a flat 15% to crit every attack.
You can continue to increase these numbers as you'd like to simulate higher levels (a 20 Dex Samurai when you get your 3rd attack, at level 11 for example, averages a roll of 26.49 on a burst round, and has nearly a 40% chance to roll 29 or over.)
Now let's talk about sharpshooter - which would be a necessity for damage and a requirement for any fighter archer. In exchange for 5 off your attack roll, you have the opportunity to do 10 extra damage. You can simulate this by increasing the AC in anyroll - so the same calculations made for 20AC above would apply for a 15AC monster. You still have a 79.4% to hit and get that sweet +10 per hit. In my opinion, at level 4, this beats out the flat +1 to hit/damage you'd get from bumping up DEX to 20. Now - If we're dealing with the 20AC high-water-mark test again (virtually 25AC), we're still looking at a 38.69% to hit versus the 27.75% your sharpshooting crossbow fighter would get if they selected Crossbow Master over Elven Accuracy.
Damage
Now let's move on to the damage. We're making consistent connections with even the hardiest foes, sure, but how much damage are we really doing? While I'm not here to compare statistical values of the most min/maxed strikers available to this build, hopefully I can arm you with some dazzling numbers nonetheless.
The damage rolls here are pretty standard but I included a reference just for the purposes of investigating potential rolls. (https://anydice.com/program/1c75c)
Early on the damage is straighforward - a d8 rolls an average of 4.5 and you'd double that amount on crits, and on action surges (though you get double the dex dmg bonus). A level 5 action surge (4 attacks + 4 dmg per) averages out at 26 dmg per turn, which is not terrible for an archer sitting up to 150ft away from the action.
One more level and things get interesting with sharpshooter. We already covered the -5 to the attack, and at a level 6 action surge with Elven Accuracy and Fighting Spirit you'd have a 39.74% (79.4%^4) to hit all 4 shots on a 15AC enemy. That averages out to 74 damage a round. At level 6, a burst round has a 40% change to do 74 damage at (up to) 600ft. If that doesn't give you the right to brag day and night to your Oath of Redemption, Divine Smiting, Melee-Attack-Taking Paladin buddy I don't know what will. And if you hit a 15% crit, which in addition to 3 other hits is about 7.5% (.794^3*.1496), you get to add another 4.5 to your average damage for a whopping 78.5 in a round. To be fair, you only get one of these short rest.
Conclusion
If you have any additions, comments, or questions feel free to post them. If you've seen me mess up any of my math PLEASE let me know. All in all, I've never seen a ranged fighter at a table - and those I've seen theorycrafting ranged fighters seem to favor Hand Crossbow picks. I wanted to delve into a longbow-only build and see just how viable it was. Elven Accuracy gives an incredible amount of accuracy, and maximizing its affects with several attacks gives incredibly high chances for high damage output. Hopefully you can take some of this info to your next campaign and get some good burst turns in with an Elven Samurai.
Haven’t had a chance to review your math, but jumping the gun to just +1 that elven samurai shapshooters have tremendous damage potential. That said, the DPR is coming from the static +10 from sharpshooter and the +Dex, not the weapon damage due, so whatever a longbow samurai produces without a bonus action attack, a Xbow expert samurai will do slightly better (though from less range). I get that the bonus attack conflicts with the fighting spirit bonus action, but against targets where triple-advantage is giving you less than a (10%? Just guessing) bonus chance to hit, the xbow expert bonus is probably more of a dpr enhancement.
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I got really excited reading this but then i realized that nothing here gives you another bonus action. I was drooling at the idea of having 4-6 attacks at advantage with sharpshooter. But having a level 5 Human Variant fighter with xbow expert and sharpshooter is still pretty dope.
Samurai does turn out a lot of attacks, one you unlock Rapid Strikes at 15, and then even moreso with Strength Before Death at 18.
At 15, when you have 3 attacks per Attack Action, your 'Big Turn' rotation with a Longbow can look like (140 dmg):
At 20, when you have 4 attacks per Attack Action, your 'Big Turn' rotation with a Longbow can look like (340 dmg):
This is a little better than Xbow Expert will do with a Hand Crossbow, no doubt, since it will do about 2 less damage per hit (though, they could always pull out a heavy crossbow for that alpha strike round and do Longbow-level damage) and their bonus actions are already spoken for. The issue is, on turns where you aren't using Action Surge and Fighting Spirit (the other 90% of the adventuring day), and thus have your Bonus Action free, Xbow Expert will do more with a Hand Crossbow because of that extra fifth attack.
Elven Samurai with Sharpshooter is definitely worth it as a build, it just will perform slightly better using Xbow Expert than it will with a Longbow.
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People tend to be seduced by Elven Accuracy. It is a good feat, but not a great feat. As you mentioned extra hits is a rather small amount of extra damage. The only real benefit is the greater chance of criticals.
To make full use of it you need to focus on criticals. Being a Champion makes sense, as do weapons like a Sword of Sharpness that have special abilities on a Crit.
A crit on 20 is like a 5% chance, with advantage like 9.75%, and with EA like... 14%? A samurai with EA gets like 8-16 attacks with that 14% crit chance at high level. Not only that, while a roll ordinarily has a 50% chance rolling 11 or higher, with three d20s that becomes an 87.5% chance, important for a Sharpshooter or GWM who is taking a -5 to hit on their attacks.
A crit range on 18-20 is a 15% chance, only slightly better than EA. A Champion gets no more than 8 attacks with that at high level. And their chance to roll 11 or higher is only 50%, causing them to miss much more often.
A samurai with EA will make more attacks, which are more accurate, with a virtually equal crit chance than a same-level Champion. IF the Champion could guarantee attacks with advantage, yes, they would get more benefit from EA than the samurai... but short of Shoving their target prone (only works for melee GWM champion, costs an attack, not guaranteed to succeed or be size-allowed), Champion has nothing in their kit to create advantage.
Hands down, a Samurai gets more out of EA than a Champion. However, you are right that the bulk of the DPR comes from strength and sharpshooter/GWM static modifiers, not damage dice (at least, not without assuming a helpful buff spell or magic weapon), so the main edge that EA is giving the samurai is that 87.5% chance to roll 11 or better to hit.
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Not that hard to get advantage. And you are loving that 1/round effect, when battles tend to last at least 4 rounds. Faerie Fire works great - Drow/half drow, Magic Initiate Feat or 1 level of bard/druid. I like to hit 20th level, so I prefer Magic Initiate Feat, especially as I can get some cantrips Taking 3 levels of Samurai just to get the Advantage 3x a day (+ 1/init later on) is a big investment for comparatively little return.
And the Champion will NOT very often because most fighter types above level 5 or so will hit on a rolled 6 or higher because they concentrate on strength etc. Unless you are fighting the BBG, in which case, your crits become even more important than the normal hits and you will quickly use up your at most 3 auto advantages per the longer battle with the BBG,
Now, I love Samurai, but the Elven Accuracy is all about the crits, not trying to get advantage. Especially as you are not considering:
What it comes down to is this:
Your EA build Samurai gets these combat abilities (excluding the silly Rapid Strike that gives up your Elven Accuracy entirely - and 3 chances for a crit for a single extra attack)
My EA Build Druid Champion gets:
So a 20th level Magic Initiate/Faerie Fire) Champion, going all out on the BBEG for a five round battle and spending the initial "approach round" to Faerie Fire, rather than attacking, gets:
That is a total of 28 attack rolls, all 3d20 = for 84 d20 rolls, with a crit on 3 chances out of 20,
You on the other hand get:
You get a total of 17 attacks with triple advantage plus 14 normal rolls = 65 d20 rolls spread over 31 attacks, and your 65 rolls only crit once out of 20.
In my 5 rounds, I got exactly THREE less attack roll than you despite using my first round for faerie fire. But I get an extra 19 d20s, from the Faerie Fire giving me advantage for most if not all of the battle. Which means a LOT more chances to hit my crit range especially as it is 3x your size.
I will take my 84 d20 chances to get an 18-20 over your 65 chances to get a natural 20. The odds say I will get around 10 crits , while you should be getting only about 3 of them.
18-20 crit range is far more important than a 3 turns a day + 1 per battle after the first ability to get advantage.
The situation gets even BETTER for my Faerie Fire Champion if the battle goes on for more than 5 rounds, as the faerie fire lasts for 10 rounds or until I lose concentration. Among other things, I do not fight alone and I can always get my handy wizard to cast Greater invisibility on me.
Nothing in the game that I am aware of gives you an extra bonus action. Maybe one of the rogue subclasses, I vaguely remember giving you something like a full extra turn at very high levels, but I'm not 100% certain.
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Tasha
I have seen that on reddit that someone posted that it doesn't say that the extra attack from Rapid Strikes cannot have advantage. It just says you "make an additional weapon attack", which would presumably be at advantage from Fighting Spirit. You're sacrificing advantage from the original attack, not sacrificing the advantage from the additional attack. Might be wrong on that though.
Mog_Dracov is still right though, this build is not made for crit-fishing. I don't think Fighter's benefit enough from crits for it to really be worth it, a crit for a longbow sharpshooter is only a average damage increase of ~18% (24.5 since longbows do 1d8 not 1d10 iirc, to 29). As shown in the charts of the OP, EA is mainly here to increase chances of hitting high AC targets, since sniping Samurais only rely on DEX (maybe some CON if you worried about not having a sniper's nest/ambushes), and the person couldn't think of a better feat.
if I edit a message, most of the time it's because of grammar. The rest of the time I'll put "Edit:" at the bottom.
Mog, I don't really understand what you've typed out. I''m not sure how many druid vs champion levels youve taken, but I think I'm gathering that you're talking about a Two Weapon Fighting Champion 18/Druid 2 if anything? Druid splash (Spore Druid for the extra 1d6 on melee hits?) doesn't seem worth it, and requires wasting ANOTHER round using your action for something that isn't attacking... so I'm just gonna ignore that and assume you're actually talking about a Champion 20 two-weapon fighting with finesse weapons?
d8 rapier+5 dex is an average of 9.5 (let's call it 10) damage per hit. With your four attacks per attack action, and a bonus attack, that's 50 damage per turn on a normal turn not accounting for crits. You're critting (2d8+5, average of 14) 15% of the time normally, so we'll say (10*.85)+(14*.15)=10.6 (let's call it 11) damage per hit without advantage, bringing that up to 55 damage per turn on a normal non-advantage turn. If you do manage to give yourself advantage (by skipping an entire round of attacks, and your targets failing their saves) with EA that bumps up to a 38.6% chance to crit, so well say on rounds where you've set that up (14*.386)+(10*.614)=11.5 (let's call it 12). So on a "good" round where you've set up having advantage, you're doing about 60 damage per turn. With Action Surge giving 4 more attacks, that could come up to about 108 per turn! Over 5 rounds of combat, we have:
All together, your Two-Weapon-Fighting EA Champion relying on Faerie Fire has done 336 damage over five rounds if it worked, or 308 damage over five rounds if they passed their saves.
d10
longbow(heavy xbow, whoops thought longbows did more, oh well fighters have feats to spare for xbow expert!)+10 sharpshooter+5 dex is an average of 20.5 (let's call it 21) damage per hit. With four attacks per attack action, that's 84 damage per turn on a normal turn not accounting for crits. You're critting (2d10+10+5, average of 26) 5% of the time normally, so we'll say (21*.95)+(26*.05)=21.25 (let's still call it 21, you're right, crits don't do much for a sharpshooter), still about 84 damage per turn on a normal non-advantage turn. With advantage (by using a bonus action three turns per long rest, with no risk of failure), with EA that bumps up to a 14.2% chance to crit... crits don't really affect damage per hit that much, but being able to throw away advantage on one attack will earn an extra attack, 21 avg x 5 attacks =105 damage per turn on an advantage round. With Action surge giving 4 more attacks, that would be 189 on that turn! Over 5 rounds of combat, we have:All together (not even using Strength Before Death to squeeze a sixth round into five rounds), the Sharpshooter EA Samurai has done 651 damage.
The samurai over five rounds of combat has done more than twice as much damage as the crit-fishing champion, even though crits help her very little. The addition of a magic weapon would probably change the math somewhat in the Champion's favor, but it's unlikely to be enough to turn this on its head. Both characters are very unlikely to miss when they have advantage, though the Champion does have a slight edge on that front... but then again, the Samurai has a
600400 foot attack radius to make attacks in, so quite likely they'll be able to pick better targets and make more attacks more consistently than the Champion.You're just wrong. The Samurai does more damage, and gets quite a lot out of EA (mitigating the -5 to hit from Sharpshooter). Just because a Champion and a Sharpshooter Samurai use EA differently, doesn't mean that EA isn't "for" the Samurai.
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Holy cow you're right, Rapid Strikes costs the Samurai literally nothing :D
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I think to put it in perspective, it helps to break things down like this:
Sharpshooter (or GWM) add +10 damage on every single hit. No setup rounds, no spell slots, no limited abilities.... the only cost is -5 to hit.
A crit adds somewhere between 2-5 damage per die. It takes a crit with a 3d6 weapon (or a 2d10, or various other mixtures) to equal the damage added by a sharpshooter/GWM hit. Even if you could guarantee critting on every single attack every round, you'd need to be wielding a 3d6ish weapon for that to equal the round-to-round damage output of a Sharpshooter/GWM. While there's plenty of builds that can stack up a lot of weapon dice in theory (usually by using magic items, spells, divine smite, or several prep rounds to buff), in practice you aren't walking around making 5 or more 3d6 attacks every single round, and you're not critting on every one of those attacks.
Sharpshooter/GWM builds do more damage than crit fishers. Their only drawback is accuracy. Sharpshooter is the stronger of the two, because Archery fighting style partially mitigates that. Giving yourself advantage on all of your attacks (some Paladin Channel Divinity Options, Samurai Fighting Spirit, Battlemaster Trip Attack, or Mounted Combatant are the most straightforward that I can think of) partially mitigates that. Having super advantage from EA mitigates it even further.
GWM/Sharpshooter is all about landing attacks, mitigating your -5 to hit malus. EA helps with that, and Fighters have feats to spare, so I don't know why you wouldn't take it if you have room for it.
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This would work great in a vacuum against a big block of tofu. In a real BBEG battle it might work maybe... 15% of the time? Maybe less.
The assumptions here are:
Even if you pass 1 -3 and 4 only delays you one turn, you've lost your advantage and it's round 3 and your guy specifically made to deal damage has dealt 0 damage in a key fight.
Now I'm not saying a Samurai can't get wrecked too but at least it gets off a nova round first. The reliability of Fighting Spirit is huge.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Great points here. Crits are something cool that happens occasionally, and are generally overrated. Rolling additional die to increase your chances of /not missing/ is way better than critting, particularly when you're dropping +10 bombs on people with sharpshooter.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
I was completely under the impression that EA required the use of a bow (I read it somewhere in a forum post and never noticed it didn't agree with the feat's text). I believe that heavy crossbows would be the best bet here for the burst rounds, then a swap (so long as the DM permits an interpretation of allowing this) to hand crossbows for standard damage (range considerations aside).
Crits can be good if you combine it with sneak attack, smites or flame tongue weapon. However, the builds that have those also less attacks in general, and might not be even able to smite at range. So, sharpshooter mostly outpaces crit fisher builds.
EA with sharpshooter is more like a hit-fisher. You're looking to minimize misses.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
It never makes sense to me why so many people test at level 20 for the 'my build is better than yours' size comparison. Most games rarely ever actually get that far, most seem to get to around 15/16 at best. Why not show your build tests at levels where they are likely to be played - such as in the level 8 - 12 range? At least that way it will be relevant to much more of the player base.
Partly, it's because the order that things can be taken in can be pretty subjective, even when you ultimately agree on what the list of things to take by 20 is. By showing what the build looks like at 20, most folks interested in replicating that build can work backwards to see what was taken when, or can make their own decisions about what they want first. But it is a valid criticism leveled at highly specialized multi-multi-multi-class builds, where it may look ok at 20 but be a complete mess at every other level up until then. For detailed build analysis, it can be good practice to give short snapshots for levels 5, 11, 17, and 20 to show all tiers of play.
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Only a few posts here actually are solely looking at builds at level 20; the thread is predominantly a discussion of a Level 6+ Samurai as a general build. Very little of my original post is dedicated to looking at what a level 20 build would look like. In fact, there is no discussion in my original post of the use of the 17th level Samurai perk and it's potential uses. Chicken_Champ breaks down possible numbers of an offensive use of Strength before Death might look like, but a careful look at the synergy between Samurai and the aforementioned feats allows one to extrapolate the output of later levels without explicitly needing to explain it.