D&D 5E A Review of Fighting Styles in 5ed

Hello,

I have a player that is playing a bladelock. He's a bit of an optimizer in that he likes to find efficient ways to gain good DPR. He asked for a change to the bonus action melee attack because a single weapon attack, Dueling Fighting style, was claimed to do more damage than the two weapon attack. A review of the Enworld forums and other internet posts gave a few ideas on how to make an improvement, but I wanted to see what the current state of damage per round was and what a future state of damage per round was. I also felt that, the players "customer concern" was really that Dueling fighting was doing more damage than Two-weapon fighting style. If that could be resolved then I should address his concern.

I'm a mechanical engineer that specializes in finite element analysis so I got a little pedantic with this analysis.

The PDF file is the report of the data I analyzed. The ZIP file contains an open document formatted Excel file of the calculations. There is a lot of information in the spreadsheet that is not in the PDF file. Some significant information is the analysis of the bladelock character that is following The Fiend path. I'll also warn that the spreadsheet is not extremely well structured for ease of use.

I also saw some analysis of what to do with two-weapon fighting in the 5e forum. I felt this analysis was relevant.

If you have any questions, recommendations, or see an error please let me know.

Pact blade is bad at TWF because you only have 1 pact weapon. They're much better off being a tome warlock and using booming blade, or switching to 2-hander. You should also count their spells, which can add some damage. Foresight for instance.

You're also ignoring an advantage of TWF, in that you waste less damage in overkill. Killing 4 kobolds instead of 3 for instance. As well as being dex based, which is more valuable than str.

IMO, TWF just needs an extra feat comparable to polearm master or crossbow expertise.

[MENTION=6801209]mellored[/MENTION], you're correct. This reminds me that I should note the house rules that show up in this report and I should include the analysis that includes Green Flame Blade.

The house rule that is prominent in the Champion fighter and Frenzy Barb / Champ Fighter is: Critical damage rolls are Maximize damage dice plus roll damage dice plus modifiers, (i.e. a critical with a great axe does 12+1d12+modifiers).

The warlock analysis, not shown in the this report, does utilize Hellish Rebuke once over the ten round period of analysis. It uses Hex. When it receives 5th level slots I had it assigned to use Blindness / Deafness on 50% of the targets in a combat. I'll admit the use of Blindness / Deafness is not something I've seen anyone talk about using or seen anyone use in combat, but it seems to be a fairly sound tactic. In addition, a recent tweet by Mearls has me wondering if I'll be adding a house rule about how Hex works, http://www.sageadvice.eu/2016/10/19/spell-after-an-encounter/.

Thank you for the feedback.

cooperjer

Darkness + devils sight is stronger for offense than blind+deafness, which has a save. Though blind/deafness helps allies as well and doesn't take concentration.

A GWM+Polearm master pactblade running darkness + devils sight for advantage does rather well. Foresight at 17.

mellored said:

IMO, TWF just needs an extra feat comparable to polearm master or crossbow expertise.

Click to expand...

Unfortunately the only differences between TWF with Duel Wielder and just using Crossbow Expert is +1 AC, and at most two die sizes (or +2 damage). And while +1 AC is good, being just as effective at range is just as good in most cases.

Yunru said:

Unfortunately the only differences between TWF with Duel Wielder and just using Crossbow Expert is +1 AC, and at most two die sizes (or +2 damage). And while +1 AC is good, being just as effective at range is just as good in most cases.

Click to expand...

Ok, then a TWF sharpshooter feat.

Take -5 to hit, and when you TWF, you can make an extra off-hand attack for each attack you made with your main hand. You can move between attacks.
or something.

I added Foresight to the spreadsheet and posted the spreadsheet in the first post. Foresight is an amazing spell.