Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ravellion" data-source="post: 1028858" data-attributes="member: 538">Two Weapon Fighting, Feat Economy, Balance, and reducing penalties Son of a preacherman, you make the argument that 1 feat reducing the penalties by 8 is in some way not balanced. However, you fail to give a numerical example of either damage output or another way of combat effectiveness that would make this argument palatable.Numerically it would actually not be unbalanced to have the rules simply state that you can use two weapon fighting at -4/-4, or -2/-2 with light weapon without any feat taken at all.The challenges for the party wouldn't be overcome any easier. It is still less efficient a fighting style than both Sword and Shield and Two Handed ( the math has been done countless times on these boards - look for threads on two weapon fighting, you'll find average damage per round outputs for all kinds of characters). Note thought that Sword and Shield is superior in a different way and does do a bit less damage than the TWF tactic.So, to come to your argument of feat economy: One feat can certainly be used to reduce penalties by 8 if the penalties are arbitrarily large in any case. Why are those penalties so large? We can only speculate, but it has probably to do with the fact that Two Weapon Fighting is "flashy" and "cool", and hence should be slightly dissuaded. Also in 2e Two Weapon Fighting was numerically superior, so it might had to do with overcompensating a 2e problem... which neatly brings us to...Something completely different: Son of a Preacherman's "Fix"In 2e, TWF gave full strength to off handed attacks. This proved to be overpowered. Your ambidexterity fix wouldn't be as bad in the beginning, but as soon as extra attacks would enter the fray through improved two weapon fighting it would be a lot of exra damage. A damage bonus the game is not designed to handle, as this would far exceed the Two Hander Character if properly optimized. An almost worst case scenario (let's say 28 strength at 18th level for a +1 BAB character) would give a damage bonus of ~12 per round if taken in conjunction with other feats (but still it is the one feat which increases this amount so), without any penalty to BAB such as would be the case with Power Attack (whihc would require an attack penalty of 6... perhaps not that big a deal with the first attack, but definitely with the latter few attacks).Well, I wonder whether I typed this all for nothing, but we'll see.Rav</blockquote>

Verification