I don't like the fact that a battlemaster can burn through his superiority dice in the first two rounds, and is forced to wait until the next short rest to use them again. So I'm considering the following houserules:
- A battlemaster starts out with two superiority dice instead of four. This increases to three superiority dice at 7th level and to four at 15th level.
- When you take the Attack action, you can give up a number of attacks to refocus, regaining one superiority die for each attack you give up. You cannot gain more superiority dice than you started with in this way.
- At 15th level, the Relentless ability allows you to regain one superiority die when you score a critical hit or reduce a creature to 0 hit points.
The goal is to reduce the up-front burst capabilities of the battlemaster, while increasing their staying power over long series of battles.
Would a battlemaster using these rules be balanced compared to the default battlemaster in the PHB?
If this is not balanced, is there a better way to reach the desired goals?
Best Answer
It's incredibly overpowered. The ability to sacrifice only portions of your attacks in exchange for receiving back superiority die allows a character effectively unlimited staying power.
No class has the ability to recover things on this scale without a short rest. Granting a Battlemaster this ability begs for abuse in your game.
Side note: If there's issues with the number of die, take the feat that gives you more (if you're playing with feats).
Reaching your goals:
You won't be able to without really breaking the game in favour of the Battlemaster. The abilities are used in the same fashion as every other classes limited abilities. Giving the fighter class an effectively endless well of power would drastically change how powerful the class already is by augmenting it with a recharge function. Picture a wizard with the ability to recharge spell slots in exchange for an action, and you can see how abusive this particular change would be.