Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The New Human Racial Bonuses

Polearm master feat grants a bonus action attack when wielding a polearm. This is pretty nifty at low levels when extra attacks are hard to come by (but its useless to monks, since they get a bonus action attack for just being a monk).

I have never seen a DEX focused build use two-handed polearms...ever. Fighters that don't use shields often use polearms because they don't usually have another use for their BA, and Polearm Mastery gives you a bonus action butt-of-polearm attack that deals 1d4+STR damage. (You can also use GWM with two-handed polearms).

Rules-wise: Polearms are defined as the glaive, halberd, quarterstaff, or spear. None of those weapons have the Finesse trait, and thus none can natively be used with Dex. The only exception is that monks can use quarterstaves and spears with Dex because those are Monk Weapons.

Glaive, which is a polearm, is number three in that list

But I genuinely believe you havent seen a polearm bearing fighter in tabletop. I also believe you havent seen a wizard casting Fireball. Because you havent played dnd 5e tabletop.

Your link lists Glaive at the 5 spot.

By "often" I can only assume you mean extremely rarely if ever at all. I've never seen a polearm using fighter...ever. It might have some merits I guess but it's not even remotely close to a top pick. I went out of my way to look this up and it's not even in the top 15 most used by fighters, ok but wait...since the weapon is so good surely there's bound to be one polearm among the 17 best legendary weapons a barbarian might want, right? Surely at least one somewhere in there, even if at number 12 or something, right? Nope, not a single one.

I missed that but still...5th best...that explains why nobody bloody uses it. Definitely not close to the best weapon for the class and far less than ideal.

Just. Stop. Trolling. Already. It's too much.

Don't tell me what I have and haven't seen, tyvm. Polearms are good on Strength-based characters. Polearm Master + Sentinel Feats is an amazing combo.

As already pointed out, the Glaive is #5 on the first list you linked. (The Halberd is mechanically the same as a Glaive, so it also gets that spot).

Your second link is about magic weapons which highly depend on their magical properties, not the base weapon type, and so isn't really relevant to the conversation. (Edit: Plus, it's well known that D&D 5e's magic weapons are biased towards swords, and in the DMG there's advice to change any of the weapon types of these Named Magic Weapons)

Those are BS listicle sites designed to just generate content for ad revenues. Nobody takes them seriously and they won’t convince anybody.

Polearm mastery is a well established meta-build option in 5E.

I am not trolling at all. I just regard polearms with nothing but disdain...they are not good weapons. If saw a Barbarian or Fighter using them I'd think they're crazy but that has not been something I've yet seen in the D&D games I played.

Thanks for some useful perspectives on polearms, folks. As far as I know it's still not confirmed that our humans will all get that proficiency and think we're still going off screenshots and don't know if we can amend the racial feats at all. But if so, then though I've tended to ignore those weapons in early access, it sounds like it might be worth giving them another look, especially for, eg, human clerics. Particularly as I think Polearm Master was on that list of feats in game.

Clearly not everyone is as convinced polearms can be useful, so some of us may just need to agree to disagree on their utility. I'd just ask that we be mindful about when useful discussion has come to an end and we're starting to go round in circles and stop at that point! EDIT And we should definitely stop if the discussion is getting bad tempered.

No offense, but you thought polearms were DEX weapons, a category that doesn’t even exist in 5E. Your opinion is not well informed.

LOL!
In my first EA attempt I threw the Party's fighter at the first glaive I came across ! Imagine my dissapointment when enemies getting into range did not trigger AoO ...

Monks dont use Polearms ...
Since in order to have acess to martial arts, they cant use Two-Handed weapons ...

Not sure about Flury of Blows tho ... there is nothing written there.

UNLESS!
Larian would implement Dedicated Weapon ... that would be quite game changing for Monks!

Finesse weapons exist...and they are essentially DEX based weapons geared toward classes with high DEX because they use DEX modifiers. Daggers, crossbows etc. You can technically say they can use STR modifier but you will never see a crossbow or dagger wielding barbarian. For all intents and purposes finesse weapons are DEX weapons for DEX focused classes like Rogues.

???

https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Weapons#toc_4

What...? Polearm Master + Sentinel is extremely popular, and if you can get in variant human for GWM added to the cheese, even better. Tons of builds use polearms, including one of the most popular ways to build melee warlock but there's also a lot of cheese to be had with 1h staff or spear with a shield and Polearm master.

Granted, if all you care about is Ung Ungh, Big Number, Big Damage, Ungh Ungh, of course you'd stick to the boring, utterly overused weapon types (great sword) for builds and pretend like GWM is the only feat in the game. But a lot of the more advanced players or people who like playing what amounts to tanks or battlefield controllers adore polearms, and as I said, polearm master itself is a very well-known and used feat.

I have a friend who played a BM fighter polearm specialist. With a couple of feats he was a beast in melee. Still usual fighter vulnerabilities, being swarmed or dragon breath.

The base TT game doesn't have any special polearms, but if you take attunement into account - and I don't think BG3 does, special weapons and armour pale compared to attunement-less +3 versions.

I.e., you want to spend your 3 attunements on say belt of giant strength, winged boots and cloak of displacement. Rest of your gear is +1 to +3 stuff.

Just spitballing on some classes that might like it

Nonmartial clerics particularly light clerics

Spore druids

Cheeky strength rogue builds

Abjuration transmutation and necromancy wizards

Warlocks

Draconic sorcs

Bards

Getting back to the topic at hand:

Good to know that Polearm Master is on the list of feats for the game, and it makes me more confident in my theory that humans get a free feat. A level 1 feat is pretty significant in 5e, although unfortunately some feats are vastly more powerful than others (e.g., GWM and Sharpshooter) and can thus have a probably-too-large effect on level 1 characters' effectiveness.

If true, then BG3 humans will actually be strictly better than Variant Human due to the +2/+1 instead of +1/+1. As variant human is already a very commonly chosen race...I thought Larian didn't want us to play Boring Human Character™ xD