Two-Weapon Fighting 5e
When you engage in two-weapon fighting, you can add your ability modifier to the damage of the second attack.
Two-Weapon Fighting 5e: Fighting Style Review
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Two-Weapon Fighting is one of my go to one-shot character fighting styles. Both fighters and rangers can pick this option up early to weaponize their bonus action, empower multi-attack payoffs like Hunter's Mark and Hex, and diversify their in combat options by a decent bit.
Without it, getting just a d6 to damage on hit leaves off-hand attacks feeling lukewarm at best. Getting your mod to the second weapon’s damage is often basically doubling its effectiveness; going from a d6 to a d6+3 damage takes your average from 3.5 to 6.5. When fighting creatures with low amounts of HP in large groups, this can easily be the difference between killing something small outright and leaving it wounded. Two-weapon fighters thrive against large quantities of small enemies early, and two-weapon fighting is a big enabler of that fantasy.
Numerically, two-weapon fighting doesn’t tend to have the highest damage per round output, nor does it scale particularly well over the course of a game. It's a big burst of initial damage, giving you what will feel like extra attack at 1st or 2nd level for your bonus action, but as the game progresses, two-weapon fighting doesn’t really scale in any other way. Your modifier goes up a bit, but options like Great Weapon Fighting and Archery improve with every additional attack you’re making, whereas Two-Weapon Fighting doesn’t get any better with more attacks.
Two-Weapon Fighting builds also tend to struggle to maintain concentration on their bonus damage effects, juggle their bonus actions around between off-hand attacks and moving their multi-attack payoffs, and using new bonus actions or other weapon improvements as they progress. There aren’t a ton of upper tier options that pay off off-hand attacks, making it particularly potent when you get it, and only ever getting worse comparatively from there. Even the feat Dual Wielder doesn’t really offer that much of an advantage for playing with two-weapon fighting, making the pool of decisions you have to improve incredibly slim.
Multi-class builds tend to leverage this pretty well, especially if you don’t want to hit 5th level on the martial option for extra attack quickly. It will help you feel like you’re scaling enough alongside the other extra attackers while you get some subclass options you want, action surge, a bit of spell casting, etc.
If you plan on playing a character over a long game and sticking with just one class, two-weapon fighting isn’t particularly sustainable. If you want to dip into a few different classes and want to do some magic/martial hybrid, Two-Weapon Fighting can be a great option to have.
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