In Dungeons And Dragons 2024 aka 5.5 edition, if you want to build a martial character using two handed weapons, then the Savage Attacker Origin Feat and the Fighting Style Feat Great Weapon Fighting might seem like a good idea. After all, if you’re building a character around dishing out large amounts of damage with a massive axe or sword then surely feats that boost damage are going to be a good idea?
Let’s take a look at why these feats are actually pretty rubbish.
Savage Attacker
Savage Attacker lets you roll the damage dice for your weapon twice and pick the highest result.
The table below summarises the average damage both with and without the Savage Attacker feat for the various dice types.
| Dice Type | Average Damage Without Feats | Average Damage With Savage Attacker |
| D4 | 2.5 | 3.125 |
| D6 | 3.5 | 4.4722 |
| D8 | 4.5 | 5.8125 |
| D10 | 5.5 | 7.15 |
| D12 | 6.5 | 8.4861 |
| 2D6 | 7 | 8.37 |
On average Savage Attacker will increase average damage by anything from 0.625 to almost 2 for weapons such as a great axe with a D12 damage dice so to get the most out of this feat, you really need to build a character around big weapons. Which is probably what almost every martial character would be doing anyway. So far so good.
For a level 1 character, doing almost 2 extra points of damage on a successful hit does seem like a very good thing indeed. The problem however is that Savage Attacker is limited to working once per turn. That bonus starts to look a lot less impressive for higher level characters. Once you’re making multiple attacks per turn then that extra damage becomes a lot less significant. You’ll also likely be taking Ability Score Increase Feats on the stat that adds to your weapon’s damage, and if the DM is generous, you’ll be wielding a magical weapon which further increase the damage you do on every attack. What began as a nice bonus for a level 1 character quickly ends up being insignificant.
Great Weapon Fighting
Great Weapon Fighting lets you treat rolls of 1 or 2 on your weapon’s damage dice as rolls of 3.
| Dice Type | Average Damage Without Feats | Average Damage With GWF | Average Damage With GWF And Savage Attacker |
| D8 | 4.5 | 4.875 | 5.891 |
| D10 | 5.5 | 5.8 | 7.2 |
| D12 | 6.5 | 6.75 | 8.521 |
| 2D6 | 7 | 8 | 8.91 |
Great Weapon Fighting is another feat that sounds good on paper but is actually pretty bad in practice. The bigger the damage dice the less likely you are to roll a 1 or a 2 in the first place so being able to treat those as 3s has little impact on the big damage dice that you’ll almost certainly be rolling if you have a two handed heavy weapon.
Two handed swords and mauls are an exception – treating every 1 and 2 as a 3 does make a bigger difference when you are rolling 2D6. Doing an average of 1 extra point of damage isn’t much to write home about but it does apply to every attack you make which is nice when you’ve got a high level fighter combining Extra Attacks with Action Surge to make many attacks on their turn.
Great Weapon Fighting is at least worthy of consideration for a character using two handed swords or mauls. There is the minor problem that the weapon type you start off using isn’t necessarily the same weapon type that you’ll be using at higher levels. If your two handed sword wielding fighter switches to using the powerful magical long sword they’ve found then Great Weapon Fighting drops in effectiveness.
If you’re not using a weapon with 2D6 damage dice then Great Weapon Fighting is going to give you a pitiful extra 0.375 – 0.25 points of damage on average.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Savage Attacker could be a good choice for a low level one shot adventure where you won’t be continuing with the character long term, but generally it should be considered to be a trap for unwary players lured in by the potential to increase the damage they are doing instead of taking another feat that may prove to be more useful long term. The Alert Origin Feat for example will stay useful throughout a character’s adventuring career.
Great Weapon Fighting is a complete waste of time unless you use two handed swords or mauls. A feat aimed at characters using big weapons with correspondingly big damage dice isn’t much good if it scales inversely with the size of the damage dice. If your class gives you a Fighting Style Feat then take something else, perhaps Defensive. If you are in melee combat then you can never have too much AC. Certainly don’t ever consider wasting an Ability Score Increase by taking this feat in its place.
An even bigger waste of time is if Savage Attacker is combined with Great Weapon Fighting where the average damage is barely higher than an attack using Savage Attacker alone. Just don’t do it.
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