D&D 5E Are ranged attacks too good in 5e?

[Bill Zebub]

Fair enough. I always try to speak and write from the mindset "what can I do to make D&D work the way I want?"

And mine is, "What do I hope WotC does for 6e?"

 

[Stalker0]

Bows are better than swords in game and in real life.

Something we have to remember though:

• Bows in real life take years and years in real life to be good at, and also require tremendous strength. The sterotype of the high dex/low strength archer is BS in real life.
• In real life, when your melee troops get in melee with the archer line...the archers are slaughtered. The notion that an archer can defend themselves perfectly fine and even still get shots off is also BS.

 

[humble minion]

In a complete white-room situation, or with a flying archer in a low-terrain area, range becomes a factor too. A longbow has 600ft long range, which is far longer than almost any spell, and Sharpshooter means that you won't even be attacking with disadvantage (which is an especially big deal in a campaign like the one i play in, which uses a NASTY homebrew fumble table on natural 1s)

The 5e weapon table needs a bit of an overhaul in general, to be honest (rapiers uber alles being one of the main offenders), but if I was making some houserules I'd specify that weapons with the Loading quality require two hands to use (because 1 hand has to be free to do the loading!) to put down the worst of hand crossbow shenanigans, but I'd also consider applying a minimum strength requirement of some sort to things like longbows. Analagous to the Strength requirement on heavy armour. Maybe if you don't meet the Str requirement with some bow weapons you don't get to add your Dex to damage? It'd mean that as an archer you can no longer completely dump Str without penalty.

Our campaign has a GWM paladin and a Sharpshooter ranger. I play the paladin and while I've rarely felt completely overshadowed, the lack of an effective ranged option (I have javelins, but see above re homebrew fumble tables so i rarely use them at long range!) has left me feeling like I'm twiddling my thumbs in some combats. However, our ranger almost never uses the -5/+10 ability from Sharpshooter (heaven knows why) and i think my opinion might change if he did. We have a hand crossbow rogue too, but he's put his feats into skill-monkeying rather than Crossbow Expert/Two Weapon Fighting etc.

While I haven't tested it in play, I reckon it was a mistake to make Crossbow Expert take away the disadvantages of using a crossbow, rather than simply enhancing its hitting power or something. Using a crossbow should feel tactically different to using a bow, and after Crossbow Expert, I'm not sure it does.

Edit: alternatively, Dex bonus to damage only applies at close range. After that, it's just too far away to be precise. Longbow close range brackets are still ludicruously long though.

 

[ECMO3]

when I played a Fighter/Rogue archer, I missed so rarely, especially as a Halfling, that I was once told to make all attacks at disadvantage for a fight due to high winds, and because the DM didn't say otherwise continued to do so for the next two encounters and didn't miss once).

So this has me wondering- compared to being a melee martial, well, the thread title says it all.

To answer the question in the title no.

On a Rogue your highest damage is often going to be booming blade.

As far as what i copied here; you slose sneak attack with disadvantage which means you may have hit but it was for crap damage.

 

[Maxperson]

But one of things I'm taking into account is an encounter with a flying enemy, who cannot be attacked with a greataxe.

Carry both. You don't need to be an expert with the ranged weapon for it to be useful against flying enemies. You can primarily be melee, with a minor in ranged beat downs. Especially if you're a Battle Master with Trip Attack. Shoot it out of the air and then beat it down with the axe.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And mine is, "What do I hope WotC does for 6e?"

I wish you good fortune on that. I have no reason to believe 6e will be a game I will want to play.

 

[James Gasik]

To answer the question in the title no.

On a Rogue your highest damage is often going to be booming blade.

As far as what i copied here; you slose sneak attack with disadvantage which means you may have hit but it was for crap damage.

Oh I know I lost my 3d6 Sneak Attack, it was suboptimal (the character was in many respects), but the fact I could do that still surprised me. I hadn't even gotten around to taking Sharpshooter or Crossbow Expert, but that made me really think I could get away with the -5 to hit more often than I had thought. Damage was my secondary concern, what I really wanted to do was throw out some battlefield control with my maneuvers. I only got it on one shot a round anyways.

 

[James Gasik]

Carry both. You don't need to be an expert with the ranged weapon for it to be useful against flying enemies. You can primarily be melee, with a minor in ranged beat downs. Especially if you're a Battle Master with Trip Attack. Shoot it out of the air and then beat it down with the axe.

You're right, I made the thread because I realized that you could just focus on archery and not really need a melee weapon. I almost got a magic short sword on my archer, but the Monk wouldn't stop begging me to let her have it. Otherwise I might have stabbed something on occasion, lol.

 

[ad_hoc]

No.

Sharpshooter is too good.

Ranged isn't. There are serious downsides to using ranged attacks. A party all specializing in ranged attacks is going to have a very hard time with quite a lot of encounters. They will obliterate some encounters but then get TPK'd by others.

 

[Amrûnril]

In a complete white-room situation, or with a flying archer in a low-terrain area, range becomes a factor too. A longbow has 600ft long range, which is far longer than almost any spell, and Sharpshooter means that you won't even be attacking with disadvantage (which is an especially big deal in a campaign like the one i play in, which uses a NASTY homebrew fumble table on natural 1s)

Long distance engagements certainly aren't limited to white-room scenarios. In a campaign with a lot of outdoor adventuring, it's more or less inevitable that some encounters will fall into that category, which means multiple rounds of unanswered attacks by ranged combatants about melee combatants. This would be one thing if long range shots had intrinsically poor accuracy, could be easily blocked by shields and had poor penetration against armor. But when those long range shots do damage at a rate comparable to melee weapons, melee focused combat approaches quickly start to feel invalidated. Harassing fire from such weapons also makes retreat next to impossible in a lot of scenarios.

That said, melee and ranged approaches do feel reasonably well balanced in dungeon crawls and other shorter range environments, which was likely the main focal point during design. And more complicated rules for weapon range would definitely feel anomalous given the relative simplicity of 5E's overall weapon/armor rules. Without a setting worse than "disadvantage" but better than "completely out of range", though, it's really hard to set ranged weapon properties in a way that's balances what ranged attackers can accomplish without overly limiting what they can attempt.