I've often felt that having a consistent bonus-action attack (or other mechanic) is 'optimal' in builds during combat. The more actions/options you have, the 'better' you are able to handle different situations or deal more damage.
Traditionally, in order to have a consistent bonus-action attack, the Dual Wielder feat and Two-Weapon Fighting fighting style was a common source for melee-focused builds. But there was a pretty big investment in doing so (feat and fighting style).
Eberron's new double-bladed scimitar seems to bypass this investment, but does it actually? Is it better or worse from an optimization and damage output perspective?
A double-bladed scimitar is a martial weapon, weighing 6 pounds and dealing 2d4 slashing damage on a hit.
It has the two-handed property and the following special property:
- If you attack with a double-bladed scimitar as part of the Attack action on your turn, you can use a bonus action immediately after to make a melee attack with it. This attack deals 1d4 slashing damage on a hit, instead of 2d4.
Another thing to consider is the similarity of the scimitar to that of the scimitar of speed, but without the +2 property.
Best Answer
The Double-Bladed Scimitar compares very favorably to most kinds of Two-Weapon Fighting in terms of raw damage
I've created a table below of the expected DPR (damage per round) values for four different combat styles
Double-Bladed Scimitar has been shortened to Scimitar due to formatting issues.
A few important observations stand out:
But it might be difficult to find its real use case
It's worth contextualizing these options. The ability to change fighting styles is still limited to the Class Features Unearthed Arcana, and Strength-based Two-Weapon Fighting characters are somewhat rare, given that Strength-based characters would generally prefer the (DPR-superior) great weapons instead, and Dexterity allows use of Rapiers with no loss in DPR compared to Longswords. As a result, for most characters that would consider using this weapon, I don't think they would likely have the GWF fighting style, so I don't think it's totally accurate to use GWF-Boosted DB Scimitar as the baseline we compare against.
So if we take as a given that most Dual-Wielding characters are Dexterity-based (invalidating use of this weapon), and most Strength-based characters would instead prefer using a Greatsword or Greataxe, the actual use-case for a weapon like this (which cannot be used with Dexterity and cannot be used with Great Weapon Mastery) is actually quite narrow.
Which leads me to the surprising conclusion that I think this weapon is... fine? Yes, it absolutely is a strict upgrade over TWF-styled weapons in the specific scenario where the person considering using this weapon is a Strength-based Fighter that did not take GWF, but I think that that type of character is actually quite rare.