D&D 5E Why everyone think that Battlemaster is better than Samurai?

[Garthanos]

And the other 16% are lying liars.

Lying liars who lie, is perhaps the full phrase.

"not well known" was what I was aiming for. It's actually a synonym for "swashbuckler" - originally a sobriquet for one of Napoleon's marshals I believe.

I might translate better to my thinking as dashing blades-man. Swashbuckler gets you pirate fans and wait a minute this ant no pie-rat.

 

[Blue]

Only in certain circumstances is precision better than advantage, and, honestly, you're unlikely to encounter those circumstances in normal play.

...

However, the utility of being able to use the +d8 after seeing the d20 roll significantly increases it's use efficiency, but that also increases observer bias in estimating its overall effectiveness. Advantage is almost always going to be more effective.

Advantage may be more effective on a single roll, but precision attack will have more effect over the course of an adventuring day. Because the results of a single roll is a small part of the comparison. Because their triggering conditions and frequency of use are so different.

Three rounds of advantage per day, picked before starting any attacks, blocking any bonus action attacks, will have the advantage change a miss to a hit a lot less times then up to four times per short rest (up to 12 times per day?) add in a die only when it can make a difference - not wasted on a roll that would likely hit, or on a roll that still (likely) won't hit.

With a 65% chance to hit, advantage has a 22.75% chance to turn a miss into a hit. (Turning a hit into a hit is no change.) With two attacks per round, so with six attacks over three rounds we can expect 1.365 misses turned into hit. Since it's a bonus action we can't add in bonus action attacks to increase that.

(I had Wolfram Alpha do the math: 6 trials at 22.75% probability of success - Wolfram|Alpha)

With precision attack, assuming we have a good idea of the AC needed, we don't have to waste any on hits. We only have to worry about the 1-7 results that would be a miss.

If we apply them only to 7s, all 12 are good - but that would take ~240 attacks to have enough. With 3-4 rounds * 6 encounters * 2 attacks per round we're looking at say 36-48 attacks a day, so let's aim for more. Heck, let's add it to 2+. That needs roughly 40 attacks to use up all 12.

So the chances are 100% to switch a miss to a hit on a 7, 83.33% (6), 66.67% (5), 50% (4), 33.33% (3), and 16.67% (2), which averages out a 50% chance of success assuming an even distribution of failed numbers (a natural 2 is just as likely as a natural 6).

12 trails at a 50% chance is 6 expected successed. (Wolfram Alpha again: 12 trials at 50% probability of success - Wolfram|Alpha)

So we can see that the number of uses plus the triggering conditions make Precision much more effective than Fighting Spirit when first taken. Both scale, Fighting Spirit with more Extra Attack, Precision Attack with more dice and larger dice. I think the bonus gets skewed even more in favor of Precision later on. Again, the limit on which misses to attempt to turn was based on number of attacks - more attacks mean more potential misses, so you can be more discerning on when to tirgger them because you still expect to use all of them. Since you'd be cutting out the lowest chance, the miss-to-hit change for any particular attack would grow, so you'd end up with more successes in the end.

That can also be realized with a bonus action attack, such as from Polearm Master or Great Weapon Mastery's crit - while advantage would give more crits, you have no bonus actions to take advantage of those since it was used to trigger Fighting Spirit.

And, this is assuming just trying to outdo Advantage in terms of attacks hitting. Being more selective on where to use Precision will up the chance of turning that miss into a hit so there's not a great loss in conversions, but will leave more superiority dice for other uses, such as Riposte.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Recharge on long rest is misplaced on the fighter.
The cavalier as well as the samurai suffer from that.
The palytest cavalier had recharge on short rest. I don't really know why it was changed.

 

[Ashrym]

Battle master is a lot more front-loaded, that's for sure. Maneuvers are more versatile too.

It's 10th level when tireless spirit guarantees fighting spirit once per battle that it looks a lot better. That makes for a lot of temp hit points throughout the day, fitting in an extra attack at 15th level decent. Strength before death is really good when it gets used but the tendency is to avoid using it. Comparing that to another late bloomer like survivor seems unfortunate because survivor gets used a lot in comparison.

 

[jasper]

It is in the freaking name.
BATTLE MASTER vs
Sam or You I
One is the master, the other is Sam.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Still simple to use but additional skill, language, wis saving throw made him a more interesting character.
samurai is not the best name.
this build can be use to play a Knight, an wise soldier.

I feel like it was only called Samurai because the other archetypes had subclasses already named after them. It clearly fits the "cultured, spiritual warrior" archetype that exists in dozens of cultures around the world, and in our game it was taken as such immediately. Samurai is the most obvious "pop culture" reference for it so I suppose there's that.

It is hilariously OP when the 5MWD is in effect, I note, which is most days where overland travel is happening in D&D. We have a level 13 one and basically any NPC who gets in front of him is toast. He does fall back to reasonable levels as the number of encounters increases.

Name-wise he probably needs a non-real-world-related name. Samurai isn't great and something like Beau Sabreur is fun but would cause even more confusion, especially if people looked it up. Cavalier would have been perfect if generations of idiots hadn't superglued that name to horse-warriors.

Hero, Gallant or Vanquisher would be my top suggestions. All meaningless but Gallant sounds right and all would allow people to take the class for what it is without being confused or put off by the name. The player in my campaign had the name issue until we looked through the abilities and he was like this is "exactly right for my concept!".

 

[Ashrym]

It's weird. Abilities like tireless spirit are decent but using them forces blowing resources early. That's a bit counter-intuitive to conserving resources for important battles.

It's nice to have a failsafe but those tend to get under utilized in various scenarios.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's weird. Abilities like tireless spirit are decent but using them forces blowing resources early. That's a bit counter-intuitive to conserving resources for important battles.

It's nice to have a failsafe but those tend to get under utilized in various scenarios.

I mean, at least in this case they get the "failsafe" at level 10, instead of as an utterly terrible L20 feature like a couple of classes.

 

[Ashrym]

I mean, at least in this case they get the "failsafe" at level 10, instead of as an utterly terrible L20 feature like a couple of classes.

The legendary bard capstone, lol.

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

I think with the fighter subclasses we've seen since the PHB that the designers themselves have realized that Battlemaster is imbalanced at level 3. It just gets too much making it a poor comparison when balancing future archetypes.

Samurai is much more in line with the Eldritch Knight. Instead of two cantrips and two first level spell slots you get a skill proficiency and three uses of tireless spirit.