D&D 5E What will be the maximum bonus on magic weapons?

[Li Shenron]

I would remove the attack/damage bonus completely from all magic weapons and armors that have other bonuses or special abilities.

I would lower the attack/damage bonus to +1 from most of those who don't have anything but such bonus.

I would keep the higher attack/damage bonus on some occasional item, but restrict how often or in what circumstances such bonus actually works.

 

[Pickles JG]

I would remove the attack/damage bonus completely from all magic weapons and armors that have other bonuses or special abilities.

I would lower the attack/damage bonus to +1 from most of those who don't have anything but such bonus.

I would keep the higher attack/damage bonus on some occasional item, but restrict how often or in what circumstances such bonus actually works.

I misunterstood this at first & thought you were talking about an ideal 5th rather than converting as a conversion it's good guidelines IMO at 10th level.

It was good to see an absence of vanilla +1 items in the Starter set. All of the wepoans & armourt had names & other abilities even if these were rather marginal. If you get weapon that does maximum damage to plants it is meh junk. If it is a +1 weapon that does that then it is a valuable & rare item with a good dose of flavour.

 

[Jer]

If you get weapon that does maximum damage to plants it is meh junk.

This depends entirely on the campaign. For the party that is fighting a Far Realm tainted Druid with his evil Treant allies and his Plant Aberrations, I suspect that such a weapon would be nearly priceless.

 

[the Jester]

I am much more worried about a plus to hit rather than a plus to damage. I would tend to allow higher damage bonuses while keeping the +1 to hit.

Yeah, before 3e I had a long tradition of giving away weapons that had different bonuses to hit and to damage. No reason not to bring that kind of thing back.

 

[SkidAce]

+ 6, because of Oriflamme (not converted yet.

Back in AD&D we created Sigildarks 99 Most Powerful Swords Synopsis and have kept converting them from edition to edition.

To be honest, its mainly for campaign flavor and legends, nobody has ever gotten their hands on anythin near or in the top 20. Except maybe Fragerach, a Final Word sword.

So functionally, to answer the OP, I think + 3 will be the max.

 

[KarinsDad]

It seems that the range is +1 to +3, but my guess is that we eventually see artifacts and/or epic weapons that are +4, even +5. So Excalibur might by a +4 sword of sharpness and Mjolnir might be a +5 hammer of some kind.

The PHB uses a loose array of tiers, levels 1-4, 5-10, 11-16, and 17-20 (I don't know why they aren't all five levels, but that's just me). So how about this:

tier one (1-4): non-magic weapons are the norm, +1 are rare
tier two (5-10): +1 weapons are the norm, +2 are rare
tier three (11-16): +2 weapons are the norm, +3 are rare
tier four (17-20): +3 are the norm, artifacts/epic weapons of +4 are rare
tier five (21-30 "epic"): +4 weapons are the norm, +5 are rare
tier six (31+ "immortal"): +5 weapons are norm

Or something like that.

This.

No matter how hard of a design rule today's game designers put in about +3 weapons being the max, some (nasty word avoided) game designer down the road in a splat book is going to throw in the bigger, better, badder +4 (or higher) weapons.

It's inevitable. They cannot help themselves. It's like an addiction.