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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5020608" data-attributes="member: 52073">In your initial reply you said "My problem with the ambush feats is that they are very hard to balance.Disembowling strike would be a case in point. I wouldn't allow it in my game. Are there better things to spend a feat on? Probably not if you do 4d6 or more worth of sneak attack damage.[...]It's hard to think of another feat that can yield such a big upside in so many situations. At the upper levels, the rogue would never not use Disembowling Strike except when they couldn't sneak attack at all.Inflicting at will condition damage is very powerful. It's like spells only worse because it evades the normal defences against spells."...which makes it look as though you are objecting to the power level in this case.Gamist or not, I made the suggestion with the caveat that it's usable 1/round and 1/opponent/encounter; if it were usable more often you'd of course want to tone it down.  And I did describe why it might be hard to pull it off many times in a row: they're called [Ambush] feats and do something above and beyond the normal SA damage, so whatever you think of the (admittedly flimsy) fluff justification, they're obviously not as easy to pull off as the standard sneak attack.  If you don't agree with that, then rebalancing with the assumption that you can pull them off with every single SA is possible.No, but you need to take monster abilities into account for two reasons:1) PCs should be able to accomplish things on a par with their enemies.  If a PC can take a full attack from a pit fiend which results in "Make 4 Fort saves or take 4d6 Con, then 4 more or die," and the worst that the pit fiend will take in return is +40d6 sneak attack, the pit fiend has the advantage.2) Rogues can be NPCs.  Just as you want to ensure that all PCs in a party have roughly equal power and spotlight time, you want to make sure that any given NPC you throw at the party can have a roughly even effect for its CR.On the contrary, the overall balance level increased significantly in the last few years of 3.5.  The large majority of the most broken material was in core, and most broken tricks are based on something out of core.  Psionics, Tome of Magic, Tome of Battle, and Magic of Incarnum stuff are among the most balanced 3e material (with the exception of the truenamer, of course)--and yes, that's in relation to core and the shenanigans a core caster can pull, not the latest and greatest splatbook.CR never really worked anyway.  It was based on an assumed sword-&-board/thief/blaster/healbot party of average tactics and below-average optimization and wasn't playtested past level 10 at most.  Trying to up the power-per-CR in later supplements wasn't power inflation, it was trying to give an accurate assessment based on what the designers were learning about the system.Which is fine and dandy, but in a thread specifically asking for the tweaking of one mechanic, giving advice requiring a major overhaul is out of the bounds of the thread unless you go into all the overhauling you'd need to do to make the advice work.You'll note I said balance against what is available, not what is the most powerful option out of what is available.  What is the likelihood that the OP's game includes Pun-Pun vs. the likelihood that it includes a RAW ray of enfeeblement?  That it includes any no-save abilities?  That it includes other high-power rogue options to which ambush feats are inferior?  The last one is 100%, apparently, because the OP asked for help making the ambush feats better....which, again, is a fine assumption, but out of the bounds of this thread.  The OP has asked for help making ambush feats better.  Whether he's willing to overhaul all of 3e to do so shouldn't matter unless he say "Hey guys, I've houseruled X, Y, and Z, so that's the power level I'm looking for."  All we got was "make them better but not overpowered," and without being given a standard of balance to compare them to, what other metric should we use aside from "what else can be done in 3e?"Yes, it doesn't really describe combat well, but neither do many aspects of combat.  I offered one possible interpretation of how they work; if you don't like it, well, you're free to come up with your own.  Obviously the OP is fine with them from a fluff standpoint.The relative balance of rogues to other classes is in fact what's in question if the OP believes the ambush feats aren't up to par.  If you're trying to give the rogue ways to inflict stat damage or status effects, compare those ways to ways PCs can do the same--currently, via spells.  If you're trying to up his damage, compare methods to do so with ways other PCs do more damage--currently, ToB maneuvers and feat chains."Full scope of 3e" =/= "Every broken trick you can do with 3e"Just because you seem to think 3e is irretrievably broken without a complete overhaul doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of useful balance metrics in 3e or that the rogue can't be balanced without a complete overhaul.It's a feat from Tome of Battle that lets you pick up one maneuver of your choice.  You might want to have it in your game because it (ToB in general, not this particular maneuver necessarily) gives martial characters the ability to do more things than existing feats do.It's a supernatural ability of the swordsage class (the pseudo-monk of the book), and it can be used 1/encounter.Actually, I picked the second one on the list.  The first one is strictly inferior to Arterial Strike from Complete Warrior, so I skipped over that one.If you're so worried about crits, why not balance them as if they can be used on regular sneak attacks?  Anything that triggers off of a crit is going to be one of two things: someone not focusing on crits is going to find them too situational to use, and someone focusing on getting crits as often as possible is just going to make their crits more powerful by adding them onto the other "triggers on a crit" abilities they can get.</blockquote>

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