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Two-Weapon Fighting. You can fight with a weapon in each hand. You can make one extra attack each round with the second weapon.
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For more information about Wizards of the Coast or any of Wizards' trademarks or other intellectual property, please visit their website at. I just started playing dnd a few weeks ago, and I am now in two different sessions. Since my first session was a wild magic sorcerer with some very interesting home-brew wild surge mechanics, I wanted to try a more simple fighter build, so I made a Str-based dragon born fighter (especially since I ended up rolling a 19 in Str with the bonuses). I thought dual wielding scimitars would be cool so I picked up Two weapon fighting. I went for the champion archetype at lvl 3, and now I've been hearing that TWF is a trap.
I wanted to know if it is possible to make a Strength based Dual-Wielding work well through some multi-classing, or if I should just get the great weapons fighting style at lvl 10. It isn't as good as great weapons in the long run, but the tier gap in 5e isn't too big - chances are you won't notice. TWF is strong early game, but doesn't scale as well since you don't get as much mileage out of each Extra Attack, since the TWF is just your bonus action, end of story. But again, not by a big margin.You're also technically better off with hand-axes since you're using Strength anyway, and you can throw handaxes - but that's also a small thing, and if you pick up Dual Wielder feat to just dual wield longswords and flavor them as curved. Scimitars are really longsword sized anyway. Maybe call them 'Falcions.'
Edit: Falchions. And, I figure you're thinking of the classically more heavily curved scimitar look, which I'm generally more a fan of too, but something about a Dragonborn with the straight-backed style of Falchion, terrible as the image quality is there, seems really cool. A tad of that curved middle east look while still the broad heft of a strength weapon. It's only 'a trap' if your primary concern is doing as much damage as possible on your turn.Great Weapon Fighting (Style) / Master (Feat) does deal more damage per round that Two Weapon Fighting. However when you compare apples to apples it only does as much 'more' damage as 1 extra attack per round.So if you like your character, have a good backstory/mental image in your head, if your character inspires you to be a better role player then tell the roll players to go take a hike and just enjoy yourself as a Dragonborn Champion!.
TWF isn't as good as GWF 'by the numbers' due to how many attacks the fighter gets with an attack action. However, if you find a weapon that applies an on hit effect it can compensate things and shift the balance a bit towards TWF. You can use two weapons that have different magical effects or maybe have your offhand apply some negative effect to the enemy that makes the rest of your attacks more effective. You might need to quest around a bit for it (tell your DM what you want to do) but it's a good goal for your character. I play a TWF ranger at the moment and I'm pretty much picking up as many interesting (though non-magical) light weapons as possible. I got a couple of daggers with rings as the pommel so I can pass a rope/wire between them for a makeshift wire trap, bolas, garotte or even a crappy improvised grappling hook.
Next I plan on picking up some hollow handled knives to store various vials in, maybe see if I can get some engineered to apply a vial's contents with a trigger function.I'm happy to sacrifice damage output for the sake of versatility. To me, GWF is all about doing it big with one weapon. With TWF, you're able to pull out whatever the situation calls for as things change. The first point of discussion is 'short-term versus long-term' applicability. The second point of discussion is whether you are seeking DPS or durability or whatever else.In terms of long-term DPS, using 'Great-Weapons' is the best option. This is particularly the case because once you get a second attack, you are doing two attacks each of which are at '2d6+Str'.a total of 4d6+8 for you if both attacks hit.
Meanwhile, 'dual-wielding' only allows a second attack with one of the weapons and both weapons are light weapons.meaning you do 3d6+8 if all three attacks hit.You may notice that this makes the difference 1d6 per turn. Well, 1d6 averages to 3.5 points of damage.
So you're only missing 4 points of damage every time you attack compared to a Great-Weapon Fighter.But this completely ignores feats. So let's look at some time-builds.GWF Fighter 1: Attacking does 2d6+4 damage, Fighting Style shifts 1d6 average from 3.5 to 4.2; average of 12.4 DPR.TWF Fighter 1: Attacking does 1d6+4 for first weapon, Fighting Style makes second weapon 1d6+4; average of 15 DPR.
Please note, however, that hitting with one sword and missing with the other sword is possible. So this 15 DPR is probably a couple points over the actual DPR; I don't want to do the specific math right now.GWF Fighter 1 and 3: Also, the GWF has a 5% chance to score a critical hit.
This doubles the amount of dice for his sword, turning it into 4d6+4 damage 5% of the time. Because all these dice are affected by GWF, this means the GWF does 20.7 DPR whenever they crit.TWF Fighter 1 and 3: The TWF fighter, meanwhile, crits twice as often.
But this only doubles the dice from one sword. Thus if one sword crits and the other is a normal hit then the damage is 3d6+8, which averages to 18.5 DPR. This is also affected by the limitation that one sword might miss when the other hits, so the actual DPR would likely be lower if we factored in probability.Now let's get to level 4. Both take a feat.GWF Fighter 4: Takes Great-Weapon Master. When they reduce an enemy to 0 HP or score a critical hit, they can use their bonus action to make another attack. This effectively means they can potentially do 4d8+8 (averaging 24.7) DPR with 6d8+8 (averaging 33) DPR on a crit. But it's obviously less effective against one or two really-strong enemies with lots of HP because then less things are dropping to 0 HP so you get less bonus attacks from it, which means you are obviously doing less Damage per round than this assumes.
If you don't use the feat or can't use the feat, then you are still doing an average of 12.4 DPR on a hit.TWF Fighter 4: Takes Dual-Wielding. Now they can upgrade their weapons to Long-Swords (1d8), and they gain +1 to their AC. They now deal an average of 17 DPR every turn, with 21.5 damage when they crit and still scoring a crit twice as often as the GWF.but this is dampened by the same limitation that one may hit and another may miss.As you can see, both builds are roughly the same up to Fighter 4. One has more-consistent damage but one has more chances to possibly do more damage. I appreciate how thorough you made your analysis but I have one amendment I would like to suggest.You are saying that the TWF's DPS can possibly decrease because there is the situation where one weapon misses and the other hits and counted this as a loss of DPS but the GWF is just as likely to miss. Actually, to do the analysis accurately, I have an Excel sheet that analyzes DPR assuming an average enemy AC of 15 (because that's roughly a 50% hit chance at level 1).
And it accounts for the damage from a critical hit.However, relaying every detail of that excel sheet is excessive when rough approximations can be made. And if we are already considering that the GWF doesn't have to worry about missing, it's kind of unfair to levy different standards to the TWF.Plus, whether I approximate or not, my overall point is that which you point out: 'the extra attacks obviously count as an increase of DPS'. And the approximations bare this point to fruition. Yay for proof of concepts! Squees in science-joy. I agree with you entirely.
Your point isn't wrong and neither is your math, I was more replying to the end sentences of your second and third paragraph. You only mentioned the fact that the TWF's DPS was potentially lowered by missing one of its two attacks but didn't mention the fact that the GWF could miss.
I know it is technically obvious that both fighter's can miss, and the extra attacks of the TWF give it an edge in this, but nevertheless I wanted to bring attention to it just in case it slipped people's minds in deciding between the two styles. There's another problem people overlook when they have TWF's.
A GWF will have an awesome weapon to use to the fullest and so will a TWF. However, a GWF only needs one awesome weapon to reach full potential while a TWF needs two. You see, the DM isn't going to give you two Flaming Swords or two Vorpal Swords. Ergo, your extra attack will be mediocre and hit less often because the DM isn't going to give you another +3 Flaming Sword.In my game we remedied this by creating Paired Weapons that work just like gloves or boots, which is to say only in pairs. They're just like any other magic weapon but they attune to a single person as a pair.
You'd be surprised how must this improves the numbers, while also playing into the character's style. So far our Ranger is digging it. It adds some style. I have a fighter with TWF and also a Champion, though he's human variant so I get the feat early on.We were playing on level 10 and so far I don't see any downside to it. The crit hitting capabilities of the class is well and beyond most of my party and I'm not even a combat oriented player in general.
The fighting styles I have is TWF and Defense, with the Dual Wield, Alert, Observant feats. I never get surprised, I almost always act first, and If I really want to kill someone, the Action Surge is enough to bring a single enemy on his knees.Of course, that being said, I have good party mates. Our wiz and I have a combo: he casts haste on me and I just rampage through. Our bard eyebites my target. And my best friend half-orc barbarian/fighter goes double tapping people after I pass through.
![Fighting Fighting](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125541330/461377742.jpg)
Right so this is a whole lot of BS, two weapon fighting is a-o-good.The first important thing is that this ignores feats. You're going to take the Dual Wielder feat, which will immediately turns your damage dealers from d6's to d8's.
That's huge.Now, this is another option that would put you by and large ahead of pretty much any other option, although it would take some work, probably another feat, and may or may not work with your character design:Mounted combat. Go up from your swords to fucking Lances. One in each hand.
1d12 damage each. GWF has nothing on that. Don't let pseudo min-maxxers get in your way of having a good time. You take your dragon desert warrior out there and you be proud.
Brand new to Dungeons & Dragons? Check out our! Learn more about our sub at the Get questions answered in our latest Find great artists in our latest Filters. It is recommended that you go into your and increase your displayed links to 100. The filters work on reddit mobile. Most apps include their own filtering systems.
Any questions? Check out the. Both the title and the content of posts must directly relate to Dungeons & Dragons. Do not suggest, promote, or perform piracy. This includes illegally distributed official material (TSR, WotC), reproductions, dubious PDFs, and websites or applications which use or distribute non-SRD rules content. All images must be original content, must include OC or Art in the title, and must be accompanied by a description in the comments of at least 400 characters.
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Follow the and the, including the provisions on unwelcome content and prohibited behavior. If you believe a rule has been broken, please report the offending post/comment. Do not attempt to call anyone out.Please read the for a more detailed break-down of each rule.Play D&D Online.Looking for a Game Store?.
General Role Playing Games. Looking For Group. All maps, big and small, for your campaign. Drawings of PCs/NPCs/commissioned works.
Free resources for DMs.Humorous D&D stories.For a full list, see the wiki page.Boring Legal StuffWizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons, and their logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the United States and other countries. © 2018 Wizards. All Rights Reserved.This subreddit is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or specifically approved by Wizards of the Coast LLC. This subreddit may use the trademarks and other intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast LLC, which is permitted under Wizards' Fan Site Policy. For example, Dungeons & Dragons® is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast.
For more information about Wizards of the Coast or any of Wizards' trademarks or other intellectual property, please visit their website at. I just started playing dnd a few weeks ago, and I am now in two different sessions. Since my first session was a wild magic sorcerer with some very interesting home-brew wild surge mechanics, I wanted to try a more simple fighter build, so I made a Str-based dragon born fighter (especially since I ended up rolling a 19 in Str with the bonuses).
I thought dual wielding scimitars would be cool so I picked up Two weapon fighting. I went for the champion archetype at lvl 3, and now I've been hearing that TWF is a trap. I wanted to know if it is possible to make a Strength based Dual-Wielding work well through some multi-classing, or if I should just get the great weapons fighting style at lvl 10. It isn't as good as great weapons in the long run, but the tier gap in 5e isn't too big - chances are you won't notice.
TWF is strong early game, but doesn't scale as well since you don't get as much mileage out of each Extra Attack, since the TWF is just your bonus action, end of story. But again, not by a big margin.You're also technically better off with hand-axes since you're using Strength anyway, and you can throw handaxes - but that's also a small thing, and if you pick up Dual Wielder feat to just dual wield longswords and flavor them as curved. Scimitars are really longsword sized anyway. Maybe call them 'Falcions.' Edit: Falchions. And, I figure you're thinking of the classically more heavily curved scimitar look, which I'm generally more a fan of too, but something about a Dragonborn with the straight-backed style of Falchion, terrible as the image quality is there, seems really cool. A tad of that curved middle east look while still the broad heft of a strength weapon.
It's only 'a trap' if your primary concern is doing as much damage as possible on your turn.Great Weapon Fighting (Style) / Master (Feat) does deal more damage per round that Two Weapon Fighting. However when you compare apples to apples it only does as much 'more' damage as 1 extra attack per round.So if you like your character, have a good backstory/mental image in your head, if your character inspires you to be a better role player then tell the roll players to go take a hike and just enjoy yourself as a Dragonborn Champion!. TWF isn't as good as GWF 'by the numbers' due to how many attacks the fighter gets with an attack action. However, if you find a weapon that applies an on hit effect it can compensate things and shift the balance a bit towards TWF. You can use two weapons that have different magical effects or maybe have your offhand apply some negative effect to the enemy that makes the rest of your attacks more effective.
You might need to quest around a bit for it (tell your DM what you want to do) but it's a good goal for your character. I play a TWF ranger at the moment and I'm pretty much picking up as many interesting (though non-magical) light weapons as possible.
I got a couple of daggers with rings as the pommel so I can pass a rope/wire between them for a makeshift wire trap, bolas, garotte or even a crappy improvised grappling hook. Next I plan on picking up some hollow handled knives to store various vials in, maybe see if I can get some engineered to apply a vial's contents with a trigger function.I'm happy to sacrifice damage output for the sake of versatility. To me, GWF is all about doing it big with one weapon. With TWF, you're able to pull out whatever the situation calls for as things change. The first point of discussion is 'short-term versus long-term' applicability.
The second point of discussion is whether you are seeking DPS or durability or whatever else.In terms of long-term DPS, using 'Great-Weapons' is the best option. This is particularly the case because once you get a second attack, you are doing two attacks each of which are at '2d6+Str'.a total of 4d6+8 for you if both attacks hit. Meanwhile, 'dual-wielding' only allows a second attack with one of the weapons and both weapons are light weapons.meaning you do 3d6+8 if all three attacks hit.You may notice that this makes the difference 1d6 per turn. Well, 1d6 averages to 3.5 points of damage. So you're only missing 4 points of damage every time you attack compared to a Great-Weapon Fighter.But this completely ignores feats. So let's look at some time-builds.GWF Fighter 1: Attacking does 2d6+4 damage, Fighting Style shifts 1d6 average from 3.5 to 4.2; average of 12.4 DPR.TWF Fighter 1: Attacking does 1d6+4 for first weapon, Fighting Style makes second weapon 1d6+4; average of 15 DPR. Please note, however, that hitting with one sword and missing with the other sword is possible.
So this 15 DPR is probably a couple points over the actual DPR; I don't want to do the specific math right now.GWF Fighter 1 and 3: Also, the GWF has a 5% chance to score a critical hit. This doubles the amount of dice for his sword, turning it into 4d6+4 damage 5% of the time. Because all these dice are affected by GWF, this means the GWF does 20.7 DPR whenever they crit.TWF Fighter 1 and 3: The TWF fighter, meanwhile, crits twice as often. But this only doubles the dice from one sword. Thus if one sword crits and the other is a normal hit then the damage is 3d6+8, which averages to 18.5 DPR. This is also affected by the limitation that one sword might miss when the other hits, so the actual DPR would likely be lower if we factored in probability.Now let's get to level 4. Both take a feat.GWF Fighter 4: Takes Great-Weapon Master.
When they reduce an enemy to 0 HP or score a critical hit, they can use their bonus action to make another attack. This effectively means they can potentially do 4d8+8 (averaging 24.7) DPR with 6d8+8 (averaging 33) DPR on a crit. But it's obviously less effective against one or two really-strong enemies with lots of HP because then less things are dropping to 0 HP so you get less bonus attacks from it, which means you are obviously doing less Damage per round than this assumes.
If you don't use the feat or can't use the feat, then you are still doing an average of 12.4 DPR on a hit.TWF Fighter 4: Takes Dual-Wielding. Now they can upgrade their weapons to Long-Swords (1d8), and they gain +1 to their AC. They now deal an average of 17 DPR every turn, with 21.5 damage when they crit and still scoring a crit twice as often as the GWF.but this is dampened by the same limitation that one may hit and another may miss.As you can see, both builds are roughly the same up to Fighter 4. One has more-consistent damage but one has more chances to possibly do more damage. I appreciate how thorough you made your analysis but I have one amendment I would like to suggest.You are saying that the TWF's DPS can possibly decrease because there is the situation where one weapon misses and the other hits and counted this as a loss of DPS but the GWF is just as likely to miss. Actually, to do the analysis accurately, I have an Excel sheet that analyzes DPR assuming an average enemy AC of 15 (because that's roughly a 50% hit chance at level 1). And it accounts for the damage from a critical hit.However, relaying every detail of that excel sheet is excessive when rough approximations can be made.
And if we are already considering that the GWF doesn't have to worry about missing, it's kind of unfair to levy different standards to the TWF.Plus, whether I approximate or not, my overall point is that which you point out: 'the extra attacks obviously count as an increase of DPS'. And the approximations bare this point to fruition. Yay for proof of concepts! Squees in science-joy.
I agree with you entirely. Your point isn't wrong and neither is your math, I was more replying to the end sentences of your second and third paragraph.
You only mentioned the fact that the TWF's DPS was potentially lowered by missing one of its two attacks but didn't mention the fact that the GWF could miss. I know it is technically obvious that both fighter's can miss, and the extra attacks of the TWF give it an edge in this, but nevertheless I wanted to bring attention to it just in case it slipped people's minds in deciding between the two styles.
There's another problem people overlook when they have TWF's. A GWF will have an awesome weapon to use to the fullest and so will a TWF. However, a GWF only needs one awesome weapon to reach full potential while a TWF needs two. You see, the DM isn't going to give you two Flaming Swords or two Vorpal Swords.
Ergo, your extra attack will be mediocre and hit less often because the DM isn't going to give you another +3 Flaming Sword.In my game we remedied this by creating Paired Weapons that work just like gloves or boots, which is to say only in pairs. They're just like any other magic weapon but they attune to a single person as a pair. You'd be surprised how must this improves the numbers, while also playing into the character's style. So far our Ranger is digging it. It adds some style. I have a fighter with TWF and also a Champion, though he's human variant so I get the feat early on.We were playing on level 10 and so far I don't see any downside to it. The crit hitting capabilities of the class is well and beyond most of my party and I'm not even a combat oriented player in general.
The fighting styles I have is TWF and Defense, with the Dual Wield, Alert, Observant feats. I never get surprised, I almost always act first, and If I really want to kill someone, the Action Surge is enough to bring a single enemy on his knees.Of course, that being said, I have good party mates. Our wiz and I have a combo: he casts haste on me and I just rampage through. Our bard eyebites my target. And my best friend half-orc barbarian/fighter goes double tapping people after I pass through. Right so this is a whole lot of BS, two weapon fighting is a-o-good.The first important thing is that this ignores feats.
You're going to take the Dual Wielder feat, which will immediately turns your damage dealers from d6's to d8's. That's huge.Now, this is another option that would put you by and large ahead of pretty much any other option, although it would take some work, probably another feat, and may or may not work with your character design:Mounted combat.
Go up from your swords to fucking Lances. One in each hand. 1d12 damage each. GWF has nothing on that. Don't let pseudo min-maxxers get in your way of having a good time. You take your dragon desert warrior out there and you be proud.