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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mike Sullivan" data-source="post: 955096" data-attributes="member: 9824">Yes, yes, stipulated that any kind of damage bonus is very useful when it doesn't impact your chances to hit.On the other hand, seriously, who cares?  You're putting an 8th level character up against CR 3 opponents, here.  The 8th level character is going to win with minimal effort, it seems clear.  That he may or may not win marginally faster seems to me to be pretty irrelevent on the grand scale.This, on the other hand, is interesting.  I want to examine it more closely:Fighter as statted above, facing bugbears as statted above.The fighter's chance of one-hit killing a bugbear (without PA) is either his chance of rolling a 9+ on 2d6 (10 in 36), or guaranteed on a critical hit.  He rolls to hit one per round at +9, so his odds of hitting at all are 65%, and his odds of criticaling are 6.5%, so his odds of normal-hitting are 58.5%.  Each normal hit will have a 27.8% chance of dropping a bugbear.  Thus, his odds of normal-hit-dropping a bugbear, per round, are 16.25%.  Add to that the critical hit chance, and we see that this is the per-round breakdown of the possible outcomes:Fighter misses: 35%Fighter hits and wounds: 42.25%Fighter hits and drops: 22.75%The fighter, then, has a 22.75% chance of getting a Cleave attack on a round when he's attacking an unwounded opponent.Now, let's look at the fighter PAing for two.He now misses 45% of the time, and he still auto-drops his opponent on a critical, but criticals are now rarer -- 5.5% of the time.  The other 49.5% of the time (normal hits), he needs to roll a 7+ to drop the bugbear.  The odds of this are 58.3%.  So that's a 28.875% chance to drop the bugbear on, plus the 5.5% from the critical, is Fighter misses: 45%Fighter hits and wounds: 20.625%Fighter hits and drops: 34.375%So, he's got a 34.375% chance of getting a Cleave attack.Now, what are the results of those Cleave attacks?  Well, they precisely mimic the normal attacks for those rounds.So, we can create a total matrix for one round of each fighter:No PA:Misses entirely: 35%Wounds 1 opponent: 42.25%Drops 1 opponent, misses next opponent: 7.9625%Drops 1 opponent, wounds next opponent: 9.726%Drops 2 opponents: 5.176%PA for 2:Misses entirely: 45%Wounds 1 opponent: 20.625%Drops 1 opponent, misses next opponent: 15.469%Drops 1 opponent, wounds next opponent: 7.09%Drops 2 opponents: 11.816%What's all that translate to?  Well, a wounded opponent is dead meat for the next hit, so I think it's fair to say that wounding an opponent constitutes .5 killing an opponent.  So, this translates to the following, in terms of "number of opponents dropped per round":No PA:.35 * 0 + .4225 * .5 + .0796 * 1 + 1.5 * .09726 + 2 * .05176 = .54026 opponents dropped per round.PA:.45 * 0 + .20625 * .5 + .15469% * 1 + .0709 * 1.5 + .11816 * 2 = .600035 opponents dropped per round.As is broadly the case in this thread, for a low-level fighter, we're looking at mild benefits -- or so it seems to me.</blockquote>

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