Dual Wielder: Make it a Double

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

God this feat is such a letdown. It has a whole bunch of foundational problems, chief among them being how it tricks people into trying to work with weapons that have no business being on a dual wielder’s character sheet.

+1 AC is a “free” bonus here that’s mediocre. A +2 Dexterity modifier is almost always going to equate to a bonus AC on characters with Dual Wielder, as dual wielding relies heavily on light, finesse weapons to function. These characters tend to be rangers, fighters, and rogues who are working with light or medium armor, and probably are going to want powerful light armor as they get a +4 or +5 Dexterity online. The +1 AC kind of mitigates the need to switch from medium to light in the upper tiers, but that’s not a particularly compelling reason to take this feat on its own.

Drawing or stowing two one handed weapons is nifty, but really feels so clunky in practice. This primarily is for characters who want to be throwing two weapons a turn, or for when you’re surprised and have to spontaneously draw weapons. Drawing a weapon happens as a part of an action, such as an attack, so this is a fine little quality of life upgrade for those two scenarios, but you’re not often going to be in circumstances where you wouldn’t have had at least one weapon held at a time. Dungeoning with a short-sword in one hand and a torch in the other mitigates the bulk of this line entirely.

Finally, there is the piece of text that really annoys me: “You can use two-weapon fighting even when one of the one handed melee weapons you are wielding aren’t light”. This basically is telling you to upgrade a short-sword to a rapier, but in practice, so many players will deviate from dexterity based weapons for some other non-finesse weapon to try to get a bigger die size. It encourages you to attack with your Strength AND Dexterity. That’s not a great place to be; numerically you’re going to want as much juice as you can get out of one attack roll stat you intended to use a lot. If you’re two-weapon fighting, short-swords and daggers make it very appealing to use Dex. If you’re already a two-weapon fighting build with Strength, you’d probably be better off with a great-sword, but if you’re determined to fight with hand-axes this will let you change one of them out for a d8 longsword instead I guess. Is one weapon upgrading a die size worth a feat? No, not even a little bit.
The nail in the coffin for Dual Wielder to me is how it doesn’t incorporate the fighting style bonus of adding mod to damage on the off hand hit. If you don’t already have the fighting style, you do not want this. If you do already have the fighting style, you probably just want a higher mod to increase both weapons damage instead of just one by a die upgrade. When an ability score increase is doing the majority of what a feat is doing, you should know this isn’t delivering as it needs to to justify taking it. A +2 Dex also boosts your Dex skills, saving throws, and other attacks. Dual Wielder sometimes gives you a +1 to one of your two attacks damage roll, and rarely will offer you a tool to prep both weapons at once.

You don’t need Dual Wielder, even on characters built to Dual Wield. Defensive Duelist is better than this. Mobile is better than this. An ability score improvement for +2 Dex is better than this. Don’t take Dual Wielder. Get something worthwhile.

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