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Message: <blockquote data-quote="superlurker" data-source="post: 4427786" data-attributes="member: 41720">I tend to agree with the original poster's assessment. Did Cleave need to be fixed? No. Does the change make it more useful? Sure. Making changes like that isn't necessarily a good thing, though, especially if "backwards compatibility" is a goal. You'll get a lot of "huh?" moments from players used to things being different; this was also one of the flaws with the 3e to 3.5 transition -- making lots of little changes that weren't always easily "visible" at a glance. The more such changes that are made, the less useful Pathfinder will be for the goal of maintaining backwards compatibility. More than that, a lot of the new mechanics introduced are clunky or not very sound from a mathematical perspective. The barbarian rage point mechanic is an excellent example -- it makes the class a tad more complex and requires a lot more bookkeeping than before. More options for a class like this might be good, but the way they did it will just be likely to slow down play, when the goal should be to make things play faster. The same is true with some of the feats, such as Backswing, which allows a character to add double Str bonus on the first attack when making a full attack -- while in itself that might not be the cause of huge slowdowns, options like that are poorly designed in the sense that they accumulate very quickly to slow down the game's flow, especially for players that aren't too math-savvy. This is precisely the opposite of what a revision to the 3.5 rules should aim for, especially with high-level play in mind.  Another thing is the math. Let's take a feat like Devastating Blow; make a single attack as a standard action at a -5 penalty, automatically score a critical hit. The flaw here is pretty obvious in that it's a much better option for weapons with high multipliers than for weapons with high threat ranges. Those weapons are balanced against each other in terms of what damage they dish out in the long term; swords get to inflict double their damage twice over the same series that axes get to inflict three times their damage once. Another example would be the fighter's 20th level weapon mastery ability -- automatically confirm criticals and increase critical multipliers by 1. This very obviously favors high threat range, low multiplier weapons. Effects like this completely changes the balance between weapons. There might be something I'm missing here, due to some other changes I haven't seen, of course. If it stems from a desire to keep things "simple" rather than not getting the math, I think that's a bad idea as well -- especially in the light of the other things they're doing, that makes things more complex anyway. That's not to say there aren't lots of things that are good and very good about this -- but to me, some of bad ideas stick out like a sore thumb, because they look just like some of the bad designs of yesteryear (i.e. WotC's Power Critical feat in 3e).</blockquote>

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