(3.5) More Damage when Charging with a Lance

[tahu88810]

Why heya People in the Playground!
I've recently found myself with a D&D group again, and we're playing a campaign in Eberron. This Sunday I can expect my Human Fighter to reach level 4, so I was wondering if anyone could help me out.
See, Sir Fredward the Wayward Knight uses a lance. He also rides a horse, and he enjoys charging things with his lance while riding said horse. So far, he averages about 30 damage with each charge. I'm looking for ways to get Fredward, my fighter, to do even more damage. But it's been a while, and I don't remember all the feats available to me that involve charging. I've already taken Mounted Combat, Spirit Charge, and Weapon Focus (Lance).
So! What avenues do I have, feat-wise, that allow me to get even more damage out of a lance while charging? Available books shouldn't be a problem, collectively the entire group has each one.

And how about charging damage overall? I can't be mounted all the time, sometimes places just don't fit massive six-feet tall warriors and their war horses.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Leap Attack and Shock Trooper(CWar and...I don't recall). One requires Jump Checks, the other Imp Bull Rush, both require Power Attack, but they combine to be the source of massive charge damage.

Also, Spirit Lion Totem Barb variant in CChamp grants Pounce. Take it.

[UglyPanda]

What about Power Attack and Shock Trooper at level 6?

Also, don't forget to hold the lance in two hands.

Edit:
Ninja'd.

Weapon Focus isn't worth your time. Leap Attack is in Complete Adventurer, it's a level 5 feat.

[Chrono22]

If you can acquire pounce, you'll be able to full attack on a charge.
I guess at level 4 that wouldn't be such a big bonus to damage... but at level 6+ it makes a big difference. Especially for a mounted charger.

Ever thought about taking levels in ranger? You can get two weapon fighting for free, which would allow you to dual wield lances while mounted. You can call him "Sir lances alot".

[HCL]

I don't know if you are open to the idea of a cleric or archivist, but Rhino's Rush doubles your damage on a charge (it is cast as a swift action).

On the same note, Raptorans deal double damage on flying charges if they move at least 30 feet including 10 feed downwards (you would not be able to use this with a lance).

[Eldariel]

Power Attack. In Core, Power Attack, Spirited Charge and To Hit buffs (like True Strike, insane Str, Heroism, Pale Green Prism Ioun Stone, etc.) are the best and only real way to do one-hit damage as a melee type. Outside Core, the **** really gets serious; add:
Shock Trooper (Feat) [Complete Warrior]
Leap Attack (Feat) [Complete Adventurer] - Tricky (get creative) to combine with Mounted Charge
Headlong Rush (Feat) [Races of Destiny] - Orc/Half-Orc only
Battle Jump (Feat) [Unapproachable East] - Again, tricky to combine with Mounted Charge
Valorous (+1-cost Weapon Ability) [Unapproachable East]

And levels of:
Barbarian (take Spirit Lion Totem ACF from Complete Champion to get Pounce; full attack on charge)
Frenzied Berserker (makes Power Attack multiplier increase)


And remember that you're allowed to wield Lance in two-handed even during mounted charges; adds +1.5x your Str to damage. Use magical boosts to your strength (Polymorph & al.), and damage (weapon enhancements, Greater Magic Weapon to keep your weapon bonus up to par; ask for it from your caster once it gives more than +1 bonus and you can afford a Pearl of Power for compensation), and go to town.

Btw, don't combine all that. Otherwise you'll be dealing thousands of points of damage by level 20 and that's not nice. That said, right now you can't really do much more than add Power Attack and Barbarian-level, along with acquiring a +1 Valorous Lance.


And there's more stuff that adds damage to charge like Powerful Charge [Eberron Campaign Settings], Greater Powerful Charge and the like, but they just give you few bonus dice which isn't as good as stuff that adds raw damage (Collision weapon [MiC/XPH] is a must, btw; +5 base damage >>> +2d6 or whatever when it's multiplied while extra dice aren't) since raw damage gets multiplied a lot on a charger and multiplication means its value increases dramatically.

[Chrono22]

Oh, and speaking of rhinos, there is an armor in the DMG that boosts damage on a charge.
It's kind of a crappy item though.

[Lycanthromancer]

Get some grafts to get two more arms, or take girallon arms via the Shape Soulmeld feat (and bind them). Take the Two Weapon Fighting feats, and dual-wield two-handed lances. Get Pounce, Power Attack, Shock Trooper, and Leap attack. Make sure your lances have the manyfanged enhancement (for 4x damage) and collision (+5 damage per hit).

Also, find a way to polymorph your horse into a 12-headed hydra.

...Yeah.

[sofawall]

Power Attack. In Core, Power Attack, Spirited Charge and To Hit buffs (like True Strike, insane Str, Heroism, Pale Green Prism Ioun Stone, etc.) are the best and only real way to do one-hit damage as a melee type. Outside Core, the **** really gets serious; add:
Shock Trooper (Feat) [Complete Warrior]
Leap Attack (Feat) [Complete Adventurer] - Tricky (get creative) to combine with Mounted Charge
Headlong Rush (Feat) [Races of Destiny] - Orc/Half-Orc only
Battle Jump (Feat) [Unapproachable East] - Again, tricky to combine with Mounted Charge
Valorous (+1-cost Weapon Ability) [Unapproachable East]

And levels of:
Barbarian (take Spirit Lion Totem ACF from Complete Champion to get Pounce; full attack on charge)
Frenzied Berserker (makes Power Attack multiplier increase)


And remember that you're allowed to wield Lance in two-handed even during mounted charges; adds +1.5x your Str to damage. Use magical boosts to your strength (Polymorph & al.), and damage (weapon enhancements, Greater Magic Weapon to keep your weapon bonus up to par; ask for it from your caster once it gives more than +1 bonus and you can afford a Pearl of Power for compensation), and go to town.

Btw, don't combine all that. Otherwise you'll be dealing thousands of points of damage by level 20 and that's not nice. That said, right now you can't really do much more than add Power Attack and Barbarian-level, along with acquiring a +1 Valorous Lance.


And there's more stuff that adds damage to charge like Powerful Charge [Eberron Campaign Settings], Greater Powerful Charge and the like, but they just give you few bonus dice which isn't as good as stuff that adds raw damage (Collision weapon [MiC/XPH] is a must, btw; +5 base damage >>> +2d6 or whatever when it's multiplied while extra dice aren't) since raw damage gets multiplied a lot on a charger and multiplication means its value increases dramatically.

Races of Faerun.

[Eldariel]

Races of Faerun.

Ah. Right. I remember looking for it in Races of Destiny at some point and coming up short. That explains.

[sofawall]

Ah. Right. I remember looking for it in Races of Destiny at some point and coming up short. That explains.

I actually just went to look for it, and couldn't find it. I looked it up in the consolidated lists.

[Dimers]

Well, there's always Weapon Specialization, the bonus of which gets multiplied on a charge. Or on any other successful hit, of course. It doesn't change what you can try to do, like the feats other people have suggested -- just makes you better at what you already do.

[Mongoose87]

Well, there's always Weapon Specialization, the bonus of which gets multiplied on a charge. Or on any other successful hit, of course. It doesn't change what you can try to do, like the feats other people have suggested -- just makes you better at what you already do.

Marginally. There's really no reason to take it with Power Attack still availability.

[herrhauptmann]

A shame you're not in Faerun. With a few ranks of Knowledge local: Cormyr, you could take the feat "Furious charger" (Players guide to faerun I think) which gives you an additional +2 on charge attacks.
It might not seem like much, but personally (and especially at low levels) I don't like to power attack for full, because it usually ends up that I'll miss my target because I reduced my attack bonus too much. Getting that +2 means an additional +2 points of power attack you can take (up to your maximum) without negatively affecting your chances of hitting.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think you could use leap attack while mounted. Since it's your mount making the jump check, and yourself making the attack roll.

[Poil]

Is it possible to get the horse to learn leap attack and use that to add charge damage?

[ranagrande]

One of my favorite characters was a charger. At level 6 he was a Ranger 1/Fighter 1/Druid 3/Beastmaster 1 with a rhinoceros for an animal companion.

I think when they both hit they were doing something like 3d8 + 4d6 + 40, but he wasn't even really optimized.

[Cyanic]

You can get two weapon fighting for free, which would allow you to dual wield lances while mounted. You can call him "Sir lances alot".

http://instantrimshot.com/ You should be beaten with an oar for that.

[Darrin]

Is it possible to get the horse to learn leap attack and use that to add charge damage?

Difficult to do. An animal needs at least 5HD and 8 ranks in Jump to qualify, in addition to the Power Attack feat. A warhorse comes close (4HD) and you can bump that up to 5HD with the Warbeast template (MMII), but from just using the stats in the MMs, it wouldn't have the ranks in Jump or Power Attack. I don't see why you couldn't raise and train a horse that put all it's skill points in Jump and takes Power Attack instead of Endurance or Run. In the real world, they certainly do train horses to jump.

(There's a bit of a snag giving animals skill points, however... the animal type gets 2 skill points per level, but by definition animals always have a -4 Int penalty, so I don't think they ever get more than one skill point per level after their first 4 at 1 HD. You can teach a horse to jump, but for the first 5 levels that's the only thing it will know how to do, apart from tricks.)

Pony/Warpony is a bit easier, since they start at 2HD and if its your mount you could presumably pick it's 3rd level feat as Power Attack. Add three more HD, and you could take Leap Attack at 6HD.

The easiest way to add HD to animals is take them as an animal companion or as a Paladin's special mount. The Warbeast template adds 1HD, and the Awaken spell adds another 2HD (plus skill points as a magical beast, but as a free-willed sentient being, no longer counts as "your" mount unless you Diplomance it up or take it as a cohort).

You could also add feats to your mount by casting Heroics on it (Spell Compendium, Sor/Wiz 2). So long as it had the necessary ranks in Jump and Power Attack, you could give it Heroics. I don't recall if multiple applications of Heroics stack, but if so, then you could give it both Power Attack and Leap Attack. Wand of Heroics = 50 feats, make the Fighter weep like a Monk.

[herrhauptmann]

Is it possible to get the horse to learn leap attack and use that to add charge damage?

Or you could try taking a Tauric template and the mounted combat feat tree. You are YOUR mount, which opens up leapattacking frenzied berserker shenanigans, as well as mounted charging. (As a tauric creature, I don't think you can technically count as your own mount, but with DM's permission...)

[Aldizog]

What does the optimization level of your game look like? What is your sense of how the DM views the intent of the rules? What kinds of combinations do the other players consider too cheesy? If you are currently doing pretty well in pulling your weight, DO NOT go for any insane damage combos. Stick to a moderate increase. Otherwise, the DM adjusts to compensate, and the players who don't enjoy optimizing find their PCs slaughtered.

Cavalry Charger (Complete Warrior) is not that powerful, but seems fitting. Requires Trample.

Prestige Paladin (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/prestigiousCharacterClasses.htm) might be nice if you take one level of cleric.

Some things that by RAW work for a lance just seem so opposed to the visual image that it's hard to see how they're supposed to work. Dual-wielding lances, or making multiple lance attacks against a single opponent on a charge. Just for the visual they'd make the game less fun for me as a player, regardless of how much damage they add. See if your DM will let you treat the lance as two-handed while mounted so you can still look like the classic mounted knight without sacrificing a great deal of effectiveness.

WF and WS are a decent good combo. The +6 damage on a charge from WS is about 20% more than you're doing now. If you can treat the lance as two-handed for Power Attack, that's another +6 damage from the WF bonus when you can afford to trade it off. WF qualifies you for the Cavalier PrC, which you might like.

[sofawall]

A shame you're not in Faerun. With a few ranks of Knowledge local: Cormyr, you could take the feat "Furious charger" (Players guide to faerun I think) which gives you an additional +2 on charge attacks.
It might not seem like much, but personally (and especially at low levels) I don't like to power attack for full, because it usually ends up that I'll miss my target because I reduced my attack bonus too much. Getting that +2 means an additional +2 points of power attack you can take (up to your maximum) without negatively affecting your chances of hitting.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think you could use leap attack while mounted. Since it's your mount making the jump check, and yourself making the attack roll.

You can't do that anymore.

[herrhauptmann]

You can't do that anymore.

It's a moot point, he's playing an Eberron game, not Forgotten Realms.
But when did they announce you could no longer take ranks in knowledge local to qualify for regional feats?
I know you were still required to meet the other prereqs. Racial prereqs and first level only, being the most common prereqs.

[golentan]

How is it you're only averaging ~30 damage with a mounted build.

Of the top of my head, lances are 1d10, and do x3 on mounted charges with Spirited Charge. So 3d10 (average 17) + 3 x 1.5 STR (let's say 12) + 3 x Power Attack (24) without any additional damage modifiers should put you up around 53 damage a hit, and charging and strength bonuses (with tweaking for foes with high AC) should keep you hitting fairly consistently.

What's your build look like at the moment?

[sofawall]

It's a moot point, he's playing an Eberron game, not Forgotten Realms.
But when did they announce you could no longer take ranks in knowledge local to qualify for regional feats?
I know you were still required to meet the other prereqs. Racial prereqs and first level only, being the most common prereqs.

Player's Guide to Faerun, the 3.5 update of Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

[Runeclaw]

A warhorse comes close (4HD) and you can bump that up to 5HD with the Warbeast template (MMII

You explicitly cannot apply the Warbeast template to a Warhorse. It already has a "version" of the template built into its base stats.

You can Awaken a warhorse, though, and get +2 HD that way.

[ranagrande]

You can Awaken a warhorse, though, and get +2 HD that way.Or as per one of the other threads going on now, you could Awaken a warhorse, Polymorph it back into a warhorse and Awaken it again. You can repeat the process until it has as many hit dice as you'd like.

[herrhauptmann]

Player's Guide to Faerun, the 3.5 update of Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting.

I'll have to reread the front pages then.

[tahu88810]

How is it you're only averaging ~30 damage with a mounted build.

Of the top of my head, lances are 1d10, and do x3 on mounted charges with Spirited Charge. So 3d10 (average 17) + 3 x 1.5 STR (let's say 12) + 3 x Power Attack (24) without any additional damage modifiers should put you up around 53 damage a hit, and charging and strength bonuses (with tweaking for foes with high AC) should keep you hitting fairly consistently.

What's your build look like at the moment?

I'm not using power attack regularly, and the lance in question is only 1d8 (though I may have gotten that wrong, so now I'll have to go look it up again)

Anyways,
Thanks for the help, everybody. I'll look into the suggestions!