Prerequisite: Proficiency with at least 1 heavy weapon

You’ve learned to put the weight of a weapon to your advantage, letting its momentum empower your strikes. When you successfully hit a creature with a heavy melee weapon attack on your turn, you can use your bonus action to make a single melee weapon attack against a different creature within 5 feet of you using the same weapon.

Great Weapon Master is not a bad feat. Actually, it’s very good. It’s possibly too good. This feat is designed as part of an effort to remove the -5/+10 mechanic from feats. The damage gained from these feats represent a huge amount of single target burst damage, making them a requirement to get as quickly as possible.

This modified version allows a bonus action attack every round, however the attack requires at least 2 creatures within 5 feet of you (or possibly 1 creature within 5 feet and another creature within 10+). This spreads out the damage, providing the great weapon master a reliable damage bonus, but does so spread out across multiple enemies.. The idea is that dealing damage three times feels really good but has far less burst potential, ensuring the character never gains upwards of 80 damage in one round from a single feat (Action Surge at 20th level). Compare 100 damage to 1 enemy, verses 20 damage to 5 enemies. While the second one has some use, the single large nuke is desired as creatures with high health are typically more dangerous.

Credits

2 Average Shield Rating
1 0 reviews
2 1 review
3 0 reviews
4 0 reviews
5 0 reviews
Revision: 1
Guest Review2 / 5 Shields
No risk vs rewardThe whole point of this feat is to reward taking a risk in combat. I agree it is overpowered though.
Suggested ImprovementsKeep the -5 but drop the +10. Such a huge bonus is pretty much unequalled for regular combat in 5e. There shouldn't be any guaranteed rewards of that magnitude, outside of stats that is. Anything over +3 is usually a die.
So instead make it either; add an additional damage die on a hit (D10 instead of +10 for example); or a D6+3.
I prefer the D6+3 because it results in a likely almost 1 for 1 exchange of hit to damage -5/+6 but a minimum of 4 to a max of 9, and on a critical it bumps it up to a likely 10 extra damage with a range of 5-15, rewarding the luck of the crit which makes for great roleplaying moments.
It also puts it inline with similar abilities such as sneak attack and battle maneuvers without supplanting them.
Also keep the bonus attack on a crit or drop enemy to 0. Gives it that extra bit of flavor without going overboard.

Add a Review

Your Review will be submitted as a guest review