I substituted a more common magic item for a rare one.
How often do you actually roll a Wand of the War Mage on the random treasure tables? Even if it is "more common," unless it is in fact actually common, it makes sense to exclude it from a general analysis of legendary creatures.
My sense is that a Wand of the War mage may become factor in something like 5-10% of all L1-20 campaigns.
Your effectively going to die if you don't make an archer specialist against flying creatures that are powerful. What I'm saying is that a player should not be limited to making a dex-based character because it is the far, far superior option due to other limitations in the game. Right now having run with both melee martials and ranged archer martials, the ranged archer martials are vastly superior even if they have to take an occasional AoO to move out of melee range to not have disadvantage.
I agree that melee specialists are pretty lame in 5E. The combination of 5E mobility rules, short ranges on monster spells/magical effects, the Archery style, Sharpshooter feat, and feats/spells for enhancing mobility make ranged skirmishing clearly a dominant strategy compared to melee. For the most part, anyone who makes a melee fighter in 5E is an idiot, or at the very least is playing against the grain (probably unwittingly due to not really grokking the 5E ruleset). For example, you've talked a lot about fighting adult White Dragons--with a melee party, the chances of multiple characters getting caught in the breath weapon are quite high because your forces all have to concentrate in order to engage it simultaneously. With a ranged party, you can spread out so that the dragon only ever hits one guy at a time (who might even make his saving throw!). The relatively minor damage boost of GWF Greatswords over longbows doesn't even begin to compensate for the much greater disadvantages of a melee profile--and that's before you even bring Fly/concentration requirements into play.
5E isn't a good edition for people who enjoy melee fighters. We like to say, "you can't go wrong in 5E with any build," and to an extent that's true, but if you have a DM who likes to metagame and make Int 8 foes like white dragons extremely cunning and tactical
and he likes to throw CR 13 White Dragons at level 8 parties in violation of the nominal encounter guidelines, you've exceeded the parameters for which "any build" is appropriate. If he just stuck to CR 8 foes for level 8 parties, even melee-oriented builds could probably do okay, although they should still
carry and use longbows as appropriate (because why not?).
