The Archery Fighting Style is a powerful fighting style that adds a +2 bonus to ranged weapon attacks, making it suitable for any character making ranged weapon attacks. This style works well with Crossbow Expert and Gunner, which grant immunity to the disadvantage posed by using either weapon in close quarters. Depending on how the DM rules it, Archery can even be applied to spells that utilize arrows, making Spell Sniper an excellent feat choice for Rangers.
The Archery Fighting Style does not apply to ranged attacks made with thrown weapons, such as daggers or handaxes. It only applies to ranged weapons, so daggers are not included. Close quarters style works with ranged attacks (spells too!), so it works for daggers too. Sharpshooter’s third benefit is clear: Before you make an attack with a spear, you can use the Sharpshooter feat to prepare for the attack.
The Archery Fighting Style works well with many DnD class features and feats, depending on how the DM rules it. It can even be applied to spells that utilize arrows, meaning Spell Sniper is an excellent feat choice for Rangers. While the Ranger class benefits most from Archery, it can be effectively utilized by others.
In terms of the bonus, it only affects ranged weapon attacks, not ranged spell attacks. The Archery Fighter Style does not function with attack spells, dueling, or defensive abilities. Bracers of archery provide its bonus to ranged attacks made with longbows or shortbows, but using such a weapon as a spell focus is not the same as making an attack.
In conclusion, Archery is a powerful fighting style that can be applied to any character making ranged weapon attacks, not just archers.
📹 Fighting Style #1: Archery (DnD 5E)
You gain a +2 bonus to attack rolls you make with ranged weapons. The Guild: https://chancesguild.com/ Facebook: …
📹 2024 Player’s Handbook: Fighting Style Feats D&D 5.24
Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:15 Archery 6:13 Blind Fighting 11:09 Defense 11:38 Dueling 12:45 Great Weapon Fighting 18:50 …
I think it is important to mention that some of the fighting styles are also aviable to the ranger and paladin both get an exclusive ones as well. Furthermore College of Swords bards also have access to some. Fighters: Archery, Defense, Dueling, Great Weapon Fighting, Protection, Two-Weapon-Fighting, Thrown Weapon Figting, Unarmed Fighting, Blind Fighting, Interception, Superior Technique Paladins: Defense, Dueling, Great Weapon Fighting, Protection, Blessed Warrrior, Blind Fighting Rangers: Archery, Defense, Dueling, Two-Weapon Fighting, Blind Fighting, Druidic Warrior, Thrown Weapon Fighting College of Swords: Dueling, Two Weapon Fighting
You should do this with the Battle Master Maneuvers too. There are a lot of little details that people miss due to how things are phrased. The fact that the terms for melee/ranged and weapon attack are all phrased weird makes people assume certain things. Melee Weapon – A weapon that is used in Melee Range. This range may vary due to Reach. Thrown Weapons are considered melee weapons that you can make a Ranged Weapon Attack with. Thrown weapons do not benefit from Archery Fighting Style. Ranged Weapon – A weapon that attacks enemies greater than 5 feet away that uses ammunition. Weapon Attack – Any attack made with a weapon. Cannot be a spell or Unarmed Strike. Melee Weapon Attack – An attack made with a weapon in Melee Range in which the weapon does not leave your character. Ranged Weapon Attack – An attack made with a weapon at a range greater than 5ft and the ammunition or weapon leaves your character. Thrown and Ranged Weapons use this. Certain Battle Master Abilities say things like “When you hit a creature with a weapon attack…” or “When you make a melee weapon attack…” and due to the phrasing you can do unexpected things. Like Disarm an opponent with an Arrow, do a Sweeping Attack with a whip, Push an enemy with a Sling’s ammunition, or using a Net (Ranged Weapon) and then follow up with any maneuver that simply says ‘Weapon Attack’. Nets are bonkers they are Ranged Weapons with the Thrown Property. They benefit from archery and can use the Quick Toss Battle Master ability.
It’s really hard to imagine how something like Great Weapon Fighting makes it past whatever QA they have in place. This is not hard math. Features that are more about the subjective experience than the math have their place, but ideally they should have both, and it’s not like this fighting style is a super niche thing.
Shouldn’t Great Weapon Fighting scale with the amount of dice you are attacking with? It doesn’t qualify ‘weapon damage,’ it just says, “When you roll damage” which would also apply to berserker frenzy dice, or to magical damage associated with an enchanted or magical weapon. Combat superiority dice. Sneak attacks. Sentinel triggered strikes. It’s bad if you don’t have access to more damage dice, but seems strong when you start stacking them on.
About great weapon fighting, I feel like it’s better than it looks, as it doesn’t specify weapon damage, so for every single die you roll, you get the boost. Like someone else pointed out, great sword having a minimum roll of 6 is pretty good, doesn’t raise the ceiling at all but definitely raises the floor by a amount
I think Two Weapon Fighting does work with the Dual Wielder feat because of the wording in Dual Wielder. You gain an extra attack that is the result of using a weapon that has the Light Property. The Bonus Action attack with a weapon that lacks the two-handed property is a result of making an attack with a weapon that has the Light property. It should absolutely work.
Great Weapon Fighting might apply to additional damage dice. It was clarified before that it was supposed to be just for weapon damage dice, but from what i’ve heard that was so it didn’t slow down the game. Now that it’s faster, you might be able to use it for additional damage die, like divine favor, smite, hunter’s mark, frenzy dice, sneak attack dice, etc, might make it more worthwhile overall, ontop of its very unique benefit that it’s the only fighting style to benefit crits, although that’s very niche.
Just to play devil’s advocate for Great Weapon Fighting, would knowing you had a higher minimum damage affect how you attack in combat advantageously? Like, if you have a +3 STR and a greatsword, does knowing that on a hit it’s impossible for you to deal less than 9 damage allow you to more consistently one-hit kill 9hp enemies, and leave the ones at partial HP for your other party members to finish off with less consistent attacks? Dunno how the math plays out, but in concept, it seems like I’d be able to play with a kind of benefit in knowing I have a damage range of 9-15 instead of 4-15. This would be most relevant at low levels when clearing lots of small enemies, but worth pointing out if someone is doing a low level 1-shot or something.
For those that want the math for the alternative proposed by Treantmonk; the numbers should be correct (except last one). Hope the formatting is good. GREAT WEAPON FIGHTNING\tTreantmonk’s Temple 1. When you roll damage for an attack you make with a Melee weapon that you are holding with two hands, if the damage roll on a dice is less than half the dice maximum, you can treat is as half. LONGSWORD\t\t 1d10\taverage 5.5\twith GWM\taverage 6.5\t\t+1 min-max 5-10 HALBERD / PIKE / GLAIVE\t1d10 \taverage 5.5\twith GWM\taverage 6.5\t\t+1 min-max 5-10 GREATAXE \t\t\t 1d12 \taverage 6.5\twith GWM\taverage 7.75\t\t+1.25 min-max 6-12 GREATSWORD / MAUL\t2d6 \taverage 7\twith GWM\taverage 8\t\t+1 min-max 6-12 2. When you roll damage for an attack you make with a Melee weapon that you are holding with two hands, if the damage roll on a dice is less than the dice average (rounded up), you can treat is as average (rounded up). LONGSWORD\t\t 1d10\taverage 5.5\twith GWM\taverage 7\t\t+1.5 min-max 6-10 HALBERD / PIKE / GLAIVE\t1d10 \taverage 5.5\twith GWM\taverage 7\t\t+1.5 min-max 6-10 GREATAXE \t\t \t1d12 \taverage 6.5\twith GWM\taverage 8.25\t\t+1.75 min-max 7-12 GREATSWORD / MAUL\t2d6\t average 7\twith GWM\taverage 9\t\t+2 min-max 8-12 BEST AND PROBABLY WHAT TREANTMONK SUGGESTED, GOOD PLUS AVERAGE 3. GREAT WEAPON FIGHTNING\tfrom Laserllama Fighter (modified to work with longsword and non-heavy weapons) When you roll damage for an attack you make with a Melee weapon that you are holding with two hands, you can treat a TOTAL roll of 5 or lower on the weapon’s damage dice as a 6.
My thoughts on the Fighting Style feat prerequisite are basically just that it’s a limiting factor for Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers. Like, a class feature that gives you a feat, but it has to be one of these, as opposed to something like Sharpshooter or Great Weapon Master. So, the Fighting Initiate feat gives you the “Fighting Style Feature” prerequisite for the Fighting Style feats. At least, that’s how I plan to run it for my own table.
If you are playing a Paladin in DnD 2024 you can now pick up Magic Initiate as an origin feat for the Shield spell and pick up Protection as your fighting style at level 2. At level 6 you’re now potentially boosting your allies’ saving throws by up to +5, and can use your reaction to give yourself a +5 to AC for a whole round or give disadvantage to attacks against an ally for a whole round. I hope DMs will have fun trying to hit anyone in a party with a Paladin now. Also worth noting that Defensive Duelist only requires you to hold a Finesse weapon but still works if you are wearing a shield, so you can even boost your whole party’s defenses AND your own without expending any resources at all.
Since GWF doesn’t limit the benefit to WEAPON dice, and instead implicitly allows rider dice to do so, I think the optimal level 20 GWF build now is Elf (for Revenant Blade in combination with the Double-Bladed Scimitar -which doesn’t have a Mastery yet, but I think we could give it Cleave as a placeholder-) Fighter 1/Scout Rogue 19, since it basically makes your average sneak attack 40, instead of 35, but your base damage is 30, instead of 10, and the Scout subclass allows you to do it again on a bonus action against another creature. Just gotta make sure your allies help you gather 2 or more enemies within 10 feet of each other so that you can get in the middle and shank’em two at a time for an average total of 103 damage (combined), before weapon bonuses and assuming 20 DEX, and again as a reaction if any of them run without disengaging (or take Sentinel and do it anyway when they disengage or attack an ally in the melee, too). A potential 154 damage per round, sustained and without resource expenditure, is insane, I think. This new version also helps Paladins, STR rangers and Battlemaster/Psi Warrior fighters, in that it allows them to slightly increase the minimum and average damage of their Smites, Hunter’s Mark and Superiority/Psionic Energy dice, so that expending them is less of a gamble (and critting with them is juicier).
Thanks for getting all this information out! @15:00 Great Weapon Fighting – OK, I know I shouldn’t say this but I am so jealous of people that have the connections and opportunities to work at jobs that they LOVE. SO JEALOUS!!! It’s stuff like this that basically tell me these people are not really working as hard at their game as I am, and that pisses me off. SO many things that should have been changed over 10 years of feedback on the internet. GWF that should have at least been checked for basic math logic. Or just say it straight up that we were trying to lower the damage gulf between Monks and Barbarians and this is an intentionally bad feat. That there was a reason for this (and so many other things that don’t seem to make sense – like the spells that should have changed but didn’t). OK I have to admit they did change and catch some things that I didn’t expect them to catch. That thing about the Check for Traps spell for instance, but how did this get missed?
Interception that scales better (Prerequisite: Fighting Style Feature) When a creature you can see hits you or another creature within 5 feet of you with an attack roll, you can take a Reaction to reduce the damage dealt to the target by 1d6 plus your Proficiency Bonus. The damage reduction increases by 1d6 when you reach levels 5 (2d6), 11 (3d6), and 17 (4d6). You must be holding a Shield or a Simple or Martial weapon to use this Reaction.
I would just rework Great Weapon Fighting to instead have the damage die explode on any maximum die roll. So in the case of a longsword, a damage roll of 10 lets you roll another d10, and if that nets you another 10 result, you roll again. That feels more in keeping with the “swing for the fences” nature of the feat.
2 points of note about great weapon fighter: – The heavier weapons like greatsword or greataxe have great weapon masteries like cleave or graze will significantly increase your average damage, so that will still make them better than a longsword I think – it seems that great weapon fighting applies to all damage dice? so when you have extra damage from like Flametongue or smites or some other spell, then those will revert to 3’s too when you roll 1 or 2 on them… or at least that’s how I always have interpreted the rules. when you also factor in crits then you will always have a higher average damage output than the flat +2 that dueling has to offer…
I was trying to figure out the average bonus from Great Weapon Fighting myself, and I was sure I had to have screwed up the math when I came up with 5.5 to 5.8 myself. I thought there was no way they could have screwed up that badly. I’m glad to have it confirmed here. I’ll just take Defense instead.
Archery and Ranged Weapon is for consistency and safety. You will always in range, you are more accurate, you are regularly safer than a melee combatant. I think the benefit sbalanced the drawbacks. Melee now become the big damage dealer as it should, because you risking your life more in melee, and there are times that you can’t deal any damage if the enemy is too far apart.
I hope these aren’t taken as normal feats. Why would anyone take blind-fighting over Skulker if so? I assume these are still freebies for a couple of classes. Great weapon fighting, I think, shines on those 2d6 weapons like Maul and Great sword. You have a much greater chance to roll 1 or 2 on a d6 and the results are doubled. I run an Echo Knight Bugbear that uses a maul and I have to say that those rerolls produce quite a bit of damage for me… Im not sure what the math would say for the rerolls, but they were definitely better than a fixed 3.
The reason for the prequisite is for 1 main reason, It makes it so they dont have to list every single feat that you can get from fighting style every time they write the fighting style feat Another thing to note is that blind fighting is strictly worse than skulker if you aren’t getting it from a class feature
For great weapon fighting it might be worth noting that the wording doesn’t seem to restrict the dice roll to just the weapon damage dice. So if you are for example a level 11 Eldritch knight with 9 wizard levels using conjure minor elemental, the those 8d8 on 3 attacks might also come up as 1s or 2s.
I think the best use of Great Weapon Fighting is on a Rogue to round up Sneak Attack damage. A Double-Bladed Scimitar (though that then requires Revenant Blade to become a finesse weapon) or the Hoopak from the Dragonlance book are the only non-magic weapon ways to have a two-handed finesse weapon. Otherwise Conjure Minor Elemental to stack more dice on every attack should also benefit.
Who would have predicted that 2024 rules would bring the return of the 2nd Ed. Dart-Master? Honestly though, I think the dethroning of Ranged Combat is a bit exaugurated. The biggest advantage of ranged combat is at the tactical scale, where you are effectively getting an extra turn or two of DPR compared to a Melee-only bruiser who has to run over to engage the enemy. Or alternatively, you could use your range to prevent the enemy from doing damage, which often times has a greater impact.
We optimizers are too focused on the MEAN average when comparing results and fail to account for other probabilities in our calculations. Longsword + dueling – 12.5% chance to roll any value between 3-10. Mean 6.5 (no mode). But if we just look at the mean, we fail to consider the fact that we have a 37.5% chance of rolling 3-5 damage, and a 62.5% chance of rolling 6+ (50% chance of a 7+) A greatsword has a bell curve with a 27.76% chance of rolling 2-5, and a 72.24% chance of rolling 6+ (58.33% of a 7+). It has a mode of 7 with 16.66% chance. So without any fighting style, you still have a higher probability of rolling those higher damage numbers. A greatsword with GWF has a 100% chance of rolling 6+, a mode of 6 with 41.66% chance, and the same odds of rolling 7+ as a greatsword (58.33%). GWF looks much better once you actually compare them properly, instead of being tunnel visioned on MEAN damage. Lets look at some other numbers. The average monster HD is a d8. So let’s look at the odds of rolling 8+. For the duellist longsword – that’s a 37.5% chance. For either greatsword, those odds are 41.66%. Clearly the greatsword is going to down things more frequently than the duellist longsword even though the MEAN result favours the duelling fighting style. And these odds are substantially higher with GWF than without since you guarantee a 6+. And these numbers don’t take into account any other source of damage which would skew the bell curves even further. No, it’s not as good as an entire extra attack from a nick weapon (TWF with a nick weapon is leagues better than any single weapon combat style when it comes to raw damage output).
For GWF, they could have made it so that when you roll the minimum value on a die, you treat it as the maximum instead. That turns the biggest feel-bad when rolling damage for your great weapon into something that you are actually hoping for. Mathematically, it’s still only adding around 1 point of damage in most cases, but at least it would feel better at the table.
Something to remember about Greatweapon Fighting is that it at least avoids really disappointing rolls. You’ll always roll the middle result on a d6 with it. So it helps avoid things like rolling a crit and then bombing all 1s on the damage. On the note of crits, they, along with any other damage modifications to your attack, will be effected by Greatweapon Fighting. That means if you roll a crit you’re applying a damage range of 12-24+stat instead of 4-24+stat. It doesn’t improve your average damage much, but it does make it so that your consistent. With it a Greatsword fighter realistically cannot do less then 9 damage. And that’s avaialble at level 1.
I feel like the damage bonus from Great Weapon Master could’ve gone here. Adding proficiency to your damage would start as good as dueling and then gotten progressively better, which feels fair for an damage specialized style. Though it also begs the question of why GWM is limited to the attack action on your turn and dueling isnt.
Regarding Eldritch Adept: That’s one feat that … I won’t say I would ban it, but I’d definitely want a player to chat with me first before telling me they’re taking Eldritch Adept and the Pact of the Blade invocation to get those benefits without even slowing down their spellcasting as, say, a Valor Bard.