"...made #6 on this list for the sole reason that it's kind of in the middle in regards to how good it is compared to other weapons on this list." That one really took me a second to wrap my head around.

The Oversized Longbow is a unique non magical weapon from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. It is a HEAVY, STRENGTH based 2d6+str ranged weapon with a 150/600 range.

There are two relatively easy ways to get rid of the Loading property problem with the Heavy Crossbow. If there's an Artificer in your party, you could get the Repeating Shot infusion put on your crossbow. Or, just take the Crossbow Expert feat. Yes, it allows you a bonus action attack with the Hand Crossbow, big deal. It also allows you to fire any other crossbow for every attack of your Attack action, since it specifically removes the Loading property.

Every time I think of the whip in d&d my brain goes to the 3.5 version that did nonlethal damage. You couldn't kill something with it, but good Lord could you punish the fuck out of them. I think there was an old nonlethal damage build that would just whip the shit out of somebody for a ton of damage and then capture them instead of killing them. It was really good for city fights where you didn't necessarily want to leave a blood trail or dead body, or if you wanted to interrogate somebody. I believe it's still in 5E, but there was a man catcher that is essentially a neck trap on a stick that lets you drag somebody around doing non-lethal damage if you're able to grapple them with it and it has range, so you would ensnare them with that and then have the paladin hold the pole while you whip them into submission. There were also modifiers for non-lethal damage, so you could get an extra d6 if you chose to do non-lethal damage with your weapon. Imagine how easy it would be to get a criminal to rat out their bosses if they're getting intimidated, whipped so hard they go down to 1HP, and then healed by the cleric just to get intimidated and have the cycle repeat until they crack. There was even a feat that you could take that modifies your spells into doing non-lethal damage, so imagine if you will a fireball that drops everyone in a room down to one HP so you can capture everyone. Crazy stuff 😂 In that same edition, on the topic of lances, there's a way to do literal thousands of damage on a charging build. When you charge with a Lance You do double damage or triple if you are on a mount, and there was an entire prestige class called cavalier that could increase that to four and even five times damage. There was a special Lance that would give you an extra doubling so that's six times, a feat that let you get another multiplier if you do it while you are falling or flying downwards so that's seven times damage, and two different spells that also individually increased the multiplier up to a total of 9 times damage. Normally you can only do one attack at the end and at a d8 + 4 or 5 That would get you over a hundred, but there's two things that modify that. If the paladin took initiate of horas re as a feat they could get a full attack on a charge, which leads to some absolutely nutty bullshit. That means that you can use every one of your attacks, which is four at level 16, and each one of them has the charge multiplier though the two spells only work for the first attack. You can take this one step further by getting two lances to dual wield them because you only need one hand for a Lance if you're on a mount, Then take all the dual weapon fighting feats to get you three extra attacks. That's seven attacks, the first is at 9 times damage and the other six are at eight times, so you're over here doing several hundred damage on average If you charge with dual lances and use a full attack while you're Riding atop a flying creature That is swooping down. But wait, there's more! If you use the charging variant of the power attack feat called reckless charge, you can reduce your chance to hit by as much as your attack bonus is and increase your damage on hit by as many as you want. There's a ton of bonuses to your attack roll that you get by attacking this way, so you can just get rid of them all to give yourself like a 10 damage boost for free and all of that will get applied to each hit. I calced it before to see how high the damage would get, it was somewhere in the range of 6 or 7,000. Oh and you can do this while riding a fucking dragon, getting all but the last multiplier bonus by level 12. 3.5 is busted 😂

id even put the maul slightly higher than the greatsword, since there are way more creatures that resist slashing damage in comparison to bludgeoning, in fact, magic bludgeoning is one of the least resisted types

No.9 My favorite paladin i ever ran used a whip heres my trick, my party went to the backsmith and i asked the smith to mount the flanged mace head we had picked up to the end of the whip turning a 1D4 slash into a 1D10 bludgeon

The weapon that gets no mention in D&D is the cesta, which is like a curved half-pipe with a short handle. It could throw fist-sized rocks which are really going to hurt when they land. You could even upgrade that in the same way as you do with sling stones upgraded to sling bullets. A cricket ball sized metal sphere, in effect. Nasty. I would also love to see the whip with the 'wrap' ability, to be used a la Indiana Jones style, wrapping round overhead objects so you can swing across a gap or wrapping round an enemies arm, possibly frustrating or a least hindering their attack. The final weapon i like is the long spear. I envision it being used as it is in Oriental martial arts films - a spear head on a flexible (possibly bamboo) wooden pole. I see it as the lightest weapon you can use that has the reach property. Not sure what that means in D&D terms............a parry ability, perhaps ?

Since you did include feats in your evaluations hand crossbow is by far the strongest weapon. SS + CE gives you the safest, highest, and most consistent single target dmg across all other weapons

Halberds/glaives and hand crossbows are the crux of all the best physical damage weapons because of Polearm Master and Crossbow Expert, so those should probably be #1/#2. PAM and CBE give you bonus action attacks that *aren't* offhand weapon attacks so they get your full attack modifier tacked on. Having consistent use of a bonus action attack is far better than a bigger damage die. 1. Halberd/glaive (PAM/Heavy Weapon Master) 2. Hand crossbow (CBE/Sharpshooter) 3. Greatsword/maul (better for everything but barbarians as a raw STR build, and those builds do more DPR than barbarians) 4. Greataxe (only good with barbarians, the worst class in the game) 5. Rapier (for Bladesingers and Swords bards [amazing subclasses], but sucks since its not light for dual-wielding for rogues) 6. Quarterstaff (PAM + Shield for paladins going for a tanky build since you get 3 attacks per round to Smite, and Smites do the heavy lifting in your build, not raw weapon damage) 7. Longbow (best backup weapon for melee characters since 2 1d8+DEX shots are better than 1 1d10+DEX shot, since you won't have the feats) 8. Shortsword (best dual-wield weapons without feats since they're light finesse 1d6) 9. Longsword (best sword & board weapon, but that's not an optimal playstyle; if you're STR and not a paladin, you want to smack things as hard and often as possible) 10. Dagger (meh, handy but not great) Whips are mid since if you're finesse, reach doesn't really matter since you're better off just using a longbow and shortsword/rapier combo since you'll be able to use either one or the other. Javelins and heavy crossbows just don't have a good niche (and you never want to *have* to use them), since you're better off making two attacks with a longbow than only one with a heavy crossbow. 1-6 are "build your martial/half-caster/gish around having this weapon," 7-10 are "best things to be backups in your arsenal."

Petition to classify a frying pan as a legitimate weapon rather than an improvised one. Can be wielded as a weapon and as a small shield. 1d6 bludgeoning or +1 to AC that you can alternate at will. Monks would go crazy with this. Let’s make it happen. ~_~

One more thought on the Maul vs Great Sword/Ax is the maintenance factor. You can't really make a Maul any duller then it already is.

I feel polearms (glaives, Halberds, etc.) should be number 1 for the following reasons: 1) d10 damage, second higest martial weapon damage dice in the game. 2) 10ft range will keep out of range in some cases and provoke less attacks of opportunity, giving you the chance to run away and be at a greater distance from the enemy. 3) You can use great weapon master feat as you would with greatswords, mauls, and greataxes. 3) Polearm master feat allows you to attack anyone who enters your range as a reaction 4) Combining the Polearm Master feat with the Sentinel feat could outright waste the target's turn, and its abilities are martial.

Overall great presentation. A couple math bits... The great weapon fighting style has a bigger impact than represented. At base, a greatsword or maul has an average damage of 7, vs the average damage of a great axe or Lance of 6.5. When you add the great weapon fighting style, those jump to 8.5 and 7.3. A natural crit bumps those to 17 and 14.7 respectively. Adding an extra die to each for brutal critical raises them to 21.3 and 22 respectively. Adding 2 extra dice creates 25.5 and 29.2. Yes adding those d12s increases damage, but at an incredibly slow rate. Even with an expanded critical range and advantage on 3very single attack, there's never ever a scenario where the d12 comes out ahead. ...and that's only counting dice. Ability modifiers and flat boosts like gwm and hex curse don't double on crits. Which leads us to polearms... Polearms aren't the best because of reach or polearm master, though both of those are good. Gwm, all by itself makes polearms the best. Every other heavy weapon requires a bit of luck to weaponize your bonus action. With polearms, you can get the -5/+10 on every single bonus action. That consistency adds more average damage than the great weapon fighting style (though they can be stacked). The ability to add a BIG bonus action hit every round trumps all other ways to boost damage. ...which gets us to hand crossbows, and the archery fighting style... With both SS and GWM, accuracy is far more important than the dice, and the archery style gives a direct boost to accuracy, the hand crossbow becomes the consistency king of high damage. Depending on the build, if you can get advantage consistently on a SS/CBE build, you can also dump in Elven Accuracy and make that -5 modifier almost meaningless. Addressing the basic damage dice of the weapons without addressing the feats that make them work ends up as misinformation. The guy who picks between the maul and greatsword is going to feel cheated when the PAM/GWM Barbarian starts swinging... and that barb is going to be embarrassed by the Halfling Fighter with SS/CBE, especially when the Halfling works as well in melee range as at distance.

Good video. I do think that there are quite a few errors with the ranking. At least knowing how to make strong weapon using builds. The top three should be 1.) Hand Crossbow, since its one handed and can be used with both crossbow master and Sharpshooter feats 2.) Quarterstaff, since its the melee weapon best for half casters because it can be used as an one handed weapon/spell focus and work with both dueling and polearm master 3.) Halberd/Glaive, since they have reach and can be used with great weapon master and polearm master

Dart is not Light!! One of the oddest omissions in the 5E rulebook. The OneDnD playtest allows two Light missile weapons to be used, which makes Dart not being Light even more peculiar. I raised this several times in OneDnD playtest feedback, and it still isn't fixed.

Thri-kreen can use the crossbow expert feat to use a heavy crossbow for their two main attacks and a bonus action atrack with a hand crossbow in their secondary hand

One benefit of Lances tho Small Races can use them unlike Glaive, Halberd, and Pike

I disagree with the ordering of the list. 10: Dagger 9: Heavy crossbow 8: Whip 7: Rapier 6: Longbow 5: Greataxe 4: Maul/ Greatsword 3: Quarterstaff 2: Hand Crossbow 1: Polearm/ Halberd Hear me out, PAM, Sentinel is beyond Meta for melee martials. Sacrificing a tad bit of base damage (d10 as opposed to a d12) for additional reach is made up by the 1d4 butt action attack, which allows you to weaponize your bonus action. On average, 2d12 deals 13 damage, assuming both attacks hit. 2d10+1d4 deals 13.5 damage on average; additionally, you have more chances to hit, given that you are actively attacking more. A weaponized bonus action is a really useful tool for all applicable martials. This is also why I put Quarterstaff at number three. Along with the acknowledgment that Quarterstaffs can be used in multiple ways beyond just a weapon. It's considered an arcane focus when equipt, a monk weapon (IE a Simple, non-two handed or heavy weapon), and the use case for the spell Sheleighlagh which can be used by: Druids (wisdom), Druidic Rangers (wisdom), Anyone with the Magic Initiate feat; druid (wisdom, good for high wisdom monks), Nature domain Clerics (Wisdom, and the cleric gets heavy armor so this isn't a sub-par pick), Bard's magical secrets (Charisma, good for Valor, whispers, and Swords bards) and Pact of the Tome Warlocks (Charisma). Additionally, when sheleighlagh is cast, it stacks with the dueling fighting style, meaning you are getting more average damage then it being a d10 weapon whilst it's equipped in one hand, allowing a you to carry a shield as well and most people who get it, also have shield proficiency. (D10 weapon deals and average of 5.5 damage,1d8+2 is on average 6.5 damage). And again PAM bonus action attack. The last one I want to talk about is a Hand Crossbow. It's a One-handed Light Weapon meaning Crossbow Expert can work With just ONE CROSSBOW. You don't even need two rules as written, as Crossbow expert Specifies that it ignores the loading property. Additionally, Thanks to Piercer and Sharpshooter, any perceived weakness that the hand crossbow may have compared to the higher damage counter parts is made obsolete as it is more action economy friendly than its competitors (IE it allows for more attacks, weaponizing the bonus action as well as the action.)

I thought I would see the Net, Double-Blade Weapon, or Oversized Longbow that keys off of STR.

Just saying, it almost feels to me that WotC dislikes Piercing damage, as it is the only weapon damage type that doesn't have a 2d6 weapon, and the only 1d12 piercing weapon is the Lance, which has a bunch of weird hoops and rulings you have to go through to have it be usable.

7:13 or if you're nice, you can ask the Artificer to sacrifice two of their infusions to put repeating weapon on both. 16:26 eh. Ranking a weapon based on how good it is for critical hitting seems iffy, since you can go a full campaign without landing one. Now, when it lands, sure it's great, but there's never a guarantee. That said, a d12 is great and rare for some reason.

I think the long sword would have been better than the dagger or whip as it’s the best weapon for monks, warlocks and bards sword college, but also it should be said that they have the most magical weapons to upgrade into. Even if these are non magical weapons, they could be upgraded later, and already having access to the most common magical weapon is a bonus

The inability to roll one damage on greatsword/maul actually makes the damage the same as the 1d6 damage advantage that greataxe has because of the scarcity of crits. Also the re rolls on greatsword/maul is understated bevause you gave twice the chance of rolling a 1 or 2 on a d6 than a d12 and you are rolling two of them making the feat useful four times as often

You can't dual wield a Rapier and a short sword without dual wielder feet. BOTH weapons must have the light property, not just the one in the offhand. The Rapier does not have the light weapon property.

Big fan of a Wood Elf Ranger with Rapier dual-weild (feats or sub class allowing the dual-weild of course). With high Dex in light armour (studded leather or leather), they can mow down multiple opponents that are relatively far away from each other

I allow my strength based martials to use strength instead of dex for (only) the heavy crossbow. I don't know that I've seen anyone use it otherwise. Plus, if you have an artificer, your martials will love them forever if they put the "repeating shot" infusion on the crossbow .

whips being martial weapons seems kind of weird to me. no one trains the whip for warfare. but i guess its just to illustrate needing some specialist training. but then i think that would be more served by baking it in to aplicable backgrounds like farmer, slaver, animal handler, cart driver, and archeologist.

the whip is rlly good with a battle master, making their maneuvers proc at range

Daggers are very versatile, but they are not Versatile.

I like to build a paladin with the ambidexterity feat, and use 2 lances, while riding the steed from de find steed speel

Hand crossbow has the ammunition property too so no akimbo crossbows

What about a top 10 martial class or subclass features?

OMFG Do you guys not have any other non-magical weapons? The dwarven war axe? The push blade? The Ogre Greatsword.

Did they not make a correction/errata to the other pole weapons (spears, pikes, etc.) that allow them to work with Pole Arm Master? I'm pretty sure that was confirmed (definitely for spears). I'd honestly rule as a DM that if you're using a glaive, halberd, spear, pike, quarterstaff or any pole-based weapon of a similar design, you should be able to use PAM with it.

Great Axe's average damage is 6.5 not 6. Simple way to understand besides adding all results and diving by 12, is realize that with 12 possible outcomes 6 and 7 are the median and adding these two up and dividing by 2 is 6.5.

Best weapon in thr game is a quarterstaff due its its spellcssting versatility and combination with pam and warcaster

Not considering the weapons in combination with feats, like hand crossbow + sharpshooter + crossbow expert, was a huge miss. Hand crossbow is pretty much the best ranged weapon, same thing for a spear in a weapon + shield setup.

I am a little dissapointed not to see the lance on this list

First of all i write the comment with little understanding of the language, i comprehend it well but in writing i'm a goat Honestly, as a first player and later as a master, I have always considered and will always consider weapons as if they had a single damage die regardless of whether they roll 1D6/12 or 2D6. This is because for me it doesn't make sense that a weapon changes its behavior depending on what feature it uses, and therefore for me the reading of the greatsword or maul is 1 (2d6) damage dice and reading it like this the sword is substantially equivalent to the ax. If this reading wasn't there I don't see why I would ever choose the mallet over the greataxe (except for the type of damage) and for me the wording one damage die is useful in case there are situations that increase the number of damage dice of the weapon example in the rules for oversized weapons which increase the damage dice by adding 1 for each larger size, not only that even in that case then an ax would do 2d12 while a greatsword 3d6 if you think about counting the sword as 2 separate damage dice. I realize that it was also specified by the creators but I don't understand why create 2 mechanically similar weapons and decide to make one of the 2 objectively worse than the second. Yes, I know that if you add the feet then the sword is technically better but I remember that these are in fact an optional rule (albeit always used) and that consequently they should not be taken into consideration as always present when writing an object . Having said this, as you will have understood if not for a situation in which feet are taken into account then for me the 2 places in the ranking should be reversed. In the case that the feets are present then the weapon that in my opinion benefits the most for the GWF is the Double-Bladed Scimitar causing 2d4+1d4 damage and therefore withdrawing 50% of the results in favor of greater damage. Other than that, as always, nice video.

Hand crossbow at 6th and Halberd/Glaive at 5th is incorrect imo Hand crossbow has access to Crossbow expert feat which lets you attack an extra time as a bonus action, combined with Sharpshooter its the most damaging pure martial buildnin the game and with ss it can ignore its debilitating range The polearms works with polearm master for bonus action attack and a reaction attack Greatsword maul and greataxe had no right to be that high since they only deal slightly more damage without a feat and gets toppled by weapons with feats

How is hand crossbow not number one?

RAW you *cannot* dual wield hand crossbows, even with the Crossbow Expert feat. Yes, the feat removes the *loading* property, but all bows and crossbows also have the *ammunition* property that requires you to have a free hand to load the weapon as part of the attack. So you can't even use a hand crossbow with any other melée weapon unless you drop or stow said weapon before loading your hand crossbow. However, what Crossbow Expert does allow is one or more attacks with the HC for your action and then another attack with it as a bonus action.

You can't double throw darts...

Ykwla

S2

No longsword ? back to the gutter.

Industrial knife and hammer for the wind baby

I loathe loading property. It adds nothing to the game.

"Unlike pikes, halberds and glaives can benefit from polearm master", but pikes are listed in the polearm master weapons too. Other than that great video as always