Double Weapons fixed?

[Caliber]

A player of mine just raised a question about Spiked Chain but I'm farm from home.

He wanna know if spiked chain can be used with the Two Weapon Fighting feat. He says, according to Adventurer's Vault pg 10 "wielding a double weapon is like a wielding a weapon in each hand" and from feat description: "while holding a melee weapon in each hand, you gain a +1 bonus to damage rolls with your main weapon".

CB isn't adding the +1 bonus to damage roll.

Two Weapon Fighting feat doesn't apply to Spiked Chain or CB is wrong?

Avin, a spiked chain isn't a double weapon, so I suppose between the two choices given it is number 1.

Your player is maybe thinking about the spiked chain mastery feat in this month's issue of Dragon, that lets you treat the spiked chain as a double weapon. That's a bonus for the feat though, not an intrinsic property of the weapon itself.

 

[avin]

Yup, he's talking about the feat.

So CB is probably going to add the bonus only when is updated by the end of the month, I presume...

 

[Eldorian]

Double weapons would be perfectly fine if you got rid of the offhand property (which they don't even need, ruleswise) and the light blade part of the double sword. This is of course to fix tempest fighters and rogues.

 

[Mengu]

I see the massive cheese for tempest fighters, but I've heard a lot about having a weapon be both a light blade and heavy blade that does a d8 being completely broken, but I'm not seeing it. Is it something more complicated than allowing a rogue to exploit Heavy Blade opportunity and a fighter to exploit Light blade Precision? Can anyone clue me in?

As already mentioned, I think the fact that the doublesword essentially combines Rapier and light shield feats into one, makes these two feats obsolete for the rogue. Not only that, but it also opens the door for two weapon fighting and two weapon defense (not bad for a rogue). And rogues suddenly have acces to magic weapon properties such as battlecrazed which are supposed to be on heavy blades.

It's not so much a broken exploit, but I still think it's too much for 1 feat to do. If doublesword was going to be the norm for the offensive and defensive power of a feat, then what good is a feat like dodge giants, a conditional +1 defense with the hefty requirement of being a dwarf? There is already a good bit of discrepency between the potency of feats, and double weapons certainly aren't helping matters in that department.

 

[BobTheNob]

As already mentioned, I think the fact that the doublesword essentially combines Rapier and light shield feats into one, makes these two feats obsolete for the rogue. Not only that, but it also opens the door for two weapon fighting and two weapon defense (not bad for a rogue). And rogues suddenly have acces to magic weapon properties such as battlecrazed which are supposed to be on heavy blades.

It's not so much a broken exploit, but I still think it's too much for 1 feat to do. If doublesword was going to be the norm for the offensive and defensive power of a feat, then what good is a feat like dodge giants, a conditional +1 defense with the hefty requirement of being a dwarf? There is already a good bit of discrepency between the potency of feats, and double weapons certainly aren't helping matters in that department.

Personally I dont like that the rapier which WAS the weapon of choice for rogues (which also matched the image of the rogue) was just instantly cast aside because of a mechanical ruling. All rogues in Faerun use double swords! Cause there (numericly) stupid not to.

We play DoubleSword-Light and DoubleSword-Heavy as two different weapon types (with the light doing d6). Even our rogue agreed that worked better. He hasnt chosen whether to go Rapier or doublesword-light yet, but I like the fact that it is now a choice rather than a fore-gone conclusion