What makes Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter so good?

[Mistwell]

Take a Battlemaster Fighter for example. He gets +2 hit from archery style and precision attack. (Precision attack is basically a +2/+3 bonus to hit over the whole course of a standard adventuring day). This basically completely negates the -5 penalty and he is left with +10 damage. End of explanation.

That is a terrible awful no good "explanation". In no way does precision attack "basically a +2/+3 bonus to hit over the whole course of a standard adventuring day". And archery has an opportunity cost of not taking one of the other options, like a higher AC.

 

[5ekyu]

"The problem that many have is the various ways a character can mitigate the -5 attack penalty, such as from Bless, Advantage, Precision Attack, Magic Items, etc"

As an observation, these do not mitigate the penalty.

You still take a -5.

Unless the Ac vs hit skew is so far that you are unable to miss on a 2-5 roll, after the +5 you are still getting 5 more chances to miss on a d20 roll.

If i need an 8 to hit and get a +5 from precision, and all that jazz - i am choosing between hit on 3-20 for x gamage vs hit on 8-20 for x+10 - an almost guaranteed vs a 35% miss.

Now, the question is "what is x" to determine how good that is.

There is no doubt that in the right circumstances it boosts damage but there often seems to be a presumption that its going to be working very often.

It seems as if low ac just slug-o-matic brutes is the norm for adversaries.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

A last reminder: one should assume that the feat overall gives a benefit. Lets further assume that it needs to be better than savage attacker since that feat is more univerally uswful. Lets also assume that it should be better than +2 strength while fighting with 2 weapons since again +2 is more universally useful. Anything less useful and it was a trap feat.

 

[Li Shenron]

I haven't actually seen either GWF or SS feats in play, so I am commenting only on the math.

+10 damage is good, probably around doubling your damage on a hit (for argument's sake I am assuming 12 or 11 damage on a hit normally), but it comes with a 25% drop in accuracy.

Players with those feats usually save the big damage attacks for low AC monsters, even at high levels.

I think that in general the idea that a -5 to a d20 roll equates to -25% probability is misleading. I would rather think of it as the following:

Old roll to hit   Old prob     New roll to hit    New Prob    Hit rate difference
1 or less          95%          7 or less          70% or more  -21% or less
2                  95%          7                  70%          -26%
3                  90%          8                  65%          -28%
4                  85%          9                  60%          -29%
5                  80%          10                 55%          -31%
6                  75%          11                 50%          -33%
7                  70%          12                 45%          -36%
8                  65%          13                 40%          -38%
9                  60%          14                 35%          -42%
10                 55%          15                 30%          -46%
11                 50%          16                 25%          -50%
12                 45%          17                 20%          -56%
13                 40%          18                 15%          -63%
14                 35%          19                 10%          -71%
15                 30%          20                  5%          -83%
16                 25%          20                  5%          -80%
17                 20%          20                  5%          -75%
18                 15%          20                  5%          -67%
19                 10%          20                  5%          -50%
20 or more         5%           20                  5%          no change

Of course my math may be wrong, but what I see is that in general the hit rate (i.e. how often are you actually going to hit the target) is always decreased by more than 25% except against extremely easy targets which you would normally always hit unless you roll a natural 1.

For example, if you would normally hit on a natural 11 or more (hence your hit probability is 50%), if you take -5 then you would hit on a natural 16 or more (probability is 25%). The amount of successful attacks is therefore halved, not reduced to 3/4, so in general the loss is quite a lot more significant.

If the table above is correct, then taking -5 in exchange for bonus damage is more convenient against easy-to-hit but high-HP monsters, which in fact also makes sense narratively.

However, the "automatic hit on natural 20" rules creates the anomaly in the last table rows: since you always have at least 5% chance to hit, taking -5 is also the least convenient when you hit on a natural 15 or more, then the cost progressively drops. It might therefore makes sense to take -5 when you would normally hit on a natural 19 or more (because your hit rate drops by half, which is large but doable), and it is actually a no-brainer when you only hit on a natural 20 (because with -5 you still need the same natural 20 to hit).

 

[Horwath]

So far, I found that the best way to deal with GWM/SS is to replace -5/+10 part with +1str/+1 dex.

 

[Zardnaar]

The average AC in the MM being 14.5 (apparently).

Not sure if I was the 1st to call out these feats in 2014, I was one of the early ones anyway. HotDQ had a +2 Greatsword, found out the hard way a +2 bow/handcrossbow is worse.

 

[CapnZapp]

If everyone uses their buffs on the person with that feat, everyone contributes equally. I'd also claim that a wizard with fireball or a good hold person will easily contribute in as many fights as the gwm fighter. What is the problem with one person being good at what he does? And to shamelessly quote myself: it is only outpacing everything else in trivial fights. If you can do a gwm nova with all buffs activated there were also other methods of winning the fight.... and if there should be a fight were that was the only solution or you were lucky hitting more than you should it was a feat worth taking.

Others have replied.

Again: it is about balance within a party.

With GWM you can no longer compete in the "bloke with sword" niche without it. Dealing half as much damage as the other guy is seriously erasing game fun for many players.

Maybe not for you, but now at least you know why it is considered so broken.

 

[CapnZapp]

That is a terrible awful no good "explanation". In no way does precision attack "basically a +2/+3 bonus to hit over the whole course of a standard adventuring day". And archery has an opportunity cost of not taking one of the other options, like a higher AC.

AC is often good enough.

Damage is where the game is at.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Others have replied.

Again: it is about balance within a party.

With GWM you can no longer compete in the "bloke with sword" niche without it. Dealing half as much damage as the other guy is seriously erasing game fun for many players.

Maybe not for you, but now at least you know why it is considered so broken.

I know all that. And then you see the other guy missing when he would have hit with just 2 points of strength. Of course it is a good feat and if it is important to you to see big numbers go for it. At least it is obvious how to do it. There is no feat chain or strange combo. Just take the feat and be happy. Bit it is far from broken or unbalanced.

 

[CapnZapp]

There is no doubt that in the right circumstances it boosts damage but there often seems to be a presumption that its going to be working very often.

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).

This in itself might have not been such a huge issue if it did not leave every other martial archetype in the dust.

But this is the real issue: the intra-party balance. The way it creates two tiers of martials. The ones with GWM (and SS) and the ones without. At mid to high levels the damage potential differential reaches +50 points of damage - a potential completely unheard of by other means. No wonder the spellcasters focus their efforts on the GWM:ers and not on the others.