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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ashkelon" data-source="post: 6667567" data-attributes="member: 6774887">So you are hyperfocusing on the 3-5 encounters per day thing and completely missing the bigger picture. So lets make it a little more clear for you. Right now, picture a fighter, paladin, and ranger. Now strip the spells away from the ranger and paladin entirely. Got it? Good.In terms of combat potential, the ranger at level 3 gets +d8 damage once per round when it hits a damaged enemy. The paladin has channel divinity, the fighter has superiority dice or an improved crit range. The fighter also has action surge.Action surge gives the fighter +100% damage for 1 round per rest.The paladins CD gives it advantage on attacks against a target for a whole fight, once per rest. If the paladin has GWM, advantage translates to ~+50% damage. If the paladin doesn't, it is only worth about +25% damage. So, assuming the paladin is smart and only uses CD on what appear to be boss monsters, he only needs 2-4 rounds of combat for it to match the output of action surge. Of course, if the boss fight lasts 3+ rounds, the CD can actually greatly outdamage action surge. CD also doubles you chance to crit, which pairs nicely with smites (you can choose to use smites after you see if you crit, to double their dice). Since both action surge and CD are short rest abilities, this puts the paladin on nearly equal combat capability with the fighter, before we even consider the effect of spells.Now for the ranger. Colossus Slayer basically translates to a free d8 damage every round. From 5th-10th level, action surge provides the fighter with roughly 20 extra expected damage when used. Assuming you take a rest every 8 rounds of combat, that gives you roughly 2.5 additional DPR. Including critical hits, Colossus Slayer gives the ranger ~4.6 additional DPR from level 5 and up. So, the ranger actually has better "reliable" DPR than the fighter. Of course, most groups don't rest quite that often, which pushes the usefulness of Action Surge downward. A more realistic estimate is Action Surge once every 10+ rounds of combat, but we will give the fighter the benefit of the doubt here.Now a crit range of 19-20 won't actually do much so the champion is out of luck, but superiority dice do add roughly 2-3 DPR to the fighter. This makes the fighter roughly on par with the paladin or ranger in these examples. But, these calculations are both before taking spells into consideration mind you. Spells like haste, hunter's mark, magic weapon, and smites can all add a significant amount of damage over the course of the adventuring day (whether you have 4 encounters or 8).For example, a level 10 paladin has 25d8 smite damage he can toss about each day. The level 10 paladin also has more total HP than the fighter due to 50 HP worth of lay on hands, so the paladin is actually more likely to make it to 6+ encounters than a fighter.Of course, at level 11+ the fighter pulls ahead slight (slightly). And at level 17 when the fighter gains his second action surge, then he truly shines. But for those first 10 levels, the fighter definitely isn't the "best" at fighting. He is pretty much on par with or even slightly behind all the other weapon users.</blockquote>

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