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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6667077" data-attributes="member: 6787650">You may be underusing shoves. Once your shove bonus gets high enough that you have a 75-80% chance of it working (+8 or so relative to the target) and you get multiple attacks, shoving an enemy once during the combat is probably better than a basic, non-GWM attack, especially if you have melee allies. Your party-mate the strongest bard in the world clearly recognizes this fact (he's built his whole character around Athletics, including Shield Master and Resilient (Con) so as not to lose Enhance Ability (Strength)). I don't know if he is fully exploiting it defensively, but he's obviously exploiting much of Shove's offensive potential by letting his GWM buddy (you) get powerful attacks in at advantage. That's totally worth the loss of a single attack, and when you add in the potential defensive advantages [1] it is clearly superior to a basic attack in any situation where the above assumptions hold.[1] &quot;Restricting enemy movement&quot; + &quot;imposing disadvantage on opportunity attacks&quot; = &quot;enemy gets only one opportunity attack at disadvantage while PCs are getting in a full GWM attack sequence any time the bard goes before the GWM guy.&quot;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6667077, member: 6787650"] You may be underusing shoves. Once your shove bonus gets high enough that you have a 75-80% chance of it working (+8 or so relative to the target) and you get multiple attacks, shoving an enemy once during the combat is probably better than a basic, non-GWM attack, especially if you have melee allies. Your party-mate the strongest bard in the world clearly recognizes this fact (he's built his whole character around Athletics, including Shield Master and Resilient (Con) so as not to lose Enhance Ability (Strength)). I don't know if he is fully exploiting it defensively, but he's obviously exploiting much of Shove's offensive potential by letting his GWM buddy (you) get powerful attacks in at advantage. That's totally worth the loss of a single attack, and when you add in the potential defensive advantages [1] it is clearly superior to a basic attack in any situation where the above assumptions hold. [1] "Restricting enemy movement" + "imposing disadvantage on opportunity attacks" = "enemy gets only one opportunity attack at disadvantage while PCs are getting in a full GWM attack sequence any time the bard goes before the GWM guy." [/QUOTE]

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