Combat Archetypes

[Ponce]

It is fairly common knowledge that Sword and Board characters, along with dual wielders (barring those with extra damage die), tend to pale in comparison to Two-Handed fighters in 3.5e. The leading cause of this being, of course, the double return to two-handed fighting found in the fundamental Power Attack feat. My question is, how would you go about rectifying this?

The first and most obvious answer is to drop the double return on power attack, returning the feat to the 3.0 version.

What else could be done? Do you already have a house rule for this? What about a double return to AC with combat expertise if you wear a shield?

[Necromas]

There are a few ways you can look at it....

Like you said, removing the double return from power attack is the most obvious way to nerf two handed weapons.

A good way to buff two weapon fighting is a feat to allow dex to damage instead of strength, since the two weapon fighting feats require a very high dex score to get the later ones, which pretty much gimps the idea of a strength based dual wielder who isn't a ranger. There are various existing ways of achieving this but I would think it perfectly fair to allow it in a feat one could access without having to mess with their build, especially since two weapon fighters are feat starved already. As it stands now, most characters have to dip to get this.

Another idea for buffing two weapon fighting is to modify the feats so you don't need such a high dexterity score, and/or compressing TWF/ITWF/GTWF into a single feat.

To buff sword and board, various abilities that require a shield to function work, as would simply changing combat expertise. I'm sure there are a good deal of feats and prestige classes that have shield based abilities already, but one idea would be a feat that allows a shield user to intercept enemy attacks somehow to protect an ally, so they can protect the squishy casters from enemies smart enough to realize that a character who sacrifices offense for defense just makes him a low priority target.

[Baron Corm]

See Power Attacks in my signature for my attempt. It gives different types of Power Attack feats which double damage for each fighting style. Optional Leap Attacks are in there as well.

[Infinity_Biscuit]

My preferred idea to help strengthen shield users is to simply double the bonus provided by shields. You can keep it a flat bonus for simplicity's sake, or make it so half of the shield bonus goes away when the shield bearer is denied DEX bonus and/or is flanked.

A tower shield providing marginally less protection than a chain shirt makes little sense to me anyway, so this not only helps the balance, but also the realism.

Granted, this kind of bonus doesn't scale quite as well as the Power Attack family, but I think it's a start.

[Ponce]

Another idea for buffing two weapon fighting is to modify the feats so you don't need such a high dexterity score, and/or compressing TWF/ITWF/GTWF into a single feat.

How would you hammer it out? Dex 13?


Granted, this kind of bonus doesn't scale quite as well as the Power Attack family, but I think it's a start.

You aren't in favour of improved Combat Expertise? It also struck me to remove the seemingly arbitrary 5-point cap placed on CE when Power Attack does not suffer from a similar limitation.