Ranger - Spiked Chain ?

Spiked Chain Ranger dude

There's a few builds online devoted to the spiked chain. Fighters and Rangers mostly. There's a goliath ranger that takes a paragon path and some other goodies, ends up with something ridiculous like reach 5, and you can have threatening reach a few times with different powers. So you cover a huge area with opportunity attacks. At lvl 8 with the spiked chain feats, you can swap out a power to gain a daily, threatening reach for an encounter.

What does the "Stout" property do?

Rechan: it means you can use it as a two handed weapon.

It eats up your MC slot, which can be pretty severe (no Fighter MC, which is awesome).

If you don't mind that, it's ok. I'd rather just wield 2 rapiers and keep my MC option open.

It is both a light blade and a flail, so you can take advantage of both aspects. Basically, the main hand is a light-blade/flail with the stout and reach properties, and the off hand is a light-blade/flail with the off hand and reach properties. I might be bothered to find the CS messages where I confirmed this, if anyone cares.

EDIT: That is, it's a light blade and a flail when you take the Spiked Chain Training feat. Otherwise it's just a two-handed flail with reach.

It's a good weapon for a two-weapon fighting ranger, since you get reach and you only need one weapon enchantment (instead of two). The damage dice doesn't matter very much, since eventually static bonuses will completely dominate damage output for a multi-attacker, minimizing the contribution of the damage dice. If you can consistently get CA, light blade expertise helps ramp up your static modifier, as well. The only comparable weapon would be a double sword.

It's even better for a fighter, since you can get excellent melee control (flail expertise, dragging flail, lashing flail), and really accurate mark enforcement (deft blade) on the same weapon. You can also give yourself threatening reach 1/day with a power swap feat, making the multi-class meaningful. I am fond of a paragon tempest fighter that I play on occasion who goes all in with a staggering weapon and the polearm master paragon path, giving me a slide 5 and prone on my MBA, threatening reach 2/day, and some other nice things.

bargle0 said:

It is both a light blade and a flail, so you can take advantage of both aspects. Basically, the main hand is a light-blade/flail with the stout and reach properties, and the off hand is a light-blade/flail with the off hand and reach properties. I might be bothered to find the CS messages where I confirmed this, if anyone cares.

It's a good weapon for a two-weapon fighting ranger, since you get reach and you only need one weapon enchantment (instead of two). The damage dice doesn't matter very much, since eventually static bonuses will completely dominate damage output for a multi-attacker, minimizing the contribution of the damage dice. If you can consistently get CA, light blade expertise helps ramp up your static modifier, as well. The only comparable weapon would be a double sword.

It's even better for a fighter, since you can get excellent melee control (flail expertise, dragging flail, lashing flail), and really accurate mark enforcement (deft blade) on the same weapon. You can also give yourself threatening reach 1/day with a power swap feat, making the multi-class meaningful. I am fond of a paragon tempest fighter that I play on occasion who goes all in with a staggering weapon and the polearm master paragon path, giving me a slide 5 and prone on my MBA, threatening reach 2/day, and some other nice things.

Click to expand...

Yeah, this is correct. The weapon becomes both a light blade and a flail, which is a pretty nice combo. It is a pretty good choice for a ranger, not over the top or anything but quite solid, and having reach can be pretty handy. It is a pretty good choice particularly for a Beast Master since it lets you use 2d4 damage in each hand, which is about as good as what you normally get anyway (1d10 and 1d6), plus you get the reach and knockdown possibilities of the flail. Such a build with a nice BC blocker can be both quite sticky and defenderish and still do the usual ranger striker thing quite well.

Remember, the other advantage of using a double weapon in general is that you're only going to need one magic weapon vs a ranger etc using 2 separate weapons needs to maintain 2 magic weapons, which sucks up a lot of your parcels. As long as the MC feat slot isn't a consideration you can take the chain and get reach or something like double sword which doesn't and nowadays isn't really better in any particular way.

In any case, you can safely consider it a solid choice for most multi-attackers.

Nice work guys, good explanations.

And since an evil weapon master disabled and stole 2 of his swords