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Dual-wielding is pretty weak in dnd 5e tabletop. Attacking with an offhand requires a bonus action, which kills it right away for many classes(hexblade warlock, paladin, monk, ranger). And it scales pretty badly too compared to polearm master or great weapon master feats, which boosts your big heavy axe damage a lot.

So my suggestion is this: how about making an offhand and main hand attack as a single action once per turn(so if you are a 5 level fighter only your first attack will be with two weapons). What do you think?


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I think you get eaten alive once some 5e purist get here. laugh

As for the idea ...
Sory but personaly i dont like it. :-/

Imagining monk attacking with dual wield and then also with flurry of blows seems kinda too powerfull. :-/

Last edited by RagnarokCzD; 06/06/22 06:57 PM.

I still dont understand why cant we change Race for our hirelings. frown
Lets us play Githyanki as racist as they trully are! frown
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It can be balanced out further, my point is that there is no really good option if you want to dual wield


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It's kinda funny that drizzt do urden, probably one of the most popular characters in dnd, is a dual-wield ranger. But you can not actually replicate his fighting style effectively


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Personally I favor what you suggest but with a penalty to the attack roll. Attacking with both weapons, as a single attack-action, 1x/turn, at a -2 sounds about fair. It somewhat balances the fact that you're still keeping your BA free in this, and also allows additional tactical choices.

A big balance issue is rogues vs fighters. Attacking with your off-hand results in a roughly constant additional ~35% damage for rogues (depending on exact level, Dex, weapon, etc), but it results in a range of 45% to only 5%, as you grow in level (sharp drop at lvl 5 when you get Extra Attack), buff to fighters' damage. Great at low levels, but terrible at moderate-to-high levels.

**Numbers may very well be incorrect.

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-2 penalty seems fair. There are lots of ways to boost your attack roll, so why not


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Originally Posted by mercurial_ann
It's kinda funny that drizzt do urden, probably one of the most popular characters in dnd, is a dual-wield ranger. But you can not actually replicate his fighting style effectively

It's because he's from older editions that have worked differently We don't actually have his class makeup for 5e yet, but I imagine it'll be a fighter/ranger mix, heavy on the fighter, like it was in 3.5.

5e and 3.5 actually share this issue, dual-wielding is not good unless you use feats and styles to specialise into it, but 5e has it worse because now you have to choose between feats and ASI, unlike earlier editions.

Originally Posted by mrfuji3
A big balance issue is rogues vs fighters. Attacking with your off-hand results in a roughly constant additional ~35% damage for rogues (depending on exact level, Dex, weapon, etc), but it results in a range of 45% to only 5%, as you grow in level (sharp drop at lvl 5 when you get Extra Attack), buff to fighters' damage. Great at low levels, but terrible at moderate-to-high levels.

While I can't back up your numbers the overall statement is correct, having played a dual-wielding fighter/rogue myself.

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Two weapon fighting is definitely a little weak compared to PAM + GWM (which basically does its job with much better damage). You have to be careful when re-balancing it though since it's pretty easy to create something OP.

I like your method, but personally I'd try to balance it via feats. There's two ways I would do it:

The first would be to introduce a "Power Attack"-style feat (like GWM) for Two Weapon Fighting, perhaps something like a -3/+6 instead of GWM's -5/+10. I'm not a huge fan of this method though TBH since it treads on GWM's identity.

The second way would be to try and adapt 3.5's Improved Two Weapon Fighting/Greater Two Weapon Fighting feats to 5e. Essentially, the way I'd imagine it would go is something like this:

Quote
Feat Name: Improved Two Weapon Fighting.

Prerequisite: Extra Attack class feature.
  • When you use a bonus action to perform an offhand melee attack, you can make an additional melee attack.
  • Any additional attacks are treated as offhand attacks and follow the same rules as them.
  • You can select this feat multiple times. Each time you do, you gain an additional attack. In order to do so you must have the appropriate number of "Extra Attacks".
  • You cannot select this feat if the resulting number of offhand attacks would be greater than the number of main-hand attacks your character can perform with a single action.



This homebrew feat would work decently well in tabletop. It would be powerful but still fairly balanced since at most you'd be able to do 3 offhand attacks in total (and only if you're atleast a level 12 fighter) and would require spending atleast two feats to do so. It would still be weaker than GWM + PAM in terms of pure damage, but it would also be more consistent than the former since it doesn't have the -5 to-hit penalty. Essentially it would just be letting you apply a more limited version of the extra attack feature to offhand attacks. I also specifically limit it to melee attacks in there just so that it doesn't make dual hand crossbows with crossbow expert + Sharpshooter even more powerful. If it's still too powerful, you could also add in a -2 to-hit penalty on extra offhand attacks.

The issue with adding a feat like this though would be Larian's homebrew would make it massively OP. More specifically being able to get more than one bonus action per round would also allow you to get way more attacks than you should. A 15th level character (Fighter 12/Rogue 3) would be able to attack 12 times per round, every round, which is ridiculously OP.

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Feat Name: Improved Two Weapon Fighting.

This sounds promising! O_o


I still dont understand why cant we change Race for our hirelings. frown
Lets us play Githyanki as racist as they trully are! frown

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