I grew up practicing martial arts and always loved using two weapons at the same time. Once I discovered DnD, I thought two weapon fighting would be awesome, and it is in the beginning, but in the long run it doesn't keep up with other play styles. So here is an attempt to balance this fighting style, input appreciated!
Two Weapon Master:
You have learned to coordinate two weapons together in perfect harmony, flowing seamlessly between offense and defense.
When you are wielding a weapon in each of your hands that you are proficient with, you gain the following benefits:
On your turn, when you take the attack action and score a critical hit with a melee weapon or reduce a creature to 0 hit points with one, you gain an additional melee weapon attack during your bonus action.
Melee weapon attacks made with your bonus action come with advantage.
When another creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to roll the damage dice for one of your weapons and add the results to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you. If the attack misses, you can make an opportunity attack with the other weapon with advantage.
Before you make a melee attack, you can choose to take a -5 penalty to the attack roll. If the attack hits, you add +5 to the attack’s damage.
..................
So my thought process and how this feat was created:
The main other strong fighting styles are great weapon master with polearm master, and sharpshooter with crossbow expert. The common feature with these combinations is there a way to increase damage output by taking a penalty and also getting an attack with the bonus action. In addition they also give extra benefits, polearm master gets an opportunity attack when targets enter its reach, great weapon master gets to make a bonus attack, sharpshooter ignores almost all cover and gets no penalty with shooting from long distance, and crossbow expert doesn't have to worry about fighting in close range anymore.
With two weapon fighting there is only one beneficial feat: dual weilder. By itself it doesn't add much, slight increase to AC, a little bigger damage die, and now we can move 2 things at once, yay.....
So we need to balance this out with a second feat. Everyone already has access to attacking with their bonus action, so how do we make it better? Simple, give them advantage, it makes sense, one weapon is creating an opening while other is striking, this will help with increasing chances to hit, not a bad start. And notice its only with the bonus action attacks, not the attack action. That to me seems balanced.
And similar to great weapon master, if you crit or down a foe, which is rare but is nice every now and then, you get to keep the momentum up and are rewarded with additional attacks during your bonus action. Example, say your level 5 fighter has extra attack, if one of those attacks crits, during your bonus action, instead of getting just 1 attack, you get 2. If on the very rare occasion you crit 2x, your bonus action gets 3 attacks etc.
On to defense: fighting with two weapons is like boxing, the sweet science of hit and don't be hit. So similar to the defensive duelist feat, you can use your reaction to create a miss with one weapon. If they miss, this creates an opportunity attack, just like how polearm master gets an opportunity attack. Once again you have advantage for your attack in this scenario.
Lastly, we need to find a way to get extra damage per attack. Taking a penalty -5 attack roll is standard. But +10 damage like sharpshooter or great weapon master is too broken. +5 damage is more reasonable, especially because this Two Weapon Master feat helps give you advantage. If you want to strike with advantage, great. If you want to minimize that advantage by taking a penalty, when you hit you'll get extra damage, also nice.
So that's it, let me know what you think, and how you would build an awesome dual wielding character with this feat :)
Added on a requirement for this feat: Requires the Dual Wielder feat. If not, it would be too strong compared to the follow feats at early levels.
I thought about how it doesn't take a feat to get a bonus action attack with two weapon fighting, yet it does take a feat for polearm master and crossbow expert.
So for example, for a first level Variant human, in terms of damage all styles should be close to equal.
Polearm master: glaive, 1d10+1d4= 5.5+2.5=8.0. With extra benefit of opportunity attack from creatures entering your reach.
Crossbow expert: hand crossbow, 1d6+1d6= 3.5+3.5=7.0. With extra benefit of not having disadvantage being within 5 feet of a hostile creature. You now have range and melee distance.
Dual wielder (with two weapon fighting style): 2x short swords, 1d6+1d6= 3.5+3.5=7.0. If you can upgrade to 2 longsword a later on then it can eventually be 1d8+1d8=4.5+4.5=9.0. With extra benefit of +1AC.
Of the above 3, polearm master should edge out in damage because of the opportunity attacks.
Then after 4 levels you can grab your second feat, the feats that increase damage per attack:
Great weapon master -5 atk roll, +10 dmg roll, with benefit of getting bonus action attack with main weapon side.
Sharpshooter: -5 atk roll, +10 dmg roll, with benefit of no penalty attacking from max range and disregarding 1/2 & 3/4 cover.
Two weapon master: -5 atk roll, +5 dmg roll, advantage for bonus attacks, and a reaction to melee attacks against you to boost AC and possibly counter with your own opportunity attack.
Despite having less extra damage with Two Weapon Master, I think it makes sense; you're attacking with a smaller weapon, you're not swinging a giant great weapon around.
And the feat makes up for the smaller damage by increasing its accuracy and improving its defense. Two Weapon Fighting has a different style, "hit and not get hit".
Thematically, being a two weapon master should mean you can weave in offense with defense, which this feat tries to accomplish, and should be very fun to use.
Two-Weapon fighting is actually very good. Everyone can fight with two weapons, but only the Martial classes can add that extra damage. And there is already a feat to make the fighting style better, the Dual Wielder feat.
In addition, the feat you wrote is waayyy more powerful than I think you realize.
Fighter get more ASIs than any other class meaning that they can take more feats than any other class. Add to that, the Champion Subclass is a Crit fisher, eventually Critting on an 18+. So while another character without Extra Attacks or Improved Criticals would only have around a 5% chance to generate an additional Bonus Action attack during any given turn, Fighters will eventually increase that to approximately an 18.5% chance every turn, and Champions in particular will eventually raise that to almost 48% chance every single turn. Is too much.
The ability to guarantee oneself Advantage on a single Attack every turn is the thing that makes a lot of DMs hate Find Familiar. But at least a DM can temporarily shut that down by killing the Familiar. A DM would have no way to counter this feat if they allowed it in their campaign. To make matters worse, this feat also allows for a potential for example onBA Attacks, therefore making it doubly vexing. And if the character in question is an Elf and can therefore take the Elven Accuracy feat, forget about it.
Having the option to spend a Reaction to get a potential 1d8 bonus to AC is a statistical equivalent to the Shield spell since the average on a 1d8 is pretty much 5. But this feat doesn’t even cost a spell slot to use giving it near infinite potential. And then you added another additional Attack if it works!!
And then you also gave this feat a 1/2 equivalent to GWM/Sharpshooter on top of everything else. That not only partially invalidates two of the most powerful feats in 5e, but also the fighting styles they pair best with as well.
So basically, this would be too powerful as 4 feats, and you rolled them all into one.
I noticed that your main reason for creating this was a comparison based solely on DPR. What I think you haven’t considered is that two weapon fighting isn’t really about DPR, but instead APR (Attacks per Round). When fighting a large number of weaker creatures, being able to make more attacks is an advantage over making fewer, more powerful attacks. A spellcaster maintaining Concentration has way more to fear from volume of attacks over the individual power of any one attack. To be frank, Dual Wielder is already one of the best feats in 5e depending on the build a player is going for.
Really great feedback, thank you, this is what I was looking for!
I can totally see an advantage on your bonus attacks would totally be abused by an elven accuracy. We can adjust that benefit by changing it to, "when you take your bonus action attack, you can roll one of your weapon dice and add the result to the attack roll of your attack."
I still feel like there should be a benefit gained from scoring a crit with those taking this feat. I was just following great weapon master's example and saw that it gives an extra bonus attack. But since two weapon fighting already use their bonus action, it would be nice to add something to the bonus action. We could either give extra attack after the crit, or allow the next attack to have advantage.
That's true that you are using a spell slot for a reaction spell like shield. We can create a limit to how often you can use such reflexes. I would change it to, you are limited to this reaction equal to your constitution modifier per rest. This makes sense in that, it takes extra effort and energy to do such manuevers, and after resting you should have energy to counter again when needed.
The issue I have here with the DPR vs APR argument is that a dual wielding building doesn't actually have more attacks per round than any other fighting build. Both great weapon master and polearm master, or crossbow expert and sharpshooter, still get the same amount of attacks. Each utilizes the bonus action attack. And because two weapon fighting has no feats to increase damage, it falls behind at later levels. So that's why I feel like there should be some way to mitigate the damage output per strike. Because this feat tries to increase the chances of a dual wielder hitting their target, I feel like taking a penalty to atk rolls and increasing their dmg roll seems fine.
Thank you for your input though, really good advice. I'll think about the adjustments and come back with the updated feat :)
You have learned to coordinate two weapons together in perfect harmony, flowing seamlessly between offense and defense.
When you are wielding a weapon in each of your hands that you are proficient with, you gain the following benefits:
On your turn, when you score a critical hit with a melee weapon or reduce a creature to 0 hit points with one, you can make two melee attacks with your bonus action. You must alternate between both weapons for these attacks.
Whenever you attack with your bonus action, you can roll the damage dice from one of your weapons and add the result to your attack roll for your other weapon.
When another creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to roll the damage dice for one of your weapons and add the results to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you. If the attack misses, you can make an opportunity attack with your other weapon. You can only do this a number of times equal to your constitution modifier per rest.
...........................
Took out the -5 atk roll, +5 dmg roll. You're right, two weapon fighting isn't about directly increasing the damage from an attack. The way I thematically envision this feat to work is that you are using your other hand weapon to help you hit, or help you not be hit. Just because you get an opening for a strike doesn't mean the strike gets stronger. The focus of this feat is rolling the weapon dice to either increase our atk roll or our AC.
The updated benefits above will increase your chances of landing hits, so indirectly increasing DPR.
We've also limited the extra attacks you can gain during the bonus action to just 2 max, whenever you crit or down a foe.
And we've limited the counter striking reactions based on your constitution modifier per rest.
Lastly, I made it clearer that when you try to boost your AC or atk roll with one weapon, the attacking weapon is a different weapon. This is because you never know when people will be wielding different damage dice weapons. It might be a longsword with a shortsword. It could be a katana and a wakizashi. Or even a shadow blade and a battle axe. Either way, you can decide which weapon is attacking, and which weapon is assisting.
That seems more balanced now. Any other thoughts? Appreciate the input.
I grew up practicing martial arts and always loved using two weapons at the same time. Once I discovered DnD, I thought two weapon fighting would be awesome, and it is in the beginning, but in the long run it doesn't keep up with other play styles. So here is an attempt to balance this fighting style, input appreciated!
Two Weapon Master:
You have learned to coordinate two weapons together in perfect harmony, flowing seamlessly between offense and defense.
When you are wielding a weapon in each of your hands that you are proficient with, you gain the following benefits:
On your turn, when you take the attack action and score a critical hit with a melee weapon or reduce a creature to 0 hit points with one, you gain an additional melee weapon attack during your bonus action.
Melee weapon attacks made with your bonus action come with advantage.
When another creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to roll the damage dice for one of your weapons and add the results to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you. If the attack misses, you can make an opportunity attack with the other weapon with advantage.
Before you make a melee attack, you can choose to take a -5 penalty to the attack roll. If the attack hits, you add +5 to the attack’s damage.
..................
So my thought process and how this feat was created:
The main other strong fighting styles are great weapon master with polearm master, and sharpshooter with crossbow expert. The common feature with these combinations is there a way to increase damage output by taking a penalty and also getting an attack with the bonus action. In addition they also give extra benefits, polearm master gets an opportunity attack when targets enter its reach, great weapon master gets to make a bonus attack, sharpshooter ignores almost all cover and gets no penalty with shooting from long distance, and crossbow expert doesn't have to worry about fighting in close range anymore.
With two weapon fighting there is only one beneficial feat: dual weilder. By itself it doesn't add much, slight increase to AC, a little bigger damage die, and now we can move 2 things at once, yay.....
So we need to balance this out with a second feat. Everyone already has access to attacking with their bonus action, so how do we make it better? Simple, give them advantage, it makes sense, one weapon is creating an opening while other is striking, this will help with increasing chances to hit, not a bad start. And notice its only with the bonus action attacks, not the attack action. That to me seems balanced.
And similar to great weapon master, if you crit or down a foe, which is rare but is nice every now and then, you get to keep the momentum up and are rewarded with additional attacks during your bonus action. Example, say your level 5 fighter has extra attack, if one of those attacks crits, during your bonus action, instead of getting just 1 attack, you get 2. If on the very rare occasion you crit 2x, your bonus action gets 3 attacks etc.
On to defense: fighting with two weapons is like boxing, the sweet science of hit and don't be hit. So similar to the defensive duelist feat, you can use your reaction to create a miss with one weapon. If they miss, this creates an opportunity attack, just like how polearm master gets an opportunity attack. Once again you have advantage for your attack in this scenario.
Lastly, we need to find a way to get extra damage per attack. Taking a penalty -5 attack roll is standard. But +10 damage like sharpshooter or great weapon master is too broken. +5 damage is more reasonable, especially because this Two Weapon Master feat helps give you advantage. If you want to strike with advantage, great. If you want to minimize that advantage by taking a penalty, when you hit you'll get extra damage, also nice.
So that's it, let me know what you think, and how you would build an awesome dual wielding character with this feat :)
Added on a requirement for this feat: Requires the Dual Wielder feat. If not, it would be too strong compared to the follow feats at early levels.
I thought about how it doesn't take a feat to get a bonus action attack with two weapon fighting, yet it does take a feat for polearm master and crossbow expert.
So for example, for a first level Variant human, in terms of damage all styles should be close to equal.
Polearm master: glaive, 1d10+1d4= 5.5+2.5=8.0. With extra benefit of opportunity attack from creatures entering your reach.
Crossbow expert: hand crossbow, 1d6+1d6= 3.5+3.5=7.0. With extra benefit of not having disadvantage being within 5 feet of a hostile creature. You now have range and melee distance.
Dual wielder (with two weapon fighting style): 2x short swords, 1d6+1d6= 3.5+3.5=7.0. If you can upgrade to 2 longsword a later on then it can eventually be 1d8+1d8=4.5+4.5=9.0. With extra benefit of +1AC.
Of the above 3, polearm master should edge out in damage because of the opportunity attacks.
Then after 4 levels you can grab your second feat, the feats that increase damage per attack:
Great weapon master -5 atk roll, +10 dmg roll, with benefit of getting bonus action attack with main weapon side.
Sharpshooter: -5 atk roll, +10 dmg roll, with benefit of no penalty attacking from max range and disregarding 1/2 & 3/4 cover.
Two weapon master: -5 atk roll, +5 dmg roll, advantage for bonus attacks, and a reaction to melee attacks against you to boost AC and possibly counter with your own opportunity attack.
Despite having less extra damage with Two Weapon Master, I think it makes sense; you're attacking with a smaller weapon, you're not swinging a giant great weapon around.
And the feat makes up for the smaller damage by increasing its accuracy and improving its defense. Two Weapon Fighting has a different style, "hit and not get hit".
Thematically, being a two weapon master should mean you can weave in offense with defense, which this feat tries to accomplish, and should be very fun to use.
Two-Weapon fighting is actually very good. Everyone can fight with two weapons, but only the Martial classes can add that extra damage. And there is already a feat to make the fighting style better, the Dual Wielder feat.
In addition, the feat you wrote is waayyy more powerful than I think you realize.
Fighter get more ASIs than any other class meaning that they can take more feats than any other class. Add to that, the Champion Subclass is a Crit fisher, eventually Critting on an 18+. So while another character without Extra Attacks or Improved Criticals would only have around a 5% chance to generate an additional Bonus Action attack during any given turn, Fighters will eventually increase that to approximately an 18.5% chance every turn, and Champions in particular will eventually raise that to almost 48% chance every single turn. Is too much.
The ability to guarantee oneself Advantage on a single Attack every turn is the thing that makes a lot of DMs hate Find Familiar. But at least a DM can temporarily shut that down by killing the Familiar. A DM would have no way to counter this feat if they allowed it in their campaign. To make matters worse, this feat also allows for a potential for example onBA Attacks, therefore making it doubly vexing. And if the character in question is an Elf and can therefore take the Elven Accuracy feat, forget about it.
Having the option to spend a Reaction to get a potential 1d8 bonus to AC is a statistical equivalent to the Shield spell since the average on a 1d8 is pretty much 5. But this feat doesn’t even cost a spell slot to use giving it near infinite potential. And then you added another additional Attack if it works!!
And then you also gave this feat a 1/2 equivalent to GWM/Sharpshooter on top of everything else. That not only partially invalidates two of the most powerful feats in 5e, but also the fighting styles they pair best with as well.
So basically, this would be too powerful as 4 feats, and you rolled them all into one.
I noticed that your main reason for creating this was a comparison based solely on DPR. What I think you haven’t considered is that two weapon fighting isn’t really about DPR, but instead APR (Attacks per Round). When fighting a large number of weaker creatures, being able to make more attacks is an advantage over making fewer, more powerful attacks. A spellcaster maintaining Concentration has way more to fear from volume of attacks over the individual power of any one attack. To be frank, Dual Wielder is already one of the best feats in 5e depending on the build a player is going for.
I hope this feedback was helpful.
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Really great feedback, thank you, this is what I was looking for!
I can totally see an advantage on your bonus attacks would totally be abused by an elven accuracy. We can adjust that benefit by changing it to, "when you take your bonus action attack, you can roll one of your weapon dice and add the result to the attack roll of your attack."
I still feel like there should be a benefit gained from scoring a crit with those taking this feat. I was just following great weapon master's example and saw that it gives an extra bonus attack. But since two weapon fighting already use their bonus action, it would be nice to add something to the bonus action. We could either give extra attack after the crit, or allow the next attack to have advantage.
That's true that you are using a spell slot for a reaction spell like shield. We can create a limit to how often you can use such reflexes. I would change it to, you are limited to this reaction equal to your constitution modifier per rest. This makes sense in that, it takes extra effort and energy to do such manuevers, and after resting you should have energy to counter again when needed.
The issue I have here with the DPR vs APR argument is that a dual wielding building doesn't actually have more attacks per round than any other fighting build. Both great weapon master and polearm master, or crossbow expert and sharpshooter, still get the same amount of attacks. Each utilizes the bonus action attack. And because two weapon fighting has no feats to increase damage, it falls behind at later levels. So that's why I feel like there should be some way to mitigate the damage output per strike. Because this feat tries to increase the chances of a dual wielder hitting their target, I feel like taking a penalty to atk rolls and increasing their dmg roll seems fine.
Thank you for your input though, really good advice. I'll think about the adjustments and come back with the updated feat :)
Two Weapon Master:
You have learned to coordinate two weapons together in perfect harmony, flowing seamlessly between offense and defense.
When you are wielding a weapon in each of your hands that you are proficient with, you gain the following benefits:
On your turn, when you score a critical hit with a melee weapon or reduce a creature to 0 hit points with one, you can make two melee attacks with your bonus action. You must alternate between both weapons for these attacks.
Whenever you attack with your bonus action, you can roll the damage dice from one of your weapons and add the result to your attack roll for your other weapon.
When another creature hits you with a melee attack, you can use your reaction to roll the damage dice for one of your weapons and add the results to your AC for that attack, potentially causing the attack to miss you. If the attack misses, you can make an opportunity attack with your other weapon. You can only do this a number of times equal to your constitution modifier per rest.
...........................
Took out the -5 atk roll, +5 dmg roll. You're right, two weapon fighting isn't about directly increasing the damage from an attack. The way I thematically envision this feat to work is that you are using your other hand weapon to help you hit, or help you not be hit. Just because you get an opening for a strike doesn't mean the strike gets stronger. The focus of this feat is rolling the weapon dice to either increase our atk roll or our AC.
The updated benefits above will increase your chances of landing hits, so indirectly increasing DPR.
We've also limited the extra attacks you can gain during the bonus action to just 2 max, whenever you crit or down a foe.
And we've limited the counter striking reactions based on your constitution modifier per rest.
Lastly, I made it clearer that when you try to boost your AC or atk roll with one weapon, the attacking weapon is a different weapon. This is because you never know when people will be wielding different damage dice weapons. It might be a longsword with a shortsword. It could be a katana and a wakizashi. Or even a shadow blade and a battle axe. Either way, you can decide which weapon is attacking, and which weapon is assisting.
That seems more balanced now. Any other thoughts? Appreciate the input.