Blind Fighting 5e
You have blindsight with a range of 10 feet. Within that range, you can effectively see anything that isn't behind total cover, even if you're blinded or in darkness. Moreover, you can see an invisible creature within that range, unless the creature successfully hides from you.
Blind Fighting 5e: Fighting Style Review
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Conceptually, Blind Fighting is a deeply rich concept for paladins, fighters, and rangers; using the tremors around you of an enemies footwork, the sounds of their attacks, and the subtle feeling you get when your instincts kick in to pull back to dodge a blow all compose this picture of a Daredevil like superhuman that just knows what's around them, the master of martial arts or swordplay that predicts enemies strikes long before they can land without even needing to see them. Mechanically, Blind Fighting is just 10 ft. limited Blindsight, which can lead to moments where you’ll reach that fantasy, but many more where you won’t be getting any real benefit from it.
Taking advantage of Blind Fighting can be incredibly rewarding; striking enemies that can’t see you offers you advantage, and imposes disadvantage on their attacks against you. Hypothetically, Blind Fighting is superior even to darkvision when in melee combat, giving you an edge up on foes. Practically, Blind Fighting can only go on incredibly specific builds and find regular use. Most environments aren’t going to have a great means of leveraging the blindsight, whether that’s because there is ample light or you’re facing down enemies accustomed to their darker environments and have darkvision. Fighting Styles tend to need to empower every attack a character is making to justify picking them up, or otherwise offer a major consistent boon that will be a readily usable ability. Blind Fighting, by the nature of diverse environments, struggles more than most when it comes to variance in usability. There will be sessions that go by, fight after fight, where Blind Fighting can’t come up on most subclasses within fighter, paladins, and rangers.
There are two major ways to improve this: magical darkness and heavy obscurity. Fog Cloud is probably the cheapest and most consistent way to turn on your Blind Fighting, specifically in ranger, as it's a 1st level spell that you can employ regularly where you need it. Darkness is a 2nd level spell option that opens up to some paladin subclasses. Beyond that, you’ll be stretching to get the consistent advantages of it online for you. Fighters have to bend over backwards to get access to these kind of effects, either committing to Eldritch Knight for cheap access to Fog Cloud, or need to spend feats getting features like Magic Initiate. It’s doable, but not particularly easy.
Even with access to at will magical darkness or heavy obscurity, the 10 ft. distance on it can still be surprisingly situational. For you to not suffer from the penalties incurred by the darkness and heavy obscurity, you need to be engaged within 10 feet of whatever you want to hit. Ranged builds can’t reliably leverage this ever. If you’re fighting in total darkness, getting to a place where you can be at parity with the creatures with darkvision might be a problem of itself. Navigating in environments where Blind Fighting can thrive can be a challenge on its own.
The payoff is there, though. Advantage on all your attack rolls and imposing disadvantage on all theirs as the maximum potential is enormous, and not being disadvantaged by creatures with darkvision or Invisibility, too, is generally pretty useful. You can make Blind Fighting work on most melee characters, and the added benefits blindsight gives you outside of combat does make it an interesting option from among the otherwise combat exclusive fighting styles. If you build towards it to empower it, it can be the best out of the group, but on most sheets, it’ll be somewhat feast or famine.
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