TWF Feat

[TheSnowHatHero]

Alright, so I was thinking on what a feat could do to allow builds with it to be close to as strong as PAM+GWM.
This is what I came up with:
Dual Wielding Master
Perquisite: Dual Wielder feat
When you make an attack when wielding a weapon in each hand, if you do not already have disadvantage on the attack roll, you can gain disadvantage to make an additional attack when you use your bonus action to make an attack with two-weapon fighting.

i.e., you have Extra Attack. You make 2 disadvantaged attacks. When you use your bonus action, you take disadvantage on that attack. You can then make 3 additional attacks, for a total of 6 attacks.

I've done some math with this, comparing it to the aforementioned build. What I'm looking for is:
1. A way to make the wording of the feat's text more clear.
2. Everybody here to make the most optimized build they can, using this feat. I need to make sure this doesn't break with specific features that I didn't think of.

[UnintensifiedFa]

Hmm, perhaps if your worded it something like this.

When you make an attack as part of an action while wielding two one-handed melee weapons, you can make the attack at disadvantage (provided you do not already have disadvantage on the attack roll), and increase the number of attacks you make with your offhand weapon as a bonus action by 1 for each attack you make at disadvantage in this way.

It's a bit wordy, but it gets the point across, I personally wouldn't publish this as "Official" homebrew as it's a bit convoluted and hard to interpret, but I think it goes nicely as homebrew someone might just decide include in their games.

[TheSnowHatHero]

Hmm, perhaps if your worded it something like this.

When you make an attack as part of an action while wielding two one-handed melee weapons, you can make the attack at disadvantage (provided you do not already have disadvantage on the attack roll), and increase the number of attacks you make with your offhand weapon as a bonus action by 1 for each attack you make at disadvantage in this way.

It's a bit wordy, but it gets the point across, I personally wouldn't publish this as "Official" homebrew as it's a bit convoluted and hard to interpret, but I think it goes nicely as homebrew anyone might include in their games.

Well, the idea was also to allow them to do the disadvantage/+1 attack with the TWF default bonus action attack, too

[Zhorn]

I think going from 2 attacks using the base Extra Attack, up a total of 6 attacks using this feat is a bit much, even with disadvantage on the attack rolls.
We've had a few threads recently on the new Beast Barbarian in Tasha's, and using a mix of weapon swapping/drawing to weave claws in with TWF it is possible to get 4 attacks at level 5 which is very competitive

Assuming no feats, start each round with a light melee weapon in each hand (also assuming you are already raging at this point with claws)

Step 1: Free actionless drop one weapon
Step 2: Attack Action with claw
Step 3: Free claw as part of the same action
Step 4: Object interaction pick up dropped weapon
Step 5: Extra Attack with that picked up weapon
Step 6: Bonus Action off hand attack with Two-Weapon Fighting
With our end state now matching our starting state.
4 Attacks with a level 5 Path of the Beast Barbarian, all 100% RAW compliant and supported without featsLink into this thread to read the full post if curious of the rules that allow this to work
Add in a TWF fighting style and Dual Wielder for better weapons and a +mod on the bonus action attack and it can beat out the GWM+PAM expected DPR on higher AC targets (GWM+PAM still wins on low AC targets with the better hit reliability).

The takeaway from this though is you just need the one more attack to mostly close the gap in expected damage between TWF and the GWM+PAM build.
6 attacks at disadvantage may also do it (likely), but it is also more bloated with the higher number of attacks and dice rolls.
A fighter's action surge is cool, but it get's a bit long if your doing it every round. 4 attacks as a standard round-to-round number should be plenty.

[sophontteks]

Disadvantage is probably not the mechanic to use, because its typically reserved for unfavorable situations. The problem is, if you are facing an unfavorable situation, this has no penalty. And if you are facing multiple instances of disadvantage and one instance of advantage, they don't stack RAW. The attacks would all be normal.

I think this allows for the penalty to be too easily circumvented.

[heavyfuel]

Perquisite: Dual Wielder feat

Are feat chains really something you want to bring back? Feats are way, way too precious in 5e for feat chains to exist.

Just make Dual Wielder better, don't make it into a feat chain.

Also, this feat is terrible. I would literally never take this on any character. You could simply add this to Dual Wielder and people would still rarely ever (if ever!) use this option.

[Arkhios]

There's no other feat in this edition of D&D that has another feat as a prerequisite. And it's intentional. All feats they've made are stand-alone wholes.

And frankly, it should stay that way. Whether the feats are good or not is another question entirely. As heavyfuel said above, instead of trying to deliberately bring (insane) feat chains back to D&D, make the existing feats better, if you feel they're lacking something.

[Gale]

Seems unnecessarily complicated, to be honest.

Here are my immediate takeaways from this feat:

It's great if you already have disadvantage, as it literally doubles damage with no downside.

Otherwise, this increases your damage per round by about 2 points on average. If you have Dual Wielder, and increased your DEX by +2 instead of taking this feat then you would be increasing your DPR by 3. So, you do one more damage on average and don't have to waste everyone time rolling a bunch of attacks that are mostly going to miss anyways.

However, if you have advantage then you can roll normally. (Advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out.) In this instance, you do about 8 more damage on average in comparison to not activating this feat, and just taking the advantage. If you have a spell like Hunter's Mark active as well then this increases the damage difference to about 12.

For sake of comparison, if you took an ASI increase instead of taking Dual Wielding Master, then the damage differences listed in the previous bullet are only 4.6 and 8 respectively.

(Comparisons done using LudicSavant's DPR Calculator. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?582779-Comprehensive-DPR-Calculator-(v2-0)) Characters are Level 6, going against a CR 6 monster.)

Off the top of my head, a Bladesinger using an upcasted Level 3 Shadowblade in dim light or darkness, has advantage and can use Dual Wielding Master to make 6 attacks per round. 4 of them are made with the Shadow Blade, 2 of them are made with an offhand rapier. 5 of those attacks have advantage. (Familiar uses the Help action to give advantage once to one of the rapier attacks.) Advantage is cancelled out by disadvantage, obviously.
Damage per round equals about 56.5~ In comparison, without this feat but doing everything else the same the damage is about 42.

In conclusion, this feat is pretty good if you have advantage. Otherwise, it's mostly pointless and just eats up time at the table. Either way, I think this is a bad way to try and fix TWF personally. It technically does its job if the player can build for it. But there are better ways of achieving that goal without having to bring back Flurry of Misses. Something as simple as stating each attack does 1d6 extra damage would achieve a similar effect, while being easier to understand, and not leaving the door open for potential abuse.

I'm also simply not a fan of feats having requirements, especially when the previous feat is already kind of lackluster. It just further encourages players to choose Variant Human or Custom Lineage.