D&D 5E Fighting Style Balance: Offense vs. Defense

[Mephista]

How much that matter starts to depend on the campaign, and the party, not the character. A party that's light on healing resources can't afford to keep a party member like that up. A campaign that tends towards the 5MWD has no problem with it (thanks to full overnight healing).

It also depends on how difficult the monsters are. AC is difficult to raise, while attacking accuracy increases fairly easily. At high levels, I find that AC becomes less useful in favor of other measures. I mean, hells. Its one of the major arguments centered around Great Weapon Mastery - at high levels, the -5 to hit is negligable compared to AC.

As such, AC becomes less less important at higher accuracy levels for many. Games do vary wildly enough that there's no standard answer, but even with as much standardization we can make between games, the answer is still going to change greatly depending on factors like level or preponderance of Saves versus Attack Rolls. OR, heck, even against enemies angling for Advantage on their rolls like PCs do.

As such, white room benchmarks aren't a factor I really feel do justice for the argument.

 

[Xeviat]

Thanks for the replies. I think I didn't make part of my question clear enough. I'm thinking about the benefits of choosing a shield over choosing a two-handed. The comparisons I was looking at was to compare a sword and board against AC X and the greatsword against AC X+2. The jump from 1d8 to 2d6 is a big one. Is it too big? Not big enough? I'm reminded of when I started playing WoW, and my friends told me to go two-handed at low levels because the benefits from a shield were low at low levels. I wouldn't want that choice to be made.

I found the discussion about what's fun for the player to be interesting. Value aside, offense is fun. Defense is passive and less fun. So should choosing defense be better mechanically to make it more enticing?


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[The Crimson Binome]

In a straight comparison, I would expect the defensive fighter to handily defeat the offensive fighter, because defensive fighters are pretty much only good against other fighters while offensive fighters are equally good against everyone. To complete the triangle, shield should beat greatsword because greatsword beats staff and staff beats shield.

 

[Tony Vargas]

AC is difficult to raise, while attacking accuracy increases fairly easily. At high levels, I find that AC becomes less useful in favor of other measures. I mean, hells. Its one of the major arguments centered around Great Weapon Mastery - at high levels, the -5 to hit is negligable compared to AC.

There is a compelling case that regardless of any 'should's, the game currently favors offense over defence, and not just in the context of combat styles....

As such, white room benchmarks aren't a factor I really feel do justice for the argument.

Facts and quantitative analysis have their place, even if not every argument benefits from acknowledging them.

 

[Bardbarian]

You pretty much said it in your statement OP but there really shouldnt be a balance. The sword and board player is balanced against the threat of incoming damage from monsters which scales differently from that of a player and the GW player is balanced against the HP of the enemies. they each serve a different role in a group which is improved exponentially by the presence of both in the group.

 

[CapnZapp]

Thanks for the replies. I think I didn't make part of my question clear enough. I'm thinking about the benefits of choosing a shield over choosing a two-handed. The comparisons I was looking at was to compare a sword and board against AC X and the greatsword against AC X+2. The jump from 1d8 to 2d6 is a big one. Is it too big? Not big enough? I'm reminded of when I started playing WoW, and my friends told me to go two-handed at low levels because the benefits from a shield were low at low levels. I wouldn't want that choice to be made.

I found the discussion about what's fun for the player to be interesting. Value aside, offense is fun. Defense is passive and less fun. So should choosing defense be better mechanically to make it more enticing?


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Without feats, the damage increase is small enough that you can choose whatever you feel is right.

With feats, the damage increase is so big it's not funny. Every fighter not boosting damage is left in the dust, together with cantrip users (not Eldritch Blast) and war clerics, valor bards etc.

With feats, the martial character (fighter, pala, barb) becomes the supreme damage dealer, and every party should have at least two.

Casters are reduced to specialists, rogue sneak attack becomes nothing special (and serious questions as to their viability are raised: why build such a squishy character for less than stellar damage)

...and defensive fighter builds generally only prolong combats, since their choice NOT to go offensive reduces total party DPR considerably.

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[Dualazi]

If we're breaking it down into the simplest terms of offense and defense, I would say offence because that's usually easier for the DM to account for. More specifically though I would rather develop a system where both shine in different scenarios, which is something that D&D 5e has not done well as yet, and I suspect will not be quick to remedy, unfortunately. So for the time being I am voting a slight favor towards offense.

 

[Mephista]

Thanks for the replies. I think I didn't make part of my question clear enough. I'm thinking about the benefits of choosing a shield over choosing a two-handed. The comparisons I was looking at was to compare a sword and board against AC X and the greatsword against AC X+2. The jump from 1d8 to 2d6 is a big one. Is it too big? Not big enough? I'm reminded of when I started playing WoW, and my friends told me to go two-handed at low levels because the benefits from a shield were low at low levels. I wouldn't want that choice to be made.

I found the discussion about what's fun for the player to be interesting. Value aside, offense is fun. Defense is passive and less fun. So should choosing defense be better mechanically to make it more enticing?

Well, there's more information needed on the subject, really. First of all? What class are you? If yuo're going paladin, for instance, I would put the recomendation on sword and board. Meanwhile, I think Fighter benefits more from Greatsword, given the presence of Action Surge.

Are you getting feats? If so, that changes the game a lot. Shield mastery, despite not increasing your dps a lot, is very excellent for knocking enemies prone, and granting advatnage to your entire party. That's a HUGE benefit, and highly recommended. GreatWeapon Mastery has one of the highest dps output in the game, but comes with some accuracy issues, so I recommend that primarily if you have someone to be running Bless or Bardic Inspiration or something similar and want to go offense. I'm also very fond of glaives with Polearm Mastery and Sentinel - quite the fun combination.

So, the question really comes down to less "is defense or offense better" than more of a question of "do you want to help your party out more, or be a huge dps machine?" Its a good question to think about, because D&D favors hyper specialization, and the choice here really should affect all your decisions from here on out. They're both extremely competative styles, so you can't go wrong with either path.

 

[Mephista]

duplicate

 

[The Old Crow]

One possibility is to let martial characters have one defensive and one offensive fighting style. Then the offensive and defensive styles can be balanced against their kind, rather than against each other.