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gnomas
2008-05-18, 02:28 PM
so I recently got Tome of battle (along with some other stuff thanks to about six free giftcards, yay!) and i am pretty pleased. enough about that, I need help! the new maneuver system seems similar to spells and with that comes the problem of which ones to choose. I could go with the desert wind fire blasty damage ones, but like being a blaster wizard I feel like I would be missing out on something better. So what are some good/bad maneuvers? how much do my choices really matter anyway?

Pyroconstruct
2008-05-18, 02:35 PM
Stay far away from the blasty Desert Wind manuevers. Desert Wind isn't a bad school, but the blast manuevers are bad.

Manuevers matter a lot, but only in that you can fill your readied list with good stuff. Check out Tome of Battle for Dummies on the CharOp board: http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=956362

MorkaisChosen
2008-05-18, 02:57 PM
I like Diamond Mind. The 3rd-level strike "Insightful Strike" is particularly amusing- you could have a Tiny character with a dagger dealing 1d20+10 damage quite easily at 5th level...

Some other interesting choices are the combination of Assassin's Stance (or other Sneak Attack/Sudden Strike) with the various strikes that make the enemy flat-footed (Sapphire Nightmare Blade, Swooping Dragon, might be some others).

Eldariel
2008-05-18, 03:25 PM
All have their sides. The good thing about Tome of Battle is that you can't really make a sucky character since there're no horrible maneuvers. Most of them are at least fair. Just take a good mix of boosts, counters and strikes (if you plan on using strikes, that is) and you'll be fine.

I personally like Iron Heart and Diamond Mind-schools; Iron Heart is an excellent defensive school while Diamond Mind has few nice counters (Rapid Counter, Diamond Defense, etc.) and a ton of good offensive potential (Time Stands Still, Insightful Strike, Avalanche of Blades, etc.) along with two of my favourite stances; Hearing the Air and Stance of Alacrity.

All of them have their sides though; Shadow Hand-focused swordsage can be a very believable Rogue, while Setting Sun makes for what Monk should've been. Desert Wind makes you basically an evoker (although not as sucky as it can be used to boost all your attacks; also Hopliteish maneuver attacking opponent, tossing a damage spell the turn before reaching melee range and then beating up), while White Raven is an extremely handy Commander school. Tiger Claw is great for TWFer and Devoted Spirit is very much a healer school with a few kickass stances (Auras, Thicket of Blades, Immortal Fortitude).

RTGoodman
2008-05-18, 03:31 PM
Devoted Spirit is very much a healer school with a few kickass stances (Auras, Thicket of Blades, Immortal Fortitude).

Devoted Spirit has some pretty good strikes, too. I mean, +8d8 damage from Divine Surge is pretty good at ~6th level. I almost one-shotted a Hydra with it (and good rolls on damage).


Really, like others have said, you can't really screw up a martial adept too much. My first whack at ToB was just a generic Crusader (a mix of White Raven, Stone Dragon, and Devoted Spirit stuff) and I ended up being one of the stronger party members.

Arbitrarity
2008-05-18, 03:36 PM
Yeah, I like divine surge. It's an excellent damage dealing manuver, even if I can't use it that often.

Oh, and I apparently misread crusader recovery, according to the wizards boards. I thought you had to USE all the readied manuvers before you could recover them. Huh.

MorkaisChosen
2008-05-18, 03:41 PM
Don't tell him about using that feat that lets you use a Cure Light Wounds spell to turn all rolls of a 1 into a 2 on damage combined with Aura of Chaos, which allows you to roll and extra die for damage whenever you roll maximum, and a 1d2 damage weapon.

Eldariel
2008-05-18, 04:04 PM
Don't tell him about using that feat that lets you use a Cure Light Wounds spell to turn all rolls of a 1 into a 2 on damage combined with Aura of Chaos, which allows you to roll and extra die for damage whenever you roll maximum, and a 1d2 damage weapon.

I think it's actually necessary to tell, to prevent abuse. So here; Complete Champion has this feat called "Imbued Healing". Cast it and confer the "Luck"-ability of treating all 1s as 2s on dice rolls. Aura of Chaos lets you reroll damage on each die rolling maximum. Therefore, if you have a weapon with 1d2 damage, attacking opponent and dealing damage means that all your 1s will be treated as 2s, which will be rerolled, meaning you'll get infinite damage dice.

That's not really the only way to interpret it though; Aura of Chaos can be interpretted to only work for the number you rolled instead of the result you got, which would mean the combo wouldn't work. This is the most sensible way to read it as no DM is ever going to allow infinite damage anyways. So don't get scared, it's just a stupid random combo that nobody thought of when making the books. Basically, this doesn't make Tome of Battle broken, it just gives munchkins one more way to try to break games (and fail at it).

gnomas
2008-05-18, 04:56 PM
that seems pretty cheesy. and seeing as how im usualy the DM, im not going to do anything I wouldn't allow.

thanks for all the help so far guys