How do these ideas fix Power Attack?

[Warbringer]

On/Off

+5 damage (x2 applies)
-5 to AC

The idea is you are giving up 'attention' to opponent for extra damage

 

[Evilhalfling]

trading damage for AC is a bad idea. In many situations you either just assume you will get hit, esp for barbarians with poor ac, or the foes attacks are generally small. it took 2-3 feats and a charge in 3.5 to do it, and it was still highly valued.

I have used power attack in 3 situations, 1 when the charater/monster was restricted to a single attack, or when the targets AC was demonstratetly feeble compared to normal attack rolls, and when fighting against high DR.
I have had two players use it in conjunction with true strikes, one a duskbalde that did this in most sessions. He used attack bonus chart with common buffs and modifiers figured in.

It has slowed down my games, both on my turn and players who had to recaluclate all the bonuses each round.

I could live with a straight -5,+5 feat, it would certainly add speed while still allowing the big swing on occasion.

 

[helium3]

So, "Power Attacking for 5", "Power Attacking For Ten" and "Full Power Attack" were pretty much all I used - this idea of working out the sliding scale of what the most effective amount of power attack would be - meh. Seriously, I have better things to do with my out-of-game time than run a maths problem.

This is my experience as well.

I've never seen anyone use a full sliding scale in the manner that Tweet suggests. If I had, I probably would have hated playing with them as well. Even for me, that's just too much clomping nerdism.

 

[Najo]

Isn't limiting a full-round action to once per round redundant?

There are abilities and magic items that give you multiple actions or attacks per round. Once per round keeps you from putting all you got into the hit twice. Those to are seperate from each other.

 

[Najo]

Most players aren't going to "abuse" power attack. This is why most of you haven't seen players in your games doing it. The players who do it are those power gamers who do push the limits of the game that test how well the system holds up. They are the ones that do this with it. The original feat either is underperforming (making you hit less but do more damage, working out to the same average damage per round) or broken depending on how it is used in conjunction with other game effects.

Once a power gamer figures out a broken combo and it spreads into peoples games, it hurts the integrity of the game system, people's trust in it and for organized or tournament style play where house rules aren't used to fix those problems.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Maybe somehow when I played 3e with my friends, I was playing it radically different, but I never saw this whole sliding-scale probability-analyzing thing going on in the games I played.

Power Attack was the sort of thing that was either not used, or used at full power. A very common Fighter phrase used at the table was "Power Attacking for full".

Then again, a lot of the things that they are supposed to be "fixing" in 4e are "fixing" things I never thought were broken to begin with.

In my group it was 'power attacking for everything'. Which was done on average once a battle for some players, others would routinely power attack for 1-5 points and others very rarely or not at all. I'm afraid the last group was the most common.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'm in the "Power Attack isn't broken" camp, but since you asked for feedback, I prefer this version:

Power Attack (pre: Str 13+)

You may choose to use power attack as a full-round action. Make a single melee attack. If the attack hits your foe, add a damage bonus to your attack equal to the amount your attack roll is greater than your foe's armor class. If your attack misses, your opponent may make an attack of opportunity against you.

You may only use this feat once per round.

Except for:
1- Full round action. Why should this cause you to give up your movement, and not be able to leverage the momentum of a charge? I'd make it a standard action.
2- AC-based attack. This feels too abstract, and requires the DM to give away the AC of the target. Perhaps simply add a die of weapon damage.

Alternate:

Power Attack (pre: Str 13+)

You may choose to use power attack as a standard action. Make a single melee attack. If the attack hits your foe, add another die of damage to that inflicted by your weapon. If your attack misses, your opponent may make an attack of opportunity against you.

You may only use this feat once per round.

Or perhaps, in keeping with the reckless nature of the feat, we need something charge-based (does this already exist?):

Reckless Charge

Prerequisite: Str 13+

Benefit: When you successfully hit an opponent when attacking from a charge, your attack does double damage, but you suffer an additional -1 penalty to AC for the remainder of the round.

Another alternative -- perhaps PA should work as is, but should be Strength-based, rather than BAB based. That is, you can subtract a number up to your character's strength bonus from the attack roll, and add that number (or twice, in the case of two-handed weapons) to the damage roll. So if you have a 12 STR, you're only Power Attacking for 1 (2), but with an 18, you're PAing for up to 4 (8). I could certainly accept that sort of change.

 

[Deset Gled]

It's hard to fix something like PA in a vacuum. We don't know enough about how attacks and such work to know how to apply it. For example, we know that muiltiple attacks are going away, so one of the biggest mitigating factors of PA (getting high damage on your early hits meant screwing yourself over on your itterative attacks) has already changed. We don't even know how feats work, or if fighters will get bonus feats, or if the ability to sacrifice accuracy for damage will be an ability everyone has that's merely improved by a feat (like Fighting Defensivly and Expertise).

If we're going to wildly assume things, though, I'll take a whack at it.

PA should be a Talent Tree. Something along to lines of:
Rank 0 (everyone): Take -4 to your attack roll for a +2 to damage. This must be decided before your first attack, and will apply to all attacks until the next round.
Rank 1: Take -2 on your attack roll for +2 to damage
Rank 2: Take -2 on your attack roll for +4 to damage
Rank 3: In addition to the above, you gain the option to take -2 on attacks for +1d6 damage
Rank 4: Option to take -2 on attacks for +1d12 damage
Rank 5 (max): All attacks receive +2 damage, in addition to the options below.

Of course, this would require a lot of number tweaking and knowledge of how Talent Trees actually work to make everything work out right.

As I have posted before, I believe that using fixed numbers, not an open ended bonus, is key. Even allowing dice rolls for the bonus is questionable to me, but will probably be okay as long as it's not available without significant follow-through in the Talent Tree.

Edit:

P.S. People saying that they never had a problem or don't like the change, please take the discussion to either the thread dedicated to that, or the poll. The purpose of this thread is to suggest alternatives. Lets not clutter things up unnecesarily.

 

[pawsplay]

Mighty Swing from Star Wars Saga is pretty much what I think PA should be.

 

[FireLance]

First off, let's have powerful strike as a combat option, like fighting defensively, as follows:

Powerful strike: You can choose to strike with additional power when you make a melee attack. If you do so, you take a –4 penalty on all attacks in a round. You gain a +3 bonus to damage if you wield a non-light weapon with two hands, a +2 bonus to damage if you you wield a non-light weapon with one hand, and a +1 bonus to damage if your weapon is light. The penalty on attacks and bonus on damage apply until your next turn.

A natural weapon (including an unarmed strike) is treated as if it was a non-light weapon wielded with one hand. If you attack with both ends of a double weapon, each end is treated as if it was a non-light weapon wielded with one hand. If you attack with only one end of a double weapon that you wield with two hands, you treat it as if it was a non-light weapon that you wield with two hands.

A weapon used with Weapon Finesse is treated as if it was of the next less advantageous category, so a spiked chain used with Weapon Finesse gains a +2 bonus to damage, and a rapier used with Weapon Finesse gains a +1 bonus to damage. A light weapon used with Weapon Finesse still gains a +1 bonus to damage.​

The Power Attack feat can then work off powerful strike, as follows:

POWER ATTACK [Fighter]

Prerequisite: Str 13

Benefit: When you make a powerful strike, you only take a -2 penalty on your attack rolls. In addition, your damage bonus increases by +1 for every 3 fighter feats that you possess if you wield a non-light weapon with two hands, by +1 for every 6 fighter feats that you possess if you wield a non-light weapon with one hand, or by +1 for every 9 fighter feats that you possess if you wield a light weapon.

Special: A barbarian can add the number of times he can rage per day to the number of fighter feats that he possesses to determine the effectiveness of this feat.
​

Note: A fighter feat is a feat that could be selected as a fighter bonus feat regardless of whether the character obtained it as a fighter bonus feat. Fighters potentially get the most benefit from Power Attack due to the large number of fighter feats they can get. A human fighter with a two-handed weapon could get a +10 bonus on his damage rolls at 18th level (for a -2 penalty on attack rolls) if he used all 18 of his feats for fighter feats. In comparison, an 18th-level barbarian with a two-handed weapon could have +8 if he had at least 7 fighter feats, and an 18th-level paladin could have +6 if he had at least 6 fighter feats.

With this approach, Power Attack still toggles, but the attack penalty is fixed, so the player only needs to decide whether or not to power attack instead of how much to power attack for. In addition, most of the math for the damage bonus can be done before the game starts instead of during the game. It also scales slightly with level, and scales better for fighters and barbarians than other characters, but not as much as before (which some will see as an additional advantage).