D&D 5E So Was That Z Fellow right?

Henry said:

I have seen it, and in our groups they gave up because they kept missing more than half the time. The damage looks impressive, but when you count the number of extra misses, in practice at the table when a 10th level warrior with an effective attack bonus of +4 or +5 is trying to hit an AC 18 or 20 creature, it doesn’t work out that much better. Maybe it’s just that my players have worse dice luck than usual.

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At level 10 a sharpshooter crossbow expertise human fighter that start with 16 dex would have 20 dex and both desired feats. His attack bonus would be +4 from proficiency +2 from archery + 5 from stat - 5 from SS. That totals to 6. Then he uses precision on anything he thinks missed by 4 or less which turns about 80 percent of those misses into hits. Effectively this gives him the equivalent of about +9 to hit. If he had a +4 or +5 bonus and didn't use precision wisely then he did it wrong.

Mistwell said:

Is it that time of the month again where Zard pats himself on the back and demands everyone else pat him on the back to?

Must be a day of the week ending in "ay".



You have to understand the context. If his reply were to almost anyone else you'd be right. But in the context of posting that reply to Zard, after he does this same kind of post (with slightly different wording each time) yet again, it's an appropriate response. Give it some time and after you see Zard do this same thing pretty much every month for years, on multiple message boards, you might also want to react like that.

Mind you, I like Zard. He plays (or did play) the game a whole lot. He shared his experiences, and it was valuable to see. But, for some reason he really enjoys people paying attention to him (frequently posting threads with titles intended to get a negative outraged reaction), and patting him on the back and being told he was right and others were wrong (like this one). Once or twice, nobody would care. But he long ago exceeded the limit where he should be free from some pointed push-back over it.

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It *is* true that Zardnar posted about this a lot... and will post about this a lot too.

But the "pain" of those issues don't go away. They probably won't for the entire edition. It's a wound that won't heal. So the posts keep coming.

FrogReaver said:

At level 10 a sharpshooter crossbow expertise human fighter that start with 16 dex would have 20 dex and both desired feats. His attack bonus would be +4 from proficiency +2 from archery + 5 from stat - 5 from SS. That totals to 6. Then he uses precision on anything he thinks missed by 4 or less which turns about 80 percent of those misses into hits. Effectively this gives him the equivalent of about +9 to hit. If he had a +4 or +5 bonus and didn't use precision wisely then he did it wrong.

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So you’re talking about a heavily optimized build, for one class/race combo, with precision attack to shore up the penalty, which can only be used four times in the whole combat? You could have as easily used menacing attack or goading attack to achieve the same effect (limited number of hits with lots of extra damage) and hit all the time to boot.

Are you going to shine? Sure, you ought to, you optimized the heck out of it! It still doesn’t mean the feat is flawed, it means it is extremely powerful for that circumstance. (personally, I disagree with the design of the +2 from archery, because the Dex score already double-dips for AC, ranged attack and ranged damage, but that’s a different topic). If you’re going into every fight with four superiority dice, it also means to me that the DM is giving way too many chances to get an hour of uninterrupted rest in dangerous venues, too.

Henry said:

So you’re talking about a heavily optimized build, for one class/race combo, with precision attack to shore up the penalty, which can only be used four times in the whole combat? You could have as easily used menacing attack or goading attack to achieve the same effect (limited number of hits with lots of extra damage) and hit all the time to boot.

Are you going to shine? Sure, you ought to, you optimized the heck out of it! It still doesn’t mean the feat is flawed, it means it is extremely powerful for that circumstance. (personally, I disagree with the design of the +2 from archery, because the Dex score already double-dips for AC, ranged attack and ranged damage, but that’s a different topic). If you’re going into every fight with four superiority dice, it also means to me that the DM is giving way too many chances to get an hour of uninterrupted rest in dangerous venues, too.

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That you even mentioned menacing and goading tells me you don't understand how it actually works. Maybe next time don't talk so matter of factly about things you obviously don't understand.

The theory with precission strike is that you only need to use it on near misses. For example out of 20 attacks you will miss one of those attacks on average by a 1. If we use precision attack on that miss by a 1 we have turned it into a hit. So basically for every 20 attacks it takes 1 precision dice to increase my chance to hit by 1. I could do the same thing for misses by exactly 2 and 3 etc. Except misses by exactly 2 don't have quite a 100% chance of being turned into a hit with precision attack. Instead they have around a 90% chance of working. Misses by 3 are similar except precision has about an 80% chance of working. So what we are finding is that for every 20 attacks I make if I have a very small number of superiority dice for precision attack say about 3 then I can increase my overall chance to hit for that 20 attacks by close to 15% (that's close to a +3 bonus).

In other words, I'll need 1 superiority dice about every 6-7 attacks. That means starting 5 superiority dice will almost get me through about 30-35 attacks. Since I'll be making 3 attacks a round that's about 10-11 rounds of combat I can get through before needing a short rest. In those 10-11 rounds of combat I managed to increase my chance to hit by nearly an effective 15%. Keep in mind I'm not saying it increases my chance to hit on a given attack by 15%. It increases my overall chance to hit by about 15%. By the way I estimate that 10-11 rounds of combat is pretty dang close to 2 combats. So no, I don't need the 5 superiority dice I get at level 10 every fight to do what I'm saying with precision attack. I just need a short rest after 2 combats to keep it up.

Hopefully that's helped clarify it a bit. If you didn't see a character using it in the manner I'm describing then you haven't really seen what everyone is complaining about and so you really shouldn't be passing judgment on it.

Just one other tidbit for you. With the fighter I described at level 10, he gains 45% increased DPR (+8.5 DPR) compared to a fighter doing the same things without sharpshooter. (precision attack is the best damaging ability for a battlemaster fighter not using sharpshooter as well).

Henry said:

I have seen it, and in our groups they gave up because they kept missing more than half the time.

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Sorry to be blunt, but all that tells me, is your players need to practice their min max...



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Ancalagon said:

It's a wound that won't heal.

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Until WotC stops pretending all is well and issues errata, of course.


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Henry said:

So you’re talking about a heavily optimized build, for one class/race combo, with precision attack to shore up the penalty, which can only be used four times in the whole combat? You could have as easily used menacing attack or goading attack to achieve the same effect (limited number of hits with lots of extra damage) and hit all the time to boot.

Are you going to shine? Sure, you ought to, you optimized the heck out of it! It still doesn’t mean the feat is flawed, it means it is extremely powerful for that circumstance. (personally, I disagree with the design of the +2 from archery, because the Dex score already double-dips for AC, ranged attack and ranged damage, but that’s a different topic). If you’re going into every fight with four superiority dice, it also means to me that the DM is giving way too many chances to get an hour of uninterrupted rest in dangerous venues, too.

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It would be far more pleasing if you assume FrogReaver knows what he's talking about.





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FrogReaver said:

That you even mentioned menacing and goading tells me you don't understand how it actually works. Maybe next time don't talk so matter of factly about things you obviously don't understand.

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While this post is also very blunt, Henry, please take to heart that FrogReaver took the time to explain, in detail, the build.

Please appreciate that instead of continuing your questioning. He is not wrong.


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CapnZapp said:

While this post is also very blunt, Henry, please take to heart that FrogReaver took the time to explain, in detail, the build.

Please appreciate that instead of continuing your questioning. He is not wrong.


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I appreciate that he took the time to detail one extremely optimized build. Still doesn’t mean that the two feats are broken. Matter of fact, he spent more time talking about how precision attack is broken. Looks like I’ll be removing precision attack from my games.

More seriously, Frogreaver, thanks for explaining your position.

Yeah, those builds aren't likely to occur to most people, even assuming feats are allowed, and following the fights per day guidelines or going for more, will reduce the overall effectiveness by attrition.

I wouldn't expect to see it changed during 5E, maybe sometime next decade: doesn't bear on many games in any significant way, just min-maxers.