D&D 4E The math behind power attack and why it needs to be redone in 4e

[OpusLich]

Missing the Point

New to the boards --

IMHO, the argument over whether Power Attack is mathematically sound and all the nice little charts proving or disproving it, is entirely missing the point.

Yes, if you leave Power Attack on all the time, in some cases you may do less damage. And if you take a drive in your car and leave the steering wheel in the same position all the time, you'll most likely hit a tree. Or a street light.

To begin with, the OP is really cheating his argument by stipulating a base 50% miss chance. That's one poor excuse for a fighter, or one ill advised mage with PA if you're only hitting half the time. Other, more sane, examples followed, along with accompying charts.

OP concludes that because of his charts, PA is utterly useless.

Missing the point.

Power Attack is situational. It can't be quantified by a chart. A chart, and any assumptions tied to that chart, assume it's on all the time.

If you choose your moments to use PA, it is well worth the cost of the feat.

Power Attack, quite simply, gives the fighter the ability to 'pull one back' when he/she thinks the time is right. And the fighter realizes when he/she does 'pull one back', they're doing it at the expense of precision.

That's the role playing reason.

The number crunching reason can be boiled down to this simple idea. In a game based on probability, PA gives the player the opportunity (in some circumstances) to sacrifice a little to get (relatively) a lot. And in the cases previously discussed involving DR, PA can be the only way to do any appreciable damage at all.

Is that worth a feat? Absolutely. It's a risk/reward that makes you a better fighter, and a more valuable member of your party, with PA than without PA.

---this opinion will self destruct in 5 seconds....

 

[neceros]

Really? Cleave? I've never seen any fighters take this feat. It just seems so ... situational. You have to drop an opponent and a second one has to be in reach. This isn't a common thing IME, where you frequently face one opponent, or multiple opponents spread out because of reach/size.

D&D standards is usually based on a group of mobs, not one big boss. The one big creature at a time is usually a boss fight or something specific.

the DMG suggests fights of 4 or more mobs at a time. Last session my group fought up against 4 waves of pygmy midgets, in groups of 6-10 at a time. Not too challenging one at a time, but in a group we almost lost a couple people.

Works out nicely.

 

[Najo]

To understand the effect of the feat you have to lay out a base line somewhere. The example with the 50% chance to hit means that the challenge is just that, a challenge for the melee character in the group. Remember there are three more characters assumed by the rules being there, and an encounter is supposed to eat up 25% of their resources.

I know that this is not the way most of us play. But that is the guidelines for design that the developers work along to keep game balance. Likewise, by my showing average damage overtime, it reflects what the feat is doing for most people.

I could take and make a wall of numbers that shows every possible configuration of to hit va armor class and degree of power attack, both with and with out two handed attacks. That would have been mind numbing for all of us, so I simplified it and boiled it down. Even then Lanfan's head exploded

Anyrate, the data is what it is. Opuslich, you are misrepresenting the facts (which the designers of the game brought to our attention) and making it sound like the feat is fine. But it doesn't work the way you described it, it only appears to. Which is why Johnathan Tweet himself said the feat is a vile tempter, or something to that effect. Because it doesn't really do what it advertises it should.

 

[Jinete]

Power Attack is situational. It can't be quantified by a chart. A chart, and any assumptions tied to that chart, assume it's on all the time.

If you choose your moments to use PA, it is well worth the cost of the feat.

Power Attack, quite simply, gives the fighter the ability to 'pull one back' when he/she thinks the time is right. And the fighter realizes when he/she does 'pull one back', they're doing it at the expense of precision.

<snip>

Is that worth a feat? Absolutely. It's a risk/reward that makes you a better fighter, and a more valuable member of your party, with PA than without PA.

I agree. If you *always* want a bit more damage per hit get weapon spec. If you want to go wild when you run across a gelatinous cube, or your monk buddy successfully trips a zombie, get power attack.

 

[ruemere]

Power Attack is one of the few feats, which can change the tide of a battle. It is also extremely effective in certain situations. Since the scope of applications of this particular feat easily exceeds a single post, I will simply present two cases, where the usage of this feat may strongly influence outcome of conflict.


BBEG vs players
In numerous cases, BBEGS aka Big Bad Evil Guys, possess high attack bonuses. Giants, Dragons, Treants, Invisible Stalkers... these guys can employ Power Attack effectively to channel surplus to-hit bonuses into significant amounts of damage.
And, while front-line fighters are likely to either use high armor class or high number hitpoints to soak damage, all other characters can easily become a toast thanks to a single swing of a weapon.

In short, Power Attack significantly improves strength of BBEGs against heroes, especially non-melee specialists.

Standard action attack and massive amounts of enemies
My style of campaigning relies on large number of relatively weak troops (soldiers, mindless dead, barbarians) lead on by champions. Fighter types fit with Power Attack and Cleave may turn ourselves into mobile area effect zones. Hence, while the power creep of spellcasters is prominent, fighters do not feel limited to role of meat shields.
Also, that encourages combatants to move about - trading blows while taking only 5-feet steps is not the only option worth using.

Fighting and moving around makes the combat much more dynamic. Remaining stationary while trading iterative attacks loses to sudden charges / drops / chases with power attacks used for quick finishers (in my campaigns high armor class is a more difficult to obtain).


These are only two examples on how this feat enhances gameplay.

Regards,
Ruemere

 

[Hussar]

D&D standards is usually based on a group of mobs, not one big boss. The one big creature at a time is usually a boss fight or something specific.

the DMG suggests fights of 4 or more mobs at a time. Last session my group fought up against 4 waves of pygmy midgets, in groups of 6-10 at a time. Not too challenging one at a time, but in a group we almost lost a couple people.

Works out nicely.

Actually, that's not true. The DMG does not suggest fights of 4 or more mobs at a time. It actually states that large numbers badly skew the EL of an encounter, making it very difficult to judge the difficulty of a fight.

3e is based around small groups of bad guys fighting the party. Once you get beyond about 4 bad guys in a given encounter, you have to dig down so low in the CR range to make an appropriate EL encounter that the monsters are no longer a thread. After all, 10 CR 1 monsters is an EL 7 encounter, but, a 7th level party is going to obliterate the encounter, whereas a pair of trolls is also an EL 7 encounter and is a much more effective challenge to a 7th level party.

Heck, the designers of 3e have specifically stated that 3e is based around small numbers of baddies. That's one of the things they want to change in 4e.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

That is the overall point about all of this. It should do what it advertises. I agree with you Nifft.

Another point to consider:

There is a high percentage of players using the feat wrong. The forums have proven that. So many players think it is helping, and go by their gut on it. In reality, it hurts their ability to do damage.

There is another camp, that loves the feat for the wrong reasons. That camp knows how to min/max it and break the feat with ungodly amounts of bonus damage and virtually no penalty to their to hit.

There very fact that both of these extremes exist and are about 80-90% of the feat's usage shows that the feat needs to be fixed. The first group is refusing to see that, even with math laid out. The second group is reinforcing how broken power attack gets when it works.

I would like to ask you not to say that I am using the feat 'wrong'.

I use power attack, and I have fun, and other players around me have fun. Therefore I am not 'wrong'.

I agree that PA is not working for a lot of people, and should be changed (and I'm liking a lot of suggestions). However, the idea that somehow I'm 'wrong' because I'm not using a spreadsheet to analyse the best option...ack. I don't care whether or not I'm using the best option. I care about the feel of my character, about striking immensely powerful blows that can topple a giant, and about dramatic moments of unlikely heroism when the dice fall true and the fifteen point power attack hits and kills the bad guy before he can finish me off.

That's what I care about - and I'm very sure it's not 'wrong'.

 

[Particle_Man]

To understand the effect of the feat you have to lay out a base line somewhere. The example with the 50% chance to hit means that the challenge is just that, a challenge for the melee character in the group. Remember there are three more characters assumed by the rules being there, and an encounter is supposed to eat up 25% of their resources.

This 50% is where you are getting the disagreement. Fighters usually hit their opponents way more often than 50% when fighting in encounters of their challenge level, especially since "challenge level" encounters often include multiple, weaker (and hence lower AC) opponents.

I just realized my Iron Heroes campaign is even more tailor-made for PA, since my DM is using some SW Saga Edition rules, so no iterative attacks. We get the damage bonus too, though. Of course IH tends to trade away AC for DR, which is also a PA-enabler.

 

[Najo]

I would like to ask you not to say that I am using the feat 'wrong'.

I use power attack, and I have fun, and other players around me have fun. Therefore I am not 'wrong'.

I agree that PA is not working for a lot of people, and should be changed (and I'm liking a lot of suggestions). However, the idea that somehow I'm 'wrong' because I'm not using a spreadsheet to analyse the best option...ack. I don't care whether or not I'm using the best option. I care about the feel of my character, about striking immensely powerful blows that can topple a giant, and about dramatic moments of unlikely heroism when the dice fall true and the fifteen point power attack hits and kills the bad guy before he can finish me off.

That's what I care about - and I'm very sure it's not 'wrong'.

I did not intend to insult anyone, and the term "wrong" is being taking out of context. According to our discussion and the math, those players are using the feat ineffectively.

When you miss 3 rounds in a row and then hit during the 4th round, you effectively allowed the BBEG to potentially inflict more damage on your party. You are usually better off to deal consistant damage round to round than miss a bunch and then hit for alot in one big wack.

Power attack is much more heroic if it didn't weaken the character's chance to hit so badly. That is why the feat is misleading. I am all for those heroic moments and a feat that does what power attack should do. But power attack doesn't do what most people think is does.

 

[Pinotage]

Power attack is much more heroic if it didn't weaken the character's chance to hit so badly. That is why the feat is misleading. I am all for those heroic moments and a feat that does what power attack should do. But power attack doesn't do what most people think is does.

Ok, so I did the math. I'm looking at a character with BAB +8, +13 attack roll, on a full attack with a greataxe (two-handed) for damage 1d12+5. Your fairly typical character, in other words. So I've calculated the maximum damage from optimum power attack for each AC, and put next to it the average damage from no power attack. This includes critical hits, BTW.

ADWPA - Average damage with optimum power attack
AD - Average damage

[SBLOCK=Power Attack Numbers]

AC ADWPA AD

15 27.19 20.87
16 24.83 19.86
17 22.52 18.34
18 20.37 17.07
19 18.28 15.81
20 16.36 14.54
21 14.49 13.28
22 12.78 12.01
23 11.13 10.75
24 9.65   9.48

[/SBLOCK]

From AC 25, it's better not to use Power Attack. Basically this is saying that for low AC where you have more than 50% to hit, it's always better to use Power Attack. If you have a smaller than 50% chance to hit, never use Power Attack.

Pinotage