9th level maneuvers

[JiCi]

Feral Death Blow: when you combine it with Spot the Weak Point (skill trick from Complete Scoundrel), you only get a Jump DC equal to the creature's touch AC, not normal one.

 

[Mort]

I like Mountain Tombstone strike, personally.

Feral Death Blow is a nice visual but anything worth doing it on will make the fort save 9 out of 10 times and the 20d6 (to 1 target), while it sounds big, isn't exactly earthshaking at levels 17+.
If you want consistant high damage the Iron heart one (strike of perfect clarity? don't have the book) - is probably better.

 

[Nail]

Feral Death Blow (if the target makes the save) does an average of +70 extra damage on top of your weapon damage etc. Considering the target is flat-footed, Power Attack might be in order, and so you'd be doing even more damage.

The Iron Heart 9th level manuever you are thinking of is Strike of Perfect Clarity (as you guessed), which does +100 hp of extra damage. Given there's no target AC reduction and no extra benefits to this manuever, I think Feral Death Blow and Strike of Perfect Clarity compare pretty favorably, actually.

 

[Mort]

Feral Death Blow (if the target makes the save) does an average of +70 extra damage on top of your weapon damage etc. Considering the target is flat-footed, Power Attack might be in order, and so you'd be doing even more damage.

The Iron Heart 9th level manuever you are thinking of is Strike of Perfect Clarity (as you guessed), which does +100 hp of extra damage. Given there's no target AC reduction and no extra benefits to this manuever, I think Feral Death Blow and Strike of Perfect Clarity compare pretty favorably, actually.

Oh no question, they're not hugely variant - but with Strike of Perfect Clarity - you hit you do +100 damage - done.

with Feral Death Blow - first you make a jump check, then you make an attack roll, then they roll a saving throw and if they make that then you roll 20d6 plus damage. lots of places where something can go awry - especially against a high level opponent. And the true kicker is that high level play can already drag - this just adds that many more rolls to the mix. just saying it's not my favorite high level manuever.

 

[Nail]

Oh no question, they're not hugely variant - but with Strike of Perfect Clarity - you hit you do +100 damage - done.

with Feral Death Blow - first you make a jump check, then you make an attack roll, then they roll a saving throw and if they make that then you roll 20d6 plus damage. lots of places where something can go awry - especially against a high level opponent. And the true kicker is that high level play can already drag - this just adds that many more rolls to the mix. just saying it's not my favorite high level manuever.

Gotcha. I agree with your assessment, FWIW.

Our high-level combats did take an awfully long time. We had a two-weapon PC with Tempest, etc. He rolled lots and lots of dice....and to make matters worse, my Clr buffed him with extra attacks and bonus weapon damage and enlarge and.....

The player used his PDA to calculate the damage. We'd often let him start rolling well before his turn came up, just to speed things along.

 

[BASHMAN]

Interesting that noone is going for tornado throw. ISTR there were some broken builds on the WotC CharOp board that used it.

Well, I chose it, mainly because my SwordSage is a Setting Sun emphasis (and also a Shadow Sun Ninja now).
Nothing looks cooler than picking up enemies and using them as throwing weapons to hit your other enemies.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Oh no question, they're not hugely variant - but with Strike of Perfect Clarity - you hit you do +100 damage - done.

with Feral Death Blow - first you make a jump check, then you make an attack roll, then they roll a saving throw and if they make that then you roll 20d6 plus damage. lots of places where something can go awry - especially against a high level opponent. And the true kicker is that high level play can already drag - this just adds that many more rolls to the mix. just saying it's not my favorite high level manuever.

You won't fail the Jump check though if you care about Jump checks, and if they don't make the save and take +70ish damage, but maybe they're dead" versus "100, no chance of dead". Which is better depends on just how easy the save is for your enemy and how many HP they have. If they have hundreds and hundreds of HP, Feral Death Blow may be better even if they only fail their save on a 1 (for instance, the 717 HP Great Wyrm Gold Dragon will only fail on a 1, but that's still a 1/20 chance of doing 717 HP worth of damage with a death effect, which amounts to 35 extra damage on average from the death effect, which when added to the +70 from 20d6 is a bit better than Perfect Clarity)