Battle Jump/Pounce: let's make spring attack good for something

[Barnabus]

Hello all,
I've perused GITP for a long time now, finding some wonderful threads that have helped me along in my mad science character concepts. It is finally time that I participate in the glorious madness that you all engage in. As my first entry into these forums, I present to you my idea of the day: the pouncing battle jump spring attack. Can it work? Your thoughts on the concept are appreciated.

The theory:
-Pounce (SRD), obtained for instance from the Barbarian ACF spirit lion totem (CC), allows for a full attack to be carried out at the end of a charge.
-Battle jump (Unapproachable East) allows for a charge to be initiated when a character drops on an opponent from 5 feet above their head.
-Spring attack (SRD) allows for a player to split a move action on either end of an attack action. Jumping is a commonly accepted partial use of a move action.

From these three statements, one could reasonably assume that it is possible to carry out a spring attack, jump above an enemy as the initial partial move, initiate a charge using battle jump, and carry out a full attack via pounce before moving away with the remaining partial move.

Assuming this theory holds, why is it useful?
I'm here to show you a new kind of fighting. You may ask me, "What do you mean, Barnabus?" Mobility, dear Steinman. It's time we did something about mobility...
Say you're running around with the average, run-of-the-mill 100+ feet movement speed monk. Dear heavens! All that movement speed and nothing to use it for once you've dashed in upon your hapless foes! You have this lovely Flurry of Blows class feature (or the Decisive Strike ACF, we'll get to that later) to full attack with, but if you're full attacking say goodbye to getting out of melee once you've done your ubercharge-pounce for the round.

Sure, you can use Travel Devotion cheese, pop a nifty teleportation item, or pull some psionic foolery to get yourself out of there afterward, but those have to deal with pesky attacks of opportunity or use finite daily resources to pull off. What we're looking for is something nice and elegant that can be carried out round after round, ad infinitum, in an antimagic field if need be (why else would we bring this monk fella?).

And here, my friends, is where we arrive at the spring attack method. Leap into range, pounce your enemy's face off, leap back out of range, all without provoking an attack of opportunity, wasting any daily resources, or having to leave yourself sitting in the middle of a gang of baddies. Finally something spring attack can do fairly well without being made fun of on the playground (literally and figuratively).

Now let's give pounce the truly broken status some people assign it.
This is all fine and good, but how is this a truly unique tactic? Well, are you perfectly happy with leaving yourself sitting in the middle of that band of mooks after your devastating one-round-kill ubercharge of the BBEG, but wishing you could have dispatched the other two elites sitting amongst their ranks that can still put the hurt on you? Slap on bounding assault and rapid blitz (PHB2) for two more spring attacks in a round. The text of the pounce special ability could possibly be interpreted several different ways in this scenario, which I'd love to discuss, but let's first operate under my initial interpretation: any time a charge is carried out, pounce allows for a full attack to be executed at the end of it. Assuming this interpretation holds, this brings our rapid blitz to three full attacks in one round! Yowza!

Forget mobility, let's just make everything dead.
Three devastating assaults in a round not doing it for you? You've probably already dished out many thousands of points of damage by now, but the blood god demands more blood, and you're not satisfied with having to spend five whole feat slots to reach Rapid Blitz. Time to crack open your good old "Tome of DM Nightmares Martial Classes Finally Becoming Useful Battle" and see what goodies can be had. Desert Tempest? Yes, please! Move up to your speed in a round, and get an attack off on any opponent that was in a square adjacent to one you're exiting? Work in the necessary acrobatics required to be five feet above each opponent as your attacks go off, thus triggering battle jump pounces, and you are looking at enough damage output in a round to tear a hole in the fabric of the Prime Material Plane.

Is there seriously more?
Let's face it, everyone thinks your monk's flurry of blows is boring. Let's spice it up with an ACF... how about that Decisive Strike (PHB2) I mentioned earlier? Uberchargers love damage multipliers, and this is one that is often overlooked due to its having anything to do with a monk. Assuming we apply the mantra of "multiple effects from the same source don't stack" to this ability, the madness ends with you beginning your trail of death by christening the head of your first victim with one of these.

However... I'd like to propose the possibility that this ability can stack with itself since it is being used multiple times, each time adding a floating, untyped multiplier (and -2 penalty to hit at lower levels) to all other attacks made in the same round. Please feel free to give your input on whether this can squeak past the general interpretation of the "same source" rules, although I doubt it does. Once more assuming that the one side of the argument can convince our friendly and slightly naive DM, however, we now have a monk plowing their way through a dozen hapless kobolds using Desert Tempest and Decisive Strike to deliver increasingly monumental blows, finally reaching the Great Wyrm Dragon looming behind them. The monk manages to keep just enough movement in reserve to leap up over its head and deliver one final Decisive Strike. All who witness the act are left in awe, as it is uncertain whether the dragon's head turned into a black hole from the sheer force of the blow, or from attempting to fathom a damage total that approached Graham's Number and therefore caused the amount of data being stored in its brain to have such a high mass that it collapsed in on itself.

~

Thanks for reading along with my little theory here, and let me know what you think!

[supermonkeyjoe]

I'm really sorry, I just can't get past the image of a warrior running in and Mario stomping all the enemies.

[Legendxp]

Originally posted by Barnabus
Work in the necessary acrobatics required to be five feet above each opponent as your attacks go off, thus triggering battle jump pounces, and you are looking at enough damage output in a round to tear a hole in the fabric of the Prime Material Plane.

Good in theory but the DC for vertical jump checks are rather high. For every 1 foot high you want to jump the DC increases by 4. If the average person is 6 feet tall and you need to jump down on them from at least 5 feet. You're looking at a jump DC of 44 ([5+6]*4). Also, if you are not currently running (moving 4x movement speed as a full round action) the DC is doubled to 88. If you want to use this technique on a large creature, you'll have an even higher DC

[Fouredged Sword]

Well, then don't use jump. Get a fly speed, fly up, then drop down on the target.

[Aliek]

Good in theory but the DC for vertical jump checks are rather high. For every 1 foot high you want to jump the DC increases by 4. If the average person is 6 feet tall and you need to jump down on them from at least 5 feet. You're looking at a jump DC of 44 ([5+6]*4). Also, if you are not currently running (moving 4x movement speed as a full round action) the DC is doubled to 88. If you want to use this technique on a large creature, you'll have an even higher DC

Sounds like a job for Leaping Dragon Stance. You gain +10ft to your jump just because and all jumps are treated as running. I'd say a DC 4 isn't hard to meet, especially since jump is strength-based.

[Kuulvheysoon]

Good in theory but the DC for vertical jump checks are rather high. For every 1 foot high you want to jump the DC increases by 4. If the average person is 6 feet tall and you need to jump down on them from at least 5 feet. You're looking at a jump DC of 44 ([5+6]*4). Also, if you are not currently running (moving 4x movement speed as a full round action) the DC is doubled to 88. If you want to use this technique on a large creature, you'll have an even higher DC

Or devote another pair of feats into Sudden Leap/Leaping Dragon Stance, which gives you a +10ft enhancement to Jump checks. Not a bonus to Jump, a bonus to your result. It also makes all jumps considered to have a running start.

[Person_Man]

I believe you're misreading the rules.

A Charge is a full round action. You take that action, then you move (with restrictions), then you make one attack (with modifiers). Pounce modifies Charge by allowing you to make a full attack instead of one attack. Battle Jump allows you to execute a Charge by falling, when normally you would need to move in a strait line over non-difficult terrain. But the Charge itself is still a full round action. Just falling does not trigger additional Charge actions.

Spring Attack modifies your movement when you take an attack action. The attack action is a standard action. So you can move, take your standard action to attack, and then continue moving.

Decisive Strike (or Flurry of Blows) is a full round action. You take that action, and then you make X attacks.

Charge + Spring Attack + Decisive Strike cannot be combined in any way, because each takes a separate action to use.

[Barnabus]

Or devote another pair of feats into Sudden Leap/Leaping Dragon Stance, which gives you a +10ft enhancement to Jump checks. Not a bonus to Jump, a bonus to your result. It also makes all jumps considered to have a running start.

Unfortunately Battle Jump precludes the use of flying, so having a good Jump skill is generally important for this idea to succeed if you're not already hanging from the ceiling. Factor in that your Jump check is modified by your speed; you gain a +4 bonus for every 10 feet beyond 30 feet. Between leaping dragon stance and this, a monk with his full speed progression and no other modifiers should be capable of success when battle jumping most huge creatures. With a little bit of optimization gargantuan-height leaps may be within reach. For a colossal creature, a round-trip vertical jump is going to be the lion's share of your movement anyway, so why not find something else to do with your movement, like using the Wall Walker ACF from Dungeonscape to just run up the side of the creature then jump five feet up? In fact, if you interpret a 'vertical surface' in Wall Walker to include the side of any creature, you never need to jump more than 5 feet to use Battle Jump.



Battle Jump allows you to execute a Charge by falling, when normally you would need to move in a straight line over non-difficult terrain. But the Charge itself is still a full round action. Just falling does not trigger additional Charge actions.


While I agree with your reading of the rules, I put this all up because I think that the semantics of Battle Jump can be interpreted in such a way that the fall can initiate charges freely. It primarily comes down to what you think 'execute a charge' means in the first line of the feat:

"You can execute a charge by simply dropping from a height of at least 5 feet above your opponent."
Allow me to present the opposing viewpoint. One may interpret 'execute a charge' to mean inserting an unused full round action into the Battle Jump in order to have it carry out a Charge action. I disagree with that interpretation on the basis that it would contradict the most commonly accepted usage of Battle Jump.

Allow me to explain. Most ubercharge builds take the Battle Jump feat to take advantage of its damage multiplier. The character executes an ordinary Charge action, getting to move twice their movement speed in a straight line and then carry out an attack action, in exchange for the expenditure of their full round action for the turn. As part of their movement, they jump five feet over the head of their enemy in order to gain the benefits of the Battle Jump feat. The Battle Jump feat allows for a charge to be executed, and "if you hit," it adds its damage multiplier. There is only one piece of prior text to which "if you hit" can be referring to in the feat description, and that is the Charge you are executing as part of Battle Jump, not any external action like a previously initiated Charge. Under the opposing viewpoint, this would mean if they want to gain the benefit of the damage multiplier, the character would have to expend a full round action at this point to pay for the Charge that Battle Jump is asking to carry out. This can't be done, of course, because the character already used their full round action to carry out the Charge that they were performing when they jumped into the air to do the Battle Jump. By this line of reasoning, the opposing view would thus invalidate the use of Battle Jump as we have seen it applied in ordinary ubercharging.

Now, allow me to present one of the several possible assumptions that must therefore be made, given the above explanation of the opposing view, by everyone who views Battle Jump as being applicable within a Charge action already being carried out. Namely, "the action currently being carried out is now treated as a Charge action."

[Vedhin]

Spring Attack modifies your movement when you take an attack action. The attack action is a standard action. So you can move, take your standard action to attack, and then continue moving.

At least in 3.0, a full attack action was comprised of multiple attack actins, i.e. Spring Attack worked with every attack.
I think that changed in 3.5 though.

Anyway, for Spring Attack that works with Battle Jump, just get a big Jump check. It activates any time you fall on a foe, so no Spring Attack needed. If you have a DM that thinks this isn't RAW, get the Mantis Leap feat from Sword & Fist to make all your jumps charges. And jumping is part of a move action, so...

[Angelalex242]

Why does this sound like somebody looked at a Final Fantasy Dragoon, went 'cool, I wanna play one!' and made a D&D class out of it?

[Vedhin]

Why does this sound like somebody looked at a Final Fantasy Dragoon, went 'cool, I wanna play one!' and made a D&D class out of it?

I don't know, because it's a feat. Here's the Dragoon Hanbook (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=7200), which is all about building a FF-esque Dragoon in D&D.

[Barnabus]

Why does this sound like somebody looked at a Final Fantasy Dragoon, went 'cool, I wanna play one!' and made a D&D class out of it?

Ironically, I have no knowledge of Final Fantasy whatsoever.


At least in 3.0, a full attack action was comprised of multiple attack actins, i.e. Spring Attack worked with every attack.
I think that changed in 3.5 though.

Anyway, for Spring Attack that works with Battle Jump, just get a big Jump check. It activates any time you fall on a foe, so no Spring Attack needed. If you have a DM that thinks this isn't RAW, get the Mantis Leap feat from Sword & Fist to make all your jumps charges. And jumping is part of a move action, so...

Thanks Vedhin, when I came up with this I knew there was another feat that was mechanically similar but for the life of me I couldn't remember which. Mantis leap indeed accomplishes the concept much more explicitly and efficiently. Admittedly, after looking over the case I gave in response to Person_Man, it would seem that even with Battle Jump there's still no need for Spring Attack in either of these cases, which to me is a bummer because it's such a nice idea that is outstripped by better applications.


In regards to Pounce, which gives a "full attack", do you think this applies to Decisive Strike and similar attacks, which is written as an attack that requires a full round action, rather than a full attack? And if so, would you say multiple uses of Decisive Strike in a round stack?

[Vedhin]

In regards to Pounce, which gives a "full attack", do you think this applies to Decisive Strike and similar attacks, which is written as an attack that requires a full round action, rather than a full attack? And if so, would you say multiple uses of Decisive Strike in a round stack?

There is a distinct difeerence between "full round action" and "full attack action".

For example, see Pounce (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#pounce):


When a creature with this special attack makes a charge, it can follow with a full attack—including rake attacks if the creature also has the rake ability.

Now see Full Attack (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/actionsInCombat.htm#fullAttack) under full round actions.

Next, relevant text from Decisive Strike:


As a full-round action...

Thus, both call for use of a full-round action specifically. As they both require an action of a specified type, you can no more do both simultaneously than cast Fireball while attacking with a sword a one standard action.

An example of something compatible with a full attack action, and therefore Pounce, is the Arcane Duelist's (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/re/20030224a) Flurry of Swords, containing the following line:


It requires the full-attack action to use this power.

Pounce allows a full attack, and Flurry of Swords requires a full attack to use. Thus, one could potentially use Flurry of Swords here. (Other restrictions within the ability make it useless for trying to jump on multiple opponents, however.)


And Decisive Strike could be used more than once per round, as long as you could scrounge two full-round actions each turn.