D&D 5E Great Weapon Mastery - once more into the breach! (with math)

[CapnZapp]

As you sort of argued yourself earlier, I believe that the proper metric of measurement is per attack.

Not sure what you mean. You can't *just* focus on the benefit per attack to realize GWM's potential for abuse, since its benefit scales linearly with the number of attacks.

In other words, had there been no way to get more than, say, 2 attacks, the benefit of GWM would have been sharply curtailed. GWM can be used by a Fighter 20 to make nine (9) attacks in a nova round. That's +90 damage, unless you have worse than average luck. How is the number of attacks not relevant?

I don't dispute that sharpshooter + crossbow expert + archery fighting style is probably broken. It is important here that we stay focused and don't go on tangeants.

Calling it a "tangent" is a bit harsh I think, considering how it is the exact same mechanism. And you're not the only one I'm talking to here. But sure, let's focus on GWM.

Well, you kinda did... Remember this?

I don't and the context gave me no clue.

Of course these help a GWM guy hits, but they also help a non GWM guy hit! That's my point!

Sorry what? You don't need to make a "point" of the trivial fact you can pick Precision even without GWM. What I would appreciate, however, is you meeting *my* point that Precision is much more useful if your base damage were to be increased by +10.

The math indicates otherwise

Sorry, you don't get to simply say this. It's too unspecific, and I don't know where to counter such a vague claim. Prove it. Or at least point out my math mistakes.

Again, the math indicates otherwise. And a precision dice can only be applied on 8/20 rolls. If you missed by 9, adding a d8 won't help. If you hit, adding that d8 won't help either. I calculated the increased average damaged based on the odd of *each number with advantage* coming up and then the *odds of the d8 making a difference* for every number in that 8/20 range, for each AC tested (12, 15, 18, 21). "if we say half the time" - not precise enough.

First off, just saying "math indicates otherwise" is unhelpful. What exact figure of mine do you contest?

Second, what are you talking about. How is it relevant to our discussion that "precision dice can only be applied to eight out of twenty rolls". First, we have advantage - it is not a linear distribution. Second, I never said to use Precision on eight results - I specifically chose to use Precision only on four results.

At the end there it seems you made the grave mistake of including the average DPR with GWM even against AC 21. Nobody would ever use GWM against an opponent with that high AC. You are forgetting that using GWM is optional. Sorry, but I need you to redo all your calculations (or at least share your spreadsheet) - allowing AC 21 to drag down the average is a critical mistake that completely skews your results.

(What you need to do is calculate the DPR both with and without GWM. And then take the bigger of the two resulting values for each AC to model how a math-savvy player never uses GWM when it is detrimental to do so).

Correct -but the precision maneuver may not even pay off at all. You may have missed by a 3, and then roll a 2 on your d8. The damage dice maneuvers are added on a *hit* - ie you *always* are getting a bang for your buck. That's pretty significant.

I addressed this specifically. Yes, you can roll a 1 on your d10 (I was using d10s since my example character had 11 fighter levels) and still miss. But I believe to have included all that in my calculations.

And again: while you "always gain a bang for your buck" I maintain this leads you to draw the wrong conclusion. You STILL burn through your superiority dice MUCH faster if you use damage maneuvers than if you use the precision maneuver. What you're forgetting is that all the times you hit even without having to use Precision is an attack where you didn't have to spend a superiority dice at all. This happenstance more than well compensates for the (relatively rare) times where you "lose" a precision die (you use it, roll low, and still miss). If you still don't see it, ask, and I will be happy to take you through it step by step. It's all due to the non-linear curve of advantage.

Again your roughly half doesn't seem to ban out.

Since in my example I hit 85% of the time and not 50%, the reality is even better than what I said.

You really need to restate what your point is here, because while I can understand you are pointing out that my rough calculations doesn't pan out, you're using an example where reality was even better than my estimate?

Ok this is just a mess. One guy has magical weapon one doesn't, one is using a hand crossbow one isn't...

What, exactly, is the mess.

I didn't spend all that time just for you to dismiss my example as "a mess". Please point out exactly where you feel I am unclear and I shall do my best to clean it up for you.

That I gave the GWM guy a magical weapon was just to maintain par with the first guy that was using a hand crossbow. By providing a +2 weapon, I just wanted to make it easier to compare results (since the hand crossbow guy gets +2 from Archery).

and as I've pointed out before, the guy without GWM doesn't seem to have something else to compensate (higher stats, another feat, whatever... is that why you gave him a magic weapon?). AND your math for the benefits of precision is very fuzzy. I'm very reluctant to accept this conclusion, it lacks robustness.

If you ask specific questions and point out vague sections I shall do better.

There is no guy without GWM - not yet anyway. I specifically said we need to first agree on a replacement feat, and then I'm fully willing to repeat the exercise for this comparison character. What is your suggestion for this feat, Ancalagon? In other words, which is the feat you feel does most damage (besides the -5/+10 feats), and we can use that one.



Regards,
Zapp

 

[CapnZapp]

So the fighter barbarian with elven accuracy and using precision (assuming I added precision maneuver into the equation correctly) is telling me that the fighter barbarian with a greatsword does more damage than your crit fisher in most situations. No magic weapon. No other abilities used except barbarian rage, reckless attack and precision attack. Requires 11 levels of fighter and 2 levels of barbarian. I am looking at level 20 DPR. Any other classes can be used afterwards.

AC DPR
11 89.35
12 89.27
13 89.07
14 88.68
15 88.03
16 87.05
17 85.70
18 83.90
19 81.58
20 78.69
21 75.16
22 70.92
23 65.92
24 60.08
25 53.35
26 45.66
27 36.94
28 27.13
29 16.18
30 16.18

It appears you're having a subdiscussion about the Elven Accuracy UA feat. Would it be to much to ask you to start your own thread? Or, failing that, to summarize your concerns?

(Myself, I feel that UA material will have to take a decidedly secondary priority. I'm having my hands full just with the PHB feats, and would like to fix those first before adding new powerhouse ones...)

 

[CapnZapp]

What math indicates that precision attack isn't the go to DPR maneuver for any fighter that uses a weapon bigger than a non-magical dagger?

Precision attack has the same effect at virtually all to-hit values (at least without advantage). That is the magnitude of the increase in DPR it causes doesn't change if your chance to hit the monster changes.

I'll admit I've not found a perfect way to factor precision attack into an advantaged fighter and so I have been using the assumption that it works the same with the advantaged fighter as it does with the unadvantaged. If you can show it doesn't work that way I would be happy to see that.

Perhaps I am stating what you already know, but:

Advantage is key to Precision.

Just look at the probability curve of an attack with and without advantage.

You should easily see that not only does advantage increase the probability of hitting outright (doh!), it also significantly increases the probability of a miss being a near miss instead of a "far miss".

Even in the case where advantage is generally thought of doing little utility (when you are making a dificult attack, i.e. very high AC) you should see that the "near miss AC" which is several points lower (say 4, for the sake of example) does gain a considerably larger boost from advantage.

In practical terms, if you're trying to hit AC 18, what you're trying to hit from a Precision-using perspective is maybe AC 14. You should easily be able to conclude that even when advantage doesn't provide that great of a bonus against AC 18, its bonus is considerably greater against AC 14.

 

[Yunru]

Perhaps I am stating what you already know, but:

Advantage is key to Precision.

Just look at the probability curve of an attack with and without advantage.

You should easily see that not only does advantage increase the probability of hitting outright (doh!), it also significantly increases the probability of a miss being a near miss instead of a "far miss".

Even in the case where advantage is generally thought of doing little utility (when you are making a dificult attack, i.e. very high AC) you should see that the "near miss AC" which is several points lower (say 4, for the sake of example) does gain a considerably larger boost from advantage.

In practical terms, if you're trying to hit AC 18, what you're trying to hit from a Precision-using perspective is maybe AC 14. You should easily be able to conclude that even when advantage doesn't provide that great of a bonus against AC 18, its bonus is considerably greater against AC 14.

But that's just it. Advantage isn't free.

You're investing in getting that advantage. Which means either you or another teammate is forgoing at least one attack.

As a completely random aside, re: PAM: I wouldn't let a player use GWM with the bonus attack from PAM. It's about the same as trying to use Sharpshooter's -5/+10 when throwing the bow

 

[Hillsy7]

But that's just it. Advantage isn't free.

You're investing in getting that advantage. Which means either you or another teammate is forgoing at least one attack.

Actually - should we be talking about DPS "builds" in total damage generated for the whole team, rather than personal?

So say we have Sword and Board Seb who knock foes down, giving advantage, and GWM Gwen. If DPR vs AC 16 is (Using arbitrary numbers):

Seb no Adv: 20
Gwen no Adv: 30
Seb with Adv: 35
Gwen with Adv: 50

Then actually - is DPR Comparison

Seb: 35+20 = 55
Gwen: 30

Making Seb Significantly better than Gwen?

Is Shield Master Overpowered?!?!?!?!?!

 

[CapnZapp]

[MENTION=6795602]FrogReaver[/MENTION]. Here are some details about the impact of precision attack

First, you need to know the odds of each number (1-20) being rolled with advantage. The odds are as follows. The chance of rolling 1 are 1/400. The chance of rolling 2 are 3/400. The chance of rolling 3 are 5/400.... all the way to 20, which is 39/400

(btw, I *reaaalllly* recommend excel or similar program for this!)

So let's say your character has a +4 bonus to hit, has advantage, and is trying to hit AC 16. You need to roll 12 or higher. With advantage, your chances of doing that are 0.6975 (I trust you all know how to do this math right?). So if you roll 12 of above, no point of rolling a precision maneuver - you hit already! If you rolled 3 or less, there is again no point - 3+8 =11, a miss, so why bother. So it's only in that 4-11 range that you want to take that precision maneuver dice and add it to your roll.

If you roll a 3, you need an 8. there is 1/8 chance of this helping you. If you rolled a 4, you need a 6, so 2/8... all the way to 8/8 if you rolled an 11, where the precision dice is *guaranteed* to help you.

So what you do is you take your column of 1-20 numbers, the column of probabilities, and you line them up, and multiply.

So if you roll a 3 - there is a 5/400 chance of this occurring, there is a 1/8 chance of the roll being an 8, you multiply, so this "helps" you by a fraction of 0.0015625... not very much - but you repeat this process for 4, 5... all the way to 11, and then you add the fraction. In this case, the sum is 0.16125. This sum is then added to 0.6975, resulting in a new to hit chance of 0.85875.

(edit: I just noticed, this means your estimate of 15% was quite good... but please keep in mind that this varies based on the AC so if I had picked a different AC it would have been a bit different)

Another way of looking at it is that with advantage, you had 0.3025 chances to *miss*. And in this case, it turns out that hey, in this case [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] is correct, this is roughly reducing your chance of a miss by half... but this does *not* double your damage, it only goes from 0.6975 to 0.85875 of the "base" damage.

So yeah, this maneuver helps a GWM warrior a fair bit... BUT a warrior who is not using GWM can use that maneuver dice to increase his or her damage instead! I've compared that in my previous posts. The GWM still come out a bit ahead. but it is NOT +10 damage per attack, not even close.

I hope this answers your question.

I feel I have taken EVERY aspect of what you say here into account in my example.

Random observations:

* Attacking AC 16 with only a +4 bonus to hit... feels very first level. And at that level, even I don't pretend it's easy to come up with advantage with anything near a regular frequency. In fact, any time you need to roll a 12 to hit is a poor poster boy for this entire concept - using GWM in this case is probably just bad for you.
* I suggest Anydice over Excel. Just say "[highest 1 of 2d20]" (without the quotes).
* You are correct in your methodology for computing the benefit of Precision, but you seem to (again) not remember two things:
a) you don't HAVE to use Precision. If you need to roll 12 to hit, and you only roll 4, yes you need to roll an 8 on that 1d8. Which is a good reason to not do so! Just chalk that up as a miss, and save your Precision maneuver for later.
b) you only use your Precision dice on "near misses". Not "far misses" (as in a) but also not on "actual hits". This greatly contribute to you burning through your maneuver dice FAR SLOWER than when you use them for damage (and statuses).
* Who said Precision doubles the DPR? I fully agree that when used correctly, you use your precision dice only with a far lower frequency than every other attack. The main reason for this, of course, is that you should only do this when you have a better chance of hitting overall! (In my example, I was using Precision on rolls of 5, 6, 7 and 8 I believe. With advantage that happens less than the 20% percent, so we can definitely agree on 15% as a representative number) But the correct conclusion isn't to say "this makes precision much less valuable" - the correct conclusion is to say "precision enables you to use GWM on higher AC monsters than anticipated by WotC while conserving your superiority dice so this can be a real strategy, and not just some burn-out single nova-round thing".
* As for the actual damage, I showed that the numbers aren't very different. 86 and 83 I believe. But you need to acknowledge that while your superiority dice run out in a round using your strategy, I get to keep them for close to 10 rounds.

 

[CapnZapp]

I will note that I did not compare Precision vs Precision + GWM. My gut feeling is that it would not have helped as much as a damage dice, but I may be wrong.

I did not either.

My point is that while damage maneuvers provide much the same benefit regardless of GWM (since +1d8 damage is +1d8 damage), Precision benefits greatly the higher your base damage.

 

[CapnZapp]

Just been running some numbers and the output surprised me somewhat……(Disclaimer - this was all done on excel using macros, so none of the calculations will be off, only the base assumptions)

The Precision Featless Vs Precision GWM can be viewed very simply by focusing on Total Damage per short rest

Roughly speaking, SD are a Short rest resource. DPR means nothing long term if your SD use is a slim fraction of non-SD use. So let’s ping out the numbers as per the DMG for a fighter with 3 attacks.
A=Attacks per Round, D=Damage per Attack, H=Hit probability, R=Rounds per combat, C=Combats per Short Rest……

Total Damage per short rest (No SD) = A*D*R*C*H
Total Damage per short Rest (with SD) = (A*D*R*C*H) + (6*D)
[So cancelling out, you can see that the “true” benefit of precision is the ratio of (A*R*C*H) Vs 6 (to be adjusted for likelihood of precision turning a miss to a hit). The more you hit between Short Rests, the less beneficial Precision is……]
Now we know A (3), and we can get R and C from the DMG: (roughly) 5-6 rounds per combat, 2-3 combats per short rest. Therefore A*R*C = 3*2.5*5.5 = ~40. So with 40 dice rolls we can assume each value is rolled twice. Using a target value that’s likely to be somewhere between 4 and 16 we can reasonably (regardless of H) assume you will be using precision to correct for two 1s’, two 2’s and two 3’s. Therefore, we can adjust for likelihood of precision turning a miss to a hit (1+1+0.875+0.875+0.75-0.75). So 5.25 additional D……

So let’s get back to our comparison (Because Advantage is assumed, H is quite high) (Vs AC 19 with +11 Attack bonus)
Fred Featless: H=90%
Gwen Great Weapon Mistress: h=65%
So a rough Comparison with all things being equal and 40 attacks per short rest gives the following Total hits per Short Rest (If Fred doesn’t miss enough to spend SD, I’ve used Riposte to add attacks)
Fred: 3*2.5*5.5*0.9=41.1
Gwen: 3*2.5*5.5*0.65=31.6
Therefore, Gwen gains 5.25 more hits than Fred, or a 17% top up on Damage per Short Rest. Fred only Gains 12.6%. Also you can see that using precision for Fred is much better than just adding SD as damage as turning a close miss to a hit 5.25/6 times with a base damage around 15, is much better than adding a single SD dice on a hit.

So there you go. The benefit of Precision Vs Precision + GWM = Total Damage per Short Rest ratio of 1.167:1.126

However, add it all together (assuming Fred’s Damage = 20 and Gwen = 30) and Gwen is only popping roughly 13% more damage than Fred. This narrows slightly the more Ripostes (Less than 6 misses per short rest) Fred can do.

I could be wrong here, but this looks to me as yet another Averaging Fallacy. Just as you can arrive at numbers that "does not look all that bad" by averaging GWM DPR for a whole AC range (without remembering that the player doesn't use it when it makes your DPR worse) and/or calculate results for Precision assuming you use it whenever there's a chance of changing a miss into a hit (without remembering that the player doesn't use it when the Precision die is more likely to do nothing)...

Anytime the fight is easy, nobody cares about DPR since you're going to win without expending resources anyway.

The point of GWM isn't a +X average increase in DPR over a whole day or between one rest and the next.

It is the +Y average increase in DPR when it matters that is at stake here.

It is the ability to leave the other fighters far behind you in the dust whenever you feel like it. What it boils down to is an issue of "spotlight stealing".

(And just as a reminder, I'm not talking single-round bright-nova damage here. The example character I provided above could maintain his GWM DPR for close to ten rounds on average. That should cover most if not all combat rounds where it matters, which is the point - few other weapons combo/build get to do that.)

But I could be wrong, and you could be talking about something entirely different here.

 

[CapnZapp]

But that's just it. Advantage isn't free.

You're investing in getting that advantage. Which means either you or another teammate is forgoing at least one attack.

As a completely random aside, re: PAM: I wouldn't let a player use GWM with the bonus attack from PAM. It's about the same as trying to use Sharpshooter's -5/+10 when throwing the bow

Any competent team makes sure attacks are made with advantage, no matter what their builds are.

Since "getting advantage" more than pays for its own cost, let's not factor it into this discussion. You would use it anyway.

It certainly does not cost more when used with GWM than when used elsewhere.

Zapp

PS. If some of you reading this are at a lower level of player expertise where you aren't sure advantage is that good, and/or you are unsure on how to go about getting it on a consistent basis, I'm more than happy to provide advice, just as long as we take it in another thread

 

[Yunru]

I could be wrong here, but this looks to me as yet another Averaging Fallacy. Just as you can arrive at numbers that "does not look all that bad" by averaging GWM DPR for a whole AC range (without remembering that the player doesn't use it when it makes your DPR worse) and/or calculate results for Precision assuming you use it whenever there's a chance of changing a miss into a hit (without remembering that the player doesn't use it when the Precision die is more likely to do nothing)...

Anytime the fight is easy, nobody cares about DPR since you're going to win without expending resources anyway.

The point of GWM isn't a +X average increase in DPR over a whole day or between one rest and the next.

It is the +Y average increase in DPR when it matters that is at stake here.

It is the ability to leave the other fighters far behind you in the dust whenever you feel like it. What it boils down to is an issue of "spotlight stealing".

(And just as a reminder, I'm not talking single-round bright-nova damage here. The example character I provided above could maintain his GWM DPR for close to ten rounds on average. That should cover most if not all combat rounds where it matters, which is the point - few other weapons combo/build get to do that.)

But I could be wrong, and you could be talking about something entirely different here.

Averaging is not a fallacy, it is a law.