D&D 5E A tweak for the Battlemaster fighter

[Ashrym]

I was giving it some more thought as well. The "no feats" qualification is interesting because rangers tend to be MAD and fighters have 2 bonus ASI's they don't really need. I find fighters more likely to have feats or have them earlier. In a featless game this usually translates into ability score modifiers for skills or saves, or given the typical levels a game gets to more effective ability scores than a ranger (2-3 vs 3-5). Given the assumption of no 4th attack for the fighters it looks like the ASI's might be 4 vs 6. Bonus ASI's are under-rated, IMO.

I'm not sure about how the precision maneuver might be currently applied. It's one of the significant ones. I think more information on assumptions might be due. IME, battlemasters are preferable for combat.

 

[Quartz]

If you are using the bonus action then a better estimate is that you get it on half of your attacks IMO.

And I factor this in to my spreadsheet. Just change the number of attacks the fighter gets to a number between 3 (11th level and no extra attacks) to 6 (20th level and bonus and reaction). If you want to emulate only one extra attack a round (i.e. Reaction OR Bonus) then choose 4 for a 11th level Fighter or 5 for a 20th level Fighter. You'll see that the Fighter still sucks.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Let me know next time you have a battle that lasts 40 rounds....

 

[Pauln6]

Be warned that raw data can be misleading. If you only count damage that matters, fighters fare much better than you expect. A paladin spending spell slots to inflict 60 damage on a creature with 10 hp is actually doing 10 hp. You do get peaks and troughs and variations dependant on whether you have Dungeon crawls, one off fights, or adventures set against the clock and whether you are fighting large meat sacks vs lots of minions. Overall, there is not much difference between the classes.

I ended up giving battle masters two extra manoeuvres from a fan supplement plus one extra die - basically the martial Adept Feat for free.

 

[dave2008]

Really? Over 40 rounds a Ranger can make up to 160 attacks - two base attacks, an attack from a Bonus Action, and an attack from a Reaction each round.

The fighter is balanced excluding those, but fails when you include them. If you'd checked my spreadsheet you would have spotted this.

Hmm. I just checked your spreadsheet and you have the fighter doing more damage than the paladin and ranger. And that is without adding any "bonus" damage for the fighter's battle maneuvers or action surge. Did you upload the correct spreadhseet?

 

[Quartz]

Hmm. I just checked your spreadsheet and you have the fighter doing more damage than the paladin and ranger.

Yes, Fighters do more damage as long as you don't factor in the attacks from Bonus Actions or Reactions. As soon as you figure in those, Fighters drop behind. As I said in my OP:

but the other classes outshine it once you include attacks from the Bonus Action and the Reaction

It's not that the higher-level Fighter gets three attacks to the others' two attacks but five to their four. Both the Paladin and the Ranger get bonus damage to every attack which the fighter does not get. The Paladin gets +4d8 damage and the Ranger gets +4d6 damage from Hunter's Mark.

I was giving it some more thought as well. The "no feats" qualification is interesting because rangers tend to be MAD and fighters have 2 bonus ASI's they don't really need.

I specified no feats so as to keep things simple.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

However you wash it, "No feats" is a de facto fighter nerf.

 

[FrogReaver]

Hmm. I just checked your spreadsheet and you have the fighter doing more damage than the paladin and ranger. And that is without adding any "bonus" damage for the fighter's battle maneuvers or action surge. Did you upload the correct spreadhseet?

That's actually hilarious. His own math shows the fighter doing more after he repeatedly told me to "check his spreadsheet".

He didn't account for action surge or superiority dice in any way. He didn't account for OA's (rare as they are in many games) at all, despite proclaiming they were in his spreadsheet.

I think I'm going to fix his spreadsheet and repost.

What we see is that a level 10 Ranger does a slightly higher DPR than a level 10 Fighter (subclasses excluded).

Keep in mind the fighter in this example has +2 AC or +3 AC over the ranger. He has one extra ASI, so in a featless game that would translate to +2 to con.

The fighter subclass will add a lot more in terms of damage to him than the ranger's adds for him. I didn't factor that in because precision is a bit difficult to get right, but it probably offers the best daily DPR total. Even something like trip attack could significantly boost the fighters DPR and help teammates DPR.

 

[FrogReaver]

However you wash it, "No feats" is a de facto fighter nerf.

Honestly, even if feats are included and the big abusers are disallowed then it doesn't really help the fighter in terms of damage in that instance either.

I have no problem with the featless game concept. That's what I play. From experience I can tell you that fighter's (even battlemasters) do tend to get overshadowed by nearly every other melee class in such a game. It's really only with the -5/+10 feats that fighters become good.

The problem is without feats, all the other classes keep up in damage relatively well with the fighter, and the fighter has nothing to offer out of combat that they can't already provide along with lots of extra goodies. (I think after level 11 the fighter will step ahead of the ranger and barbarian in terms of damage in such a game, but paladin is still better and monk still offers the best utility.

 

[FrogReaver]

Be warned that raw data can be misleading. If you only count damage that matters, fighters fare much better than you expect. A paladin spending spell slots to inflict 60 damage on a creature with 10 hp is actually doing 10 hp. You do get peaks and troughs and variations dependant on whether you have Dungeon crawls, one off fights, or adventures set against the clock and whether you are fighting large meat sacks vs lots of minions. Overall, there is not much difference between the classes.

I ended up giving battle masters two extra manoeuvres from a fan supplement plus one extra die - basically the martial Adept Feat for free.

Overkill is not a thing to be concerned with.
1. Damage is a variable range and so having enough damage to guarantee your next hit kills an enemy also naturally produces a higher overkill value
2. Dead is the best condition and guaranteeing (or greatly increasing your chance for dead) by increasing the amount of overkill you can do is still a good thing.
3. Thus all reports that overkill is damage your not doing, while true misses the bigger picture. We aren't actually concerned with damage, we are concerned with dead. Higher overkill causes the dead condition more often than lower overkill (Exception is on exactly equal DPR PC's). Higher DPR correlates to the dead condition being afflicted to the enemy faster. That's why we care about DPR, not because the number is bigger.