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View Full Version : Combat Expertise, Power Attack and Combat Feats



Matthew
2006-03-29, 05:27 AM
[Edited]

First of all, I was wondering whether anybody else thought it strange that Power Attack has unlimited potential, whilst Combat Expertise is limited to five points until you take 'Improved Combat Expertise' (Complete Warrior?) or 'Superior Expertise' (Complete Divine?). Is Combat Expertise more powerful than Power Attack? It seems to me they're pretty much equivalent, so why the need for two Feats for the former and one for the latter?

Also, I was playing around with this trade off system [i.e. giving up BAB for Damage / AC] and came up with a couple of possible Feats following the same lines, but ran into a couple of balancing issues, indicated by the [?]. Any feedback would be appreciated:


PRECISE ATTACK [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Dexterity 13, Weapon Finesse.
Benefit: When you use the Attack Action or Full Attack Action and are using a weapon suitable for Weapon Finesse, you can take a penalty of as much as –5 to all your Melee Damage Rolls and add the same number to your to all your to hit rolls made with a weapon suitable for Weapon Finesse. This number may not exceed your Base Attack Bonus. The bonus on attacks and penalty on damage applies until your next turn.
Special: A fighter may select Precise Attack as one of his fighter bonus feats.



RECKLESS ATTACK [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Strength 13, Offensive Fighting*,
Benefit: When you use the attack action or the full attack action in melee, you can take a penalty of as much as –5 to your Armour Class and add the same number (+5 or less) to your Attack Bonus. This number may not exceed your BAB.
Special: A fighter may select Reckless Attack as one of his fighter bonus feats.

Whilst on the subject of Feats, I thought I'd offer up another two linked Feats for some honest criticism (I'm a glutton for punishment):


PARRY [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Intelligence 13, Combat Expertise, Dexterity 13.
Benefit: During your action and when wielding a weapon, you designate an opponent and receive a +1 Parry Bonus** to Armour Class against attacks from that opponent.
Special: A fighter may select Parry as one of his fighter bonus feats.



COUNTER ATTACK [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Intelligence 13, Combat Expertise, Dexterity 13, Parry, BAB +6
Benefit: Whenever an opponent designated by the Parry Feat misses his attack against you, he provokes an Attack of Opportunity from you; this counts against the usual limit.
Special: A fighter may select Counter Attack as one of his fighter bonus feats.


*This is only a prerequisite if using the Reckless Offence Feat from the Complete Psionics. However, it likely wouldn't harm game balance too much for the options presented through that Feat to be a variant option in combat independent of Feats, at the discretion of the DM, i.e.:

FIGHTING OFFENSIVELY
Exactly as FIGHTING DEFENSIVELY, except that you take a -4 Dodge Bonus and receive +2 AB

** If 'Parry Bonus' is not desired, this may be considered an Unnamed Bonus or Dodge Bonus, as the DM prefers.

Altair_the_Vexed
2006-03-29, 05:39 AM
Have you mis-typed Precise Attack?
It seems a bit daft: after taking off your STR bonus to hit and then adding it to your attack roll (to give you no change in your melee attack bonus), you just end up taking a penalty on your damage with no benefits.

Your other new feats seem to be balanced - Parry is a sort of variant of Dodge, Reckless Attack is a variant of Power Attack, and Counter Attack looks okay - being limited in use by its requirements.

Matthew
2006-03-29, 05:42 AM
Oops, forgot to mention; that one is only good for PCs using Combat Finesse, if you see what I mean.

TimB
2006-03-29, 08:23 AM
Seems the feats are meant to be used in conjunction with feats that allow substitution of another stat to calculate the attack bonus.

Personally, I would immediately cross out all of these feats the second they made an appearance (especially counterattack, which goes firmly in the Hold the Line bin of shameful feats).

Azrael
2006-03-29, 09:10 AM
Parry is just Dodge under a different name -- and conveniently, a different bonus type that would stack -- with everything. At the very least, it should grant a shield bonus. But honestly, scrap it.

Counter Attack is right out. Admit it. You knew it the minute you posted it ;)

I actually like the first two. Yes, a clever comination of some of the X instead of Y to [_____] feats could result in undesirable outcomes. But that is not a good reason to disallow these feats. Worst case, a DM might have to ponder the questionable comination for a minute and realize that the X to Y type feat is probably the worse of the two.

coredump
2006-03-29, 10:00 AM
Hey Matthew, this may come as a huge surprise, but I am going to support you. :)

Precise attack: Do you mean -5 to str bonus or str stat? If aimed at weap finesse, I would spell that out. And even simplify it to just taking off of damage and adding to attack.
Abuse: anyone that doesn't care about weapon damage.
ie. Poisen, touch attacks, sneak attack, etc.

Reckless Attack: Adding to both att and dmg seems overpowered. Also, if you only want AC, then don't do Dex bonus, unless you want them to get no AoO, and fall down a lot.

Parry: I would remove CE as a req. And change "any action" to "any time during your turn".

Counter Attack: Unlike most here, I don't have much problem with this one. Keep CE as a req. Specifically call out that it can only be done once per round per opponent.
Potential abuse: I am curious about a build that is very AC intensive, using tumble, total defense, parry, etc, and still getting one attack a round via AoO on a miss. OTOH, it would be feat intensive, and I think it might be worth trying it to find out. After all, this type of 'stall' tactic is often will just make you the last to die...


I was wondering whether anybody else thought it strange that Power Attack has unlimited potential, whilst Combat Expertise is limited to five points until you take 'Improved Combat Expertise' (Complete Warrior?) or 'Superior Expertise' (Complete Divine?). Is Combat Expertise more powerful than Power Attack? It seems to me they're pretty much equivalent, so why the need for two Feats for the former and one for the latter? The reason, as I understand it, is that CE is trading off two different things, while PA is trading off two versions of the same thing. To wit...
When you attack, your ultimate goal is to do damage. There are two components to this, hitting, and dealing damage. They inherrently balance each other, so PA, while adding to damage, subtracts from to hit.
Combat Expertise deals with unrelated items, when you are trying to not get hit, it has no effect on you hitting someone.

The danger in dealing with non-dependent abilities, is it makes min-maxing easier. You also have to be sure that what you are giving a penalty, cannot be easily replaced. (Such as with your Precise Attack, the -str/dmg is easily replaced with other forms of damage.)

Norbert
2006-03-29, 12:00 PM
Precise Attack:
I think your wording is a tad ambigous as to what this actually does, but I think your intent is to make it a reverse power attack (trade 1 point of damage for 1 point of to-hit). As such, that seems useful. You should consider disallowing it for touch and ranged touch attacks.

Abuses: Anything where the attack doesn't inflict strength-dependent damage. Touch attacks, rays, sneak attacks, etc. If you make it so it doesn't help touch attacks, then I think it would be good as-is.

Reckless Attack:
Looks fine. Losing dex bonus can be pretty harsh, since it lowers AC, potential attacks of opportunity, and reflex save.
You might want to change it from 'loses dex bonus' to 'causes you to be flat-footed' with a bonus equal to the AC difference.

Parry:
Looks fine. Requirements are sufficiently steep, and even though it's a new type of AC that stacks with everything else, one point of AC for a high requirement feat is not out of line.
You will need to tighten up the wording though. Reading as written, you could change the parry every time an opponent attacked (any action includes your opponents actions), and thus always have the bonus against all enemies. It should probably read 'designate an opponent at the start of each of your turns. Bonus lasts until the start of your next turn.'

Counter Attack:
This one could be pretty abusable. If you've ever played neverwinter nights, look at their parry / counter attack system. It was pretty broken, and it seems similar to what you're talking about here.
A build using this, combat reflexes, high AC, and a good dex score could really pump out a lot of attacks in a round (since every miss counts as a miss from the parry target, since as above you can constantly change the designated parry target).
It would probably be better if you followed the example of firing into a melee. If and only if the AC bonus from the parry feat caused the miss, then you get a free AoO.

Chris_Chandler
2006-03-29, 12:40 PM
Quoth the SRD:


Reckless Offense [General]

You can shift your focus from defense to offense.
Prerequisite

Base attack bonus +1.
Benefit

When you use the attack action or full attack action in melee, you can take a penalty of -4 to your Armor Class and add a +2 bonus on your melee attack roll. The bonus on attack rolls and penalty to Armor Class last until the beginning of your next turn.

Your reckless attack feat is already taken. No, it's not verbatim, but the concept is already there. I'd personally not muddy the waters with so similar a feat.

I see where you are headed with precise attack, but think about the logistics. You are using a finesseable weapon, based on prerequisite, so you aren't going to have a high "damage bonus" to the weapon to begin with. Finesseable weapons likewise aren't the most damaging on the table. Now, your wording is completely fuzzy, but I think I know what you are getting at. I don't think you mean that you want to give, for example a -1 to attacks and damage for a +1 to attacks (making it null to an attack and a -1 to damage), but rather you take a -1 to damage rolls for a +1 to attack rolls. Is this correct?

So... Let's just take a Lvl 1 fighter with weapon finesse and a rapier. Since he's finessing, his Str will be lower than his Dex, so let's be generous and give him a 12 Str for a +1 to damage rolls. With this example, a -1 to damage rolls (based on modifier), for an additional +1 to hit. We can say, likewise, perhaps a 14 Dex granting a +2, for a +3 total attack at 1st level. The -1 to damage would give a +4 total attack bonus. That's okay, at a low level. If you make the extreme case with a 1st level character, that'd be a -5 to damage rolls for a +5 to attacks, or +8 total, doing a maximum of 1 damage (2 with a crit) each round. Death by papercuts indeed.

I think this feat needs tweaking for balance, but the idea is there. Think about what it actually means by taking away damage for the sake of precision. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Parry - A rose by any other name... I wouldn't start bringing in new types for AC. It just creates headaches. Make it a shield bonus, so that it would be useful for a non-shield using swashbuckler-type. Other than that, it's a decent feat.

Counter attack. This is cheese, plain and simple. If you were actually going to use this, make the BAB +8, and increase the Dex requirement to 15. That way it limits the exploitation somewhat. It realistically has limited usefullness (depending on a particular single opponent missing in order to gain an AoO), so I wouldn't disallow it, but watch for exploitative use of it.

StarWarz2
2006-03-29, 01:19 PM
Counter attack. This is cheese, plain and simple. If you were actually going to use this, make the BAB +8, and increase the Dex requirement to 15. That way it limits the exploitation somewhat. It realistically has limited usefullness (depending on a particular single opponent missing in order to gain an AoO), so I wouldn't disallow it, but watch for exploitative use of it.

Thing is, this is Karmic Strike, with the prereq of Parry and only being effective against the designated Parry target. So, slightly weaker.

I don't have the prereqs for Karmic Strike currently available, so I can't compare the two. I think the prereq's for Counter Attack should be slightly LESS than the prereq's for Karmic Strike.

Otherwise, it's fine as written.

coredump
2006-03-29, 01:46 PM
I don't understand all the hate for CounterAttack.

It costs 3 feats, one of which is pretty weak (parry), and it only lets you pick one opponent, and you may get to get an extra attack. Granted, I would limit it to only once per round per opponent... but otherwise, why is it considererd so 'cheesy'?

Splendor
2006-03-29, 03:02 PM
Karmic Strike [General] (CWar p102)
Dexterity 13
Combat Expertise
Dodge
On your turn, you may choose to take a –4 penalty to your AC in exchange for the option of taking an Attack of Opportunity on any creatures that Successfully makes a melee or touch attack on you.
This feat does not grant additional Attacks of Opportunity.

Defensive Throw [General] (CWar p97)
Dexterity 13
Combat Reflexes
Dodge
Improved Trip
Improved Unarmed Strike
If the opponent that you have designated to receive your Dodge bonus to AC attacks you and misses, you can make an Attack of Opportunity against that opponent to attempt to trip him.

Counter Attack does not sound more powerful then either one of these to me.

Norbert
2006-03-29, 04:03 PM
Karmic Strike [General] (CWar p102)

Defensive Throw [General] (CWar p97)

Counter Attack does not sound more powerful then either one of these to me.


It's more powerful than either of those.
For the Karmic Strike, you need to get hit in order to recieve the AoO. For counter attack, you only need the oponent to miss. You can cause counter attacks by stacking AC, and there's no requirement that you actually need to get hit or take an AC penalty to get the attacks.

For defensive throw, you don't get free damage, you get a trip attempt, which can result in you getting tripped yourself. Much more constrained than a simple, free, direct AoO.
Furthermore, note that due to the wording of the parry feat you can claim the parry bonus against every opponent attacking you, which is not an issue with the Dodge feat.

Matthew
2006-03-29, 05:30 PM
Interesting responses all.


Coredump:

Lol. Dexterity Bonus, definitely. I thought about just making it -5 Damage, but I wanted to restrict it's usefulness to Light Weapon Finesse types (i.e. Duelists or Rogues). I think you're right about the Poison / Touch / Sneak Attack possibilities for abuse. Still that's the type for who it was intended...
How about Dodge Bonus? That would make things clearer, I guess.
I intended either AB or Damage, not both! Should have made that clearer. Which do you favour? I think AB in this case, probably. Maybe another Feat could cover Dodge Bonus / Damage exchange.
Remove CE for Parry? Hmmn; I suppose it wouldn't make much difference; the intent was to prevent characters combining Dodge and Parry too easily.

Norbert:

The description of Parry intentionally mirrors the description for Dodge in the SRD. I hadn't realised that Dodge could be used the way you indicate. (If it can, what's the point in designating an opponent at all? Shouldn't you just get a +1 Dodge Bonus against all attacks... or is this just meant to exclude the Dodge Bonus against Attacks of Opportunity? hmmnn, that's a much better Feat than I thought it was...)
Parry was intended with the former idea in mind, so I'll just remove the 'You can select a new opponent on any action.' clause.
I considered limiting Counter Attack in the way you suggest, but it's pretty Feat intensive as is and it would be hard to ever use it. It certainly could be keyed to a specific Die Roll / Difference between AC and 'to hit'. Not sure...

Chris:

Interesting; never seen that before, where'd you dig it up? It's the reverse of Defensive Fighting, rather than Combat Expertise, I think. Could be a prerequisite for Reckless Attack, but I'd rename it 'Offensive Fighting'. Actually, I've used a rule like this without it being a Feat with little problem in the past, obviously inspired by Defensive Fighting...
I agree there's a case for arguing that AB and Damage ought to be related, but in D&D they just aren't, so I'm not worried by that.
The problem with making Parry a Shield type is that Shield types don't stack, so it would lose it's usefulness for Sword and Shield, but remain useful for Two Handed, Two Weapon and no Shield forms; seems a bit unfair to me.
BAB +8 for Counter Attack? Interesting, I could get along with that, but not Dex 15 as well; too many feats are restricted to high Ability scores in my opinion and it only encourages Players to try to raise their ability scores (either in game or during creation)

paigeoliver
2006-03-29, 06:55 PM
Combat expertise has a limit on it because there are many situations in which someone doesn't actually even want to hit someone and instead wants the AC.

Also, there are simply some builds that just can't miss. Try playing a disarm specialist sometime. They could expertise for 5 while disarming and still beat an equal level character on the disarm roll by 15 or 20.

anime713
2006-03-29, 07:46 PM
Combat expertise is better because of the numbers involved. At 10th level, for example, adding 10 damage at a -10 to hit isn't unbalanced, because the extra damage per attack is balanced because you're a lot less likely to hit with each attack. But if your aim is just to draw fire and you don't care about hitting your opponent, a -10 to hit for a +10 to AC can make you drastically better at doing what you're trying to do. That's why it's capped.

Raum
2006-03-29, 08:00 PM
First of all, I was wondering whether anybody else thought it strange that Power Attack has unlimited potential, whilst Combat Expertise is limited to five points until you take 'Improved Combat Expertise' (Complete Warrior?) or 'Superior Expertise' (Complete Divine?). Is Combat Expertise more powerful than Power Attack? It seems to me they're pretty much equivalent, so why the need for two Feats for the former and one for the latter?
I agree, but when has WotC (or even TSR) ever been consistent? :) WotC even states feats are not created equal or balanced. It's one of my gripes with version 3.0/3.5.


Also, I was playing around with this trade off system [i.e. giving up BAB for Damage / AC] and came up with a couple of possible Feats following the same lines, but ran into a couple of balancing issues, indicated by the [?]. Any feedback would be appreciated:

PRECISE ATTACK [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Dexterity 13, Weapon Finesse.
Benefit: When you use the attack action or the full attack action in melee, you can take a penalty of as much as –5 to your Strength Bonus (affecting both to hit and damage) and add the same number (+5 or less) to your to hit roll (for one attack, all attacks[?]). This number may not exceed your BAB or cause your Strength Bonus to fall below –5.
Special: A fighter may select Precise Attack as one of his fighter bonus feats.
I'd probably change this so you can't drop your Strength bonus below 0. It prevents some of the abuse and keeps a bit of realism...characters still have to be able to carry armor and weapons. You may even want to specify they need to remain unencumbered. That starts to be an accounting nightmare though so I'd recommend just saying they can't drop the bonus below 0. Looks good otherwise!


RECKLESS ATTACK [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Strength 13.
Benefit: When you use the attack action or the full attack action in melee, you can take a penalty of as much as –5 to your Dodge Bonus and add the same number (+5 or less) to your Attack Bonus. This number may not exceed your BAB or cause your Dodge Bonus to fall below –5.
Special: A fighter may select Reckless Attack as one of his fighter bonus feats.
I'd rephrase to use terminology similar to Power Attack's. Make it clear that both the negative to dodge and the bonus to attacks last until the character's next action. Also, while I don't think it's as open to abuse here, I'm not sure I like taking a negative to gain a bonus. I prefer trading one bonus for another. In this case possibly trading Dex bonus for attack and not being able to go below 0 Dex modifier. This wouldn't make it as useful for a finesse fighter, but a finesse fighter shouldn't be 'reckless' anyway. ;)


PARRY [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Intelligence 13, Combat Expertise, Dexterity 13.
Benefit: During your action and when wielding a weapon, you designate an opponent and receive a +1 Parry Bonus to Armour Class against attacks from that opponent.
Special: A fighter may select Parry as one of his fighter bonus feats.
Since Two Weapon Defense grants a shield bonus I'd recommend the same mechanic.


COUNTER ATTACK [GENERAL]
Prerequisite: Intelligence 13, Combat Expertise, Dexterity 13, Parry, BAB +6 / +8[?].
Benefit: Whenever an opponent designated by the Parry Feat misses his attack against you, he provokes an Attack of Opportunity from you; this counts against the usual limit.
Special: A fighter may select Counter Attack as one of his fighter bonus feats.
Not really a fan of this one...just my opinion though.


Either a Feat or variant game rule...

FIGHTING OFFENSIVELY
Exactly as FIGHTING DEFENSIVELY, except that you take a -4 Dodge Bonus and receive +2 AB

[Edited]
Didn't Monte Cook's d20 game have a stance mechanic? Might be worth looking at. I don't see any issues with this though.

TimeWizard
2006-03-29, 11:39 PM
Its a good thing there are only certain weapons that work with weapon finesse, otherwise you could use these Precise shot to give up say, three damage for +3 to hit, but powerattack for three with a two handed weapon for 3, (+6 damage), getting a net result of +3 damage each attack.

And that would be bad....

But good work. My assassin is taking precise attack. Damage doesn't really matter when you can death attack.

Chris_Chandler
2006-03-30, 12:20 PM
Interesting responses all.


Chris:

Interesting; never seen that before, where'd you dig it up? It's the reverse of Defensive Fighting, rather than Combat Expertise, I think. Could be a prerequisite for Reckless Attack, but I'd rename it 'Offensive Fighting'. Actually, I've used a rule like this without it being a Feat with little problem in the past, obviously inspired by Defensive Fighting...
I agree there's a case for arguing that AB and Damage ought to be related, but in D&D they just aren't, so I'm not worried by that.
The problem with making Parry a Shield type is that Shield types don't stack, so it would lose it's usefulness for Sword and Shield, but remain useful for Two Handed, Two Weapon and no Shield forms; seems a bit unfair to me.
BAB +8 for Counter Attack? Interesting, I could get along with that, but not Dex 15 as well; too many feats are restricted to high Ability scores in my opinion and it only encourages Players to try to raise their ability scores (either in game or during creation)

Reckless Offense is actually SRD, out of the Expanded Psionics Handbook. I think making the SRD feat a requirement for your own feat would be very appropriate, actually, as it shows a move from a rather sloppy offensive strike to a dedicated offensive stance.

I would place it as a shield bonus because of the "activity" involved - an small item blocking an attack, in a similar manner as a shield. We really aren't allowed to discuss such detail about the combat system, as it is "streamlined", but a weapon parry and a shield block are more similar than dissimilar. As a concession, though, if you do not make it a shield bonus, don't add a new type , but rather leave it as an unnamed bonus. The fact that you must name a single opponent for this feat limits this potentially overpowering placement. I'd just rather you not muddy the waters with an additional type.

The reason I'd advocate a Dex of 15 is simply matching other "mid to high feat chain" feats, such as two-weapon fighting, where the further up the chain, the stiffer the ability requirement (usually a non-issue for a dedicated dual-weilder). I think the important issue is the delay of gratification with the +8 BAB, not the Dex requirement, anyways. Increasing the BAB requirement and leaving the Dex requirement at 13 is acceptable for this feat.

Matthew
2006-04-01, 03:51 PM
Thanks to everyone for their input; I've ammended the original post to take into account much of it.

Thanks to Chris for pointing out that SRD link; not a fan of psionics, so never read anything associated with it (so how can I claim ' not to be a fan', just a 'flavour' issue, not a mechanical problem).

Thanks to Raum for pointing out that all Feats are not designed to be equal. I hadn't considered that, it makes me feel a whole lot better about the Power Attack / Combat Expertise thing, though I see what people are saying about it.

Two Weapon Defence is something I looked at and took into account when writing this. As far as I can tell, since a shield is a weapon, it can be used in conjunction with TWD, yet since it grants a Shield Bonus, it is useless to do so. I thought it seemed uneccesarily harsh to the Weapon and Shield Fighter using TWF, but it can't be helped as the rules stand. I wanted to avoid penalising the Sword and Shield Fighter for taking Parry, so I chose to create the Parry Bonus; however, it could just as easily be a Dodge or Unamed Bonus (I just didn't like the nomenclature of it).

Thanks again...