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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4615412" data-attributes="member: 710">I think one of the issues of many combat maneuvers is that they bypass hit points. This can also be a problem for spells. In regards to "effectiveness" the biggest issue here is that your trip/disarm/grappe doesn't "stack" with what regular attacks to. To describe the extreme: Imagine every enemy has two hit point pools. You can attack to deal damage either to pool one or to pool two. The enemy can only be dropped if you reduce one of his pools to zero. You really wouldn't want to have two characters attacking the enemy, each targeting a different hit point pool. That's a waste of time for one of the characters!Any maneuver that doesn't - directly or indirectly - affect the same hit point pool as the other characters as a high potential of being worthless. And since you don't deal damage with maneuvers in 3E, the effects of the maneuver must compensate a lot of damage that you could inflict with a normal attack! Shoving your opponent of a height for 20 falling damage is good (if you normally deal less then 20 points of damage with your attack). Having avoided another attack for an average of 20 points thanks to the opponent now being 50 ft below you is also cool and adds to this pool. But if you just shove the enemy one square to move him into a corner or something, it sounds a lot less cool. I think that's the reason why 4E powers all have this "damage + effect" - just knocking a target prone or shoving it around the battlefield doesn't cut it. You need a situation that guarantees that you can compensate the lost weapon damage from your maneuver. But of course, "maneuver + damage" is a little too strong, too, in may cases. So these maneuvers must be limited. In 3E, things like AoOs and Countertrips/disarms provide a similar limitation, but unfortunately, they also mean they are less likely to succeed and rarely give enough benefit to be worth it. Until you have a way to negate all these disadvantages and it becomes a strong benefit.---Spamming in 3E did happen a lot, and it wasn't limited to Fighters. Wizards and Sorcereres seemed to cast a lot of Magic Missiles in easier encounters. All the standard buff spells that we cast. (They were the same, even across characters, classes, levels and campaigns!) Of course, the latter is not spamming in combat.I think we didn't avoid spamming attacks in 3e combat. Sometimes there were variations, like "my lowest iterative attack is a trip attempt!", but they were still very standard. But I wonder how much of a problem it was? The only thing I didn't like was the degree of specialization needed to have an effective character, and the number of options left unexplored because they just didn't lead to effectiveness. As ExploderWizard asked, the more interesting question is why did we start worrying about Spamming?</blockquote>

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