GWM without advantage

[Ralif Redhammer]

In my experience, GWM generally works like this:

Regular attack that hits: “Oh look, I rolled an 18! Next one I’m totally going to use GWM.”

GWM attack: me, rolling with advantage: “Oh look, I rolled a 5 and a 7."

With no calculations, I feel like unless you're playing a Variant Human, the ASI is more valuable than the GWM feat. That being said, when you pull off a GWM hit, it is pretty darn awesome. And that bonus attack, while situational, is still a free bonus attack. It's fun to take down an enemy, then another, just like that.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

And -5/+10 is still useful! It's very effective against foes with low AC and lots of hit points, such as zombies.

One thing people almost always leave out of analysis is that +5/-10 is also really effective against foes with low HP. If your enemy has a pack of wolves, snakes, or anything else with under 10+(minimum weapon damage)+(Ability score mod) hit points, then GWM/SS will automatically one-shot those enemies when it hits. That's a really big difference from needing 2-3 shots to down a creature, and it's even better for GWM since dropping a creature gives a bonus attack. None of the 'average damage' type charts that I've seen account for the extra attack from GWM, or the wasted HP on smaller foes.

 

[Yunru]

One thing people almost always leave out of analysis is that +5/-10 is also really effective against foes with low HP. If your enemy has a pack of wolves, snakes, or anything else with under 10+(minimum weapon damage)+(Ability score mod) hit points, then GWM/SS will automatically one-shot those enemies when it hits. That's a really big difference from needing 2-3 shots to down a creature, and it's even better for GWM since dropping a creature gives a bonus attack. None of the 'average damage' type charts that I've seen account for the extra attack from GWM, or the wasted HP on smaller foes.

Yes, but on the other side if they've got 20 or so HP, you waste a tonne of damage on the second hit.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Yes, but on the other side if they've got 20 or so HP, you waste a tonne of damage on the second hit.

Why would you use GWM/SS if you know its extra damage will do no good? It's not a permanent thing, you can turn it on and off per shot.

 

[Yunru]

Why would you use GWM/SS if you know its extra damage will do no good? It's not a permanent thing, you can turn it on and off per shot.

I don't know about you, but I don't know the HP of my opponents. My DM uses Bloodied at half health, but that still means I could of done anywhere from 50 to 99% of their health.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't know about you, but I don't know the HP of my opponents. My DM uses Bloodied at half health, but that still means I could of done anywhere from 50 to 99% of their health.

Standard practice in our games is to give some kind of telegraph if the enemy is close to death, like "The monster survived that last hit you did, but definitely looks like it's struggling to stay up" or "The zombie is still moving towards you, but it's been hacked enough its body is barely hanging together."

Beyond that, most fights in D&D in my experience feature at least one group of identical enemies (4 goblins, or 6 giant rats, or 12 kobolds, or something like that). Once one goes down, you know the approximate HP for the group.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

I don't know about you, but I don't know the HP of my opponents. My DM uses Bloodied at half health, but that still means I could of done anywhere from 50 to 99% of their health.

Like TwoSix said, it's pretty common to have a mob of identical cannon fodder with one or two 'captain' or 'lieutenant' types. With that, it's easy to guess their HP from the start or figure it out when the first one drops. Yeah you don't always know exact numbers, and sometimes it's not entirely clear (the smite-happy paladin who critted for 57 damage is probably a bit overkill) but it's really not hard to get enough of an estimate to decide whether the -5/+10 is a good idea or not.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Battlemasters and Samurai get great ways to counter act a -5 to hit. Champions are twice as likely to trigger the bonus action attack also. So I see 3 flavors of fighter that could get good mileage out of GWM.