You have mastered ranged weapons and can make shots that others find impossible. You gain the following benefits:
Attacking at long range doesn't impose disadvantage on your ranged weapon attack rolls.
Your ranged weapon attacks ignore half and three-quarters cover.
Before you make an attack with a ranged weapon that you are proficient with, you can choose to take a -5 penalty to the attack roll. If that attack hits, you add +10 to the attack's damage.
Sharpshooter: Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
The hunter lays flat on the roof, raining running down off his hood, a puddle gently reflecting the full moon light from above. He listens, waiting. From across town, he hears the sloppy, sloshy approach of a carriage in the downpour. He raises his head slightly, eyeing up his mark. His mark, a corrupt nobleman, in ignorant bliss steps down from the cabin, extending a hand to his date, ready to retire for the evening. The hunter notches an arrow, pulls back the string, and lets it loose. It cuts through the rain like a fish through a pond, shimmering in the moonlight as it travels. It passes over two city blocks, narrowly cutting below a second story open window and flying inches above the nobleman’s horse’s saddle before plunging into his mark’s neck. The count lets out a single strained gasp, breath escaping the hole in his throat. His date turns back, and lets out a horrified scream as he falls to the ground dead; job done, the hunter slinks down the side of the building, none the wiser to who took the shot.
That’s the fantasy of Sharpshooter. You’re a long ranged assassin. One shot, one kill. You can shoot through any condition, past any amount of obstacles. If you have a line, you can take it. Let's be real, that’s a super sweet fantasy a lot of us want to play. Here’s the problem, though: mechanically, this feat is so good at its job it can make a lot of other player’s feel entirely invalidated, and bring combat to a grinding halt. Once a character has Sharpshooter, every fight from then on out has to be built around the sharpshooter, else be entirely trivialized. It's a gigantic pain in the ass.
All the features coalesce into the problem. First, you no longer suffer disadvantage on attack rolls made with a weapon’s long range. This means with a longbow, you can hit anything within 600 feet of you. Six HUNDRED feet. Not 60, not 120, six HUNDRED. That is well over the size of the majority of battlemaps. Next, if something doesn’t have full cover, you suffer no penalties to hit it. If it's within six hundred feet of you and you can see it, you can shoot it, no problem. Finally, having removed any penalties making long range skirmishing difficult already, you can take -5 to hit (out of what is at 1st level normally around +7 to hit) to deal a bonus +10 damage. Add in a round of hiding to get advantage and you’re looking at a killing machine dealing somewhere north of 18 damage each attack that can functionally hit anything it sees, and they definitely aren’t going to always be able to smack back in these conditions.
What happens from here in particularly tactical groups feels pretty bad; everyone crowds around the Sharpshooter who picks off enemies from as far away as possible. There can not be fights in open space anymore, otherwise the Sharpshooter can get however many rounds it takes to cross the distance free attack actions at anything coming. Things have to move cover to cover, and it needs to be full cover as well. Even then, a readied action each round can put a 18 damage shot into the brain of anything trying to get on top of the Sharpshooter.
This often is going to feel like a major burden more on everyone else than the Sharpshooter. If the melee characters are incentivized to just wait around while the Sharpshooter does their cool thing of picking off baddies from a distance, they aren’t engaging with the world, supporting their buddy, or using cool tools. Full casters can’t even keep up at that range typically, meaning they’re at their best just casting Haste on the Sharpshooter and twiddling their thumbs while the group crawls through whatever environment has long lines of sight. To adjust for this, environments start being really cover heavy, with lots of creatures lying in wait for the party to approach. Fights stop being spontaneous and start being meticulously planned. Going through one of these every now and then can be a great challenge; playing this tactically every single encounter or the Sharpshooter can just circumnavigate the fight entirely by killing everything in sight before they can arrive becomes a chore. The feat is too good at making the long range high damage assassin work, on top of also making long range arrow slingers firing off multiple shots a round outrageously powerful.
Sharpshooter is so good, it's a mistake. Nobody else really can play at this axis as early as Sharpshooter; this is a long ranged option that removes the majority of counterplay to attack back at it up until you’re in the upper tiers of play. Anything with a 600 ft. range is going to meaningfully affect how fights are approached, but with disadvantage and a penalty for half or three quarters cover it was often advantageous to get to a closer space. Sharpshooter throws all that way, bumps up your damage to be higher than most other characters can reach, and scales horrifyingly well with extra attacks. This is one of few feats at the table I’ve ever said no to, and it was only after finishing a campaign that heavily revolved around me figuring out ways to justify a fight existing the Sharpshooter couldn’t just deal with on their own. It was a major headache, and while I’m not advocating you personally ban it, I would recommend at least talking with your DM or player respectively if it's something coming to the table.
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