I'm creating my first fighter, a mountain dwarf great weapon battle master, beginning at level 3. I chose menacing attack, precision attack, and riposte for maneuvers, and have rolled up this set of abilities (racial mods applied):
STR 18, DEX 13, CON 17
INT 11, WIS 12, CHA 10
Since I was lucky to get a starting STR of 18, I might go for feats early on. I'm currently debating between Polearm Master and Great Weapon Master, maybe will do both to level 6, but Sentinel is also attractive due to unstable party composition. I'm playing in a campaign where we have two separate parties that often swap characters in and out based on player availability, so there's no fixed party composition to base choices on. Casters and skirmishers are overrpresented; we have a regular cleric in one group, and a barbarian and a paladin who sometimes show up.
On the other hand, again with STR already 18, I might bump DEX and CON early to even scores for better initiative, hit points, and CON saves. So that might be worth doing at level 4-6 before taking a feat. What do you think? While I generally prefer having more active options over passive benefits, these are considerable passive benefits for one ASI!
I have also noticed that the sample builds go for DEX 12 and WIS 13, so there's that to consider now. Even so, the DM hasn't thrown much in the way of WIS saves at us, so I think I can safely delay taking the feat Resilient (WIS).