Fighting Styles, in 5.5, became feats that can be taken by other classes at levels where you can pick up a feat, while the three classes that always got them - the Fighter, Paladin, and Ranger - just get a free one at the level when they would pick one up.
Unlike General Feats, Fighting Styles don't come with any ability score bonus, and as such, they really need to punch hard for them to be worth taking over something that might also help with your primary stats.
Some of these Fighting Styles are going to wind up being probably strictly better than others, but are intended to better-enable some off-beat character builds. Let's see what their effect ultimately winds up looking like:
Archery:
This adds a +2 bonus to your attack rolls with ranged weapons. Notably, while a thrown melee weapon does have you make a ranged attack, it's not a ranged weapon. Still, the archer archetype (or even a gunslinger if you're using firearms) is a classic trope in the genre. Honestly, I think this Fighting Style is a really obvious choice for anyone who wants to play with ranged weapons - it's thus more likely to be chosen by Fighters and Rangers than Paladins.
If we compare it to just raising our Dexterity by two points, we're getting a higher bonus to hit than that, but no bonus to damage when we hit. How much, then, does it raise our damage by? It depends a bit on what weapon we're using and what our target's AC is. In absolute terms, it raises our chance to hit by 10%, but that can be a deceptive way of thinking about it - if we had a 60% chance to hit that then goes up to 70%, that's not going to result in 10% higher damage compared to what we were doing before.
Let's imagine we're using a longbow and deal 1d8+5 damage (9.5 average) on a hit (maybe we have a +4 to Dex and a +1 Longbow, or perhaps we just have a mundane bow and a +5 to Dex). If we have a 60% chance to hit our target without this, we're doing 5.7 damage on average, and then our crits add .225 (4.5x20%) so we wind up doing 5.925 damage per attack.
If we add that +2 to hit, our hit chance gives us a 70% chance to hit. Our crit chance is the same, so we're now adding that .225 to 9.5x70%, which is 6.65, so that's 6.875 damage per attack.
Thus, our damage is about 16% higher than it previously was.
This is just one example. Say we're lower-level, and only do 1d8+3 damage (7.5 on average) and only a base hit chance of 50%. Now, we're doing 3.75+.225 per attack, or 3.975. If we bump that up to 60% with our fighting style, we're looking at 4.5+.225, or 4.725. This means we're doing about 18% higher damage.
If we go to another extreme - let's say that we're very high level, tier 4, with a +3 Heavy Crossbow using +3 Bolts and we're fighting some minion monster with only a 15 AC. At this stage, we're capped on Dex. Thus, without the fighting style, we've got a +17 to hit. You don't even need to do any math to realize the Fighting Style isn't actually doing anything for us, because we can only miss on a Natural 1. But say it's an AC of 20. Now, without the fighting style, we have an 85% chance to hit. Our average damage is 1d10+11 (16.5) and our crit bonus is .275. So, we're getting 16.5x85%, or 14.025, and then .275 for crits, so it's 14.3 damage. If our fighting style bumps that to a 95% hit chance (actually the highest hit chance you can get) it becoems 16.5x95%, or 15.675, plus .275, or 15.95. And thus, in this scenario, we're looking at a boost of only about 11.5%.
In other words, the overall damage output benefit of this feat winds up being probably around 10-20%ish, with the benefits naturally being larger the harder something is to hit.
All of that said (and boy I don't think the other feats are going to have as extensive a write-up) there are few Fighting Styles that benefit a ranged character, so this is a good default option (and hitting always feels better than missing).
Blind Fighting:
This gives you Blindsight out to a range of 10 feet.
This is situational, but will feel great when it comes into play. If you have a Warlock with Devil's Sight or a Shadow Sorcerer or Monk, you can now play well with their Darkness strategies. Also, if you don't have Darkvision, this will let you fight effectively in total darkness.
Notably, though, the short range means that this won't totally safeguard you - if a ranged attacker targets you from outside that radius, they'll still get advantage on you. Likewise, it won't help if you need to attack unseen creatures at range.
But if your campaign has lots of invisible monsters that like to sneak up on you to attack, this will be amazing. I also think that this could potentially be useful if you need to find invisible objects, like a hidden key in a wizard's sanctum.
Again, it's situational, but it's a pretty cool superpower.
Defense:
This grants you a +1 bonus to AC if you're wearing any kind of armor (Light, Medium, or Heavy).
This is boring, but never bad to have. A +1 bonus to AC isn't that enormous - it only shifts your chance to be hit by 5% in absolute terms. We're kind of in a similar situation with Archery, but in reverse: the harder a monster hits, and the less likely they are to hit you in the first place, the bigger the damage reduction this provides. On my Eldritch Knight, I had a +1 shield, adamantine plate, and the Shield spell, as well as this. What that meant was that if a creature had a +7 to hit or less, they needed to land a crit to actually hit me. By mid-levels, you do start to get creatures within +8s, +9s, +10s, to hit, but even in that case, if a thing had a +10 to hit, this Fighting Style reduced their chance to hit from 25% to 20%.
Basically, I don't think you'll ever hate having this, but I also think it's one that works best if you're really piling on the AC with a sword-and-board build.
Dueling:
This adds a +2 bonus to damage when you are wielding a melee weapon in one hand and no other weapons. (Notably, this will work fine if you have a shield in the off-hand.)
On its surface, this might not seem like much, but I think it adds up quite a bit. For one thing, this will apply to all of your attacks, making it actually pretty good for a character who makes a lot of attacks, like a Fighter.
My general temptation is to compare this with Two Weapon Fighting, which we haven't yet covered. But another way to think about this is that it kind of upgrades your damage dice by two sizes - a d6 weapon starts to look more like a d10, or, more likely, a d8 weapon starts to hit as hard as a d12 (slightly less because crits don't scale as well, but given that we're talking about a difference of two average damage 1/20 of the time, that's basically a difference of .1, which is pretty marginal).
This is a very solid choice for a sword-and-board build. I guess we'll save comparing it with Two Weapon Fighting when we get to that one.
Great Weapon Fighting:
When you make an attack with a melee weapon that you are holding with two hands, you can treat any 1 or 2 you roll on a damage die as a 3. The weapon has to have the Two-Handed or Versatile property.
Now, I think the wording on this might have been changed, because I thought it explicitly excluded bonus damage like Divine Smites or Sneak Attacks. Still, the old version of this allowed a re-roll, which means this version is less powerful.
D6s with this, such as when you're rolling for a Maul or Greatsword, will go from an average of 3.5 to an average of 4. A d12 (like a Greataxe) will go from 6.5 to 6.75. A d10 (like most versatile weapons or heavy polearms) will go from 5.5 to 5.8. So, at best, we're looking at a boost of around 14% - but on the dice, not the full damage. If we have a Greatsword, for example, and have a +4 to Strength, we're talking about going from 11 to 12 average damage, which is only a 9% increase in damage. And on a Greataxe, going from 10.5 to 10.75 damage, the boost is only about 2% more damage.
This is the only Fighting Style that will directly increase damage done with two-handed melee weapons, so if you're purely interested in damage, you can still take it, but it's definitely not as powerful as the other options (that said, Great Weapon Master is probably the most powerful General Feat for damage output).
If we rule that this applies to bonus damage such as from a Divine Smite, it might start to shine a little more. If we take our Greatsword example and then drop a 2nd level Divine Smite, doing 3d8 additional damage, the d8s go from 4.5 damage on average to 4.875. Thus, the Smite damage goes from 13.5 to 14.625. Overall, then, adding each to the 11 and 12 from the weapon itself, we have 24.5 average damage versus 26.825, which is an increase in damage of about... ok, it's still just around 9%.
Interception:
In our Wildemount game, we have two paladins who both have the Interception fighting style, and without a Cleric or Druid or other full-caster healer, it has done a great job of keeping us alive.
Naturally, the main point of comparison is going to be how this does compared to the Protection fighting style, which we'll cover next. Against foes that hit extremely hard, the damage reduction might start to feel devalued. But I actually think that in most situations, it'll wind up being better.
Another thing to compare it to is a healing spell. Cure Wounds obviously does a lot more than it used to - if we figure a Cleric would heal for 2d8+3 to start with, that's about 12 healing on average. But if a Paladin with Interception instead reduced incoming damage, they'd do so for 1d10+2 at level 1, or 7.5 on average. That's certainly less, but this costs only a reaction and no other resource (you do have to be positioned in the right spot).
An advantage it has over Protection is that you get to wait to see if the attacker actually hits - if the attacker rolls poorly, you can save your reaction.
Finally, Interception can be used even if you don't have a shield equipped, making it versatile for various weapon loadouts. You can use a shield, or a simple or martial weapon.
We'll do some math to compare them when we cover Protection, which is right now.
Protection:
If you have a shield, you can use a reaction to impose disadvantage on an attack against a creature other than you if they're within 5 feet of you.
Ok, so the question is this: disadvantage or damage reduction.
Notably, if a target is hitting for a total equal to 1+ your proficiency bonus or less, Interception will fully negate an attack. But that's pretty rare. Disadvantage can negate an attack entirely, but it also doesn't guarantee any reduction in damage.
Let's go to an extreme example: the Tarrasque is targeting our Druid healer with their Bite attack. The Druid only has a 15 AC, so the attack can only miss on a natural 1. Protection will thus reduce their hit chance from 95% to 90.25%. They deal 36 damage on a hit and get an extra 26 on a crit. With disadvantage, the crit likelihood is reduced from 1 in 20 to 1 in 400. Thus:
Without Protection: 95%x36 + 26/20, which is 34.2 plus 1.3, or an average of 35.5 average damage.
With Protection: 90.25%x36 is 32.49, and 26/400 is .0065, so we're looking at 32.4965, meaning we've reduced incoming damage to about 92% of its previous value.
If, instead, we had Interception, at this level we'd be reducing the damage by 1d10+6, or 11.5. Thus, our hit damage goes from 36 to 24.5. 24.5x95% plus 26x5% winds up being 24.575, which is about 69% (nice) of the damage they would have taken otherwise.
Now, I was trying to get the hardest-hitting hit here, but I think the Tarrasque's massive attack bonus also made Protection less powerful.
Let's take something like a Stone Golem (a pretty reasonable mid-level threat) that is attacking a better-armored ally with an AC of 18. They attack with a +10 to hit and deal an average of 24 damage (mix of bludgeoning and force - basically 4d8+6). If we're level 12, say, we're working with a PB of 4. Thus, the Golem's hit chance without disadvantage is 65%, and the usual 5% crit chance. 24 damage on a hit and an extra 18 damage on a crit.
Without Protection: 24x65%, or 15.6, plus 18x5%, or .9, for a total of 16.5 average damage.
With Protection: 24x42.25% (65% squared) or 10.14 plus 18/400, or .045, for a total of 10.185, or only about 62% of the normal damage.
But then, if we use Interception, we're reducing that hit damage by 1d10+4, or about 9.5, so the average damage on a hit becomes 14.5. 14.5x65% is 9.425, and then the .9 for crits gets us to 10.325, which is around 63% of the original damage.
Which does mean that in this case, Protection does reduce the damage taken by slightly more.
Here's my call, though: between the weapon versatility that Interception lends, and the fact that it will make Concentration saves a lot easier when it does reduce incoming damage, and the fact that you only have to use it when an attack does actually land, I think that in most situations, it'll be better than Protection.
Thrown Weapon Fighting:
Returning Weapons probably should have been in the Dungeon Master's Guide, as I think that a character built around throwing weapons is a very cool one (see Vax from Critical Role). The damage bonus here is identical to the one from Dueling, though I'll note that if you're throwing Light weapons, you will get this bonus on the extra bonus action attack, so with just your standard extra attack that you tend to get at level 5, this could add up to 6 damage over the course of a turn.
That said, thrown weapons tend to have lower damage dice, so this +2 bonus is half paying that tax - UNLESS you're using Tridents, which I think became the best one-handed weapons as of 5.5. If you have a Returning Trident, you could hit twice for 1d8+Strength+2, which is nearly as good as 1d12+Strength. Given that you wouldn't be able to add Strength to a bonus action attack with light thrown weapons, the Strength would cancel itself out, so we're talking 3(1d4+2), or an average of 13.5 versus 2(1d8+2) or 13, so it's just slightly less powerful with a Trident (and indeed, if we've got Returning Weapons, that does add an extra point of damage to each hit, so it further favors things like daggers - though note that you will need at least two Returning Daggers/Light Hammers, etc. as the Light property does require multiple weapons).
Fundamentally, this scales the more attacks you can make in a turn, which favors Fighters (very much in the same way that Dueling does).
Two-Weapon Fighting:
This allows you to add your ability modifer to the damage of the extra attack granted by the Light Property. What this ultimately translates to is a kind of cap on the damage this adds to your turn: at most 5 (unless you can push your Strength/Dex to 22 or higher).
In this way, this will often outdo the damage you get from something like Dueling or Thrown Weapon Fighting if you're only making two attacks. But once those styles can get in a third attack (such as with a Fighter's second Extra Attack at level 11,) this starts to fall behind. I will note that if you want to get three thrown attacks without being an 11+ Fighter (aside from Action Surge,) you're also probably downgrading from d6 weapons to d4 weapons.
So, if I'm throwing, say, darts and daggers (going Dex because Darts are actually natively ranged weapons and thus I think have to use Dex) with Thrown Weapon Fighting and like a +4 to Dex, I'm doing 1d4+6 on the darts (let's ignore Vex for now) and 1d4+2 on the dagger, so about 21.5 damage overall. If I'm instead attacking with a Shortsword and Scimitar and Two-Weapon Fighting (again, ignoring Vex for my sanity) we're talking three attacks that all do 1d6+4, or 22.5. It's a little more damage and I don't need magical weapons (or a big dagger budget - Darts are dirt cheap, but daggers and light hammers will add up).
That said, if we compare this to Dueling, where we might be using a d8 weapon, I think we start to see this fall behind.
If we have just two regular attacks, our Two-Weapon Fighting character is getting that 22.5 we got earlier. By comparison, if we have Dueling with a d8 weapon and the same primary ability score modifier (maybe it's a Rapier and we still use Dex, though Strength would work in both cases) that character is now hitting for 1d8+6 on each attack, which is 10.5, so we get 21 damage on average. The Dual-Wielder is doing better here, but the Duelist can have a shield.
But a Fighter using something like Action Surge or even just being level 11 or higher will get to scale up that damage while the Two-Weapon Fighting character will only ever get to add that single instance of their Strength/Dex (even if they get another off-hand attack via the Dual-Wielder Feat).
If we stick with our stats and just add in Action Surge, we're now looking at the Dual-Wielder doing 5 attacks that all land for 1d6+4, so that's 37.5 (not really, as we aren't taking a lot of things like crits and hit chance into account) versus our Duelist doing 1d8+6 four times, or 42.
Even if we've capped our ability score, the Duelist damage goes up by 4 and the dual-wielder goes up by 5, which doesn't overcome this difference. Even if we add in an additional bonus action off-hand attack from the Dual-Wielder feat, that only adds 1d6 more damage, bringing them from 37.5 to 41, which is still slightly behind.
Conclusions:
I don't really see this post as a reason to say you have to take one feat or another. A lot of these are trying to accomplish different things. In the case of the Two-Weapon Fighting option, you might have other reasons to stick with it over Dueling, whether on an aesthetic level or because you've got a really awesome pair of magical light weapons.
DMs should try to award magic items that fit into players' preferred playstyle. The differences here are usually marginal enough that you'll be fine either way you go.
Mainly, I just wanted to give myself, more than anyone else, a real understanding of what these Fighting Styles wind up doing for you. I honestly feel like Great Weapon Fighting might be less terrible than I previously imagined. It also confirmed my instincts about Interception versus Protection.
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