You have practiced extensively with a variety of weapons, gaining the following benefits:
Increase your Strength or Dexterity score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
You gain proficiency with four weapons of your choice. Each one must be a simple or a martial weapon.
Weapon Master: Art of War
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Feats giving proficiencies I find to be complete and utter wastes of time. Multi-classing gives you access to new class abilities, ability score improvements make things you’re already proficient with likely better, and other feats provide new tools to amp up your builds or diversify how you can explore the world. Heavily Armored as feat is so hard for me to justify; heavy armor proficiency isn’t that much better on really any character that uses medium armor efficiently already. Weapon Master is another in this line of “+ 1 relevant modifier and some proficiencies” that has basically no business finding its way onto your character sheet outside of extremely niche circumstances. In those circumstances sure, they’re fine, but they are deeply boring, offering you no tools or new options to meaningfully change how you approach a fight outside of “I do a die size larger damage now yay”.
At its best, new weapon proficiencies open you up to the “best” weapons of each lane of combat. The longbow and heavy crossbow are the two best ranged weapons in the game (for multi-attack/single attackers respectively). Rogues might want a heavy crossbow to upgrade from their hand crossbow or shortbow. If you’re turning an odd Dex score into an even one, this can be a homerun feat for you, something that both upgrades your based weapon damage dice and upgrades your to Dex modifier. The mod improvement is a lot better than an average +2 damage to hit from the dice upgrade from getting a d10 a round instead of a d6, so if you’re not getting to an even score, it’ll feel underwhelming.
Outside of specifically upgrading rogue’s weapons, almost no other class really needs or wants this. The characters that want to be attacking with mauls and greatswords can already use them. Monks and the subclass martial options for casters like College of Swords bards and Bladesingers have their own requirements and proficiencies that are normally more than enough to get you doing what you want to be in a powerful way.
It doesn’t help that on most characters you’re going to find one weapon and stick with it for many sessions at a time. If you’re picking this up you’re probably taking one proficiency you care about that acts as a mechanical upgrade to something you’ve already been doing and three others that will just take up space in your inventory and not actually offer meaningful advantages. Fighters, with all their access to a variety of weapons, tend to narrow in on one melee and one ranged weapon option that works best with their fighting style and the rest of their build. On non-martial characters, that will often be just one melee weapon supplemented by spellcasting.
If you’re in the market to play the half-orc rogue brandishing a massive crossbow, a level in fighter gives you more proficiencies, a fighting style (for an extra +2 to hit if you want it), and second wind. Yes, multiclassing slows down progression if you intend to get to higher tier play within a class, but you can almost always open up more opportunities for damage expansion in new classes in their lower levels. A rogue multiclassing fighter can make up for the 1d6 missed out on sneak attack damage over three levels by picking up instead Battle Master fighter and the suite of abilities like action surge and their superiority dice. You’re trading earlier access to defensive, passive features like evasion for new ways to contribute to fights and engage the world in more ways. That’s a major boon to me, and a resounding reason to get your weapon proficiencies through multiclassing instead.
In the exact case you’re a rogue with an odd Dex modifier, Weapon Master will be fine, and functionally basically as a better ability score improvement. A lot of characters will prefer multiclassing, but there will be a few devoted rogues who want to get their level 17 feature, and more power to them. For literally everyone else, this feat isn’t worth looking at.
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