clearstream
(He, Him)
It proved to be simple to model. I just made a row per round and summed and divided. That allowed me to create Precision attack rounds. I found for both parties, Precision attacking was best. I identified a fault in our assumption that killing outright would happen in a quarter of rounds and that would be on top of critical attacks, because critical attacks are by far the most likely to kill outright and should overlap a lot of the time. Therefore I reverted to the higher of the two values (0.25). Accepted, sometimes a critical hit won't kill outright, but we are talking about fractions of a damage point here.You'll hit on 70% of those 20% of attacks and increase your hit percentage 14%. Of course, you can do the same with SS. But if you do this with the Battlemaster I encourage you to come up with some estimation of bonus action attack chances.
A GWM, Precision-using, GWF-having, greatsword-wielding Battlemaster will do 39.0 dpr versus an AC 17 foe. How often will he drop a foe to zero? Will he intentionally choose to target weaker enemies just to trigger a bonus attack? (I would...). For simple math let's assume that he gets a bonus attack on 25% of rounds in addition to his roughly 15% chance for a critical on one of his three attacks. That's a bonus attack 40% of the time and an extra 3.9 pts of damage per round.
Using Precision
- A = GWM Greatsword = 39/turn
- B = SS/CEx Hand Xbow = 35.7/turn at 120' range*
The ranged attacker benefits from better damage mitigation, which the GWM fighter has sacrificed for GWF. The relevant foe has +10 Multiattack for 20 per hit.
- A = we believe the GWM fighter kills outright 1/4 of the time, so he is hit back at least 3/4 of the time (depends on initiative) = 0.65*20*2*0.75 = 19.5
- B = we believe the SS/CEx fighter is in melee no more than half the time 0.65*20*2*0.5 = 13
- We call mitigated damage 60% of the value of dealt damage = 3.9
This example suggests a factor of +20% for range, which I believe low-balls it because damage mitigation is probably higher, up-time advantage is probably greater, and I have ignored the benefits of focused fire.
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