No Prebuff - Round 1 - Damage Rankings

[FrogReaver]

@Esker I need your help. I want to calculate the damage of a BattleMaster fighter using no feats but precision attack and trip attack. I've not mastered the art of calculating precision attack correctly since you figured out the correct way to do it.

For the 1 round this ended up being easier than I thought since I had as many dice as attacks. If I hit I use trip. If I miss I use precision. The complicated part came from advantage and it wasn't that bad.

 

[Esker]

@Esker I need your help. I want to calculate the damage of a BattleMaster fighter using no feats but precision attack and trip attack. I've not mastered the art of calculating precision attack correctly since you figured out the correct way to do it.

It's simpler if you're not trying to ration your dice and you just want to maximize this one turn. If you assume you have them all at the start of the combat, then you just use precision attack any time it might help. At level 6, you have 4d8 precision dice, so if you have 20 STR, we're assuming you need a natural 8 to hit, and so your chance to hit with precision attack becomes:

0.65 + 0.05 * 8/8 + 0.05 * 7/8 + 0.05 * 6/8 + 0.05 * 5/8 + 0.05 * 4/8 + 0.05 * 3/8 = 0.856

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm impressed that a featless battlemaster was able to out damage all the other feated builds posted so far while keeping his bonus action free. There's going to be a lot of potential on that chasis when we look at higher levels.

 

[Esker]

With advantage, you have a (2k - 1)/400 chance of rolling any given value from 1 to 20. That gives you an 0.8775 chance of rolling an 8 or higher w/o precision, and with precision your chance becomes:

0.8775 + (2*7 - 1)/400 * 8/8 + (2*6 - 1)/400 * 7/8 + (2*5 - 1)/400 * 6/8 + (2*4 - 1)/400 * 5/8 + (2*3 - 1)/400 * 4/8 + (2*2 - 1)/400*3/8 = 0.97

 

[Esker]

Wait, that was without GWM? Surely with the help of maneuvers, GWM is worth more than an ASI?

 

[FrogReaver]

Wait, that was without GWM? Surely with the help of maneuvers, GWM is worth more than an ASI?

Yea without GWM. I play in a lot of featless games. So I was curious how well a featless fighter could do. I'm really impressed.

GWM should increase that number fairly significantly. Half Orc didn't really add much.

 

[FrogReaver]

The hardest part of calculating GWM effect will be calculating overall crit chance since you have an ever escalating crit chance per attack and GWM adds a bonus action attack on a crit.

 

[Esker]

I got 68.6 for a featless half-orc BM. Could be small enough that you have a little rounding error I guess, since I did it assigning variables in code so the values should be exact... Or maybe one of us did something slightly off.

 

[FrogReaver]

I got 68.6 for a featless half-orc BM. Could be small enough that you have a little rounding error I guess, since I did it assigning variables in code so the values should be exact... Or maybe one of us did something slightly off.

Did you use a greatsword and GWF style and factor in the extra crit damage from half orc?

 

[Esker]

Did you use a greatsword and GWF style and factor in the extra crit damage from half orc?

Yeah. So, 8 1/3 base weapon damage, 4.5 extra damage when hitting w/o precision attack, 8 1/3 damage after GWM rerolls, 4 1/6 extra damage from Savage Attack on crits, and an escalating chance of having advantage on the attack, based on having had at least one previous hit without precision attack.