Generally, thanks to weapon masteries and other buffs, we've seen martial, weapon-focused characters get a pretty significant buff with the 2024 rules (which are nearing a year old!)
Perhaps most notably, we saw a redesign of Great Weapon Master. While the old version allowed you to take a -5 penalty to your attack in order to get a +10 bonus to your damage (which was usually, except in cases of very high-AC targets, or if you had some crazy magic weapon that already did enough damage that an extra 10 wasn't a significant enough boost to risk the higher chance to miss, worth it on average,) the new version cuts out any real additional cost while reducing the damage bonus to merely your proficiency bonus, and only on attacks made with the attack action.
This, as it turns out, is actually better than the old version. Not only does it scale up, so that you're actually getting half the old bonus by level 13, but the higher chance to hit means that (again, depending a little on the AC of the target) even if you pick this up immediately at level 4, when it's only a +2 bonus to your damage, it's still usually better even than the old version, at least according to the math that I did when the new PHB first came out - a result that surprised me (and I might revisit to check that math).
However, Great Weapon Master in 2024 had a very similar counterpart for ranged characters: Sharpshooter, along with its other bonuses, included a practically identical -5 for +10 feature, only that it applied to ranged attacks.
Ranged weapons generally don't deal as much damage as melee weapons, at least until you get into the modern and futuristic firearms categories, which are in the DMG (both old and new) rather than the PHB, because they're meant to be introduced only if a DM feels they fit in the campaign and setting (my homebrew world, for instance, has a lot of surreal New Weirdness, and thus modern technology has its place beside the ancient temples and medieval castles).
That said, with 2024's induction of the "renaissance"-era weapons to the PHB, the Pistol and Musket, we actually have some ranged weapons that deal comparable damage to the most powerful melee options. The Pistol has a d10 damage die, putting it on par with the reach-polearm options (Pike, Lance, Glaive, Halberd) and two-handed versatile weapons like the warhammer and longsword. The Musket uses a d12, putting it up there with the Greataxe (but no longer the Lance, which is now easier to use while not mounted but got a slight damage nerf in the process).
Firearms are tricky, though: if you're sticking strictly to the 2024 rules (which at this point only includes the core rulebooks) there is no Gunner feat to let you ignore the loading property on these weapons, meaning that, ironically, the only classes likely to get full effective use of these firearms are Druids and Clerics who take the more martial "order" options at 1st level, or potentially a Rogue with a dip into some martial class to get access to martial weapons. Naturally, I'd allow anyone at my table to use whatever options they want from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (except maybe the subclasses reprinted in the 2024 PHB).
To return to the point, though: while ranged weapons in the 2014 rules were a bit lower-damage than the melee options, that distinction starts to get diluted as you add on various damage bonuses, including the old Sharpshooter +10 damage. If you're doing 1d8+5 damage with a longbow, that's an average of 9.5 damage per hit, whereas doing 2d6+5 with a maul is 12. Thus, the longbow is doing about 79% of the damage. If we're getting GWM and Sharpshooter on both of those, it becomes 19.5 versus 22, or around 89%. (And, in fact, we're probably doing slightly more because we've probably taken the Archery fighting style and are thus hitting more often).
So, what's the problem now?
Well, the new Sharpshooter doesn't actually give any damage bonus at all. It still lets you attack without disadvantage at long range, but rather than giving you any sort of way to boost your damage, it now instead lets you attack in melee range without disadvantage, no longer requiring you to get Crossbow Expert for that bonus (similarly, various magic-focused feats, like Spell Sniper, also give you this).
There is, of course, always an advantage to being a ranged character rather than a melee one - while lots more monsters have ranged attacks and abilities than they used to, some still lack them, and many don't hit quite as hard or as accurately at range. It also means that you need to worry less about mobility, with a wider area in which you can stand and still make your attacks. If you can hit an enemy from far away, ideally you can take them down before they get to you. This is kind of an inherent element to combat that has proven true in the real world - very few soldiers these days fight with swords or other melee weapons.
But for game balance, we take a penalty in damage for this. And with the shift on Sharpshooter versus Great Weapon Master, that penalty has been expanded.
Or has it?
One of the other, subtler changes to Great Weapon Master is that it now applies to any Heavy weapon. And it just so happens that we have two ranged weapons that have the Heavy property: the Heavy Crossbow and the Longbow.
The tough part, though, is that GWM both requires a 13 in Strength and only gives a +1 bonus to Strength, without an option to boost, say, Dexterity.
We're also going to have to consider the following: older ranged builds could go with both Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter, allowing them to fire their hand crossbows an additional time per turn. Once again, despite its small d6 damage die, the old Sharpshooter diluted the difference in damage - even compared to a Heavy Crossbow, a d6 only does an average of two damage less, and a whole additional attack with potentially 10 extra damage is going to more than make up for that.
GWM and Crossbow Expert don't work with one another, except to allow you to shoot a Heavy Crossbow more than once per attack action.
So, let's make a build! We're going to keep things relatively simple. We'll be making a ranged Fighter and ignoring subclasses.
Weapon Choice:
Because we're limiting ourselves to heavy ranged weapons, we actually only have two options. As heavy as you might expect an Antimatter Rifle to be, no firearms actually have the Heavy quality. Thus, we can only use a Longbow or a Heavy Crossbow.
Longbows deal 1d8 damage and have the longest range of any weapon in the game, with 150 feet at regular range and 600 at long range. It will be very rare that a DM makes a fight in which enemies are going to be 600 feet away, but it's not inconceivable to have a battle map where you could be over 150 feet away (though still rare - on a 1-inch grid with each inch representing 5 feet, that's 30 inches, or 2 and a half feet). Sharpshooter is still going to be a valuable feat thanks to the lack of disadvantage when in melee range, but given that we can hold onto a rapier or the like for such situations, we don't necessarily need to grab that feat right off the back. Longbows have the Slow mastery, which isn't useless, but won't make you deal more damage than otherwise. While we might be tempted to take a Shortbow instead for Vex, we won't be able to get that GWM bonus damage.
The Heavy Crossbow is our other option. This does 1d10 on a hit. Its range is also a pretty reasonable 100/400, which in practical terms is almost always going to be good enough to hit anything in line of sight. The Heavy Crossbow has the Push mastery, which I think is actually more likely to be useful than the Slow mastery. If merely trying to keep an enemy far away from you, it'll potentially work better if you hit them multiple times, but you can also knock foes off of high platforms, into hazardous areas, and even help out an ally who doesn't want to burn their action to disengage.
The cost, though, that you pay with the Heavy Crossbow is that you will need to pick up the Crossbow Expert feat if you want to take advantage of Extra Attack at level 5. Notably, this isn't necessary in tier 1, but while Fighters do get a second feat at level 6 (one of their two bonus feats compared to other classes) I would definitely say that you'd need to take this feat at level 4 to ensure that you're getting your full combat capabilities at level 5. The good news is that level 4 is the level at which Great Weapon Master is the least powerful. Getting to use your second attack at level 5 is going to almost certainly be better than the extra three damage on your single hit at level 5.
That said, I think that this suggests the Longbow route actually winds up doing more damage specifically at level 5, because you don't need to wait on GWM to pick up the feat. That being said, Crossbow Expert does improve your Dexterity by a point, so you'll actually have a higher hit and damage modifier at level 5, while the Longbow going straight for GWM is probably stuck at a 17 Dex until level 6.
In other words, there's a bit of power jockeying between these options.
All this being said, eventually we hit a point where we have enough feats to get the things we want. And I think that, in the long run, the Crossbow route is probably going to be the better choice, in part because of the Push weapon mastery.
So, where should we aim, (no pun intended) to figure out how powerful this build is?
I think level 10 is a reasonable one. While Fighters get a huge boost to their power at level 11 thanks to their third attack, level 10 is a pretty good spot for a climactic campaign finale.
For a Fighter, this is pretty simple: we have three feats (level 4, 6, and 8) and we've got two attacks, along with Action Surge and other less damage-oriented features.
We'll assume we're starting off with a 13 in Strength to get GWM, and then we're going to go for a 17 in Dexterity to start (which we can get as long as we've got a background that somehow boosts Dexterity - or if we are using rolled stats and we get lucky).
We'll take the Archery Fighting Style Feat at level 1, naturally (one of the best fighting styles, though obviously only useful for this kind of build).
While I think a reasonable DM would by this point give you at least a +1 weapon, for the sake of just mathing this out, I'm going to just use a mundane weapon and arrows/bolts. We'll also do the Heavy Crossbow as our weapon choice, because I think that this will probably do more damage in the long run.
That said, there is the following trade-off: if we start off with a 17 in Dexterity, we won't actually be able to get to 20 by level 10 with only General Feats that aren't Ability Score Improvements, because we're sacrificing one to get Great Weapon Master, which boosts Strength. A Longbow build can get GWM and Sharpshooter, and then use their 8th level feat to get up to 20 Dex, but a Heavy Crossbow build is either going to have to sacrifice Sharpshooter or wait until level 12 to pick up one last half-feat and max out their Dexterity. Admittedly, Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert have some redundancies - namely the "firing in melee" ability, so you might be able to get away with skipping Sharpshooter, but you probably also want to be able to ignore partial cover.
One thing that actually makes our math simpler is that GWM's Hew feature doesn't apply to ranged attacks. While this does mean that if we wind up having to stab someone in melee with a Rapier or the like, it will actually apply (this part of GWM doesn't require the weapon to be heavy) it means that in our typical scenario, we're only just getting the bonus damage.
The good news, though, is that by level 10, our PB is 4.
So, let's just commit to getting all three feats. If this campaign goes into tier 3, we can fill out that last feat at level 12 (Resilient: Dex might be a good option to have proficiency in all three physical saving throws).
Ok: let's get to the build:
We start off at 17 Dexterity and 13 Strength, the rest of our abilities being somewhat arbitrary (though I tend to like a decent Con and Wisdom if I can afford it). At level 4, we pick up Crossbow Expert, pushing our Dex to 18. At level 6, we take Great Weapon Master, bringing our Strength to 14, which doesn't do a ton for us, admittedly. At level 8, we take Sharpshooter, so our Dex is now up to 19.
With the Archery fighting style, we get +2 to attacks with ranged weapons. Thus, with +4 to Dex, a +4 PB, and the extra +2 for Archery, we have a +10 to hit.
On a hit, we're dealing 1d10+4 (Dexterity) and +4 (Proficiency Bonus), so our average damage is 13.5. We get to attack twice per turn, or four times with action surge.
Now, because we're going to want to compare this with a Greatsword GWM build, we need to talk about hit chance, because Archery does effectively increase our damage given that we're hitting more often.
So, if we're fighting at level 10, I think it's reasonable to have a lot of foes that are in the high-teens in terms of AC. An AC 18 might still be a little higher than our average target, but against tough enemies where we really need to maximize our damage, this is might be the goal to look at.
Let's get that math out there:
Hit Damage: 1d10+8, or 13.5
Crit bonus damage: 1d10, or 5.5
Hit Chance: 65%, Crit Chance 5%
Damage per attack: 13.5x65%, or 8.775, plus 5.5x5%, or .275, so 9.05.
With two attacks, that becomes 18.1 average damage per attack action (and we can double that to 36.2 with action surge).
Naturally, with certain subclasses, we can boost that further, like adding Superiority Dice with a Battle Master, but we're going generic here.
Now, let's compare this to a Greatsword-wielding GWM build. This build will do more damage, almost certainly, because they can go all in on Strength, they'll get the full benefit of the Hew feature, because Greatswords have the Graze mastery, and because 2d6 is just more damage than 1d10. The question is by how much.
While the Great Weapon Fighting Style feat does actually increase your damage done, its effect is so marginal that I wouldn't actually recommend anyone take it (it wasn't good in 2014 and it's even worse now). Thus, your Fighting Style is going to be kind of irrelevant for damage output purposes.
Naturally, in real play, being a melee character means mobility is more important - you might spend a full turn just getting to the enemies, which will be a serious dent in your overall damage. But in our ideal "empty room" scenario, we're going to see how the damage compares.
We'll say we're starting with 17 Strength, and then picking up GWM at level 4, followed by two half-feats that boost Strength. Notably, this means that our melee Fighters is actually going to halve the power of the ranged one's Archery fighting style at this level, comparatively speaking. I will note that I taking Polearm Master and fighting with a Glaive instead of a Greatsword does actually give you more damage, and will probably outstrip the ranged character even further. But for the sake of aesthetics and simplicity, we're going to instead assume that they're sticking with a Greatsword, and perhaps taking Mage Slayer and some other Strength-boosting general feat at level 8.
Our melee character thus has enough half-feats to take their Strength to 20 by level 10. With a +5 to Strength and a +4 PB, their attack bonus is +9. On a hit (with their action) they are doing 2d6+9. Additionally, if they take an enemy down or score a critical hit, they can also make one more attack as a bonus action, which does 2d6+5.
Thanks to Graze, we also do some damage even on a miss, so we'll need to add that into the calculation. (Actually, it's now occurring to me that we could calculate this differently, finding out the non-Strength damage average and just adding it to a flat 5 to get our average damage per hit - I'll try that here).
Thus:
5 damage guaranteed per attack (added later)
Hit chance: 60%, crit chance: 5%
Damage on hit: 2d6+4, or 11.
Extra damage on crit: 2d6, or 7.
So: 11x60%, or 6.6, plus 7x5%, or .35, gives us 6.95 average damage beyond graze. Adding in graze gives us 11.95 damage per attack. Thus, for our regular attack action with two attacks, we're dealing 23.9 damage, or 43.8 if we action surge.
But we're not done:
Ignoring action surge, and assuming we're fighting one scary monster, we'll get a bonus action attack if we score a critical hit at least once. This won't get the bonus damage from GWM.
First off, with two attacks, our chance to land a crit on either of them is 9.75%, which we'll need to multiply our average damage on this attack by.
We still have our guaranteed 5 damage and the same hit and crit chance for this attack.
Damage (not counting Strength) on Hit: 2d6, or 7
Extra crit damage: also 7.
So: 7x60% is 4.2, plus 7x5%, or .35 (I realize we could have just said 65% times the whole thing, oh well) gives us 4.55, and then we pop on that 5 that we're guaranteed to get from Strength for an average damage per Hew attack of 9.55. However, our chance of getting this attack is only 9.75%, so the average we deal with it is roughly .93 damage per turn.
Adding this on to our previous damage sans action surge, and we get 24.83 average damage per turn.
Now, let's compare: our Heavy Crossbow build was hitting for 18.1 damage. This is doing 24.83 (maybe shave off that last decimal point. 24.8 is precise enough). This means that our ranged build is doing about 73% of the damage of the melee build.
That is pretty close to three quarters. It is a significant hit to our damage. That being said, we should consider a few things:
With a 100-foot short range, unless dealing with targets behind full cover, there's a very good chance that we're going to be able to target things from the start of the fight without moving. If a melee character has to spend their first turn just taking a Dash action to get to their enemies, then doing 75% of their damage means that it'll take the melee character 3 rounds to catch up to the ranged character's damage output, and in D&D, a lot of fights are going to be over or nearly over by then.
There's also, of course, the survivability angle. Especially with the Push mastery, if a foe has a 30 foot movement speed and you push them back 10 feet each time you hit, with a 65% hit chance, that means you're setting them back an average of 13 feet per round, nearly halving their speed (and potentially pushing them into hazards). If you're just 60 feet away from them (and you can be even farther) it'll take them four of their movements to get into melee range with you, giving you plenty of time to open up some distance. Even if they're dashing at you, you can probably kite a monster this way for several rounds before they catch up with you.
So, it is a trade-off, and I'd think a more significant tradeoff now than it was in the 2014 rules. But I do think that it's a viable way to build a character, even if you wind up with some redundant or less useful side-features.
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