AbeTheGnome said:
does anyone understand the logic behind disallowing the stacking of the weapon focus and weapon specialization feats?
Attack bonus should not be allowed to skyrocket, otherwise it will create situations where in a certain battle there will be often characters that will never miss, and characters that will never hit. The rules try to purposefully lessen this risk (although it is still possible at very high levels to have characters with more than 20 difference in attack rolls).
Weapon specialization could be made to stack with less problems instead.
AbeTheGnome said:
how about making weapon focus accessible only to 4+ level fighters, instead of those with a +4 BAB? what would be the effect of scrapping these rules?
That's mostly because of a handover from 2e, where fighters had some specialization options unavailable to any other class (I think they were either bonus damage or increased weapon speed, but the second doesn't exist at all in 3e).
The idea is probably to give the Fighter class something unique, just like any other class has, rather than having a Fighter which is a "blank" class. This way, it is hoped that players may choose being a fighter just "to be a fighter!" and not simply as a class to pick some levels from in order to optimize another class.
The idea however comes short as soon as only 4 levels are required for that. 3.5 made an improvement in introducing something that comes into play only at 12 levels of fighter.
AbeTheGnome said:
i hear a lot of complaints about mages dealing inordinate amounts of damage compared to martial classes at higher levels. wouldn't stacking weapon focus be a way to balance out that issue?
Not really. If you have a problem with the fact above, it would be better to improve the damage dealt by the fighter-types.
Of course, you may think that increasing the to-hit chance increases the average damage per round. However that is true only up to a certain point... when your chance is very high already, the average damage is minimally incremented. Until of course you start getting multiple attacks per round, but even in that case the benefit is quite the same as just plainly increase the damage per attack (but the latter is without the original problem with characters with too large a gap).
