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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6632258" data-attributes="member: 5834">I covered GWM.Did you really miss that bless and fly were on the paladin as well? Standard buffs to get melee martials into combat. Melee martials have a mobility problem. Eliminate the mobility problem and you boost group damage. So you're going to throw large groups of enemies at the GWM every fight to eliminate his capabilities? This seems to be your answer to everything. As a DM you can justify this tactic on occasion, but not all the time, not even in every major fight.All this effort? One 1st and one 3rd level spell. Paladin is a Shield Master that gets a bonus action knockdown every round. You don't seem to understand that it is all very little effort and standard abilities used to support the party in the course of play. Not much effort at all.Very few sorcerers take empower. It is a weak metamagic. This is more theorycrafting because you haven't played to very high level and haven't seen how things work. You like to rely on theory-crafting. I like to theory-craft and then see if my idea works. I've seen the GWM in combat and played in a high level party against dragons, outsiders, and the like. GWM does superior damage. I already explained that the evoker did more AoE damage. He softened up creatures for the martials to clean up. Your sorcerer might be fun for damage, but he might lack in other areas a party needs. Or he might become the focal point for attacks from a powerful monster rather than the AC 21 GWM fighter with 200 hit points. The sorcerer in general won't last as long if they focus on him rather than the paladin and fighter. Not to mention we didn't have a sorcerer in the group. I'm not worried about casters versus martials for damage, I'm concerned about other types of martials being discouraged.I can't at the moment take much advice from you. You're level 7 in an over-sized party for the game design proscribing grapple and shoving as the end all be all for dealing with martial PCs while not seeming to take into account what the other PCs might do to counter such abilities or the +10 bonus the fighter has in athletics at high level or the two barbarian levels that give him adv on strength checks when raging. Like the bard casting hypnotic pattern to eliminate groups of bad guys while the GWM fighter kills them one at a time so as not to break the effect. Even with your sorcerer doing decent damage, he likely won't kill a bunch of high level fiends with his fireballs.You'll see what problems you have when you get higher level. They might be different since your party is a non-standard size and class composition.  I recorded hard data. I explained to you the group. I explained the situations where things differed. Your theory-crafting offers no insight other than "If I had a fire sorcererer, he might match the GWM on occasion" or "if a different DM threw things at the party that attempted to grapple someone prone, it might go differently". I wonder if I asked your players if this grapple/shove was a tactic you used on them as often as you tell me to use it. If so, why haven't they found a way to deal with it?</blockquote>

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