That is, a martial character can either take the feat, or do substandard damage.
That is simply bad design;
Since feats are explicitly optional, I'd have to assume standard damage is that possible without feats, at all.
as if dealing damage is a specialization only a small subset of martials are interested in.
Optimizing damage, perhaps, may be assumed to have limited appeal, and, for whatever reason, they decided that, with optional feats in play, the optimal path for that would two-handed weapons and archery, with other combat styles getting other feats on different paths...
...except, obviously, not all other combat styles. :shrug:
Because I'm not. I believe the current design of GWM/CE is a failure and a trap, and that it will keep wrecking games until WotC dies something about it.
That sounds like hyperbole, to me. A couple of imbalanced feats aren't wrecking games, poor DMing and problem players can wreck games, a couple of imbalanced feats, at worst, just narrow the scope of play where they apply - once everyone at the table has caught onto them, anyway.
I liek the appeals to 5E being popular AFAIK it has still sold less than AD&D and the 3E family and they had their flaws.
IDK what numbers you think you have to remotely back that up. WotC is in the habbit of saying their stuff is selling well pretty consistently, but this time around they've even used language that at least implies it's sold better than other editions since the fad (sure, there's room for equivocation, they may be talking units of a given book or $$$-not-adjusted-for-inflation or whatever to get there, but it's something).
3E family sold north of 1 million+ PHB
Wait, you're adding 3.0, 3.5 & PF PH sales guestimates /together/, aren't you?
Your game isn't close to "optimal" then. That doesn't mean the feat isn't broken. Only that you don't break it.
What's more 'optimal,' as a game, the game that breaks when you add an OP feat to it, or the one that doesn't?
While you're not wrong by the numbers, the numbers just matter less than the DM.
This thread isn't about WotC fixing GWM. No offense, but that's almost certainly a pipe dream based on what WotC has said to date.
I'm a bit amazed WotC has even published errata for 5e. The philosophy that the published rules are only a starting point kinda excuses them from any need to be flawless, or even continuously improved through official channels. DMs will provide the improvements.
You claimed the 5e can be broken to a degree that no other edition of D&D has before (you may as well throw normal encounters out and start from scratch if you want to challenge such a party). I was responding that, in fact, previous editions could be broken to such an extent. IMO, 3.x could be broken to a far worse degree than anything we've seen in 5e.
Can't argue with that. The classic game could break pretty dramatically, too, if the DM dropped the wrong magic items - heck, it would 'break' (have imbalances among the PCs) to more than the degree GWM/SS breaks 5e, just naturally, even by design, just in different directions at different levels. At low level, the non-/demi- human multiclass PCs would be broken; post weapon-specialization/TWFing, fighters would dish huge damage through mid levels; high level was the domain of single-class casters. And the classic game didn't even have encounter-building guidelines, that was a 3.0 innovation.
