Feat (or other) advice for Barbarian with bad attack rolls.

[Dubkor]

Hello,

I'm currently playing a Spirit Totem Lion Barbarian in a campaign planned to be quite long so our DM is reducing our XP to level us slower. Right now I'm suffering from a bit of an issue... I am rolling terribly. It's not my dice, I've bought several extra D20 to use and people who borrow my dice roll fine.

My current build has me with +3 strength, extra rage, reckless rage and the whirling frenzy variant using a great axe. All told, when raging I'm running a Strength modifier of +6. I'm level two so my total attack bonus is +8. In the last four sessions I've rolled one hit and the highest AC we've come up on is 16. My attack rolls are usually 5 or less.

My original plan was to take a fighter level at 3 and take power attack and improved bullrush and then to take fighter level 2 at player level 6 and grab leap attack and shock trooper. Lots of damage sounds great, but I literally spend most combats missing for about 4 or so rounds before the party has killed everything for me.

I'm thinking of dropping the bullrush from level 3 and taking Reckless Offense. Then I'll take bullrush and shocktrooper at 6 and leap attack at 9 (level 9 is probably about a year out...)

Does anyone have any better advice for me? A better feat to take to hit more often? A better class to take a dip level in to improve hit? Is it possible I have some kind of bad dice rolling technique?

Hell, even the one time I hit I rolled a 1 on damage. +9 to damage from the strength bonus, though. ;)

[Celestia]

Sounds like just bad luck. +8 attack at level 2 is rather decent. You could get a masterwork axe for another +1, but it seems like your problem is bad rolls, not a low attack bonus. Feats can't help that.

You could also try getting a belt of giant strength. It's probably out of your price range right now, but that'll bump up both your attack and damage.

[Darrin]

Does anyone have any better advice for me? A better feat to take to hit more often? A better class to take a dip level in to improve hit? Is it possible I have some kind of bad dice rolling technique?


As far as feats go, there's Weapon Focus for +1... and not a whole heckuva lot else at your current level. I'm not sure the +1 is going to help much here, but you at least get it on every attack roll with your primary weapon.

Fighter dip is fine, unless Tome of Battle is available, and then Warblade or Crusader might be worth a dip, although those won't really help your attack roll so much as give you some additional options in combat.

As far as dice rolling techniques:

1) Have someone else roll your attack for you. Hopefully your "bad luck" isn't transferrable.

2) Is there a cleric or bard in the party? Are they casting bless or using Inspire Courage? Every +1 you can scrape up helps! If there's a spellcaster in the party that is having trouble deciding what to cast, then start begging them for buffs, such as magic weapon, bull's strength, or ray of hope (BoED).

3) Do you have any ranks in Handle Animal? Donkeys/mules are cheap: 8 GP each. Train them to attack twice (so they can attack non-humanoids), and use them as flankers. +2 attack bonus for flanking. Train them to "Assist Attack" (Complete Adventurer p. 100) for an additional +2 attack bonus.

4) Fire up Excel and generate a pre-determined list of d20 rolls. Tell your DM that you're going to use this sheet for all your d20 rolls, and mark off each number as it comes up. This is going to take a lot of surprise and mystery out of your combat, and you need to be careful about looking essentially into the "future" and making different decisions accordingly. However, the nice part is you can average the results and make sure that the bell curve standard distribution is not screwing you over. If the mean isn't somewhere near 10.5, then you know that the universe is trying to kill you.