Cleave: Give me room to work, my minions!

[small pumpkin man]

True. But if it is as I've heard rumored that one hit is a kill, then it will be "bag o' rats" broken again, but not in the original way. A level 1 power should not be better than one received 20 levels and 2 tiers later.

Oh stop it with the hyperbole. Show me this 21st level power which is completely outshone by Cleave. Hell, show me the 21st level monster who cares about taking 3-5 damage a round with no save when we know of another Fighter power that lets you do this AND have the possibility of actually hitting.

3.x Bag of Rats was utterly broken, it allowed you to do abitrary amounts of damage, properly done it allowed you to take down the Tarrasque into negatives in one round, 4e cleave doesn't even come close.

 

[DarkKestral]

All RPGs ship with unbalanced choices. But if the game has too many of them, or those that are present are too dangerously unbalanced, it'll sink like a rock. And what I've seen hasn't totally convinced me that WotC's designers fully worked out the implications of their own material all the time. And it's been said before, by wiser designers than I: Game devs suck at testing their own product. They know how to unit test, but they're no match for users at producing weird, unbalanced corner cases where some minor ability becomes integral to some stupidly powerful combo that's perfectly rules-legal and thus causes a problem because the rule in question is ordinarily OK, and necessary for balanced play, so altering the rule to prevent that corner case would significantly debalance game play elsewhere... Because users are looking for every advantage they can get, while devs are more focused at making the game work as a whole. It's the same issue as computer security guys vs. crackers: the security guy has to think up every possible attack in order to succeed; the cracker just needs one that hasn't been thought of before if he wants to succeed. Even betatesters paid to find bugs aren't immune: good devs need to find people who are indifferent to their product to get the best results, but people willing to betatest are usually biased in favor of the product (or the dev) so they won't always get the feedback that they need.

 

[Imp]

Yes it is.

Aren't you pompous. Anyway, false.

 

[small pumpkin man]

Aren't you pompous. Anyway, false.

I've been reading too much Hong. The point is, it's an at-will attack, it does you basic attack damage and gives you a small but useful kicker. Why would you expect it to do anything else?

 

[TwinBahamut]

People seem to forget the root problem behind the 3E Bag of Rats...

The 3E Bag of Rats is built on the combination of cleave being a free attack that can be combined with moves like Whirlwind Attack that can multiple opponents at once. In other words, it is an exploit built upon an ability of the Fighter to abuse 3E's loose regulation of the action economy. In 4E, the action economy is strict. The fact that, in 4E, cleave is a deliberately chosen action that does not stack with attacks that hit multiple targets is a direct move to counter the existence of the Bag of Rats, not further it.

Put simply, if you can't cleave multiple times in a single round in order to hit a single foe more times than you otherwise would be able to, then the Bag of Rats is impossible. It will always be better to use an attack actually designed to hurt a single foe.

As FireLance mentioned above, compare the "broken" use of 4E cleave to another power we are vaguely aware of: the ability to do damage equal to your strength modifier regardless of whether you hit or not. If there are minions around the boss, cleave works to do a minor chance of damage (but not guaranteed, since you need to hit the minion), but if not, you can attack the boss without any chance of not doing damage and also have a chance of doing full damage or critical damage. Also, keep in mind that 4E seems to presuppose that you will always have a reasonable chance of hitting your foe. 4E does not want characters to rely upon autohit attacks in order to be useful (look at Magic Missile), it wants you to always have a fair chance.

I really don't see any problem at all with the new cleave, given what we know about 4E's more fundamental changes.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For what its worth, I do think the bag-of-rats issue is a serious one (though not for everyone). It isn't serious because the rule issue is serious, but rather because it the rule issue is so absurd. That absurdity, and the need to institute house-rule fixes (and note, there *will* be cases where you can cleave off a rat, legitimately) breaks immersion for me. It makes DnD less of a role-playing experience, and more of a board game.

Many people won't have any such problem. Some won't even understand the possibility of the problem. That doesn't mean there isn't one.

I disagree. The idea of a fighter carrying a bag of rats around and throw them at his enemies is absurd.

The power doesn't really become broken by this.
The rules presumably don't include a "bag of rats". So, using them in the first place requires DM adjudication how to rule it. I would say that it requires two hands to control the bag and the rats in a way to ensure that they don't leave all at once. It probably also takes a standard action, but at least a minor. So you probably need a "rat bearer" to prepare the bag in a manner to be useable for you.

The fundamental question is:
Is it broken to deal damage to an opponent without making an attack roll against him, if the damage you deal is a notably less then you'd normally do, and requires you to successfully attack something else?

 

[RigaMortus2]

I disagree. The idea of a fighter carrying a bag of rats around and throw them at his enemies is absurd.

The power doesn't really become broken by this.
The rules presumably don't include a "bag of rats". So, using them in the first place requires DM adjudication how to rule it. I would say that it requires two hands to control the bag and the rats in a way to ensure that they don't leave all at once. It probably also takes a standard action, but at least a minor. So you probably need a "rat bearer" to prepare the bag in a manner to be useable for you.

The fundamental question is:
Is it broken to deal damage to an opponent without making an attack roll against him, if the damage you deal is a notably less then you'd normally do, and requires you to successfully attack something else?

If you Cleave 1 rat in order to do 3 points of damage to the BBEG, aren't you also doing 3 points of damage to all the other rats in the bag? How many hit points are we assuming rats have? Seems like this tactic is self-defeating.

 

[Campbell]

If you Cleave 1 rat in order to do 3 points of damage to the BBEG, aren't you also doing 3 points of damage to all the other rats in the bag? How many hit points are we assuming rats have? Seems like this tactic is self-defeating.

Cleave only affects a single adjacent enemy, not all adjacent enemies.

 

[Primal]

As I already mentioned, this has a host of problems associated with it. If you are cutting through the person, how is it that they're back on their feet after a single application of Cure Light Wounds, especially considering that you need more powerful magic to reattach limbs? How does it work with bludgeoning weapons? With piercing weapons? Does it work with weaponlike spells like Shocking Grasp? How does that work? Does it get followed up by an unarmed strike or more electrical damage?

Cutting through the guy just doesn't make any sense from a mechanics point of view.

It's no more difficult to imagine than, say, an enemy dropping you to -29 HPs with a single blow, and you (i.e. by rolling a nat 20 on your "recovery roll") miraculously jumping back to fray the next round without *any* healing at all ("Just kidding, guys! It only *looked* like my guts were spilled, but I'm actually feeling fine!"). IMO, in most cases that just doesn't make much sense from a mechanics point of view (and also prevents you from describing the blow in any detail until you've resolved whether you were only "knocked" out or slashed to pieces). :\

 

[Imban]

The rules presumably don't include a "bag of rats". So, using them in the first place requires DM adjudication how to rule it.

This is true. However, a "bag of rats", at least as I've understood it, is a system-agnostic term for basically any container designed to hold creatures which are ostensibly hostile to you, in order to use powers that are marked as "only usable on opponents" or "only usable while in combat" when they would be useful, but no applicable targets are around. Powers that run into this tend to bother some players, because they create a strange game-world distinction between "the people with green circles under their feet" and "the people with red circles under their feet", or "in combat" and "not in combat".

I find that this power bothers me a little because of the automatic damage, but I'm not a big fan of automatic damage on non-magical powers (other than grenades or something, I guess), period. It doesn't seem to be making an unnatural distinction between friends and foes, or combat and non-combat.

(There was also the 3.0e Great Cleave + Whirlwind Attack + lots of nearby enemies exploit, but that was just an action generation engine. Heck, if you were surrounded while flying, you could conceivably launch 27 attacks against one guy with no bag of rats needed.)