Pit fiend wielding a weapon

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

I'm aware of that

Ah! OK.

but on a single attack like a charge, he can only power attack 1-for-1 because his claws are a natural weapon. With a greatsword, he can power attack 2-for-1.

Very true. Face it - Pit Fiends are nasty customers, no matter what weapons they're using [or not using, as the case may be]!

 

[the Jester]

Heck, if you really wanna scare your players, throw some bracers of armor on that fiend!

I was thinking that one advantage to using natural attacks is that the pit fiend can penetrate a bunch of DR naturally- but then I remembered that that applies to any melee weapons it wields, too.

 

[two]

Definately don't power attack

By the way, as a general rule, don't bother power attacking when the thing you are power attacking with does huge amounts of damage per hit.

It's because the average loss damage from a hit turned miss (becuase of the negative on the "to hit" roll is to high) is so great compared to the small potential increase in damage.

The Pit Field is doing 30 points of damage already with a non-magical sword (on average). With criticals and etc. it's probably around 35 on average. Anyway.

The Pit Field also has 7 attacks when using the sword.

Let's say you power attack for 5. 10 extra damage per hit with the sword! Wow! Trouble is, with 4 sword attacks, that -5 is pretty much guaranteed (on average) to turn a hit into a miss. And every time you turn a hit into a miss, you lose out on 35 points of damage. What you gain by power attack (assuming 3 hit and 1 misses) is 30 points of damage extra.

Then of course you need to apply the -5 to the bit/tail/etc. attacks, which don't benefit from the 2x1 power attack bonus, further reducing its benefit (compared to the effect of missing an attack).

To sum: no. Don't power attack at all, even for 1 point. It's just not worth it; you are risking creating a miss, and a miss remove a LOT of damage from the equation.

If you have a magical greatswod, with some nice damage dice or whatever, it's even MORE incentive NOT to power attack at all. Just focus on hitting; that will give you the best average damage per round (against all but crazy high AC's such as AC=50).

 

[Staffan]

A quick rule of thumb is that optimal power attack is when the number of rolls on a d20 that hit is equal to the average damage of the attack, including PA. It gets trickier if you have multiple attacks, especially for multiple attacks that do different damage, but it's a good rule of thumb nevertheless. For 2-for-1 power attack (like for the greatsword), you should instead go for a "hit chance" of half the damage.

 

[apesamongus]

I'm aware of that, but on a single attack like a charge, he can only power attack 1-for-1 because his claws are a natural weapon. With a greatsword, he can power attack 2-for-1.

Make it a bastard sword then. He can PA 2-1 and then switch to 1 handed to get that extra claw at -2 when he FAs.

 

[Diirk]

Actually, according to the Outsider Type description in the Monster Manual, all Outsiders are proficient with all Simple and Martial weapons, as well as any weapons specifically mentioned in its statistics. So it's automatically proficient with the Greatsword (since it's a martial weapon). If a Spiked Chain was part of its normal stat block, it'd be proficient with that too.

I've been toying with the idea of a Tiefling Wizard 5/Eldritch Knight xxx based on the idea it had martial weapon proficiency from its outsider type One of the few ways to make a caster that isn't disadvantaged too heavily by the LA !

 

[Bront]

I've been toying with the idea of a Tiefling Wizard 5/Eldritch Knight xxx based on the idea it had martial weapon proficiency from its outsider type One of the few ways to make a caster that isn't disadvantaged too heavily by the LA !

Wouldn't it actualy have to have Outsider HD in order to gain that?

 

[Jack Simth]

Wouldn't it actualy have to have Outsider HD in order to gain that?

Not necessarily; there's a note under the Humanoid Type that the humanoid must have at least 1 racial hit die to take advantage of the Humanoid Traits, rather than class traits, but it doesn't exist under Outsider, and I don't know of any rule saying it applies everywhere. Assimar could also work (same LA), although it's better suited to Wis or Cha based builds (Hmm... A VOP Assimar Sorceror 6 EK X... with an eye for getting Archmage later on....). Unfortunately, I don't know of any LA+0 outsiders, sorry.

 

[Diirk]

Not necessarily; there's a note under the Humanoid Type that the humanoid must have at least 1 racial hit die to take advantage of the Humanoid Traits, rather than class traits, but it doesn't exist under Outsider, and I don't know of any rule saying it applies everywhere.

Almost. The humanoid type has a note saying that if they only have 1 (racial) hit die they exchange the features of the humanoid type for those of their class; the features being HD size, BAB, save progression and skill points. However even humanoids get their racial traits irrespective of the number (or lack thereof) of racial HD they have.

Ie. all humanoids need to eat, breathe and sleep, not just the ones with racial HD. It just so happens however, that the humanoid traits for weapon and armour use directly reference class levels, so those specific traits can be replaced by class features.

However humanoid is the only type like that; player controlled outsiders, aberrations etc all use the features and traits of their racial types in addition to any gained from their class. So an Aasimar cleric can use longswords without penalty.

An interesting quirk in this is the Warforged from Eberron... now they got this mostly right: if you look at the description in the campaign setting they remembered to override most of the stuff from the construct traits that they didn't want. Such as specifically overriding their darkvision, immunity to mind effects etc. What they DID forget tho, is that one of the construct type traits listed is bonus hp based on size: +20 hp for medium creatures. And since there is nothing in the living construct type that overrides this... well by the RAW, warforged are a bit tougher than most people realise

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

There's also lots of other creatures that gain features of their type without needing hit dice. Undead, for example. Make a corpse creature or skeleton out of a 3rd level Wizard. When his type changes to Undead, he gets d12 hit dice, immunities, and loses his Con score.