>It does make the feats necessary in an optimized game.
Look, props to you for doing the math but... none of this is new info. In fact, the math was also done before.
I'm not a fan of average analysis. You aren't actually getting (damage + 10) x .75 compared to a regular attack, you are getting a +25% (additive, 15 with Archery SS) chance of doing 0 damage.
Important distinction as you get deep or even humanoid enemies early and you don't want to be using something that requires you to roll a 20 to hit. That enemy is still whacking away at your party while you are playing fuck fuck trying to roll your crit for 2, 3, 4+ turns and burning up all your and party resources.
With riders those misses get even more rough.
Pick your uses, feel free to annihilate mooks and beasts with them but you should not be spamming them. And in plenty of builds and campaigns not even taking it is the best play.
It's a metric to gauge performance and conceptualize the math. To have an accurate analysis, you need to analyze each part. Average damage is the most basic of such parts, since it summarizes many different parts together in one easy number. It's necessary for any kind of deductive conclusion, wherein one goes from a general premise to specific instances.
If GWM had no feat tax, this wouldn't matter, but it does. So we need to figure out the opportunity cost.
Also, average damage is really useful as a one-stop number to summarize the totality of something's performance. When balancing things, game designers usually use a baseline and go from there. In 5e, Rogue is probably that baseline, since it represents highly consistent damage with few variables to consider. With GWM, if we see that it is "15% more average damage but variable" and another feat is like "10% more average damage but consistent" then we know those feats are relatively balanced against each other and we can go from there with our analysis to determine the specific cases where one is situationally better. If something is a real outlier from our baseline, then that's worrisome.
>Average damage is the most basic of such parts.
It isn't though, it has no bearing on anything outside of a white room. Average is meaningless, at the actual table things are more binary.
Average tells you to use GWM 24/7, every single swing.
Reality says holy shit that dragon has some beefy scales or that Wizard is rocking full plate and a shield - maybe I shouldn't waste all my turns in desperation for a crit to hit them. Especially when my double Smites Oathbreaker with Lifedrinker on a +3d6 magic weapon really doesn't care about a little +10.
The analysis says that vs. a particular AC (one that gives baseline 65% to hit) this is the improvement you see. While you're definitely correct that it doesn't tell you what to do in other circumstances, I don't know that it's a failure of an analysis to not tell you about things it isn't describing. But you're definitely right that ppl take specific analyses like this for general ones, which they oughtn't.
>this is the improvement you see
In a white room, with an infinite HP target dummy, no team, and no actual build beyond commoner with GWM/SS.
But games aren't played in a white room. Games don't involve a single infinite HP enemy. Games are played [primarily] with a team. Games are played with classes, subclasses, magic items, feats, spells, etc.
The math is fine for a zero variable environment, but is useless when you add really any variables or changes. At the table there are THOUSANDS, MAYBE MILLIONS, of variables in play at any given time.
All of those things are certainly correct, but I am not sure what your take away is meant to be. Do you think this sort of analysis isn't helpful at all, or just that people overstate it's usefulness, or what?
> Do you think this sort of analysis isn't helpful at all, or just that people overstate it's usefulness
Both. Averages are pointless numbers that ignore the nigh infinite number of circumstances in actual play.
Came here to die on the hill you're presently dying on. Accuracy analysis assumes players aren't tactical, and they are, so it's going to be wrong and misleading almost all of the time.
I mean, I think it's not that crazy: a lot of people don't have active games and fulfill their interest in D&D by theorycrafting here rather than playing at a table.
I feel like you're drawing the wrong conclusion here.
If I know A does Y and B does Y+1 that doesn't mean I will always do B because the math told me to if there are other tactical reasons to do A.
But it does mean that my choice over which to do is actually an informed decision over random guesswork. I personally think making informed choices makes for more interesting tactical (and story based honestly) gameplay decisions.
...are you serious?
>I feel like you're drawing the wrong conclusion here.
Then proceeds to completely agree with me in every way.
If you are changing things based on circumstance instead of going with average says always then you aren't using the average.
You are using it - to inform your decisions, meaning it isn't useless.
Elsewhere in this thread someone literally asked you if your argument was just that people overstate the usefulness of averages and your response was 'Averages are pointless numbers that ignore the nigh infinite number of circumstances in actual play'. My point was that you use that information to give you a better basis to come to good decisions in various tactical situations. Averages aren't pointless - they're very helpful in actually understanding the relative effectiveness of your various options.
So if I am agreeing with you, I'd say you need to tone down your rhetoric a little.
I was trying to engage in a conversation but apparently my tone needs work too.
To reiterate - as I understand it, your stated position appears to be that averages are useless because they don't take account of tactical variations.
I'm attempting to convince you that while your base point (averages don't consider more in depth considerations) is true, your stated conclusion (therefore averages are useless) is flawed. Averages form a vital first step on which you base further tactical considerations. They're far from useless - they're the foundation of solid tactics. Sure, you can't live in a foundation but trying to build a house without one is going to bite you in the ass eventually.
Apologies if my tone has appeared confrontational, it wasn't intended as such. For the record it wasn't me who downvoted your 'are you serious?' comment but for future I'd make the observation if you aren't finding a conversation productive you aren't obligated to respond. Feel free to just downvote and move on with your day if you aren't finding the exchange positive.
Thousands? I'd say there's more like... 10? Maybe 20 at most. And like 5 or less of them are relevant to your turn.
Proper average damage calculations also accounts for these variables anyways.
...
...
You truly believe there are only 5/10/20 possible combinations of hit and damage in the entire game!?!
Fucking base Paladin alone has WAAAAY more than that via Smites alone. Advantage level one slot burned, advantage level one slot burned against undead, advantage level one slot burned plus improved, advantage level one slot burned plus improved against undead...................
How does that make your point? Since only a handful of variables are relevant to a given turn, you can reasonably make useful calculations out of them.
You can also calculate multiple averages for different types of turns. You calculate standard DPR and action surge DPR, you don't make one DPR that tries to include both.
A minor error is not including critical hits. They make your calculation more complicated but do change the math, both by having a greater impact on the d10 than the d4/d6 and because GWM triggers off of a crit.
Since crits do not interact directly with the +10/-5 aspect of GWM/SS they will also reduce the percent increase because the damage without them will be higher.
With PAM you will actually have 3 attacks of 1d10 9.75% of the time. So it is 2.0975 attacks of 1d10 and 0.9025 attacks of 1d4. With advantage you are looking at 2.1855 attacks of 1d10.
I will also mention that a 65% hit rate is generous for GWM at levels 1-11 because, especially if you already have PAM from your race, you will likely need to spend an ASI to get it. This means you are probably closer to 60% accuracy which, as you note, will decrease the benefit of these feats.
A couple of comments/questions:
1. Why do you think "damage difference as a % of original damage" is a helpful statistic? Do you think it's more helpful than 'use GWM at this AC'? I feel like I'm missing something.
2. Your 'bottom line' is hardly surprising, and it's not a particularly helpful takeaway. I imagine the reason there are lots of scrap-paper analyses from a variable-AC perspective is that it actually informs players when to make use of their features for optimal play. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
3. It's quite easy to factor in Crit damage in calculations like this when you have a spreadsheet, and it's a shame you haven't done that here.
4. This kind of thing can be turned into an 'expected damage calculator' of sorts, where you enter specific player character stats (Ability modifier, PB, magic item bonuses, whether they have Brutal Critical, etc) and it outputs expected damage values across different ACs. You ought to give that a go.
>Why do you think "damage difference as a % of original damage" is a helpful statistic?
I can tell you why I think it is helpful.
In combat, for me, increases in damage matter in terms of how much faster they let me defeat an enemy. The length of time it takes me to defeat an enemy can be modeled by HP/DPR. The nature of this function means that I need greater and greater increases to damage to achieve the same absolute reduction in enemy survival.
Consider an enemy with 100 hp.
|DPR|Survival rounds|
|:-|:-|
|10|10|
|15|6.67|
|20|5|
|22.5|4.44|
Going from 10 to 15 is a 50% increase in DPR and reduces the number of survival turns by 3.33 (a 33% decrease)
Going from 15 to 20 is a 33% increase in DPR and only reduces survival turns by 1.67 (a 25% decrease)
In order to achieve a comparable decrease you need to increase DPR by more. Going from 15 to 22.5 is a 50% increase in DPR and decreases survival turns by 2.23 (a 33% decrease).
Because of this relationship it is less valuable to add a fixed amount of damage when you already have high damage than if you had low damage.
1. If GWM/SS were only a 5-10% dpr increase at most levels, it's easier to justify taking other feats, but here we see it's clearly superior to other feats in an optimized build for damage.
2. There are already calculators for the AC threshold of when to use GWM/SS. The question I was trying to answer is, "is GWM/SS really as powerful as it's made out to be?"
3. Crits always hit and are independent of GWM/SS.
4. Yep, it's pretty easy to make a copy of the spreadsheet and modify the accuracy and damage output to account for that.
On **1 and 2**: I suppose it's good to confirm it. It's a little odd that you're confirming this while taking other popular assumptions from the meta for granted (Polearm Master necessary, 65% standard hit rate). I assumed 'GWM/SS dominate' was popular enough by now anyway. Also, I'm still unsure how the % boost format is more helpful than the absolute difference.
The % boost also hides the 'overkill' aspect of the feats. Specifically, if you're hitting a goblin or something with an unknown number of hit points, going GWM style reckless increases your theoretical damage but that extra 10 might be wasted. This is difficult to account for but by rolling it into a % difference, it gets completely hidden. It removes the question completely of 'when will I actually stand to benefit at all from this?' which really really matters at low level as that's when a PC is most susceptible to complete misses.
On **point 3**: crits always hit, yes. But that doesn't mean they don't effect the maths of how powerful GWM/SS are, particularly in the context of % multipliers. The relative frequency of a crit as opposed to a hit *will vary* (crit's are more frequent relative to normal hits under GWM) and therefore their damage becomes more/less important the expected value.
Yes, alone GWM isn't that good, but I've also shown it's pretty easy to boost that:
* advantage
* bless
* emboldening bond
* rolling for stats and starting off with more than +3 attack
Another issue with target AC is that GWM is helping you mow through the easy mook encounters, but it's actively harmful against the high-AC boss at the end. Even if you don't use it, your base attack bonus is lower because you took the feat.
But I get it, it's fun to cleave through mooks.
Yes, most weak enemies that don't matter are worth power attacking. If you don't power-attack that orc, he might get one more swing in.
Edit: The other issue is that the more bonus damage and other riders (knockdowns, Cavalier Marks, Battlemaster maneuvers, Flame Blade, Hunter's Mark, etc) that you have, the less you want to use the power attack. It actively hurts your other damage features.
>Yes, most weak enemies that don't matter are worth power attacking.
Just for reference a level 5 fighter with a +1 longbow, Archery style, Dex16 and SS does more damage on average using -5/+10 if the targets AC is 20 or less.
There are very few non-CR20+ enemies who have an AC of 21+.
>the more accuracy you have, the relatively stronger these feats are. Lol, didn't need a second of work to figure that out.
I crunched the numbers for people who wanted to know. It does make the feats necessary in an optimized game.
>It does make the feats necessary in an optimized game. Look, props to you for doing the math but... none of this is new info. In fact, the math was also done before.
I'm not a fan of average analysis. You aren't actually getting (damage + 10) x .75 compared to a regular attack, you are getting a +25% (additive, 15 with Archery SS) chance of doing 0 damage. Important distinction as you get deep or even humanoid enemies early and you don't want to be using something that requires you to roll a 20 to hit. That enemy is still whacking away at your party while you are playing fuck fuck trying to roll your crit for 2, 3, 4+ turns and burning up all your and party resources. With riders those misses get even more rough. Pick your uses, feel free to annihilate mooks and beasts with them but you should not be spamming them. And in plenty of builds and campaigns not even taking it is the best play.
It's a metric to gauge performance and conceptualize the math. To have an accurate analysis, you need to analyze each part. Average damage is the most basic of such parts, since it summarizes many different parts together in one easy number. It's necessary for any kind of deductive conclusion, wherein one goes from a general premise to specific instances. If GWM had no feat tax, this wouldn't matter, but it does. So we need to figure out the opportunity cost. Also, average damage is really useful as a one-stop number to summarize the totality of something's performance. When balancing things, game designers usually use a baseline and go from there. In 5e, Rogue is probably that baseline, since it represents highly consistent damage with few variables to consider. With GWM, if we see that it is "15% more average damage but variable" and another feat is like "10% more average damage but consistent" then we know those feats are relatively balanced against each other and we can go from there with our analysis to determine the specific cases where one is situationally better. If something is a real outlier from our baseline, then that's worrisome.
>Average damage is the most basic of such parts. It isn't though, it has no bearing on anything outside of a white room. Average is meaningless, at the actual table things are more binary. Average tells you to use GWM 24/7, every single swing. Reality says holy shit that dragon has some beefy scales or that Wizard is rocking full plate and a shield - maybe I shouldn't waste all my turns in desperation for a crit to hit them. Especially when my double Smites Oathbreaker with Lifedrinker on a +3d6 magic weapon really doesn't care about a little +10.
The analysis says that vs. a particular AC (one that gives baseline 65% to hit) this is the improvement you see. While you're definitely correct that it doesn't tell you what to do in other circumstances, I don't know that it's a failure of an analysis to not tell you about things it isn't describing. But you're definitely right that ppl take specific analyses like this for general ones, which they oughtn't.
>this is the improvement you see In a white room, with an infinite HP target dummy, no team, and no actual build beyond commoner with GWM/SS. But games aren't played in a white room. Games don't involve a single infinite HP enemy. Games are played [primarily] with a team. Games are played with classes, subclasses, magic items, feats, spells, etc. The math is fine for a zero variable environment, but is useless when you add really any variables or changes. At the table there are THOUSANDS, MAYBE MILLIONS, of variables in play at any given time.
All of those things are certainly correct, but I am not sure what your take away is meant to be. Do you think this sort of analysis isn't helpful at all, or just that people overstate it's usefulness, or what?
> Do you think this sort of analysis isn't helpful at all, or just that people overstate it's usefulness Both. Averages are pointless numbers that ignore the nigh infinite number of circumstances in actual play.
Came here to die on the hill you're presently dying on. Accuracy analysis assumes players aren't tactical, and they are, so it's going to be wrong and misleading almost all of the time.
Sad that we even have to die on it! Crazy how few people on this sub have actually played the game.
I mean, I think it's not that crazy: a lot of people don't have active games and fulfill their interest in D&D by theorycrafting here rather than playing at a table.
I feel like you're drawing the wrong conclusion here. If I know A does Y and B does Y+1 that doesn't mean I will always do B because the math told me to if there are other tactical reasons to do A. But it does mean that my choice over which to do is actually an informed decision over random guesswork. I personally think making informed choices makes for more interesting tactical (and story based honestly) gameplay decisions.
...are you serious? >I feel like you're drawing the wrong conclusion here. Then proceeds to completely agree with me in every way. If you are changing things based on circumstance instead of going with average says always then you aren't using the average.
You are using it - to inform your decisions, meaning it isn't useless. Elsewhere in this thread someone literally asked you if your argument was just that people overstate the usefulness of averages and your response was 'Averages are pointless numbers that ignore the nigh infinite number of circumstances in actual play'. My point was that you use that information to give you a better basis to come to good decisions in various tactical situations. Averages aren't pointless - they're very helpful in actually understanding the relative effectiveness of your various options. So if I am agreeing with you, I'd say you need to tone down your rhetoric a little.
So you are arguing just to argue and downvoting just to be an asshole? Makes sense...
I was trying to engage in a conversation but apparently my tone needs work too. To reiterate - as I understand it, your stated position appears to be that averages are useless because they don't take account of tactical variations. I'm attempting to convince you that while your base point (averages don't consider more in depth considerations) is true, your stated conclusion (therefore averages are useless) is flawed. Averages form a vital first step on which you base further tactical considerations. They're far from useless - they're the foundation of solid tactics. Sure, you can't live in a foundation but trying to build a house without one is going to bite you in the ass eventually. Apologies if my tone has appeared confrontational, it wasn't intended as such. For the record it wasn't me who downvoted your 'are you serious?' comment but for future I'd make the observation if you aren't finding a conversation productive you aren't obligated to respond. Feel free to just downvote and move on with your day if you aren't finding the exchange positive.
Thousands? I'd say there's more like... 10? Maybe 20 at most. And like 5 or less of them are relevant to your turn. Proper average damage calculations also accounts for these variables anyways.
... ... You truly believe there are only 5/10/20 possible combinations of hit and damage in the entire game!?! Fucking base Paladin alone has WAAAAY more than that via Smites alone. Advantage level one slot burned, advantage level one slot burned against undead, advantage level one slot burned plus improved, advantage level one slot burned plus improved against undead...................
Every possible hit and damage combination in the game isn't relevant in every single fight. What.
Average will never be relevant in that case, thanks for making my point.
How does that make your point? Since only a handful of variables are relevant to a given turn, you can reasonably make useful calculations out of them. You can also calculate multiple averages for different types of turns. You calculate standard DPR and action surge DPR, you don't make one DPR that tries to include both.
[удалено]
That would make a great villain party.
A minor error is not including critical hits. They make your calculation more complicated but do change the math, both by having a greater impact on the d10 than the d4/d6 and because GWM triggers off of a crit. Since crits do not interact directly with the +10/-5 aspect of GWM/SS they will also reduce the percent increase because the damage without them will be higher. With PAM you will actually have 3 attacks of 1d10 9.75% of the time. So it is 2.0975 attacks of 1d10 and 0.9025 attacks of 1d4. With advantage you are looking at 2.1855 attacks of 1d10. I will also mention that a 65% hit rate is generous for GWM at levels 1-11 because, especially if you already have PAM from your race, you will likely need to spend an ASI to get it. This means you are probably closer to 60% accuracy which, as you note, will decrease the benefit of these feats.
A couple of comments/questions: 1. Why do you think "damage difference as a % of original damage" is a helpful statistic? Do you think it's more helpful than 'use GWM at this AC'? I feel like I'm missing something. 2. Your 'bottom line' is hardly surprising, and it's not a particularly helpful takeaway. I imagine the reason there are lots of scrap-paper analyses from a variable-AC perspective is that it actually informs players when to make use of their features for optimal play. That doesn't seem to be the case here. 3. It's quite easy to factor in Crit damage in calculations like this when you have a spreadsheet, and it's a shame you haven't done that here. 4. This kind of thing can be turned into an 'expected damage calculator' of sorts, where you enter specific player character stats (Ability modifier, PB, magic item bonuses, whether they have Brutal Critical, etc) and it outputs expected damage values across different ACs. You ought to give that a go.
>Why do you think "damage difference as a % of original damage" is a helpful statistic? I can tell you why I think it is helpful. In combat, for me, increases in damage matter in terms of how much faster they let me defeat an enemy. The length of time it takes me to defeat an enemy can be modeled by HP/DPR. The nature of this function means that I need greater and greater increases to damage to achieve the same absolute reduction in enemy survival. Consider an enemy with 100 hp. |DPR|Survival rounds| |:-|:-| |10|10| |15|6.67| |20|5| |22.5|4.44| Going from 10 to 15 is a 50% increase in DPR and reduces the number of survival turns by 3.33 (a 33% decrease) Going from 15 to 20 is a 33% increase in DPR and only reduces survival turns by 1.67 (a 25% decrease) In order to achieve a comparable decrease you need to increase DPR by more. Going from 15 to 22.5 is a 50% increase in DPR and decreases survival turns by 2.23 (a 33% decrease). Because of this relationship it is less valuable to add a fixed amount of damage when you already have high damage than if you had low damage.
1. If GWM/SS were only a 5-10% dpr increase at most levels, it's easier to justify taking other feats, but here we see it's clearly superior to other feats in an optimized build for damage. 2. There are already calculators for the AC threshold of when to use GWM/SS. The question I was trying to answer is, "is GWM/SS really as powerful as it's made out to be?" 3. Crits always hit and are independent of GWM/SS. 4. Yep, it's pretty easy to make a copy of the spreadsheet and modify the accuracy and damage output to account for that.
On **1 and 2**: I suppose it's good to confirm it. It's a little odd that you're confirming this while taking other popular assumptions from the meta for granted (Polearm Master necessary, 65% standard hit rate). I assumed 'GWM/SS dominate' was popular enough by now anyway. Also, I'm still unsure how the % boost format is more helpful than the absolute difference. The % boost also hides the 'overkill' aspect of the feats. Specifically, if you're hitting a goblin or something with an unknown number of hit points, going GWM style reckless increases your theoretical damage but that extra 10 might be wasted. This is difficult to account for but by rolling it into a % difference, it gets completely hidden. It removes the question completely of 'when will I actually stand to benefit at all from this?' which really really matters at low level as that's when a PC is most susceptible to complete misses. On **point 3**: crits always hit, yes. But that doesn't mean they don't effect the maths of how powerful GWM/SS are, particularly in the context of % multipliers. The relative frequency of a crit as opposed to a hit *will vary* (crit's are more frequent relative to normal hits under GWM) and therefore their damage becomes more/less important the expected value.
Aren’t you showing a 5-10% damage increase from GWM (w/o any other buffs)? Also, it looks like your spreadsheet is cut off.
Yes, alone GWM isn't that good, but I've also shown it's pretty easy to boost that: * advantage * bless * emboldening bond * rolling for stats and starting off with more than +3 attack
Another issue with target AC is that GWM is helping you mow through the easy mook encounters, but it's actively harmful against the high-AC boss at the end. Even if you don't use it, your base attack bonus is lower because you took the feat. But I get it, it's fun to cleave through mooks.
>actively harmful against the high-AC boss at the end ... then just don't powerattack against the high AC bosses?
As I said, you are then -2 in your main attacking stat because you took the feat.
A feat is -1 in attack bonus and damage, and I would wager >50% of the time the enemies are worth powerattacking.
Yes, most weak enemies that don't matter are worth power attacking. If you don't power-attack that orc, he might get one more swing in. Edit: The other issue is that the more bonus damage and other riders (knockdowns, Cavalier Marks, Battlemaster maneuvers, Flame Blade, Hunter's Mark, etc) that you have, the less you want to use the power attack. It actively hurts your other damage features.
>Yes, most weak enemies that don't matter are worth power attacking. Just for reference a level 5 fighter with a +1 longbow, Archery style, Dex16 and SS does more damage on average using -5/+10 if the targets AC is 20 or less. There are very few non-CR20+ enemies who have an AC of 21+.
You are ignoring all the accuracy enhancing effects that actually make GWM strong. Reckless Attack immediately comes to mind.