FrogReaver
As long as i get to be the frog
ForgReaver, would you mind linking each build to the post where it was introduced? Compacting the justification for damage into a single line is insufficient and hard to read.
Good idea. I'd never considered it. I will try to do that at some point.
Personally I would have allowed the players 2 rounds and to take the average of both rounds. This would have allowed for a bit of buffing, but both are biased in some way.
I guess the most important factor for me was that Damage Now > Damage later. Damage on round 1 is worth more (in general) than damage on round 2 because if you do the damage now then the enemy has a greater chance of already being dead and thus not getting it's round 1 action. In short, I don't think it's the fairest comparison to compare damage on round 1 directly to damage on round 2.
Personally I found sustained damage more helpful than nova as sustained damage pushed towards having resources later in the day. This is going to be difficult to model as some tables frequently have 1 encounter per day, where nova would be king, while others are closer to dungeon crawl where a nova build will have sacrificed endurance for the nova itself. A way to get a mix would be that the build needs to explain what they do for 2 encounters for 2 rounds and they take the average or median of those 4 rounds. Average would bias towards nova, median would bias towards sustained damage.
If I was going to do that comparison I would look at total damage dealt in an adventuring day - which would still have the damage now vs damage later issue. In fact in addition to that it would then need to be defined what a standard adventuring day actually is in 5e. What happens when you do that is you get something that's nearly meaningless for many players.
Besides, early on in the edition at-will and nearly-at-all damages were pretty solved problems. Battlemasters (with precision and trip) are primarily the only complicated piece to calculate in those regards (and they get even harder the more rounds into the fight you go)
Speaking on this topic a little more, the assumptions in 5e are no where near as tight as they were in 4e. That makes more "complete" comparisons in 5e less beneficial.
You made reference to Damage Kings. As author of the DPR King Candidates thread in 4e I've had some experience doing this sort of thing. You said you were not wanting players to simply one up eachother with a tweak that ends up being unplayable, yet the top entries in your list are one trick ponies nonetheless.
I tend to guide toward that goal that but not strictly enforce the suggestion except for extreme outliers. I'm curious what builds you view as 1 trick ponies?
I found that you allow these tweaks and rank them all the same, then append the user's name on the entry. The competition ended up being healthy for the optimization and community as new exploits were found.
Nearly every "exploit" is known. Most of them involve some combination of Action Surge, Divine Smite, Advantage, Superiority Dice and feats. This thread isn't really to find new exploits, but more to rank the combinations of the ones that everyone already knows exists.
Another problem I found with my DPR King Candidates was differing interpretations and cheese. Like you I realized there was no way to have the same rules apply to all builds. I found that labeling the cheese or side of an interpretation was helpful as many builds ended up relying on them. I then added these labels as tags to the build so one could quickly filter out builds that wouldn't work at their table. I often had to make DM-like calls on some of these interpretations. Don't be afraid to do so here.
That was one of the things I hated most about the 4e DPR King threads. That nearly everything that ended up there was a cheese build. That said - 5e really doesn't have much cheese and there's very few rules interpretations that drastically differ. It's a pretty straightforward edition for most things.
I noticed you didn't account for area damage. According to your rules I could just make the assumption that I'm dealing with 21 HP mooks all in a giant ball and wreck the rankings. You would counter saying that is not an assumption that would be universal, yet I've cited my assumption. The way I tried to account for this was to separate out a build's single target damage from their area damage and annotate the per-target area damage with the area it applies to, then cite the additional single target damage. I was unable to find a satisfactory conversion from area to targets. For ranking it I had to guesstimate.
IMO. Area Damage has too many variables to even remotely properly account for in something like this.
Lastly have you considered having a section dedicated to guiding people through the DPR analysis. Advantage and Critting was one thing that many didn't find intuitive to calculate. I would go so far as normalizing for level by dividing the expected damage by some HP(level). I called this KPR (kills per round) and found it helpful putting builds on the same platform.
KPR worked well for 4e. Have you considered that it may not work well for 5e? Have you considered that there's far fewer standardized assumptions in 5e than there were in 4e.
Typically where I diverged from a 4e Damage Kings style thread was done for considered reasons.
Damage Calculation for multiple attacks over a round and limited use per attack abilities gets really complicated. I'm not sure that a guide could adequately explain that. I suppose crits could be explained but I figure that someone interested in this kind of thread will either know or ask how to calculate something they don't know how to.