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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 490997" data-attributes="member: 3146">Get yourself some boots of speed or other haste effect. Haste does marvels for your ability to position yourself (and for the melee vs. archer damage debate--meleers usually do more damage on a single attack which is all either can get out of a haste spell).Use the partial action to partial charge (power attacking because you'll still hit and the penalty to attack can be reset on your next action). On your full round action, don't power attack. Make a full attack instead.You should also make use of the considerable synergy between barbarian rage and bull's strength/etc. If you get your strength enhanced by the cleric and rage, you will probably be hitting strength scores of 26 to 30 (I'm assuming you've good stats since the archers both have dex 20+). +8 to +10 damage (and that's one-handed) goes a long way towards evening out the stacking damage bonus benefit that bows get.Prestige classes are more specialized than other classes. They gain abilities in their specialty and sacrifice abilities that aren't in their specialty. A ftr 18/Rog 2 is competetive with Ftr 6/Rog4/OoBI 10 but not at archery. If you want to dish out damage as quickly as the archers you need to be prepared to specialize in dishing out damage. Right now, your character seems to be specialized in avoiding taking damage (sword and shield w/ lizardman natural armor). A prestige class would give you the opportunity to specialize more radically than you've done to this point. If you don't want to specialize, you need to be prepared to deal with being a generalist though.If this really is the case then the problem is not that the archers are so awesome but that your DM is tossing weak encounters at the party and otherwise playing to the archer characters' strengths. If your DM tosses encounters in the pitch black mines of a hobgoblin cave (they have darkvision, why would they light it) or inclement weather (fog ruins an archer's day), skeletons (love the 1/2 damage for piercing weapons), wizards with Protection from Arrows, or just tosses a horde of relatively weak foes (say high hp bugbear War 2s) at the party things will be different. In the last case, even with the damage the archers deal out, they should still only be able to drop one or two bad guys a round. If the melee types have cleave and great cleave, they should be able to mow through them just as quickly.Your experience is quite different from most peoples' then. Standard AC for a melee cleric 7: 27 (+2 fullplate, +2 lg shield, +3 deflection from Magic Vestment and Shield of Faith).Standard AC for an archer cleric 7: 19 (+1 chain shirt, 18 dex--modified; the magic vestment and shield of faith go on the melee characters (at least that's how I played my RttToEE archer cleric))The standard archer cleric 7 is an elf who rarely has more than 45 hp. (12 con, 5hp/level after 1st).The standard melee cleric 7 is a human or dwarf and typically has at least 59 hp--66 in the case of the dwarf (14 or 16 con+Endurance spell, 5hp/level).Those differences aren't insignificant.And I've never played in a campaign where the bad guys didn't manage to be in melee during the first round of combat 90% of the time. (Giving fighters full attack actions and menacing the archers who provoke AoOs and are generally vulnerable). If the bad guys don't usually close until midway through round 2 or 3 of combat in your campaign, I can see what your problem is. . . .</blockquote>

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