Thrown Weapon Fighting 5e
You can draw a weapon that has the thrown property as part of the attack you make with the weapon.
In addition, when you hit with a ranged attack using a thrown weapon, you gain a +2 bonus to the damage roll.
Thrown Weapon Fighting 5e: Fighting Style Review
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
The knife juggler tossing out daggers around the room, putting on a show as much as dealing with the brigands, the brutal gladiator throwing javelins with unrivaled accuracy to pin down and destroy the competition, the woodland lumberjack who just picked up ax throwing as a hobby and found it lends itself extremely well to adventuring: these are just a few of the diverse options that like killing with thrown weapons. You won’t have any problem coming up with characters from Captain America to Gambit who love throwing things at people. What goliath hasn’t considered throwing the halfling rogue as a projectile?
Fantasy isn’t the problem with fighters and rangers looking to build around thrown weapons: the problem has always been that thrown weapons just aren’t really that good. Thrown Weapon Fighting helps a lot, but not in the ways that it really needs to to justify it as your go to means of engaging every fight.
Drawing a weapon as part of the attack is a massive quality of life upgrade for the archetype. It's what really killed its viability entirely, even at the least combat focused tables, as you’re basically gated to only getting to attack with one thrown weapon a round after the first. My hope is that in the next edition, we see this get baked into making attacks with thrown weapons, as it's nowhere near as good as ranged weapon combat anyway, and a fantasy many love to play around with even if it's not their main strategy for engaging in a fight. This brings thrown weapons, which still have the carrying capacity and cost issues when it comes to usability, closer to par with unaugmented other weapon options. You still are faced with lower ranges, worse damage, and a lack of great reason to use them as a primary weapon, but at least now they function.
+2 to damage is fine and all, but not enough. Strength based characters normally are making one or less thrown weapon attacks a fight to engage it, and after that pull out the greatsword or maul, or sometimes a longsword and shield. None of the thrown weapons get higher than d6 damage dice. Getting two attacks a round when you pick this up using your bonus action is fine, but not only are you not getting the ability mod on the damage of the off-hand hit, you run into the regular thrown weapon issues of running out of axes, failing to scale well past 5th level. Plus they tend to struggle to juggle bonus actions between Hunter's Mark and other mark payoffs and making more thrown weapon attacks. All these things considered, the +2 damage you’re getting makes it closer to a d8 than a d6 on average with a higher floor, which is fine, but still nowhere close to other damage options with their fighting styles. It makes it comparable to a regular longbow, unaugmented, with a fraction of the range.
Thrown Weapon Fighting is more of a quality of life update for thrown weapons that brings them closer to par with the other weapons as a baseline. The fundamental problem with that is they’re quite a bit worse than higher range and damage dice long-bow, and don’t give you enough reason to want to use them. 1d6+2+mod looks very similar in averages to 1d8+mod. There aren’t that many additional feats or options that empower it further, meaning once you get this and the Two-Weapon Fighting style, you’re done. Instead of empowering this niche, flexible tool you bust out every few fights, you could instead empower how you intend to actually engage in melee fighting with the better styles that empower those instead, or build towards a better ranged option with crossbows or longbows. There just aren’t enough reasons to go with thrown weapons as your main damage output, and for that reason, not enough reasons to take Thrown Weapon Fighting.
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