D&D 5E The Fighter Extra Feat Fallacy

[Ancalagon]

Again, there's my point. NOTHING you just listed is a "fighter". It's a background. I can be a samurai or a pirate or a cunning mercenary with any class. In fact, other classes would probably do the job better. Certainly ranger would be a far better pirate than fighter.

The point I'm making is that the base classes other than fighter, actually come with a roleplaying hook. You're an Oath of Ancients paladin. That says a LOT about your character. You're a fighter. That says... you can use a sword and wear armor? The class contributes virtually nothing to the actual character.

But that's the thing - those roleplaying hooks, they kind of limit you - there is a lot of variation on how a paladin (esp in 5e... perhaps too much) or a ranger can be, but far less than how a fighter could be. The fighter can be almost *anything you want*. Those roleplaying hooks almost sound like rolepaying *crutches*...

You said

All that stuff - personality, background, all the actual role playing stuff - comes from the other class.

(the other class being the multi-class the fighter is). What I'm saying is that you don't need that other class to roleplay. Your single class fighter can roleplay tons *if you want to*.

 

[Ancalagon]

I do agree that if you ONLY watch the fighter between levels 6-10 it doesn't have much of a stand-out feature. This is because the Paladins and the Barbarians have just got their frontloaded and very cool stuff, and the Fighter has not yet gotten his third attack.

That bothers me though, because levels 5-10 are perhaps the levels that see the most play. It's a significant problem that the "big" fighter thing (more attacks) only shows up at level 11...

That said, I believe there's consensus the Battlemaster got a little too much at once.

Imagine if the Battlemaster's maneuvers were properly tiered, so you had to choose among the lesser ones at level 3. Then you could gain more at level 6 or 8, and be able to pick from the better ones. Suddenly those levels wouldn't feel so empty.

Indeed - or maybe it should have been like warlock, with some maneuvers (same as invocations) needing a certain level. Otherwise you pick the best ones first and each new choice is less and less good.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm sorry, but, I'm just not seeing it.

Sure, a fighter archer may be a better archer than a paladin archer, no problem. But a ranger archer is going to put that fighter to shame. The fighter just can't possibly keep up before 11th level. Not when I've got a guaranteed d8 bonus damage every round (or nearly every round) from colossus slayer, and then hunter's mark. So, I'm pretty much always doing 3d8 bonus damage every single round as an archer ranger. You can't possibly do as much damage. And, before you bring up feats, I've got advantage on my attacks in the first round of combat as a ranger, so, giving me Sharpshooter makes me even better.

By 6th level, the only advantage you have as a fighter is an ASI. Whoopee, you're +1 to hit and damage better than me. At most, six extra attacks per day. Again, compared to my up to 3d8 bonus damage every single round, you can't come even close to competing.

And if it takes you 11 levels just to catch up, that's poor game design.

Let's look at how close the fighter and ranger actually are at ranged combat...

The first look is without feats. The 2nd look will be with feats.

Level 1 - The fighter is ahead
Level 2 - Ranger is ahead (hunters mark is just that good at these levels

Level 3 - This is going to be a great starting point since the classes get pretty much the same features from here until level 6.

A lot depends on the number of combats you are looking at. Your ranger will have 2-3 uses of hunters mark per day. My standard comparison is 6 combats that last 4 rounds each with 2 short rests between. (The number of combats and short rests may be slightly high for some peoples experiences and I'm happy to consider alternatives but for now that's what I'm using).

I'll assume hunters mark lasts 12 combat turns in this scenario. Collosus slayer has a decent chance of not working on your first attack in combat so I am not considering it on the first turn of any combats. So it can be used 18 turns and approximately 2/3 of those attacks will hit. That's 12 uses of it.

So 1d8 times 12 uses = 4.5*12 = 54 damage caused by colossus slayer

Hunters mark will be used on 12 turns and will land 2/3 of the time for a total of 8 turns it lands. That's about 28 additional damage from hunters mark.

The additional damage for a ranger under these assumptions is 82 damage per day at Level 3.

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The fighter will make 3 additional attacks per day from action surge using a longbow for 1d8+3 damage. 7.5 average damage. If he lands 2/3 of the attacks that's 15 damage from action surge per day.

Precision attack can be used 12 times per day. Using 5 dice on the nearest misses for precision attack will mean you turn 4 misses into hits. That's 30 damage. You still have 7 precision attack dice at this level. =7*4.5 = 31.5 damage.

Altogether the fighters abilities give him 76.5 damage per day under the above assumptions. That's a difference of 5.5 damage over 24 rounds of combat. That's a tiny amount of damage difference. The fighter gets the additional benefit of being able to attack whatever target he desires at anytime and can do so from his max range (unlike the 60 range requirement for hunters mark).

Even at level 5 which would be the rangers next best level I wouldn't be so sure the fighter is that far behind him.

That said under a 3 combat per day assumption and 1 short rest per day assumption the level 3 ranger will likely wreck the fighter in damage

 

[Hussar]

But that's the thing - those roleplaying hooks, they kind of limit you - there is a lot of variation on how a paladin (esp in 5e... perhaps too much) or a ranger can be, but far less than how a fighter could be. The fighter can be almost *anything you want*. Those roleplaying hooks almost sound like rolepaying *crutches*...

You said (the other class being the multi-class the fighter is). What I'm saying is that you don't need that other class to roleplay. Your single class fighter can roleplay tons *if you want to*.

And that's fair enough. But, it's also certainly not limited to fighters either. It's not my biggest peeve with the class, though, just a fairly minor one. Fighters have never really come with built in flavor, so, it's not like this is a 5e issue. Just a "Fighting Man" issue.

Now, as far as the WotC polls go, I can easily see that the majority of players would be happy with fighters. I mean, good grief, when half the PC's I've seen in our games have fighter levels, obviously someone is pretty happy.

But, I don't think they ever actually delved any deeper than, "Do you like fighters?" I don't recall seeing anything about the multiclassing and dipping. Which, to be honest, is my biggest peeve. AFAIC, you could turn Fighter's into a feat and my group wouldn't even notice.

Note, when all's said and done, this isn't a deal breaker issue for me. Not at all. It's much more of a hangnail sort of thing. It annoys the crap out of me far, FAR more than it should.

 

[Mistwell]

I'm sorry, but, I'm just not seeing it.

Given you said you've literally never even seen a fighter in play beyond a few levels because your players always multiclass out pretty quickly, I am guessing nobody here is surprised you're not seeing it. I do however doubt you're sorry about it

 

[Ratskinner]

Again, there's my point. NOTHING you just listed is a "fighter". It's a background. I can be a samurai or a pirate or a cunning mercenary with any class. In fact, other classes would probably do the job better. Certainly ranger would be a far better pirate than fighter.

The point I'm making is that the base classes other than fighter, actually come with a roleplaying hook. You're an Oath of Ancients paladin. That says a LOT about your character. You're a fighter. That says... you can use a sword and wear armor? The class contributes virtually nothing to the actual character.

I agree, but I think that that's fundamentally a profound design limitation related to the "best at fighting" paradigm of the class. I mean like "this class is unworkable compared with the others” level limitation. In specific, everybody fights (or can) using the same simple rules operations. How do you be the best at those? Simple, just put in bigger numbers and let them perform the operations more often, done. None of the other classes (possible exception rogues and skills) have such a dead simple base design, because they are all based on creating exceptions to the "normal" mechanics. (Varying in degree).

And, yes Fighters get nice things...all those big combat numbers. What they don't, and shouldn't get is those nice things AND somebody else's. Are the Fighter nice things boring in comparison? I dunno, but if a player thinks they are, perhaps they should look into one of the other classes.

Given the structure of the game (and narrative/mechanical imprecision of it's combat), I don't see a way around it. It's been, IMO, an issue for some time now. 4e skirted it only by cranking up the precision and detail of the combat engine so that everyone could squeeze a raft of mechanically interesting abilities into it. Obviously that implementation didn't serve the entire D&D audience well, for whatever reason(s). Maybe there is some other modification of the core mechanics that could work well (ICRPG?), but I have difficulty imagining major alterations achieving widespread acceptance.

Just my take.



Sent from my Nexus 7 using EN World mobile app

 

[Hussar]

Given you said you've literally never even seen a fighter in play beyond a few levels because your players always multiclass out pretty quickly, I am guessing nobody here is surprised you're not seeing it. I do however doubt you're sorry about it

No, I'm not seeing it because I cannot see how the fighter is supposed to out damage the other classes. Or, heck, even just keep up.

I did actually play a straight fighter up to 8th level and I watched and tracked the damage the party was doing. Discounting magic items, my fighter was dead last out of the four fighter types in the group. And not by just a little. I was doing less than half the damage of the top damaging character. Even the defensive paladin was outdamaging my character by about 50%.

I've said this before. Actually TRACK the damage for a couple of sessions. Everyone is talking from their gut feeling but, no one appears to actually want to take the time and look harder. I will bet dollars to donuts that your straight fighters are sitting pretty close to dead last in damage dealing, maybe just ahead of the healing cleric and the enchantment focused wizard.

 

[FrogReaver]

The level 5 version of the fighter will get twice as many uses of precision due to having twice as many attacks. He will also get double the damage from Action Surge as it applies twice the number of attacks.

Action surge now does 34 damage. Precision will take 10 dice and will turn 8 misses to hits. That's 68 damage and an additional 9 from the 2 remaining dice. That's 111 damage from abilities per day.

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The level 5 ranger will get to keep hunters mark up every fight of the day as opposed to half and will get to apply it to twice as many attacks. It's damage will quadruple to 112 damage per day. Collosus slayer now can land in the first round and has a much higher chance of landing every round. I'll say it lands about 80% of the time, that's a pretty fair sounding guy estimate IMO. That's now 86.4 damage from colossus slayer. That's an additional damage total of 198.4.

The rangers damage handily beats the fighters at level 5 without feats. Level 6 will help the fighter but the ranger will still win that battle. Feats change everything though and there's no way the ranger wins against the fighter in damage once feats are introduced. He may get close though.

 

[Mistwell]

No, I'm not seeing it because I cannot see how the fighter is supposed to out damage the other classes. Or, heck, even just keep up.

I did actually play a straight fighter up to 8th level and I watched and tracked the damage the party was doing. Discounting magic items, my fighter was dead last out of the four fighter types in the group. And not by just a little. I was doing less than half the damage of the top damaging character. Even the defensive paladin was outdamaging my character by about 50%.

I've said this before. Actually TRACK the damage for a couple of sessions. Everyone is talking from their gut feeling but, no one appears to actually want to take the time and look harder. I will bet dollars to donuts that your straight fighters are sitting pretty close to dead last in damage dealing, maybe just ahead of the healing cleric and the enchantment focused wizard.

I am not talking from my gut. You never even asked people where they were getting their impressions from but just assumed we were getting it from our gut. I am playing a fighter right now, and I am by far the highest damage dealer in our party. In the last two games we played, the fighter each time was in the top 2 for damage dealing. We do track it.

Again, your experience is not universal. You seem to still be under the impression it is. And when people disagree with you...you say silly things like they must be speaking from their guts and not as aware as you are, despite you having so little experience with single class fighters relative to so many others in this thread. I mean you've been disagreeing with [MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] for example and he's laid out some devastating Fighter builds before and I suspect you don't even have any idea of those builds because you and your players have been treating Fighter as an afterthought class and just assuming everyone else must as well.

I will say the battlemaster seems to be the popular subclass with our groups. They can nova pretty hard. I have never seen the champion played as far as I can recall.

 

[Hussar]

Ok, this is how I see it. Let's do a little white room theory crafting.

Assumptions:

• Both archer fighter and archer ranger start with the same combat stats.
• Both take sharpshooter at 4th and the fighter takes an ASI at 6th so he's got +1 to hit and damage
• 6th level
• an adventuring day that is 20 rounds long and includes two short rests.
• Ranger takes Colossus Slayer for simplicity
• Fighter is Battlemaster

So, 20 rounds of combat means the fighter gets 46 attacks to the ranger's 40. Presuming a 60% hit rate (or thereabouts) the fighter hits 28 times (rounding up) and the ranger hits 24 times. Ok, so our fighter deals an extra 12d8 damage (again assuming Battlemaster) +28 for an average of 82 points of damage over an above weapon and sharpshooter. The ranger is likely going to get Colossus Slayer 60% of the time, for an additional 14d8 damage (14 rounds of CS out of 20), plus he's 6 hours of Hunter's Mark to play with meaning he's likely going to get that about 80% of the time for an additional 19d8 points of damage. He averages 33d8 points of damage over and above weapon and sharpshooter for 148 points of additional damage.

IOW, our 6th level ranger is dealing about 30% more damage over the BEST DAY that a fighter can have.

So, how is the fighter catching up that 40 points of damage? Note, that while the fighter does have +1 to hit, the ranger is getting advantage on attacks in the first round of combat most of the time. That's mostly a wash, if not an advantage to the ranger since he can use Sharpshooter in the first round of combat most of the time without any real penalty nor needing any outside help.

This is why I'm not seeing how fighters are even remotely in the same league as other classes. And it shouldn't be like that. Fighters give up any out of combat abilities - no tracking bonuses, no movement bonuses, no spells, nothing. Fighters should be the clear winner in any DPR competition. At the absolute best, they get to equal another class.

And if it takes 11 levels just to finally pull ahead, then something is seriously wrong.