To Dire Flail or Not to Dire Flail

[AspectOfNihil]

I recently made a new character, a Fighter/Ranger bounty hunter type, and when looking for options, I discovered the Dire Flail.

Now, other than being not simply impractical, but damn near suicidal to use, the Dire Flail seems to be a fairly solid choice. Not bad damage die for a dual-wielder, no crit specials but you can trip and disarm with it, and get a bonus on the latter.

My questions here are, is the Dire Flail a good choice? Are there better options without jumping through hoops to use? And how can I make him more potent on the battlefield?

[Vegan Zombie]

Personally I don't think they're worth the Exotic Weapon feat. You need it and the 3 two weapon fighting feats if your going to 20, which probably isn't a problem for a Fighter/Ranger. Having said that, it's hard to get your full attacks in without Pounce: you'll be swinging one end of it just once on most attacks. Generally Rogues do better with TWF for more Sneak Attack damage.

There's a feat in PHB 2 called Two Weapon Pounce (p.84) that lets you charge with both ends (without the +2 from charging). Or a level of Spirt Totem Barbarian from Complete Champion can net you the actual pounce feat.

[AspectOfNihil]

Barbarian could work, his story was he was a village kid, spent most of his free time in the woods hunting, but couldn't make a living in such a small place and so went to the city and started doing what he did best, only getting paid for it.

Would have to retrain him though, Barbarian would have to come before his fighter levels. Rogue may fit as well, but I'd start getting very feat starved (DM isn't particularly worried about multi-classing, as long as I don't take any more levels in my lower level classes).

By Fifth level he would have Combat Expertise, EWP (DF), Imp Trip, Imp Dis and Combat Reflexes as his feats and TWF and Pounce from Class abilities. Seems a pretty good start (Fighter 2/Ranger 2/Barbarian 1) but still feels like it could use some work.

[Vegan Zombie]

Fighter 2/Ranger 2/Barb 1 is a good starting point. At next level you'll get an extra BAB and a feat for Improved TWF, giveing you 4 attacks all the time instead of 1 attack most of the time. Don't forget Power Attack! You can always two hand the DF for that 2 for 1 PA damage!

[ericgrau]

Well TWF works well with bonus effects too, not only bonus damage, so a TWF tripper could work well. It's especially good on your secondaries since trips are touch attacks. It's only +1 damage vs. dual sickles though so I hope you have a lot of feats to blow if you're going to blow one on something like that. Better yet if you can trip and disarm without compromising the other feats you need for damage and so on then that could be nice. But that's a heck of a lot of feats. I might go ranger 2 / barb 1 / fighter X. Then you get the most feats and favored enemy + weapon specialization + rage bonus damage for your TWF and extra str to trip with. And a raging bloodthirsty guy with a weapon that defies sanity is scary.