D&D 5E Is sneak attack damage divided by 2 when you Dual Wield?

[Gorgoroth]

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Dual wielding will probably yield much higher damage only in those cases where the user has two magic items equipped, both with substantial magic-enhanced damage bonuses on a hit.

Also, landing a maneuver. If some of them are "when you hit with an enemy", you may even be able to double down on some, or at least have a much greater chance of at least landing it once. The stats go waaaay up when you have advantage too, it's like having double advantage, if you are looking to land at least one hit to proc your weapon (okay, sorry for the Everquest terminology...not sure what else to call it). Let's just say, it's very important to land that extra fire damage in an ice realm, you probably would rather two flametongue short swords than one flametongue longsword.

Also, it remains to be seen what the higher level DW feats will be like, I predict by level 9 or so you'll have people being able to dual wield two longswords, or , and maybe by level 15 the damage / 2 will disappear.

I see DW now as doing less overall damage unless certain situations or magic items are available, until a certain level, so that you trade off early DPR for later DPR (which is a huge opportunity cost since you're much less likely to reach that level). I like that Conan single wielded his bastard sword most of his career, then later on went on to use the Father's sword at the same time as his Atlantean (in the latest movie), or use a battle axe in his offhand (in Conan the Barbarian) or Mad Martigan grabbing that extra bastard sword in the last battle and kicking butt all over the place...

I see two larger non-finessable weapons only at higher levels, and the damage penalties reduced, or perhaps the AC bonus increased.

When the number of CS dice gets large enough, the weapon damage die becomes less and less of an issue, and not having to halve your Deadly Strike regardless of whether you only score one hit or two will give you a much deadlier minimum expected damage. It's like in videogames, would you rather never dip below 60fps, or get a wildly fluctuating range of 40-90 fps? (slightly higher avergage but much greater variance). I think we all know the answer.

We still haven't seen if there are any magic items yet similar to the Sun Blade in Pathfinder, which is a bastard sword wieldable as if it were a short sword, resulting in a mathemagically advantageous way to get around the finesse limitation. I predict we will see such items in later splat books. Of course, you can't build your PC around having a certain item if you don't know you'll get it, but in a campaign where you may have an heirloom weapon, you could do it.

That all says nothing about double weapons, which will probably one day make it into the game in a later book, just like they did in 2nd edition. In Pathfinder, a double sword or orc double axe is the only way to get 1d8 dmg, similar to a longsword in each hand, in a viable way, at level 1.

 

[eprieur]

I'll give some dpr numbers to try to get some perspective.

VS AC 15
Baseline fighter, lvl 1, 18 str, 2-h: 7.1 dpr, 2.4 for deadly strike, total 9.5 dpr.
Same fighter with advantage (slightly less if you roll one attack at a time): 10.38 dps main + 3.54 DS, total 13.92.

Base line lvl 1 rogue, no DW, human, 18 dex, 2-h katana with advantage:
7.95 main + 6.8 sneak, total 14.75.

DW Rogue with advantage, sneak divided by 2 (slightly less then that due to rounding down). human lvl 1 rogue, 18 dex, 2 short sword (d6):
6.96 for both main attacks + 4.5 for sneak, total 11.46.
If you don't divide by 2: sneak give 9 dpr, total 15.96.

For 1 feat, lvl 1, you get 1 dpr more and some versatility. Eventually you get +1 ac. That's versus no feat at all (2-h for fighter or normal rogue).

The more you level, the worse it gets. For example, a lvl 5 rogue can do 35.52 dpr, where 27.21 is from sneak attack. If you divide sneak by 2, your dpr drop to 22 dpr total, losing around 13.5 dpr, making the feat more then useless.

It's similar with the dex fighter and deadly strike but to a lesser extent since deadly strike does less damage then sneak.

There is also the case at lvl 5 of a dex halfling fighter with 2 D8 SS, 18 dex, who knock down with first attack and get advantage on the 2nd if the first hit. If the first miss but 2nd hit, you knock down + 1 deadly strike. It's still less dpr then just attacking with 2 dices of deadly strike but this enable the rogue in the party to easily get advantage so it's tech, but less dpr for the fighter.

Basically, if you split the DS or SA dice, it's bad at lvl 1, but at level 5 it's more then bad, it's unusable.

 

[fjw70]

I wouldn't half anything that is limited per round. SA is once per round so no halfing. You only get a set number of expertise dice per round so no halfing.

 

[Plaguescarred]

I agree effects usable ''once per turn'' or ''once per round'' shouldn't be halved by Two-Weapon Fighting or Rapid Shot attacks.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

If bonus damage is not halved, then DW essentially becomes free advantage on every attack for rogues and fighters past very low levels.

For example, if the level 10 fighter has 4d10 CS dice and is still doing about d10+5 normal damage, CS is 2/3 of his damage. If Deadly Strike damage is NOT halved, he gots two shots per round to deal that 4d10 (along with half normal damage).

This is, IMHO, significantly too powerful.

On the other hand, halving CS and SA damage makes DW pretty terrible. There are slightly complex ways around this, but none of them indicated by the current playtest.

This seems like a pretty huge and obvious area that needs to be addressed... hopefully we'll see if they do so tomorrow!

 

[Li Shenron]

That's my current idea, it would make DW pretty good for rogues, useless or very bad for fighters. It's kinda strange. The rule about critical hits kinda make me think it's still unclear how it work.

Do you roll both dices at the same time? 1 at a time? It's alot stronger if you roll both attacks at the same time then assign them.

Actually, I don't think you halve the expertise dice from Deadly Strike either.



I read this to mean that you resolve the attack's damage (including adjusting for ability modifiers and halving for dual weild or rapid shot) then roll the expertise dice and add the result.

In the case of a critical hit, you take half the maximum damage and then the full value of the expertise dice.

Effectively, it works the same as Sneak Attack.

I agree effects usable ''once per turn'' or ''once per round'' shouldn't be halved by Two-Weapon Fighting or Rapid Shot attacks.

I think the RAW problem is in Dual Wielding that says "all damage is halved", but it is pretty clear that you are doing TWO attacks with separate rolls, even tho you can do both with the same action.

Deadly Strike works on a round basis. When you have ONE expertise dice, you apply the damage to ONE attack (after hitting). When you have TWO dice you can split them to multiple attacks or stack them on the same attack.

Sneak Attacks also works on a round basis because you can apply the damage ONCE per round.

Thus by the RAW of Dual Wielding, you really have to get 50% only of Deadly Strike or Sneak Attack damage. It means that using DS or SA together with DW really sucks.

I think it would make much more sense if only the base damage was halved by DW. You would then still get the same round-by-round damage benefit from both DS and SA. (But clearly you should NOT get the damage bonus on BOTH attacks or it would result in doubling the benefit from DS/SA!)

That said, the general benefit of Dual Wielding as written is so small that it is most likely to change after playtest feedback...