That's still 100% subjective, though.
The distinction between non-functional & OP or 'abuseable?' Or the specific examples? Because I don't think there's a lot of room for subjectivity in a mechanic that supposed to model a challenge becoming more difficult actually making it /easier/ - that's non-functional. Similarly, when the feats available to improve on two combat styles can deliver a lot more benefit than those available to other styles (and I'm not even sure, atm, if all the combat styles have such feats available), that's not a subjective things, that's what feats are available, and how they work, mechanically.
Opinions about those things can be subjective. If you think fighters who choose archery or two-handed melee weapons simply should be able to cheese up much higher DPR via some not-to-difficult-to engineer combo centered around one of those imbalanced feats, then that's subjective. It's not wrong to have that preference, it may work well for your group, or it may be purely theoretical in that no one actually does that. If you dislike it, and want a more balanced game, that's also a preference, and preferences are subjective - and you have a little work to do to fix things up, not because the rules are "broken for you" (they're the same for everyone, until you change 'em) but because your preference is to fix them.
In the game of [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION], there's a 100% chance of the feat being broken in that sense. In any game that I run, there's a 0% chance of the feat being too powerful or abuseable, so it isn't broken by the definition above, either.
If you stop your players from abusing it or can count on them not to, then /that's a fix/. Not every fix to a bad mechanic involves changing the mechanic, nor or those two off-hand characterizations the only ways to do so.
The game was intended to work in X fashion, and the math was broken so it didn't work that way.
That was the narrative at the time, but it didn't quite hold together. The 'intent' was divined from the way the 'treadmill' progressed at heroic, and extended into paragon & epic. It was a matter of simple, obvious arithmetic. So simple and obvious that the idea it was a mistake strained credulity. My theory, at the time, was that +2 to +6 stat booster items like those in 3.x were cut at the last moment and the math not adjusted for their absence - I've never hears a peep from any insider that such may have been the case, though, so I find it rather doubtful. You may not have noticed in the torrent of invalid accusations hurled at 4e at the time, but another issue noted was that a number of leader buffs gave an attack bonus based on an ability score, and since ability scores could increase, would become more potent at higher levels, /because of the treadmill keeping the chance to hit about the same at all levels/. Of course, the 'broken' math meant that the treadmill didn't do that. Yeah. Anyway, a series of OP 'Expertise' feats were introduced to patch the perceived hole in the math. They were broken in the imbalanced sense, in that they were more powerful than other feats, making them must-haves or 'feat taxes.' When people complained about expertise feats being a 'tax' and reducing customizeability by eating up a (not really that) precious feat, the response, in Essentials, was to give each already OP/must-have Expertise feat a rider that was different based on the weapon or implement in question (no, that really happened, I'm not making it up).
Right there, we have an analogy to GWM/SS, both of which are, similarly, OP feats that can be argued to serve a purpose (hps/damage baloons in 5e, GWM/SS lets weapon-users keep up with that curve). Of course, there's some differences, too. GWM/SS apply to only two combat styles, while Expertise feats were available for every weapon and implement. 5e feats, including GWM/SS are explicitly opt-in optional, even though they're in the PH, while the 4e Expertise feat taxes came under the cynical 'everything is core' policy, and, the even more potent versions in Essentials, were, as the name implies, not only core, but part of the simple new-player-facing 'Evergreen' (yeah, right) product line. Both present issues with encounter balance, GWM/SS also presents issues with intra-party and class balance, but the DM is free to decline it up-front, while the feat taxes were all but mandatory (DMs /did/ ban them, of course).
Just because you could still use it broken doesn't change that fact. It just means that it wasn't so broken that it was unplayable. It's like a car with a missing bumper.
That's almost the case with GWM/SS, except that it's more optional than a bumper. ;P
As I've tried to explain before, it's not about "Not minding, not seeing, not noticing, not caring". It's that I, and seemingly many others, do not have this issue.
I don't see how that's different. The issue exists, if you don't experience it, you either aren't using the affected mechanic, are using it with restraint, are fixing it, or are otherwise making a non-issue of it. That in no ways denies that the issue exists, nor that others do find a need to come up with other solutions, such as changing the mechanic, itself. It's really prettymuch irrelevant to a discussion of a mechanical fix.
Yes, you can simply not use feats like I do when I'm not running AL. Yes, your players can exercise restraint, or you can impose it. Yes, you can keep the spotlight moving so DPR doesn't become the be-all/end-all of your campaign just because one player can output a lot of it. No, those aren't the only alternatives to a mechanical fix.
But modding the feat is also a legitimate option.
The "brokenness" of the power attack combo can be a feature, rather than a bug, for the right table.
Nod. If you want archers and greatsworders to have a higher cieling than other combat stylists, for instance, it's a 'feature.' It's not any less a bug for being desireable to someone with that preference, though. (And, really, the kind of 'broken' we're talking about here - OP or imbalanced or whatever you want to call one choice being clearly better than the alternatives - is not the kind of bug 5e has exactly but a lot of effort into eradicating. 5e's ruleset is a starting point, building a lot of balance into it would be, to an extent, a wasted effort, since the expectation is it'll be modded, and anyone modding it would have to be very careful or they'd affect that balance - that's what kept a lot of DMs from even trying to mod 4e, for instance - something else, entirely, kept them from trying to mod 3.x, but that's a whole 'nuther subject.)
This goes significantly beyond just installing the race car components. This is like installing those components and then tweaking them until you're getting basically as much performance out of them as allowed by the laws of physics. And then complaining that the fuel economy sucks et al.
Hey, once you go for the 8-cylinder engine over the hybrid, fuel economy goes down. ;P
Now, I realize that I'm treading dangerously close to badwrongfun territory here, so please let me just say that I don't intend it that way. Different tables have fun in different ways, and I'm not suggesting that one is better than the other. I'm simply trying to explain to you why, IMO, it isn't universally broken the way you seem to believe it is.
Nod. We really aren't saying radically different things. I'm judging it based on it's mechanics and how they can be used, you're basing your judgment on how they're actually used at your table. The mechanics are universal (until you change or decline to opt into them, that is, so it's a very small and voluntary universe!) and, in the case of the -5/+10 option, even quantifiable. Opinions about them and preferences relating to them are not.
So, if I don't object too strongly to calling the feat 'broken,' it's not because I think it's 'universally broken' in everyone's game, it's just that I don't find the conclusion about the mechanics, themselves, to be unreasonable. They are not such unclear mechanics that how they work is in dispute, and they're amenable to analysis. Maybe 'broken' isn't the best label - OP, imbalanced, 'just better,' whatever - and it makes people defensive? IDK.
Again, that's not meant as a criticism of play style. However, I'm not sure that it's fair to criticize the system for being broken when the most likely reason for it breaking is that the players are going out of their way to break it. Power Attack + Reckless + Bardic Inspiration + Lucky + Bless is not something that is likely to come about by random chance.
Bard, Barbarian, & Cleric doesn't sound like an outlandish set of classes to have in a party, nor does the barbarian seem like a bad target for buffs. Barbarians stereotypically go for big two-handed weapons. Doesn't seem that implausible.
