As I said, I could see role playing reasons for using combat maneuvers. However, I could see those characters being constantly picked on by my players if they joined our group. Anyone who makes up a character who is suboptimal is often made fun of or complained about. Things like "I can't believe you are playing a character who refuses to do damage. You realize I almost died this session because you didn't attack that monster. If you were playing a better character, we'd have a much easier time. Maybe you could have your character slowly realize that his vow is endangering his friends and that by not attacking the monster you are actually hurting people. Then he can change his mind about his vow and help us kill the monsters."
Heh. It would have been interesting to see what you thought of my regular Living Greyhawk group in the last days. In the final CORS we blew through six EL21-22 encounters (with a mostly L16 table, one L14 cohort) without resting - and I think in those six encounters, only three PCs out of six dealt significant damage. The others were busy doing buffs, debuffs, battlefield control, and slides/teleports on the heavy hitters. One thing these messageboards do make clear is that different people play 3.5 very differently.
It is true that in 3.5 at low levels, direct damage from high-Str weapon-users is generally very effective (unless the dice hate you). A specialized grappler can also be extremely effective, particularly when fighting small numbers of foes - not at dealing damage, but at rendering the enemy entirely incapable of hitting back. If you can accomplish that your party can generally take them out pretty quickly - remember, at the baby levels healing is scarce, it's very worthwhile to deny the bad guy all their good actions. (If you work at it, you can be VERY good at grappling very early on: half-orc L1 monk with Improved Grapple, Str 20, Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Scorpion Claws) and a potion of Enlarge Person is at +18.)
Almost every circumstance that I've found where an enemy could be bullrushed off of something, it was just as effective to attack for damage(if not more). The only time it is more useful is against enemies with more hitpoints than you can get through in one round who are significantly weaker than you are, standing next to a drop far enough down to kill them who you don't want to loot afterwords. It's a rather rare circumstance.
Bullrush can also be useful if the creatures have nasty auras of some form, and you want to get them away from the PCs most likely to be adversely affected. The time this came up for me in LG involved eight creatures with 200+ HPs who could all generate 20ft-radius antimagic fields centered on themselves, combined with two melee monsters optimized to function in antimagic (one of whom, incidentally, was a grapple specialist). If you could get the AMF-monsters away from the combat, it got MUCH easier.
But yes, that's also a rather rare circumstance. I think the other time I've seen it used was someone bullrushing an ally to get them out of a dangerous situation.
but the question was why people used the same attacks over and over again. The answer is: because if you play 3.5 edition as written, it was the most effective option.
This is somewhat dependent on the degree of teamwork in the group and the nature of the encounters they face, but I agree that 3.5 encourages meleers to specialize, and then encourages specialists to mostly do what they're best at. Spellcasters seem more encouraged to diversify - there are a lot of different possible defences that just stop particular spells cold (e.g. magic immunity, protection from evil, true seeing, energy immunities), whereas most monsters seem designed so that "I whack it with a sword" remains a useful contribution.
I certainly felt it. Once a battle would go on more than a couple of rounds, I felt like it didn't matter whether I was at the table or not. I could tell the player beside me "Here's my attack bonus" and walk away. Since it was a given that as a fighter or other non-magic using character that all I was going to do is full attack or move and attack. The only real enjoyment I got out of it was the thrill of doing excessive damage. It was fun to say, "I hit AC 40. Does that hit? Yeah, I thought so. I do 40 damage in a single hit. Aren't I awesome?" Only to feel really crappy when the Wizard in the group countered with "I cast a Sudden Maximized, Sudden Empowered, Energy Admixtured Fireball doing 143 damage to those 5 enemies. They take 71 damage if they can make their DC 25 Reflex Saves."
This seems like a different issue to boredom with spamming, though - this is a question of balance. I guess the point is that effective spamming can be fun, ineffective spamming is just boring - which is probably why it gets complained about more in 4e, in the context of "and then we plinked away slowly with at-will powers".
I don't find fun any round that works like this: "I trip him, go." or "I'm still in a grapple. I attempt to pin him. Failed. Go." It becomes even worse if this is the 4th or 5th round of attempting to pin or attempting to escape a grapple while the other members of my group have killed 1-2 enemies each in the same time. It makes me feel kind of like my rounds are wasted doing nothing.
Again, though... this seems like more of a problem with the effectiveness of actions, not the actions themselves. Or is "I attack, I miss, go" better than "I trip him, then use my free follow-up attack to crash-tackle him, then punch him in the face"? The second example is what a friend's monk did to a certain weretiger warshaper (with initial Str 42, 300+ hit points, evasion and good saves across the board) after my sorceress zapped him with an empowered ray of enfeeblement - we were happy he was pinned and unable to do much at the end of that round. That fight lasted two rounds, I think - it seemed "quick and deadly" enough.
So yeah, I think my current answer to the question in the thread topic is:
(1) If it's a melee character, you have to build them to be good at more than one thing: it's entirely possible to build a meleer who won't want to do anything except spam their one best trick.
(2) If it's a spellcaster, by the time you reach the mid-levels I wouldn't expect it to be much of a problem: they get a lot of tactical options.
(3) In either case, diversifying the monsters the party faces and the circumstances of the encounters can help with getting them to do something different.
