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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6778832" data-attributes="member: 6701872">I appologize, I appear to have misunderstood you. When you said the feat is broken and should be fixed, I thought you were meaning that the words in the PHB should be changed for future printings because it is actually broken (read: doesn't do the thing that it is intended to do, like if an electric kettle won't heat water), but you now seem to clearly have been meaning that anyone that doesn't like what the feat does because their own personal game doesn't benefit should make an alteration (which is more like someone with a perfectly functional electric kettle that doesn't want hot water, but could use some light, so they can go right ahead and remove the power cord from the electric kettle and wire it to a bulb fixture).This, however, is where you misunderstand me. I'm talking about cause and effect, and you've confused which is the cause and which is the effect - The choice of encounters being made is causing the -5/+10 to appear more potent than it actually is, rather than the -5/+10 being so powerful being the cause of needing to "distort" encounters.It's a subtle difference, but one with a large impact... and the "distorted" that you are talking about is actually just "use more than just the lower-AC portions of the monsters already present in the monster manual" since, for example, a character with a +5 to-hit actually experiences a net zero change in average damage when using the -5/+10 option against AC 16 targets, and actually deals less damage on average against any target with a higher AC.To translate to other to-hit bonuses: if you need an 11+ on the d20 to hit, using the -5/+10 is no longer a boost to your average damage.My goodness, if you hadn't just told me that, I'm not sure I'd have ever figured it out. Thank you.Yes, but you are forgetting that in many, if not most, groups the goal of playing the game is not "be the most effective characters." Instead, it is "have the most fun we can have," and playing a character that is "the best" at one thing tends to lead to a less fun overall experience because it lends itself to each player basically sitting out when the situation at hand isn't their character's thing they are the best at - so some players basically sit out in combat so the combat characters can do their thing, then the combat characters' players basically sit out until the next combat starts, and so on. That's how I've experienced things going when the players have characters that are built intentionally ignoring one section of the game to be "the best" at another, anyways.Nope. Still nonsense, but only because Great Weapon Master only gives +10 damage on attacks that hit and significantly reduces your chance to get that hit to happen, and the extra attack "every few rounds" is actually an extra attack under certain circumstances which have zero guarantee of actually happening - and, to share an anecdote, has not actually occurred once thus far at my table because the player with the feat has only rolled natural 20s on rolls besides attacks with a melee weapon (initiative, saving throws, ability checks, and even attacks made with ranged weapons) and the only times thus far that he's reduced a creature to 0 hit points it has been the last one in the combat or the others were too far away for him to move into reach of.Plus, the benefits of Martial Adept are more combat goodness; combat goodness + combat goodness = taller stack of combat goodness, while combat goodness + social interaction goodness = a wider set of stacks of goodness.</blockquote>

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