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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mike Sullivan" data-source="post: 959882" data-attributes="member: 9824">...And they've been accounted for.  We've gone over single attacks so many times it's ludicrous.  I did a Cleave analysis.Some things are resistant to analysis, of course:  for example, the "importance of killing your opponent before he gets to act."I hope that you do realize that the most effective way to kill your opponent in the least amount of time is to maximize your expected damage per round, not to increase your expected damage per hit.  But yes, there will be situations in which you might want to take a gamble, accepting the expectation of lower damage for the chance at higher damage....as opposed to what?  The intuition of people who can't even seem to grasp the difference between expected damage per hit and expected damage per round?Any analysis is going to have its limitations, especially one as wide-ranging as this.  There's going to be a certain amount that you can only learn through play -- and a large amount that most people will never learn, because it's very hard to take even a very large amount of data (the play of your campaign, for example), and pull a single variable out of it (the actual performance of PA, as opposed to "that time I remember when James couldn't hit anything for like three rounds," or "that time I remember when Mary critted and did 120 points of damage in one round").What I reject is that somehow carefully applied statistical analysis of what is a difficult-to-grasp mathematical tradeoff (as evidenced by the number of people who keep coming in here and misunderstanding the effects of 3.0 PA) is less useful than people's knee jerk reactions.Everyone gets the new WF and WS feats (if they're willing to take the 12 levels of Fighter necessary for it).  While those certainly do constitute an up-powering of the Fighter class, it's not unique to big-weapon fighters.  And, as I've pointed out several times, TWFers get the most benefit out of them.As for "or just +8 to damage," please.  That's sloppy thinking at its worst.In 3.0, the same big-weapon guy was getting +1 to hit, +2 to damage.  And he could trade in the +1 to hit for +1 to damage, so that's a total of +3 to damage.  That means, your "or just +8 to damage" is actually only +5 higher than in 3.0.But wait, it gets better.  Let's compare a 3.5 big weapon fighter to a 3.5 sword-and-board guy.+2 to hit, +4 to damage for both of them.  "or just +8 to damage" for the two-weapon fighter.But the SAB guy gets that same +2 to hit, +4 to damage, and he can use PA as well, ending up with +6 to damage.  So this "substantial increase in power" that you're talking about for big-weapon fighters constitutes a +2 to damage over SAB guys....And it's a +2 that's unlikely in many situations to actually provide a +2 to expected damage per round.You know?  That sounds a lot less scary than "+8 to damage."The "über" option in 3.0 is being a Wizard or Cleric.The best melee style in 3.0 is sword-and-board.  Big-weapon takes a close second, TWF is a distant third.The PA changes in no way benefit the people who already had everything going for them.</blockquote>

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