Great Weapon Fighting 5e
When you roll a 1 or 2 on a damage die for an attack you make with a melee weapon that you are wielding with two hands, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll, even if the new roll is a 1 or a 2. The weapon must have the two-handed or versatile property for you to gain this benefit.
Great Weapon Fighting 5e: Fighting Style Review
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
I adore Great Weapon Fighting as a fighting style for fighters and paladins. It's a super simple concept; two-handed melee weapons get to reroll 1s or 2s once per hit. The game play this leads to, though, is incredibly fun. So many of us come to D&D to roll some dice and get up to nonsense storytelling with our friends; Great Weapon Fighting makes the dice rolling and big numbers all the more fun.
Every versatile or two-handed weapon qualifies for this fighting style, making it fit a relatively diverse amount of fighters and paladins. The two-handed options are greatclubs, glaives, greataxes, greatswords, halberds, mauls, and pikes, basically being split into three categories. You have 2d6 hits, reach 1d10 hits, or the greataxe (hitting for 1d12). Greatswords and mauls are both exceptional options to play with with Great Weapon Fighting. You roll more dice total, meaning you’ll be rerolling more 1s and 2s. What flies under the radar sometimes, though, is the higher dice size hits; getting extra chances to play the high variance game by making it far less likely to low roll on the big dice can be really fun and exciting. Mechanically, you’re going to find more consistency with the multiple dice based weapons, but there is something incredibly satisfying watching a 2 on your d12 graze turn into a 9, 10, 11, or 12. You go from a gentle poke to a deathblow.
Another element of rerolling 1s and 2s that makes Great Weapon Fighting all the sweeter is how it interacts with crits and other weapon improvements. The general consensus on whether this works or not with features like Divine Smite or Divine Favor is up in the air on the internet; I generally rule that Smite doesn’t, as the weapon doesn’t deal the extra damage in the features wording while spells like Divine Favor that specify the weapon deals the extra damage do, but your mileage may vary DM to DM. What doesn’t vary is that you get to reroll critical hit dice that land on 1 or 2, making it exceptional for crit based builds at improving your damage. As the game goes, you’ll find you’ll be regularly rerolling multiple dice every round with this fighting style, making it something that rewards building towards critical hit improvements or getting as many attacks in with the weapon as possible.
You can’t go wrong with Great Weapon Fighting on your high damage frontliners. Watching your garbage rolls turn to gold is deeply satisfying, and you’ll get a good chuckle from time to time when you roll snake eyes twice in a row. Great Weapon Fighting should be the standard starting point all the other fighting styles should look to. It adds an interesting mechanic to improve damage that feels fun to use, scales with build decisions, clearly rewards fighting in a handful of niche directions, and is easy to parse. Try out great weapon fighting if you haven’t: it's a blast.
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