I'm not overestimating the damage increase. As I've stated we hashed this out in another thread. Once you start taking into account buffs, battlemaster dice, vows, bless, foresight, familiars providing adv., spells providing advantage, prone, and numerous other party capabilities that boost hit chance, the damage divide is immense. From the damage I recorded during the course of a campaign, I believe it is 70 to 100% more damage over the course of a fight than a character not using either of those feats. They do more damage in nearly every fight. Major fights they nova using special abilities. In mook fights a single bless spell allows them to use GWMf on every hit vastly outpacing other classes for damage. This is recorded over the course of about 6 levels after level 10 because I wanted to see the real game effect of the feats. You have a seven person party. You should record damage and see the percentage difference. You must have a Sharpshooter and GWM user in your party.
Theory-crafting only goes so far. Hard data is much better. The hard data showed that the GWM fighter when set up to succeed with bless and fly (to eliminate mobility issues with a melee martial) out-damaged everyone in the group by 70% to 100% over the course of a fight. Sometimes the paladin closed the gap with smite criticals. Occasionally a caster would have a good hit here and there with a spell critical. Overall, the GWM fighter was damage king by a wide margin.
Who does this hurt the most? Mostly martials not using the feats, though I don't worry about it as a much with defensive martials using Shield Master. It hurts lower level casters that lack spell versatility and especially rogues. Rogues are hurt the most by the feats given their damage balance is based on single large hits using Sneak Attack damage.
Sure. The DM can always make something harder for any class with something imbalanced. At least neither of those feats are as bad as Come and Get Me or 3E Power Attack at high level. Unless you're going to make every fight so hard that you can't use GWM, the GWM will have a vast damage advantage over non-GWM fighters. I think the Sharpshooter damage advantage will be greater than GWM. I'll start recording damage once he hits level 10 like before. It doesn't seem as big a problem at lower level save on a few nova occasions.
I'll post the data this time to add information for those still in doubt.
The data I collected before was in the following party:
1. Shield Master Paladin: Probably skewed the numbers in favor of the GWM fighter because he was using one of the lower damage paladin options, though he was a Vengeance Paladin.
2. Battlemaster Fighter: Probably the best fighter for consistent nova damage with GWM.
3. Life Cleric: Not much of a damage dealer.
4. Lore Bard: Also not much of a damage dealer, but great at helping the GWM fighter do his damage.
5. Evoker Wizard: Supposed to be a damage dealer, but could not match the GWM fighter save with AoE damage. I was getting better at dealing damage. If the DM allows the Evoker to use his Maximize evocation damage capabilities on cantrips for max cantrip damage all the time, the gap closes somewhat at level 14 plus. That usually allows the Evoker to use one maximized regular spell, then max his cantrip for the rest of the day for an average of 45 point fire bolt hit.
Not the best comparison, since no TWF damage dealer. Still clearly showed the damage advantage a GWM fighter has over other classes.
I think the next comparison with Sharpshooter will be better because I have an Eldritch Blast specialist warlock in the group (not a Sorlock. Warlock Fighter) and an Open Hand Monk. That should give me some good real game damage number comparisons.
First off, I stated that I was explicitly discussing GWM using the -5/+10 versus GWM not using it. You appear to have missed that in your response here. So if we are not discussing the same thing, of course there will be miscommunications.
I do absolutely think that GWM has the potential to do huge amounts of damage. But I also think that your "hard data" here is skewed and you don't even see it. Your group purposely buffed this PC with Fly and Bless (although other PCs were also buffed with Bless) and (eventually) Foresight and advantage from familiars and such, and you wrote down the damage results.
But this is anecdotal. You have stated before that your DM allows the PCs to dictate combat and such. With a different DM, this PC might not shine quite as much. For example, a DM who throws large groups of foes at the PCs could easily grapple/prone this PC, giving him disadvantage (or having NPCs put up Darkness or Fog Cloud, or using traps to split up the party, or killing familiars, or a wide variety of other things that can shake up the effectiveness of a party).
Another problem with this is that you put all of this effort into making this one PC shine so much that you totally disregard how much other PCs can shine if the spotlight is focused on them and the party tactics revolve around them instead.
As an example, at level 6 when a fire Draconic Sorcerer gets Elemental Affinity, if he has Elemental Adept fire, he does 36.3 average points of damage on average with an Empowered Fireball spell instead of the normal 28 (+3 more for Charisma, +5.3 more for re-rolling 3 bad rolls and all 1s automatically becoming 2s). At level 12 with a 20 Cha, this increases to 39.3 (5 rerolls, +5 for Charisma).
Many encounters, he should be able to get 3 foes in each of his Fireball spells (sometimes more foes, sometimes less foes, but usually at least 3 because he casts the spell when he has the best chance of hitting more foes). At level 6, that's a range of damage of 163 to 327 points of damage. Typically at these levels, foes have a Dex mod of +1 or less, so average damage here against DC 14 or 261 average points of damage per day, 87 in the round he casts (29 per foe). The 6th level GWM fighter in this party averages 28 or so points of damage per round (2+ attacks, assume 60% chance to hit at -5/+10 due to buffs like Bless or Feinting), so it typically takes the fighter 3 rounds to do the same damage that the Sorcerer does in 1 round.
The Sorcerer then has other options to add even more damage in the other 2 rounds. Granted, at level 6, this is only 3 times per day, but that's 3 encounters a day where the Sorcerer is typically going to do more damage than the Fighter (and the Sorcerer still has 7 more spells he can use). Granted, there will be times when the Fighter rolls huge damage, criticals, etc. But there will also be rounds where the Sorcerer rolls 5 or better on most of his damage dice and/or he gets 5 foes in the blast and/or most or all of his foes fail their save. Sure, the Fighter might nova at 75 points in a single round, but the Sorcerer might nova at 200 points.
At level 17 when the GWM Fighter is near his peak often doing 75 or more points of damage per round (a portion of this because he is buffed), the Sorcerer gets upwards of 12 Fireballs a day (potentially 2 or 3 per encounter) ranging from 19 to 65 damage per spell per foe (limited in number to more powerful spells) or 692 to 1384 points of damage per day with a save DC of 17 (close to 1200 points of damage). The Sorcerer can still average better damage per round as the Fighter for those 12 rounds (more if he can get more than 3 foes in a blast, the times for which he will use higher level slots). The Sorcerer also has a lot of other spells and options.
Granted, this tactic does not work against creatures immune to fire. And if the party plays dumb, the Sorcerer will not be able to get as many foes in without hitting allies. And he will not be able to use it every single encounter. And the Fighter has more opportunities to wipe out creatures at the higher levels and will be doing more damage in rounds when the Sorcerer is not casting Fireball. But this is a lot of levels where the Sorcerer does comparable damage per day than the Fighter. No doubt, the Fighter does more damage at higher levels, especially if the rest of the party buffs him.
But if the party tried to assist the Sorcerer (setting up a front line so that most of the foes are on one side of the fight, pushing foes into Wall of Fire spells, funneling foes into chokepoints, etc.) like you have the party assisting the Fighter, the Sorcerer would shine too. The numbers above do not take into account any other ways to optimize this Sorcerer or to have other PCs buff him.
I'm not an optimizer and I was able to find a PC who could do comparable damage to a GWM fighter for many levels (maybe not at level 20, but probably just as good per day at levels 6 through at least 15 or so, a big chunk of the levels). I'm sure that someone who really lives and breathes optimization could find other combinations that work even better, even for melee types.