Wulf Ratbane
Adventurer
I've been doing some heavy permutations/probability number crunching over the break, and I wanted to run something past the folks here.
Playing around with possible speed fixes for iterative attacks, I've found something that works pretty good for me personally:
But there is just no way around one peculiarity of the 3rd and 4th iterative attacks, to wit:
Against creatures that you have almost no hope of hitting (natural 18 or better on your first attack, and natural 20's thereafter); and against creatures that you almost can't miss (needing "less than a natural 2" on your first attack, with a great chance of success on even your 3rd and 4th attacks), your expected damage will drop off.
So the core poll question is this:
If your expected damage over the range of 80-90% of all creatures you will encounter will INCREASE by 5 to 20%, would you be willing to lose your 3rd and 4th attack, and accept a DECREASE against the "edge case" creatures (very high AC or very low AC)?
EDIT: I want to clarify that. At -1/-1, your expected damage against most creatures you will encounter is BETTER than three attacks at 0/-5/-10; and at -0/-0, your expected damage against most creatures you will encounter is BETTER than four attacks at 0/-5/-10/-15.
There are other emergent benefits to this proposal (levelling the expected damage output non-fighter classes, reducing the necessity of AC-pumping for PCs, etc.) but I am primarily concerned with how this fix strikes the primary fighting classes.
Playing around with possible speed fixes for iterative attacks, I've found something that works pretty good for me personally:
- At 6th level, you get a 2nd attack, but both attacks suffer a -2 penalty (-2/-2 instead of 0/-5).
- At 11th level, the penalty drops to -1/-1 (instead of 0/-5/-10).
- At 16th level, the penalty drops to -0/-0 (instead of 0/-5/-10/-20).
But there is just no way around one peculiarity of the 3rd and 4th iterative attacks, to wit:
Against creatures that you have almost no hope of hitting (natural 18 or better on your first attack, and natural 20's thereafter); and against creatures that you almost can't miss (needing "less than a natural 2" on your first attack, with a great chance of success on even your 3rd and 4th attacks), your expected damage will drop off.
So the core poll question is this:
If your expected damage over the range of 80-90% of all creatures you will encounter will INCREASE by 5 to 20%, would you be willing to lose your 3rd and 4th attack, and accept a DECREASE against the "edge case" creatures (very high AC or very low AC)?
EDIT: I want to clarify that. At -1/-1, your expected damage against most creatures you will encounter is BETTER than three attacks at 0/-5/-10; and at -0/-0, your expected damage against most creatures you will encounter is BETTER than four attacks at 0/-5/-10/-15.
There are other emergent benefits to this proposal (levelling the expected damage output non-fighter classes, reducing the necessity of AC-pumping for PCs, etc.) but I am primarily concerned with how this fix strikes the primary fighting classes.
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