WhatGravitas
Explorer
While dice are not multiplied, bonuses are: Power attacking raging barbarians, wielding great swords. Or a falchion:Zachariah said:So what makes this so powerful then? I fail to see it. (I must note that Vorpal is banned from our campaigns)
Granted, a single improvement is not that good, but if you use it on something like... a falchion, you get a crit range of 12-20, meaning you threaten a critical hit with most of your successful attacks.
Raging gives you +4 Str, that gives +3 damage (two-handed), +2 to hit. Now use power attack to convert the +2 to hit to damage - +4 (for being two-handed), meaning raging gives you a net of +7 damage. If you can reliably do critical hits with that, it basically means additional +7 damage for the price of a feat (and/or keen) and a stance. Find another feat or stance that gives you that.
And once your barbarian/martial adept starts to rise in level and gets more strength/attack bonus from... anything (from buffs to weapon bonuses), you can rack up even more damage - and the criticals double that very efficiently.
And power attacking and raging also meshes with Bo9S quite well.
Basically, the problem about higher threat range is: It's very random. Doubling your damage is very powerful (if used right) or next to useless (if not abused) - and 3.5E designers basically tried to err on the safe side.
For the stance: Also about 6th-level. The other stances are often better.
Cheers, LT.