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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8638283" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Great Weapon Master is an odd duck.  Mathematically speaking, it doesn't seem particularly worth it.I mean, let's look at a Fighter with a +5 to hit vs. AC 12.  He only misses 30% of the time.  If his average damage is 10, that's 7 per turn on average.Throw in GWM, and now he misses 55% of the time.  Even though his average damage is now 20, because of that miss chance, his damage per turn only goes up to 9.Even with Bless, that average damage becomes 8.25 vs. 10.5.  But people swear by it, and DM's hate GWM because when it does hit, the damage seems far more impressive in the short run than it really would be in the long run.Of course, this is all theorycraft- AC's are variable, but thanks to bounded accuracy, are rarely going to rise too high on opponents, and advantage is fairly easy to gain if you're looking for it.  After all, if I'm doing 10 damage a hit, and I increase my hit percentage by 25, that's only another 2.5 damage a hit.Trading that 25% chance to hit for 10 more damage seems like the better deal, even if your miss chance is 25% greater, no matter what the actual damage calculation would be on paper-75% chance to hit with 10 damage is only 7.5, while 50% chance to hit with 20 still pulls ahead at 10.  It's a much smaller boost to damage than people think it is, obviously, but when you do hit, it 'feels' like you're breaking the system a lot more than you really are.</blockquote>

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