D&D (2024) What is 5th editions Spiked chain?

[Zardnaar]

I've never seen anything specific as to whether this surprised them or not. It really depends on whether they wanted anything like this in the game or not. We know they talked about walking back the system mastery game in this edition, but at the same time, they didn't want to push away (too hard) people who like that kind of thing. As maddening as it is for many (such as myself--who wants players to be choosing weapon-shield-feat combinations based on which flavor speaks to them most) for there to be some fairly straightforward simply-best choices, the difference between dual-wielding or longsword-and-shield fighter (who maxes their Str faster) compared to CBE+SS fighter is within the overall variation in power that the game has/had in 2014/seems to deem acceptable. It is entirely possible that the devs were saying, "well, maybe a little system mastery is acceptable" when designing the bonus-action-attack feats alongside the -5/+10 feats.

I think they thought the -5 part would matter. It's only -3 with archery style and the average AC in the MN is only 14.5 iirc.

And things like bless pretty much eliminate the penalty.

With XBE+ss iirc if you hit 50% after -50 is applied or more always take the -5.

 

[James Gasik]

Ultimately, what they failed to take into account was their own bounded accuracy system. Enemies with AC in the 20 and up range are rare. Advantage isn't hard to get; heck, some classes grant it (like Barbarians) on demand.

Further, the amount of damage from weapon + ability is probably less than 10. So if you're, say, a Tier 2 Fighter with a +7 to hit, and you get two swings anyways, even without advantage, against an AC of 17, why the heck not take a -5? 1d12+4 twice isn't really much worse than 1d12+14, and hey, you only need a 15 twice to get 2d12+28. Throw in advantage on those swings, and it's almost like no penalty at all.

And as you get higher in level, and get more attack bonus, it's not like AC's scale much. And this is before we get into Bards, Clerics, Mastermind Rogues, or Battlemasters, who have ways to boost accuracy further.