D&D 5E Current take on GWM/SS

[FormerlyHemlock]

In these scenarios where the damage gets completely out of control, Bless is not the problem. The -5/+10 from GWM or SS is the one piece that makes it all possible.

For example, take the level 11 case from the table I posted earlier. An 11th-level archer fighter shooting at a medium-AC target (AC 16) with Crossbow Expert, Sharpshooter, Bless, and Advantage deals an average of 67.3 damage per round, compared to baseline archer damage of 23.5. Almost triple the damage.

So of those four things stacked together to create massive damage (CE, SS, Bless, Adv), how much do they each contribute? One way to look at it is: If you remove any one element, how much of the extra damage goes away?

                      Damage  Decrease in extra damage
All bonuses            67.3       0%
All except Bless       60.4      16%
All except CE          53.5      32%
All except Advantage   50.7      38%
All except SS          35.0      74%
No bonuses             23.5     100%

The damage drops by a decent chunk when removing any of the elements, but Bless is clearly the least important contributor to the damage, and SS is by far the most important contributor. Without SS, about 3/4 of the extra damage goes away. And this is only considering the -5/+10 component of SS; it would be even larger if ignoring cover or range penalties came into play.

Your analysis is biased towards a certain outcome. It can be biased to highlight other components by altering the situation. For example, here's that same analysis with stacked Crossbow Expert, Sharpshooter, Bless, Advantage (Faerie Fire), and Purple Worm Poison, going up against a Beholder (AC 18, Con save +4). A beholder is a target that is absolutely worth spending 2500 gold on to kill safely, especially a whole shipful of beholders, so purple worm poison makes perfect sense. Under these conditions, Sharpshooter is the most insignificant element of the combination. The venom is of course the most potent element, but advantage and crossbow expert are nearly as important.

                      Damage  Decrease in extra damage
All bonuses            189.69      0%
All except Bless       164.28      15%
All except CE          142.27      28%
All except Advantage   130.75      35%
[B]All except SS          183.15      5%
[/B]All except PWV         61.77       76%
No bonuses             18.38 (20.63 with longbow)     100%

This once again highlights the fact that Sharpshooter is famous not for being especially strong, but for being cheap and readily-available, and also having nice synergies (ignoring cover and range are very nice). But in any fight which is actually important, there are better ways to spend your resources than on buffing the Sharpshooter to twice normal DPR.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The second you add any option (MC, feats, templates, boons, magic items) to the game, rogues and mages fall behind. There is no way to boost Sneak Attack nor spells. Every Class with Extra Attack or Multiattack will take any bonus damage or accuracy better as they can stack the same bonus 2-5 times.
Even at -5/+5, a blessed up warrior probably leaves a rogue or mage in the dust for single target DPR.

The contest between single attackers, mages, and multiattackers is a losing one.

I'm okay with mages falling behind in the DPR game because they have other advantages. In fact, that is precisely why feats are important (in my eyes): without them, there is no real reason to play fighters over warlocks. Fighters without feats are boring.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm still wondering why some don't take into account DM concerns. It wasn't real fun to have the GWF annihilate enemies meant for an epic fight in a couple of rounds with nova damage using Action Surge coupled with the feats.

IMHO, if your epic fights are circumvented by 300 HP of damage, they weren't very epic in the first place. My idea of an epic fight is multidimensional, not straightforward: I previously mentioned tyrant ships full of two dozen beholders and an ancient red dragon Dragon Sorcerer 19 (with minions from Gate + Planar Binding (via Wish)). Both of these are scenarios that will wipe the party completely out if they simply approach it as "a fight" using their usual tactics. Any hope of victory needs to involve scouting, planning, fighting, and then adapting on the fly to all the ways the enemies just messed up your plan. If you get the dragon down from 546 to 300 HP, guess what? he's going to bonus action Dimension Door away, rest up for an hour, and come back at you with full HP and a completely new approach. (This makes it worthwhile to burn his Legendary Resistances if you can, since they aren't restored on a short rest.) So the PCs had better have a completely new approach of their own.

I just can't get behind the idea of an epic fight which consists of nothing but rolling dice for paladin smite damage/sharpshooting/Meteor Swarm/etc. on a non-mobile, unintelligent, beefy sack of 450 HP which sits there trying to bite/claw/claw you each round. That's not an epic fight, it's just housecleaning.

This is also why Rise of Tiamat was just awful.

 

[Celtavian]

Celtavian, And others who think these feats are too powerful, I just read up to about page 30 of this thread and then jumped to the end. I haven't played much 5e (maybe 10 sessions level 1-3) but have played 35+ years of D&D and I am about to start a campaign that will probably go to 20th. I have a couple of optimisers in my group. My suspicion is that these feats are unbalancing so my questions is which feats have you changed and how?

Sorry if this is answered up thread.

edit: are there any other things I should look out for (spells etc). Happy to be redirected to other threads for any of this.

I think you should let them play as is for your first few campaigns. See how they affect your campaign. You may not mind them. You have enough experience to change them to get the right feel for your campaign once you do a run through to see how they work with your group. Come back and let us know what you think after you see them in action at higher level. Every bit of info helps.

 

[Celtavian]

IMHO, if your epic fights are circumvented by 300 HP of damage, they weren't very epic in the first place. My idea of an epic fight is multidimensional, not straightforward: I previously mentioned tyrant ships full of two dozen beholders and an ancient red dragon Dragon Sorcerer 19 (with minions from Gate + Planar Binding (via Wish)). Both of these are scenarios that will wipe the party completely out if they simply approach it as "a fight" using their usual tactics. Any hope of victory needs to involve scouting, planning, fighting, and then adapting on the fly to all the ways the enemies just messed up your plan. If you get the dragon down from 546 to 300 HP, guess what? he's going to bonus action Dimension Door away, rest up for an hour, and come back at you with full HP and a completely new approach. (This makes it worthwhile to burn his Legendary Resistances if you can, since they aren't restored on a short rest.) So the PCs had better have a completely new approach of their own.

I just can't get behind the idea of an epic fight which consists of nothing but rolling dice for paladin smite damage/smiting/Meteor Swarm/etc. on a non-mobile, unintelligent, beefy sack of 450 HP which sits there trying to bite/claw/claw you each round. That's not an epic fight, it's just housecleaning.

Depends on the level whether 300 points of damage circumvents an epic fight. I do epic fights at all levels or fights I consider epic. Fighting a powerful owlbear for lower level characters can be an epic fight.

I can't get behind your idea of an epic fight. I want a solo dragon to be an epic fight like Smaug in Lord of the Rings. Your view of an epic fight looks like an MMORPG or something like Warhammer in my mind's eye. I don't want that kind of epic fight with over-sized armies of creatures that should be powerful solo creatures capable of fighting a party without much minion help. Doesn't suit my idea of an epic fight. Looks like a Superheroes and beyond to me. Or a level of Swords and Sorcery you see when gods fight. I'm not interested in that.

I would not enjoy an encounter like the one you outlined above. I would consider it absurd and so far outside of what I consider interesting fantasy as to turn me off from the game. It's a further illustration of different strokes for different folks. We're way different in how we want the game to play and what we find interesting. Your whole owl strategy with the dragon I would consider goofy as all get up. I would hate to see it in my campaign. I like my games to mirror the stories that I've read. They tend to be lowered powered fantasy than what you enjoy, though not gritty like some enjoy.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

They tend to be lowered powered fantasy than what you enjoy.

I don't think it's about the fantasy power level per se, I think it's about gamism vs. simulationism. You're basically gamist, as I understand it, and you try to provide fun encounters to your players. (Which BTW is perfectly fine. Not my cup of tea but not badwrongfun.) I am simulationist and try to provide a fun, coherent, interactive world for the players to generate their own conflicts/encounters within. At low levels, memorable and difficult fights in my campaign have consisted of things like getting detected by flying apes and draconian cavalry (re-skinned Centaurs) while sneaking into enemy territory, and holing up behind boulders for cover while trying to repel their missile fire. (Again, I did not force this encounters on them since it's a sandbox. I telegraphed the threat in this area, and the NPC's request/demand, and the players chose to try to infiltrate here instead of going elsewhere or gathering an army or negotiating or anything else.) A squad of a couple dozen cavalrymen isn't exactly a high-powered fantasy trope. The only thing it's violating is the DMG encounter guidelines, which is a gamist thing and not a fantasy convention.

DMG guidelines at low levels exist to generate squads of hobgoblins which are just barely big enough to lose in an interesting way. Simulationism dictates that squads of hobgoblins should be small enough to maintain a good force-to-space ratio over contested territory but big enough to not needlessly endanger the force against expected opposition. How big that is depends on a number of factors--and so there are multiple paths to victory. You can either hammer straight through the hobgoblin force, or you can start ambushing little chunks of two dozen of them at a time until they contract into a big ball of 400 nasty hobgoblins all in one fort--and then you bypass and ignore them. Mission accomplished, depending on what your mission was. To me that makes 400 hobgoblins an interesting challenge at mid levels (say, 5 to 8). At low levels (1 to 4) it would be a deadly challenge but you might have to engage anyway, cautiously, if all the other good guys are dead. That is an interesting challenge in a different way.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm okay with mages falling behind in the DPR game because they have other advantages. In fact, that is precisely why feats are important (in my eyes): without them, there is no real reason to play fighters over warlocks. Fighters without feats are boring.

I agree.
Skill monkeys have Expretise. Mages have magical effects. Priests can heal.

Fighters without feats aren't boring but their range of effects and roles is low. So they have to be best at it by a point where you have to notice what is lost by not having one.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Fighters without feats aren't boring but their range of effects and roles is low. So they have to be best at it by a point where you have to notice what is lost by not having one.

This is just an opinion, but: since fighters get ASIs/feats as class features, I see fighters in a featless game as being about as exciting as a wizard who gets +2 to Int at level 2 instead of a school specialization. Not necessarily underpowered, but not interesting to me as a player.

 

[Minigiant]

This is just an opinion, but: since fighters get ASIs/feats as class features, I see fighters in a featless game as being about as exciting as a wizard who gets +2 to Int at level 2 instead of a school specialization. Not necessarily underpowered, but not interesting to me as a player.

I find that featess games with fighters are as interesting as the DM adjudications allowed and Player Improvisation done. And the DMG has many options that add a lot for featless games like marking, disarming, and cleaving. But default monsters are well so they match featless games well.

DMs really should adapt their games to the rules they allow.
Allow feats and the players powergame, use custom monsters.
Have fewer encounters that the assumption, adjust your XP budget.
Have more conversations, boost the social features of the nonsocial nonmagical classes.

 

[Celtavian]

I think most DMs do adjust their games.