Level Up (A5E) Any plans to fix Two weapon fighting in Level up?

[tetrasodium]

Commandercrud and Horwath imply or state that if anything two weapon fighting is a strong style. Do the rest of you agree?

Not really, it's lacking support so other than the rogue's sneak attack dice it falls by the wayside as people start getting sceond/third/etc attacks & things get worse when you factor in the one true way of melee imposed by 5e otherwise known as great weapon master. Even things like charger conflict with the BA need despite being terrible for any melee build.

 

[Stalker0]

Not really, it's lacking support so other than the rogue's sneak attack dice

Paladins are also surprisingly good with TWF if you really want to nova with smites.

 

[DeviousQuail]

My group changed the dual-wielder feat to allow the offhand attack to be part of the attack action instead of the bonus action. We like it and while I haven't done the math it seemed to bring the style into closer consideration with GWM, PAM, and the like.

I don't know if fighting styles is an area LU is looking to revamp but my vote is to add new ones alongside the existing ones.

 

[rules.mechanic]

My group changed the dual-wielder feat to allow the offhand attack to be part of the attack action instead of the bonus action

We do pretty much the same (noting the bonus action can not then be used for another offhand attack). We also allow players without the feat to choose between taking the bonus action off-hand attack or a +1 to AC until the beginning of their next turn.

 

[tetrasodium]

Paladins are also surprisingly good with TWF if you really want to nova with smites.

That gets into "should you be able to smite more than once per turn" & possible hair splitting of RAW where 5e is kinda lazy with. Technically this can be done as many times as you can attack per round as long as you have spell slots to "expend"
this

does not conflict with this grossly misfiled restriction on spellcasting given the existance of quicken spell & action surge in the phb

But all of these do

because they are all worded like this

Personally I don't allow smite spell spamming like you suggest, either the wording should be fixed to clearly be something specific or it should get a "once per turn" like sneak attack

 

[Stalker0]

Personally I don't allow smite spell spamming like you suggest, either the wording should be fixed to clearly be something specific or it should get a "once per turn" like sneak attack

I also house ruled that smite only works once per turn, but to me its still a house rule. By the book., TWF and Smite go together pretty well.

 

[Rabulias]

A paladin's Divine Smite ability is very different and separate from the various [verbing] smite spells. I believe the potential use of Divine Smite multiple times in one turn is intentional.

 

[tetrasodium]

A paladin's Divine Smite ability is very different and separate from the various [verbing] smite spells. I believe the potential use of Divine Smite multiple times in one turn is intentional.

You sure about that? This is the only relevant errata & changing it so a 2 paladin/18 sorc or whatever can use all of their spell slots for divine smite if they wanted does not bode well for that strict RAW interpretation.

You only need to look at warlock for numerous examples of both plain wording & RAW that are completely not how it is but should have been caught with even cursory sanity checking. For example:

Spoiler: no errata

Spoiler: errata

One of 5e's "features" that is supposed to be a strong point is not spending much effort on RAW in favor of forcing the GM to finish the system on the fly. Maybe a5e can do a better job of not forcing the gm to finish the system to avoid massively broken stuff than 5e I've never seen wotc weigh in on if paladin is supposed to be able to multi-divineSmite in one turn or not & their lax approach to sanity checking combined with reluctance to errata even the most obvious screwups in favor of forcing the gm to do it being touted as good thing works against the idea that the RAW was something intentional that should be left as is rather than declared a spell.

@Stalker0 it's a good second chance if they miss sure, but smites are a lot more limited than sneak attacks, giving up things like GWM probably hurts more than they gain because it doesn't scale when they gain a second attack at level 5

 

[Faolyn]

One of 5e's "features" that is supposed to be a strong point is not spending much effort on RAW in favor of forcing the GM to finish the system on the fly.

It's definitely a feature, not a bug. 3x had too many rules that bogged everything down. It's not "lax," its there to prevent unnecessary over-tuning. Plus, the more rules you have, the easier it is to mess something up by accidentally breaking it.

(And I say this as an autistic person who really likes to have her rules written out plainly.)

I've never seen wotc weigh in on if paladin is supposed to be able to multi-divineSmite in one turn or not

From the paladin description: "Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon's damage." Compare to the rogue's description of sneak attack: "Once per turn, you can deal an extra 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the attack roll." So it's pretty clear in saying that you're not limited to one smite a turn. Paladins can nova the hell out of a target if they want to and have the slots to do so. Rogues... can't.

Also, smite spells are different than the Divine Smite special ability, as evidenced by the fact that non-paladins can take the spells (e.g., a Hexblade can take wrathful smite) but can't Divine Smite, any more than a warlock could Lay On Hands. Your paladin wants to cast searing smite and then you decide to Divine Smite on top of it? Go for it! Bring down the wrath of your oath upon your foes!

The warlock thing is a bit vague, I admit, but warlocks aren't technically "real" spellcasters (Pact Magic is it's own thing; if you read the "Spell Slots" section under multiclassing, you'll notice that warlocks aren't included). So what this means is that a multiclassed warlock gains only its warlock spell slots after a short rest, not all of its spell slots.

If you don't enjoy houseruling, I can see where you would be frustrated. But in the long run, it's pretty simple: go by what the actual rule says paladin entry doesn't say 1/turn, so it's not 1/turn), and don't worry about how it intersects with another rule until that situation actually comes up in play and causes a problem. There's no real reason to fix something that hasn't been proven to be broken.

 

[tetrasodium]

It's definitely a feature, not a bug. 3x had too many rules that bogged everything down. It's not "lax," its there to prevent unnecessary over-tuning. Plus, the more rules you have, the easier it is to mess something up by accidentally breaking it.

(And I say this as an autistic person who really likes to have her rules written out plainly.)



From the paladin description: "Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon's damage." Compare to the rogue's description of sneak attack: "Once per turn, you can deal an extra 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the attack roll." So it's pretty clear in saying that you're not limited to one smite a turn. Paladins can nova the hell out of a target if they want to and have the slots to do so. Rogues... can't.

Also, smite spells are different than the Divine Smite special ability, as evidenced by the fact that non-paladins can take the spells (e.g., a Hexblade can take wrathful smite) but can't Divine Smite, any more than a warlock could Lay On Hands. Your paladin wants to cast searing smite and then you decide to Divine Smite on top of it? Go for it! Bring down the wrath of your oath upon your foes!

The warlock thing is a bit vague, I admit, but warlocks aren't technically "real" spellcasters (Pact Magic is it's own thing; if you read the "Spell Slots" section under multiclassing, you'll notice that warlocks aren't included). So what this means is that a multiclassed warlock gains only its warlock spell slots after a short rest, not all of its spell slots.

If you don't enjoy houseruling, I can see where you would be frustrated. But in the long run, it's pretty simple: go by what the actual rule says paladin entry doesn't say 1/turn, so it's not 1/turn), and don't worry about how it intersects with another rule until that situation actually comes up in play and causes a problem. There's no real reason to fix something that hasn't been proven to be broken.

You can't have it both ways. Your post is simultaneously arguing that RAW should not be given significant weight in favor of letting the GM finish the system and that RAW is explicit on another matter because of what is not actually in the wording of the base or errata'd version. 5e needs to take the bad with the good by embracing one thing instead of taking the good and pawning the bad off on the gm forced to maintain some semblance of balance with an endless list of one off houserules & edge cases. Sure 3.5 could get a little sticky in unintended ways when you start splitting hairs on things pulled from too many sourcebooks and such, but 5e goes the other way where the insanity is baked right into straight plain reading of RAW with too much stuff where you immediately hit the wall without even leaving the phb or phb+1 It doesn't take a 12D chess champion to catch the zero step RAW insanity examples with even the most basic of sanity checking. The paladin entry doesn't say 1/turn sure, but if we are judging based on what it does & doesn't say.... it doesn't say it's not a spell either so by the logic of "doesn't say 1/turn, so it's not 1/turn" it's a spell because it doesn't say that it's not a spell either. What is not in the plain reading of RAW an impossible & infinitely deep rabbit hole to make judgements on.

This tangent got started because a bonkers wording in the PHB wotc forces the gm to fix rather than issue an errata does not make dual wielding good. There is a difference between houseruling the system to fit the needs of your campaign & houseruling it because there is so many terribly worded bits that it's hard to believe it was not intentionally broken as designed. They were willing to errata it to raise the power for the unintended scorlockadin, just couldn't bother to be explicit or avoid forcing the GM to be the bad guy by fixing the rest.