Great. So now you're relativizing to the point where every option is about the same: "it can be good and it can be less good".
Seriously.
Well, okay - it's up to the OP I guess.
i find it hilarious that after actually quoting a small piece of the rather wordy post i made you decided to put "" around something i did not say.
But thats fine. Shows the strength of your position.
In response let me do the opposite and actually put in "" things you have said on this thread...
"Damage is where the game is at."
Thats the underlying basis os the complaints about these feats - that they allow the production of higher amounts of damage in certain situations.
i will submit that in my experience total damage and especially DPR (another point you focus on) is less important than relative damage or effective damage or the single biggest aspect of the game - number of actions. A **lot* more gain can be accomplished by denying the enemy actions or providing them disadvantage on actions they take *in my experience* in a lot more circumstances than trying to maximize DPR at the cost of a party say focusing on supporting the GWM.
Again to quote you...
"I do not deny it requires a considerable level of system mastery to use right.
Actually that's another black mark against the feat. A feat that encourages casual players to take mathematically-unsound actions (using the feat in circumstances where it statistically lowers your DPR) is a bad feat.
Anyway, once your players have achieved suffienct system expertise, the feat is a damage-enabler bar none. There simply is no other way to reach the pinnacles of DPR. Your party simply will end up focusing all their minmax efforts on the GWMers (since that's much more worthwhile than wasting it on others)."
So, even as the latter part of that quote drives to the focusing the party on the damage from the GMW instead of the other possibilities - of course how many actions you cost the other side and how many times they miss are things not lending themselves easily to excel white room spreadsheets - the mid-part is aditting that the feat can be good or can be bad... depending on the circumstance and the numbers...
If that is the case, then it seems obvious that the frequency of the circumstances where "its good" and that "its bad" will vary from table to table outside of formal league play with mandatory pre-set encounters 9or outside of static white room excel sheet assumptions.)
But, in my experience, battles are won and lost in actual play more often *not* by DPR but by the relative outputs and restoration rates of both side and that is at least as often as not decided by denying effective actions to one side or the other than it is by just winning a race.
The exceptions in my experience tend to be very brief encounters with seriously under-capable adversaries - like say many of the warm-up and mid-card encounters - many of which are flashes over and (effectively) decided 9if not done) in a round or two.
For fights that last, rounds in which you de-tooth the boss or some of the main damage dealers - do far more to shift the outcome than does some extra damage output from one character due to throwing lots of actions or power/resources from multiple characters to support one feat.
But again, like most every thing, this will vary a lot from table to table - whether or not the excel sheet says so.
