D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7

[Doug Lampert]

Must be the people who believe fighters don't deserve nice things.

Nope, people who've noticed that most of the playtest fights are in narrow corridors, and that a fighter built for defense that optimizes AC, goes defensive, and gets Parry is effectively immune to most attacks.

He tanks, and the rest of the party kills the monster(s).

A level 5 fighter can fairly easily hold off the toughest monster they've got (in a playtest that goes to level 10) for long enough for a modest sized party to kill it easily. He doesn't even need clerical help to do it.

Monsters with higher attack bonuses will largely solve this since the parry roll can come up low and in any case can only stop one attack per round, but the current crop of monsters are helpless putty before two fighters who know what they're doing and are built to work as a team.

Oh, and incidentally, whirlwind attack is utter CRAP, if you want to attack at level 10 you have glancing blow and deadly strike, then you do an extra 3d10 of damage per round on a hit, and also do an extra 3d10 of damage per round on a miss. That plus two attacks give you plently of DPR compared to other classes, a rogue or cleric has no practical way to come close.

Edit: Looked at the manuever list for something else and noticed that Glancing Blow only applies the highest die worth of damage. So it's 1d10 extra damage per attack that misses, since you have two attacks if they BOTH miss, you've still got 1d10 of expertise left to use with Whirlwind attack if you need to and took whirlwind attack as one of your manuevers for some reason. But under no circumstance except being surrounded by 3 HP kobolds or something similar should whirlwind attack be your main way of spending expertise dice even if you have it.