Great cleave

[KarinsDad]

Happens, sure, but how often really?

By yourself, probably not often.

In a group dedicated to the tactic, more often than you would think.

The group I mentioned above had it happen on average at least once per battle when the battle contained 6 or more opponents.

Once a Fireball weakened them, I saw our Fighter once take out 5 opponents with a single attack followed by a cleave and three great cleaves.

That was rare, but in combination with Full Round Attack and Power Attack, I have often seen the first Great Cleave occur. Course, we never got above 11th level, so I cannot say what happens above that.

It really depends on your group and your tactics and the type of opponents you are facing.

 

[Thanee]

It really depends on your group and your tactics and the type of opponents you are facing.

That's a given, anyways.

I generally dislike tactics which do not work, unless the opponents react in a certain way, since if the opponents do not all (or many at least) surround the fighter, then it's not going to be really useful.

Another twist... with an ungodly reach, Great Cleave (and even moreso Whirlwind Attack) is obviously more useful than with 5' reach.

Bye
Thanee

 

[KarinsDad]

Another twist... with an ungodly reach, Great Cleave (and even moreso Whirlwind Attack) is obviously more useful than with 5' reach.

Precisely.

We had a campaign with a Rogue/Fighter with a spiked chain, Cleave, and Combat Reflexes (and those pesky flank sneak attacks). He was pretty awesome and if the campaign had gotten higher, I always wondered how much Great Cleave would have helped him.

 

[Majere]

Im not a fan of great cleave.
Sure you can "set up" situations where GC might be really powerful if you are happy to leave a half dozen enemies on 10-20 hp. But you look like a bunch of idiots when the enemy cleric casts mass cure serious wounds and then you find 6 enemies surrounding one character.
In D&D your character effectiveness does not drop with damage, an emeny with 1 hp is just as daingerous on his action as one with 500. Most of the time it is a far better tactic to kill 2/3 enemies than to weaken 5/6 and hope your fighter can great cleave them all. If he doesnt you are in the poo.

Just my 2c
Majere

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Anyways... what I wanted to say is... do you know the hit points your opponents have left?

Because in our games it is often hard to guess how much damage would be needed to down an opponent, as we never know the exact hit points of them. Sure, we have a general description, but that's vague enough to accomodate quite a range.

For wounded creatures our DMs will often give vague hints if we ask, as long as it does not slow the play down. Off the cuff it might be something like: "fine" is >80% HP, "slightly wounded" is >70%, "wounded" is 50%-80%, "badly wounded" is 30%-70%, "bad" is <40%, "teetering" is <20%, etc. Of course these are just my imprecise interpretations and the DM never consults a chart of uses a calculator. His hints are sometimes misleading, but not on purpose.

We also notice how much damage typical foes or foes of certain types can take. Yes, we are regularly are surprised. Yes, it is often difficult to predict who is the leader of a group and exactly how many levels have been tacked on.

But we guess pretty accurately ~80% of the time. That is sufficient to plan tactics.

This is harder with a DM who prefers humanoid races. Because of levelling it is difficult to know if you are up against one CR 8 leader with three CR 4 flunkies, or four CR 6 dudes. Once one of them has been killed or is teetering, we can make a good guestimate of what we are up against.

 

[Magesmiley]

One factor I think which gets overlooked a lot when deciding on how effective this feat is, is reach. Reach is often the limiting factor when you cleave - you may have more opponents still around you could smash, but you can't reach them. To illustrate:

Consider a a human fighter with a long sword. He threatens 8 squares and thus his potential cleave targets is limited to that area. It seems highly likely that his opponents are in front of him and thus he probably won't have more than 3 targets to attack, and thus 2 to cleave, at best.

Let's give that same fighter a spiked chain. He now threatens 24 5' squares. Even assuming there are only targets in front of him, that's still 10 squares he can hit.

Taking this to yet another level, Let's cast enlarge person on our spiked chain fighter, making him a large creature. He now occupies a 10' square and his weapon gives him a 20' reach! He now threatens somewhere in the order of 80+ 5' squares. He effectively can hit anything in an area 50' across. And if something he attacks drops, he will have a lot of targets to choose from.

Reach can make all the difference in how effective Great Cleave is and how often you can use it.

 

[KarinsDad]

Im not a fan of great cleave.
Sure you can "set up" situations where GC might be really powerful if you are happy to leave a half dozen enemies on 10-20 hp. But you look like a bunch of idiots when the enemy cleric casts mass cure serious wounds and then you find 6 enemies surrounding one character.

Absolutely true.

But with the right tactics, Mass Cure Serious Wounds by the enemy Cleric can quickly be countered by Empowered Fireball by the Sorcerer (and Fire Resistance of some sort on the Fighter).

Situation is always important.

In D&D your character effectiveness does not drop with damage, an emeny with 1 hp is just as daingerous on his action as one with 500. Most of the time it is a far better tactic to kill 2/3 enemies than to weaken 5/6 and hope your fighter can great cleave them all. If he doesnt you are in the poo.

Again, true.

Course, we always use a "damaged" house rule.

In our current campaign, it is:

75%+ = 0
50% to 74% = -1
25% to 49% = -2
00% to 24% = -3

to all rolls (to hit, saves, damage, skills, etc.).

So, the concept of a 1 HP opponent being as threatening as a 500 HP opponent is less applicable in some campaigns.

Not only does this make damage seem more realistic, but it also gives us more tactical options than merely to concentrate on one or two opponents at a time. YMMV.

 

[Marimmar@Home]

You need to get at least two extra attacks in a single round to make ANY use of the feat, since the one is already covered by Cleave, the prerequisite of Great Cleave.

Happens, sure, but how often really?

Bye
Thanee

Consider that the Barbarian in my example hits almost assuredly twice with his normal attacks, inflicting about 50 points of damage. If it kills an opponent he Cleaves another one for 25 points and maybe finish him with his third iterative attack and gain another Cleave attack. This happens often enough IMC.

Every extra attack helps even though you may only apply it once or twice during a battle. Feats like Combat Reflexes are also very nice to have, even without a spiked chain and even though they add only an extra attack every two or three battles.
One might argue that Combat Reflexes gets more and more useless with higher levels when monsters tend to get larger, humanoids get better at their Tumble skill and spell casters hang back, using ranged spells of mass destruction.

A lot of people arguing against Great Cleave seem to not have taken the Feat before, seen it used in an efficient way or their party lacks good team tactics.

To get the most of the Feat do the following:

1) Maximize melee damage to an obscene degree (forget about using shields)
2) Get as much Reach as possible
3) Get Combat Reflexes to damage opponents before they arrive
4) Convince your party members to let you finish off almost dead opponents and wound others instead increasing the chances for Cleave attacks
5) See to it that you get as many attacks per round as possible (haste helps)

It works...

~Marimmar

 

[benshearon]

My 5th level human fighter melee tank has only used Great Cleave a couple of times, but a couple of weeks ago the party was swamped with Tiny spiders (about 90 of them) and the usefulness of Great Cleave became apparent when said fighter was killing 8 or 9 of them per round.

I think it's a good use of a feat

 

[Darkness]

1) Maximize melee damage to an obscene degree (forget about using shields)

Indeed. Since you'll have Power Attack anyway, you might as well use it to best effect - i.e., with a two-hand weapon.