The Combat Maneuver Tier List

[SangoProduction]

Note: Placed within the tiers in alphabetical order.
(Rating really only the base form of the CMs.)

Tier 0: As Tier 1, but replaces melee attacks (allows AoO usage)
Trip: Can be no larger than 1 size category greater than you, and they must have legs, and not be flying, and many-legged creatures get huge bonuses, but otherwise you've got free reign to put people on the ground, which is among one of the more punishing conditions that can be inflicted by a martial. And it has an indefinite duration that soaks up enemy actions.

Tier 1: As unconditional and useful as combat maneuvers get
Dirty Trick: Only limited by DM permissiveness. And the condition duration. Which scales with how well you beat the CMD. CMD is pretty infamous for how quickly it scales.
Grapple: Is it within your allowable size category? Do you like your combat maneuver completely locking you down when the opponent rolls well? Then pull out your flow charts. With enough successive successes, you can KO them.

Tier 2: Useful, but conditional
Disarm: If your opponent is a martial type who uses weapons, it means they don't get to attack. Unless they brought backups. But a lot of modern characters and enemies? Well, use this enough times and they'll learn.

Tier 3: Even with conditions met, does not tend to be useful (or has odious conditions)
Bull Rush: This one lets you move them to "dangerous terrain." Yay.
Drag / Reposition: It's Bull Rush! But doesn't benefit from bull rush feats! And has further restrictions.
Overrun: You... run... through people. Because reasons. I mean, I guess if you absolutely cannot do acrobatics. Or absolutely must charge straight through a pesky minion who can't stop you.
Steal: Standard action. Take any item that is all of the following: a) not held, b) not hidden, c) not "closely worn", and d) not in a bag. Anything fastened, like a pouch, gets a massive +5 (minimum) bonus to CMD. Worth more than both CM boosting feats.
Sunder: You know how disarm stops a martial-type weapon-user from attacking? Well, this lets you instead deal damage to the weapon. And maybe, potentially, destroy/disable it.


Huh. Could have sworn there were more combat maneuvers. Well... any comments / complaints?

[Cortillaen]

The arrangement in Tiers 0-2 don't really make sense to me. Part of that is trying to merge applicability and potency into a single rating necessarily means losing information. But it also seems like pretty large differences in applicability have all been dumped together under "as unconditional as it gets". Trip is far more commonly neutered by creature attributes than Grapple, and Dirty Trick is the only one of the three that nothing is overtly immune to. At the same time, Dirty Trick is more dependent on the non-system factors of your creativity and the GM's permissiveness. Still, I would not describe them all as being equally applicable.

What about ease of use? You made that the separation between Tiers 0 and 1, but it doesn't feature anywhere else, which seems odd. Disarm, for instance, can be done in place of an attack but doesn't seem to get any recognition for that.

Most importantly, the evaluation of some maneuvers would have to change drastically depending on what supporting feats/features/items you have and therefore when in a character's progression we're talking about. For instance, Dirty Trick is almost useless on most characters (some class features completely change this) without Quick Dirty Trick. Until that point, I wouldn't consider it the equal of even Disarm, but it becomes one of the best in my view once you don't have to burn a Standard action on it. Similarly, there are feats and features that can make Dirty Trick more freely than Trip attempts.

In the end, I'm not sure a tier list makes much sense for combat maneuvers. To me at least, it seems like a chart ranking each one on Applicability, Potency, and Ease of Use at various levels of feat/feature/item support (eg. Dirty Trick only becomes viable with Quick Dirty Trick or something similar, but it also changes radically with Dirty Trick Master and either the Kitsune Style or Cloak and Dagger Style feat lines) would be more useful.

[Elder_Basilisk]

I think that really is it. But there are a couple nuances that I think got left off:
Drag/reposition. Like bull rush but doesn't have to be away from you. Drag them into a flank? Sure. Its a lot harder to achieve that result by bullrush.The big catch is that you can't drag/reposition into inherently dangerous positions. You can bull rush someone off a cliff or through a prismatic wall. You can't do that with reposition. And really, if you were ever thinking: hey, I'd like to force the bad guys to move, that's probably why. Also, if you took improved bull rush, the movement will cause OAs. Also, bull rush can theoretically hit multiple targets. If you yell, "this is Sparta!" loud enough, you can bull rush a whole company of Persians off a cliff. Reposition only gets one Persian and you can't push him off the cliff.

Overrun has more use cases than you think. The overrun text specifies that it can be done as part of a charge, so I think it's RAW that if a goblin minion is standing in front of Redcloak, your Ubercharger can charge Redcloak and overrun the minion on the way in. Or any melee combatant who can't get to Redcloak with a normal move action can use the charge+overrun to get an attack on the guy he wants to attack.

One last comment. Grapple really deserves to be the top dog here because Grapple can win you fights by itself. Trip is very good and dirty trick can be good, but you can do them successfully every round and unless you follow up with OAs or sneak attacks or something else, the enemy will still be at full hit points and can still fight back. But Grapple let's you tie the enemy up and even if you don't, if you can maintain the pin long enough, you'll deal enough hp to (lethally or nonlethally) render your foe unconscious. No follow up required.

[Kitsuneymg]

Overrun doesn’t even allow you run over people without fear investment. At least not as a charge. You can’t target someone behind the overrun person because charge rules (you need charge through). You can’t overrun someone and then charge attack them (charge rules about attacking at first spot vs overrun about moving through their square means they can’t be charge attacked if you overrun them, and you can’t charge behind them because you don’t have line of effect.) it’s basically a trip you can use on a charge. With charge through, it can sometimes let you charge a wizard who thought he was safe. Sometimes.

Dirty trick is better than trip by miles. Flying makes you immune to trip. Multiple legs make it harder to be tripped. It’s a great 1-10 maneuver, but dirty trick becomes exceptionally good on the right builds. PFSFG Lore Warden wielding a PFSFG dueling (not the UE dueling) weapon has a stupidly high CMB in dirty trick. A sharp blow to the head to cause dazzle/daze or using your weapon to fling sand into eyes to cause blindness should qualify for “ dirty trick maneuvers that utilize the weapon.”

A half orc is likely tacking Fates Favored already, so adding a ton of bonus luck to dirty trick is just gravy. Once you’re using the weapon to make the combat maneuver, you can argue that weapon focus and weapon training should work too. But the +21 you’re getting from weapon, and lore warden abilities should be enough to make your full bab character pretty good at dirty trick. There’s always wizard 1+knowledge is power if you need to add your

[pabelfly]

Why not have a voting system instead? You get a good variety of opinions and polls are fun.

[Kurald Galain]

Some things to add,

Ki Throw feats. As part of a full attack, you can snatch one creature, use it to bull rush another creature, and they both fall prone. And provoke.
There's several ways to add a free Bull Rush on all of your attacks, and there are several feats that deal damage by bull rushing enemies into walls or into each other. If you want to cheese it, you can make a loop with Greater Bull Rush (BR an enemy, it provokes, your OA is another BR; repeat until out of OAs).
An Overrun build lets you charge through one enemy (which deals damage) into another enemy that thought it was protected (which also deals damage) and you get a free overrun on the second as well (which deals damage). This stacks with the previous point.
Barbarian can use Sunder to dispel enemy spells. Yes, you can remove magic by hitting it really hard. Also, a high-level sunder-specced barbarian will strip an enemy of offense and defense in a single round, dealing damage at the same time.
You can also add Grapple to your full attacks, e.g. by shapeshifting.
Rogue can Dirty Trick on a full attack, for instance to blind an enemy on his first hit and allow full sneak attack damage on all other hits.
One level dip in Monk lets you add any maneuver to a full attack, including the ones that normally take a standard action.
Magus can get +20 to several maneuvers via True Strike.
And you could add feint. Not technically a maneuver but for practical purposes it works like one. It's not great though.


A small investment in the right combo makes several maneuvers much better than they look!

[Kitsuneymg]

Don’t forget PFSFG Lore Warden and PFSFG duelist weapon enhancement. You’re looking at another +20 to most of the decent maneuvers.

Without 3pp support, trip stops working against flying enemies. I personally think dirty trick is the best CM in general because of this. With SoM on the table, disarm and trip work against everyone, putting them and DT at the top together. With path of war, you can make ranged disarm/dt in place of AoOs and fort a stance to let any one in 60’ (or was it first range increment?) who attacks an ally provoke. That’s a lot of blind opponents!

My $0.02

[Kurald Galain]

Without 3pp support, trip stops working against flying enemies.
Or this first-party feat (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/weapon-mastery-feats/ace-trip-targeting-weapon-mastery/).

I'd say Trip is great at levels 1 through 12, and Dirty Trick is great at levels 6 through 20. I'm sure there's specific builds that work outside those ranges though.

[Rynjin]

Saying Bull Rush is worse than Disarm is pretty laughable. If built for, Bull Rush is very potent; better than Trip in many regards because Feats and options that support Bull Rush often give the ability to also knock an enemy prone...and their bonuses against Trip don't apply.

[Elder_Basilisk]

Regarding overrun, the pfsrd says that the base overrun maneuver can be performed "as a standard action, during your movement or as part of a charge..." That indicates that there are three separate action types that allow overrun attempts: an independent standard action, a move action, or a charge.

There is ambiguity because of the way charge is written but if we go with specific trump's general, I would think the overrun combat maneuver description is more specific to "when can I use overrun?" than the charge description. Sure, there is th charge through feat in the APG but it wouldn't be the first time someone published a feat to let you do something that the RAW let you do already without it... and it's probably not the last time that happened either.

[Kurald Galain]

Regarding overrun, the pfsrd says that the base overrun maneuver can be performed "as a standard action, during your movement or as part of a charge..." That indicates that there are three separate action types that allow overrun attempts: an independent standard action, a move action, or a charge.
I think the point is that you can normally Overrun the target of your charge, whereas the feat lets you Overrun someone in the way in addition to attacking the target of your charge. It clearly could have been worded better.

[Elder_Basilisk]

I think the point is that you can normally Overrun the target of your charge, whereas the feat lets you Overrun someone in the way in addition to attacking the target of your charge. It clearly could have been worded better.

It could be read either way I guess. I think that the "you can overrun the target of the charge attack" reading is pretty difficult to square with the movement restrictions on charge since you can't try to overrun without entering the target's space and can't successfully overrun without leaving the target's space and entering the square behind them. On the other hand, charge normally requires you to stop as soon as you are able to attack the target of the charge and ends your turn after the attack is completed. Also, it's a lot easier to think that use of a combat manuevers against an intervening target during the movement portion of a charge is an exception to the general charge rule than to think that one of the combat maneuvers you can use against the target of your charge and the necessary exceptions to the normal movement rules for charging are the exception to the general charge rules. And the ability to overrun the target of your charge is generally pointless. (Not that there aren't lots of pointless options in the rules).

But if you look at overrun as part of a charge your way, you would still seem to be able to overrun the monster as part of a move action (the "during your movement" clause) so you can still do a regular move, overrun the front line as a part of that move action+attack the back-row target. That ability has a variety of use cases-
-the monsters are physically blocking access to the back row target and you don't have sufficient acrobatics to move through their squares/overrun is easier and doesn't reduce your movement
-you have enough movement to reach Redcloak and attack if you overrun, but not if you move around the intervening mook (which is probably not all that common but since Redcloak should be trying to be out of move+attack range and diagonals are punishing for 20' heavy armor characters it probably happens more frequently than you might think).
-you want to avoid being attacked in the back by the minion, and knocking him prone when you overrun him let's you be out of his stand up+attack range when you are attacking Redcloak. (Primarily useful if the minion has position dependent attacks (sneak attack) or full attacks that are nastier than his opportunity attacks. But goblin rogues dual wielding their kukris aren't exactly unheard of.

[Seward]

Grapple should be up their with trip as tier 0. It is punishing, is an attack action (so high level folks or even L1 monks with flurry+grapple can get more than one bite at the apple) and works on the same set of targets in Pathfinder as Trip does, except they get no bonuses or immunities from more legs or flying etc. In 3.x Trip is a pure ability check which is normally bad (more swingy, harder to get "good" at it) but did open up some high bab but smaller targets where a grapple would fail (think medium sized outsiders with high bab).

Grapple and trip are as good as maneuvers get in 3.x/Pathfinder. All others have to compare against that standard.

As a side note on the overrun discussion, if you didn't mind eating an AOO, it was easier to get a vertical high jump sufficient to clear many creatures than enough tumble to go through them, for many/most light infantry characters. You usually do need the space for a running jump though, plus time it so you're near the top of your leap as you pass over the obstacle. Bonus points if you come down on your target with leap attack feat engaged.

I don't think I ever saw overrun used, even if it was included as a free bonus to a tactical feat, class feature/archetype or magic item. Trample or nothing, for that kind of maneuver. People strong enough to be any good at it tended to just kill the thing blocking their way first, or jump over it if not in heavy armor or otherwise penalized for jump (like -4 for 20' base movement speed).

Bull Rush/Drag/Reposition were FAR more often used on your own party members who found themselves in a tight spot than on an actual enemy, in my play experience. Possibly because Dungeon Crasher wasn't a feature allowed in any 3.x I played and little in Pathfinder really did much interesting with those maneuvers. YMMV. Shock troopers would sometimes knock people into each other to try for the trip attempt, but it competed with just killing them, and that tended to take priority unless they were worried about enemies hitting back after they turned one dude into a fine mist.

[Bucky]

I've seen overrun used without any supporting feats, very rarely, as a specific counter to ready action intercept tactics from fodder mooks.

[Rynjin]

Grapple should be up their with trip as tier 0. It is punishing, is an attack action (so high level folks or even L1 monks with flurry+grapple can get more than one bite at the apple)

This is not true at all. Grapple is always a Standard unless you have Grab (which makes it a Free action tacked on to any attack), or some similar ability.

[Seward]

This is not true at all. Grapple is always a Standard unless you have Grab (which makes it a Free action tacked on to any attack), or some similar ability.

3.5 faq final edition



Can a monk make disarm, sunder, and trip attacks
during her flurry of blows? What about grapple checks?
What about bull rushes, overruns, or other special combat
maneuvers?
As long as every attack is made with one of the monk’s
special weapons (that is, weapons allowed as part of a flurry),
the monk can perform any special attack that takes the place of
a normal attack. She’s free to disarm, sunder, trip, and grapple
to her heart’s content.
She couldn’t bull rush or overrun (since those don’t use
special monk weapons), nor could she aid another (which
requires a standard action) or feint (which requires a move
action)


This spells out precisely which maneuvers are attacks in 3.5, and which are not and can't be mixed with a full attack.

Pathfinder 1e appears to have changed the way it works and specifies it as one of the standard action maneuvers.

So in pathfinder it's lower tier than in 3.5