Is Power Attack balanced?

[Grog]

Power attacking is itself not always a prudent option. But taking the power attack feat is pretty much automatic for most fighters. This by itself indicates it's too powerful.

I don't buy this argument. Taking Weapon Finesse is pretty much automatic for most rogues. Does that mean that Weapon Finesse is too powerful?

 

[Darklone]

In real life, two weapon is generally better than either two handed or sword and board. In the game it requires a feat and then is worse than two handed and only slightly better than sword and board. Go figure.

I'm considered to be a pretty good TWF dude in RL by my friends... yet I wouldn't sign that it's soo much better against a good twohanded weapon fighter. I win pretty often but I always have a hard time and couldn't say for sure if using my bastard sword wouldn't have been easier.

In general, you're right. First thing our swordmaster says: If you meet someone with two weapons who looks like he knows how to use them, RUN.

Still, fighting with two weapons against polearms, quarterstaffs or greatswords is not fun.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

In general, you're right. First thing our swordmaster says: If you meet someone with two weapons who looks like he knows how to use them, RUN.

Still, fighting with two weapons against polearms, quarterstaffs or greatswords is not fun.

I suspect, also, that it's somewhat easier to be Real Good with dual-wielding than it is to get superhuman strength (which benefits 2-h more than TWF).

Brad

 

[Dross]

Fixed that for you

And yes, PA isn't as good when you get your full iterative attacks. But there are plenty of times a fighter doesn't get the full barrage, and in those cases PA is the way.

Um, I'm aware you don't need the feats to do Bull Rush, Overrun (or even Sunder), but someone that uses the option often enough should get those feats for the help they give. And the only way to do so feat wise is via PA

I guess I'm saying that PA is useful, but I don't see it being broken because "every fighter automatically takes it" because it is also quite often (not all the time, Caliban has an example) a means to an end, albeit a useful one.

To be fair, I would not complain it if it was 1.5x not 2x, since if it is too difficult to do 1.5 x 3 damage make a chart up (or use a calculator etc).

 

[Nifft]

The fighter can benefit just as much from Power Attack as the barbarian, since he has the feats to back it up even more...you know, like Weapon Focus, Greater Weapon Focus, Great Cleave, Weapon Specialization, and so on.

Rage gives you more benefit (and earlier) than the Weapon Focus & Specialization feats; and Great Cleave sucks.

If you want to hit stuff and deal damage, Fighter is not your best choice.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Darklone]

Rage gives you more benefit (and earlier) than the Weapon Focus & Specialization feats; and Great Cleave sucks.

If you want to hit stuff and deal damage, Fighter is not your best choice.

Cheers, -- N

Well, the fighters advantage is the rages AC -2 and the duration. Great Cleave depends on the campaign. Btw: Fighters don't hit that much worse as long as the barbarian has no Weapon Focus too (and it's a precious feat).

 

[haversian]

PA damage calculator explanation

Hi all. I'm the guy who wrote the power attack damage calculator at monkeysushi that you've been talking about.

A few notes to clarify what's going on.

1. The calculator only calculates for a single attack. That should be fairly evident from the inputs it takes - base attack bonus is not one of them, so I have no way of knowing how many attacks to compute. I can change it to compute the total across multiple attacks in a round if you'd like. However, to do so in any sort of complete manner would be a lot of extra code (it's not just a simple -5 per attack until the end of the round. What about whirlwind attack? Haste? Cleaves? ...). Is this something people would find useful? The basic -5/attack code should be pretty easy to write, and I could put the rest on a to-do list. Maybe I could just add fields to manually enter the attack difficulties for a set of attacks - then you could do whatever funky combination of feats or spells you want and my code wouldn't care. Yeah. That's probably a good approach.

2. The max-power-attack field should probably just go away. All it does is artificially limit the maximum result returned, and it's easy enough to do that yourself. If you can only power attack for 3 and the script says go for 10, well...stick with 3 then.

3. The damage numbers aren't 100% accurate, since I'm not taking into account crit threats or wacky things like bonus damage on crits (burst weapons, etc.). In practice (I ran some partial tables of outcomes), I've found that those things only very rarely affect the optimal power attack amount, and then only by a point one way or the other - the impact on average damage was extremely minimal.

Let me know if there are any other mathematical curiousities about the game you'd like me to comment on.

 

[Egres]

The basic -5/attack code should be pretty easy to write, and I could put the rest on a to-do list. Maybe I could just add fields to manually enter the attack difficulties for a set of attacks - then you could do whatever funky combination of feats or spells you want and my code wouldn't care. Yeah. That's probably a good approach.

That would really be a great add..

Keep up the good work haversian.

 

[SlagMortar]

I like the site, haversian. I usually use Excel for D&D math, but not everyone has access to that so having it on the web is pretty cool. Having boxes for attacks is probably the way to go. It is nice to be able to tell what effect haste or flurry of blows will have.

 

[haversian]

I like the site, haversian. I usually use Excel for D&D math, but not everyone has access to that so having it on the web is pretty cool. Having boxes for attacks is probably the way to go. It is nice to be able to tell what effect haste or flurry of blows will have.

Thanks. I use OpenOffice, but same idea


CORRECTION:

I was really tired last night, I guess. Obviously max power attack is important. Otherwise you'd just power attack for a million on the odd chance you rolled that 20 for an auto-hit. You can see the effect of that by entering in sane data, and then increasing the max power attack. Depending on what you need to hit and what damage your weapon does, the point at which your optimal PA jumps from a small number to a huge number varies. For most cases, that number would be high enough that I could hard-code a max_PA of 50.

However, if you're a low-level rogue with a dagger and need a 18 or so to hit, your "real" best PA amount is 0. But once you hit 6, it's all uphill from there. Clearly 6 is too low a number to hard-code as the limit, so I'm stuck with needing the box that usually doesn't matter. Such is life.


I've updated the script to handle up to 6 attacks (adding more is trivial - it just takes more space on the page). Let me know if it'd be useful to have more slots.