Heavy weapons and shield fighting style

[heavyfuel]

A player wants to wield a Shield with his Halberd by spending retraining his Fighting Style. I tend to be generous, but this player is already dealing a hell of a lot of damage and is already very difficult to hit due to a few spells.

Anyway, this is what I came up with.



Class: Fighter or Paladin

Prerequisite: You must Medium size or larger to choose this Fighting Style

You are experienced in wielding heavy weapons in single hand.

- Any heavy weapon you wield gains the Versatile property. If you wield the weapon in one hand, its damage dice is decreased according to the table below. While wielding the weapon in one hand it loses its Heavy and Reach properties, and it doesn't count as a pole-arm if it previously did.

Damage dice decrease table
2d6 -> 1d10
1d12 -> 1d10
1d10 -> 1d8
1d8 -> 1d6
1d6 -> 1d4

Too good? Any potential abuse that I don't see?

[John Out West]

I like how you flipped the script on the Versatile ability, which typically makes weapons stronger if you use them 2-handed. That's clever.


Dueling: When you are wielding a melee weapon in one hand and no other Weapons, you gain a +2 bonus to Damage Rolls with that weapon.

Great Weapon Fighting: 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.



It looks like fighting styles average about +2 damage per hit. (Assuming a 1 or 2 becomes an average roll, but that heavily depends on what weapon you use) One-Hand weapons tend to be 1d8, while Heavy weapons tend to be 1d12. Thats a difference of 4 potential damage, but an average difference of 2 damage per hit. So it looks like letting him use a heavy weapon full-throttle would be about the same as him using the Dueling Combat Style. That being said, I wouldn't allow him to take either the Dueling or Great Weapon Fighting in addition to this, since combining these fighting styles can become broken. (You can also just put in that you can only use this style while using a 2handed weapon versatile)

If all you're worried about is damage, then it looks like it'll be fine as is. Their damage output, on average, won't increase if they're using a heavy-weapon with a shield compared to a Medium Weapon with a shield + Dueling.

Hope that helps.

[Damon_Tor]

Too good? Any potential abuse that I don't see?

I think you're being too harsh, frankly.

A fighter with the duelist fighting style with a shield and a whip will be doing equivalent damage to a 1d8 reach weapon along with a shield, so it seems like the damage downgrade is good enough, no need to remove the reach property. Taking away the heavy property just eliminates the benefit of the GWM feat, but that's a trap feat anyway: just make sure you're sprinkling high-AC monsters into your encounters (there's absolutely no reason monsters in the employ of a BBEG couldn't be wearing armor/barding, even if their normal statblock doesn't include it) and learn the AC breakpoint of the feat and figure out where he's going to feel like using it is a tactical decision based on opportunities, and not something he always swings with.

Using PAM one-handed is silly, and always has been. Don't let him do it, whether he's wielding a glaive one-handed or a spear/staff for that matter.

[Bannan_mantis]

I think it's currently fine if not slightly weaker than the other fighting styles since mechanically dueling is overall better. To explain a longsword with dueling deals 6.5 damage on average with just damage dice and the fighting style and then a greatsword with this fighting style would on average deal 5.5 damage within the same parameters. They don't even gain the heavy properties which is underwhelming since well then it's just a weaker dueling. I'd recommend giving a bigger buff to weapons and when I say big I mean they keep their damage dice but instead of a damage decrease they suffer an attack decrease, this works to make this genuinly different to dueling as now this is a more high risk/high reward version of dueling. Also maybe let them keep reach, heavy I can understand for great weapon master but reach is fine.

[Yakk]

Great Weapon Master works with 1 handed heavy weapons.

So this allows a shield and the -5/+10 feat to work together.

Without feats, weaker than duelist. With feats, crazy strong.