You've learned to put the weight of a weapon to your advantage, letting its momentum empower your strikes. You gain the following benefits:
On your turn, when you score a critical hit with a melee weapon or reduce a creature to 0 hit points with one, you can make one melee weapon attack as a bonus action.
Before you make a melee attack with a heavy weapon that you are proficient with, you can choose to take a -5 penalty to the attack roll. If the attack hits, you add +10 to the attack's damage.
Great Weapons Master: Stab Like a Pro
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
A raging barbarian cleaving a goblin in two with a brutal swing of a great axe: iconic. A paladin beheading a zombie ogre with righteous light radiating out from their great sword: spectacular. Giant weapons with more weight than some characters fill a crucial role when it comes to satisfying a huge array of player’s deepest fantasy of just smashing the absolute shit out of something. Great Weapon Master is THE feat to realize your big damage number dreams. I hope you like math, cause we’re talking the math behind weapon attacks and why it's almost always right to attack with Great Weapon Master’s damage for hit trade!
This feat offers you two bonuses. The first is fairly moot, as it only applies after you crit, but sometimes you didn’t kill the thing you wanted to with one critical hit from a 2d6 weapon. Odd, but sure, having another brutal swing will lead to the highest of highs.
Second, where the real controversial meat of the feat is, any time you attack with a heavy weapon you’re proficient with, you can take a -5 penalty to hit. If you do, the hitting deals +10 damage. Fun fact: this should almost always be happening.
The math behind hitting creatures in D&D is predominantly determined by chance. D20 systems have a huge array of results with equal chances of occurring. You’re as likely to roll a 1 as a 20. Modifiers come into play in 5th edition sparsely, largely represented by just your proficiency bonus and ability score modifiers. A fourth level character picking up Great Weapon Master normally is attacking with a +5 to hit: +3 for your Strength modifier, +2 for your proficiency bonus. If you’re attacking a creature with an AC of 11, with just the dice alone, you’re looking at a 50/50 to hit it. This improves to a 25/75 with modifiers, as now five more results hit that otherwise wouldn’t. You can think of it then like dropping your odds for a 75% chance to hit the thing to a 50% chance; that’s a pretty steep drop. Is it worth the damage?
Yes. Yes it is. Great swords are the highest damage mundane weapon in 5th edition, matching great axe's d12 damage maximum with double the damage floor and a much more consistent average. The level four character making a great sword attack is averaging 10 damage (2d6 +3) from a hit with the great sword. For a drop in 25% accuracy, you can add 100% to your damage. Literally double it. If 10 damage wouldn’t kill what you’re attacking, you can basically lump two attacks together at once for a slightly lower chance to hit. That’s ludicrously powerful.
This cascades wildly with advantage. Take a barbarian. At 2nd level, they get access to a togglable advantage feature called reckless attack. Now, the odds of you rolling an 11 or higher spiked from 50% to 75%, with 15 or higher representing roughly half of all advantage rolls you’re making. In a system built around advantage, the mechanic turns up often. Rolling more dice (which is the predominant force affecting whether or not you hit) makes the already comparatively small price even smaller. You’re still going to be hitting the majority creatures the majority of the time even with the -5 penalty to hit, and the pay off doubles your damage. You’re getting a buy one get one free deal. Even if you’re hitting 25% less often, you’re outputting double damage on the remaining hits, putting you way net up in damage over time.
Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter both fit into this big damage category. I actually really like Great Weapon Master; if you want to feel like a monstrous badass slicing creatures in half, really revel in the feast/famine play style, the mechanic absolutely succeeds. Sharpshooter I have a lot more problems with, and have even had talks with player’s about going in a different direction because of how it warps gameplay. I have yet to run into major problems with Great Weapon Master, would recommend it to anyone wanting to cut monsters into bitty pieces, and once again, recommend taking the -5 basically anytime you think something has more than 10 hit points.
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