Great Cleave

[Lord Iames Osari]

I've read that it's a bad feat... why?

[ClericofPhwarrr]

I've read that it's a bad feat... why?

Because in many campaigns, getting an opportunity to use it is a problem.

[Bookman]

My guess is it's the theory "How often to you drop more then 1 opponent to 0 HP in a round?" I would imagine not often

[Raistlin1040]

I use it. Not super often but enough to be a useful choice for a fighter.

[Quietus]

If you happen to be going into a very war-modelled campaign, it's great to have. And any DM worth his salt will, if you take it, occasionally throw huge masses of small enemies at you just so you can show off your Hulk Smashiness. But in general, if your fights rarely have more than four enemies, you aren't going to be using it very often at all.

[Thomas]

It's only really useful against opponents who have no more hit points than your minimum damage. That's a pretty rare kind of opponent.

Besides, all those opponents have to be within 5 feet of you, mostly.

[I_Got_This_Name]

Fights (especially melees) against huge swarms are a pain to DM and slow to play, and they're when Great Cleave comes in; otherwise it's occasionally, barely, useful.

[oriong]

And typically great cleave just means those fights go faster, if the opponent is weak enough that great cleave helps, then he's too weak to be a challenge without it.

[Thomas]

Encounters with 12+ opponents are a pretty bad idea anyway; they'll never be an appropriate challenge, basically.

[Quietus]

Perhaps they wont' be a challenge, but they may be thematically appropriate. If you're invading a place where the BBEG is, and he has a small army at his disposal, a melee buff that's sucked a potion of enlarge person can wade in and great cleave his way through a great many ranks. The intimidation factor of that goes through the roof. No, it won't ever make a huge difference - you'd win anyway. But it makes things go faster, FEELS great to do, and on the rare occasions that you do something awesome in a fight, it's great fun to tear down three or four people in a row.

[Seatbelt]

Yeah what they said. Cleve, however, is totally worth it. Free extra attack after I drop a guy? Sure. Why not.

[Emperor Tippy]

Great Cleave is great in certain situations but not really worth a feat unless you are a fighter (you get enough extra in the first place).

A table top group I was playing with once had had a fighter (level 20) manage to kill an entire fielded army on his own in 1 round. We were playing that a 1 is equal to -10 and a 20 is equal to +30. It was an army of level 1 warriors. 5,000 of them.

Needless to say, we won that war. The other 4 armies surrendered on the spot.

[oriong]

...how did that happen, legally speaking? I mean, I'm fairly sure you didn't make 5,000 rolls and I know there's no way he would have suceeded at every one of them.

EDIT: not to mention that those 5,000 enemies could not have fit inside the character's threatened area. Even with a reach weapon and Supreme Cleave.

[Thomas]

Er, how can you reach them? You can kill, at most, 9 people in a round if you have 5-ft. reach, or 24 if you have 10-ft. reach.

That's a pretty pathetic army, anyway. No officers, nothing?

Edit:

...how did that happen, legally speaking? I mean, I'm fairly sure you didn't make 5,000 rolls and I know there's no way he would have suceeded at every one of them.

I think that's where the 1 = -10 comes in; if it's not an automatic failure, and you'd still hit them at attack bonus -10...

Still, the reach issue makes the whole situation pretty ridiculous.

[Emperor Tippy]

I forgot that we had house ruled Great Cleave to "You can take a single 5 foot step after killing a target". So you kill guy number 1 and step into his square and kill the guy behind him (and so on until all of them are dead).

Stupid me for forgetting to post that (I forgot that we had housruled it and that wasn't how the feat is supposed to work).

[oriong]

That strikes me as a little...weird to be honest. That means the guy probably moved several times his actual speed while still slaughtering people, all done without even suffering attacks of opportunity.

[The_Snark]

It does seem a little weird. But then, the wizard's solution would have to cause large numbers of them to die of fright, all at once, which seems equally weird to me.

Stop the fighter/wizard double standard!

[Emperor Tippy]

Yeah. It does. And you can cross the world in 6 seconds if you have the horses lined up correctly. Or accelerate a quarterstaff to the speed of light with enough commoners. Or Punch a tree and have a pile of quarter staffs, or better yet you punch a castles drawbridge. Or speak the complete works of shakesphere as a free action if you have them memorized.

[Quietus]

Yeah - besides, there's Supreme Cleave, or whatever they call it, that gives you the ability to make a single 5-foot step between Cleave attempts, but still limits you to a single 5-foot step per turn.

Assuming you were using an oversized Spiked Chain, after drinking a potion of Enlarge Person, with Great Cleave, you would have a 20-foot reach. This means you can kill 80 people in a single turn, assuming you hit all of them. If you include a single five-foot step, that's 95 if you step diagonally. Still frightening, but not .... well, not what you described.

[TheOOB]

Any time your facing enough weak foes where this feat would be useful they a)probally are so weak that they can't do enough damage to make you need to kill them all fast and b) the wizard can probally kill them all with a single spell slot (fireball anyone).

[Thomas]

I forgot that we had house ruled Great Cleave to "You can take a single 5 foot step after killing a target". So you kill guy number 1 and step into his square and kill the guy behind him (and so on until all of them are dead).

Stupid me for forgetting to post that (I forgot that we had housruled it and that wasn't how the feat is supposed to work).

Well, your story illustrates perfectly well why that's a stupid houserule.

Allowing ONE 5-foot step at SOME point between attacks during a Great Cleave is reasonable (it was a class feature of some prestige class somewhere), but that's it.


I don't have anything against characters who can kill an army, but doing it in 6 seconds with a feat you can get at a very low level is just too much.

[Behold_the_Void]

Armies should never be all level 1 warrior mooks anyway. Heroes of Battle give great examples of what a powerful high fantasy army looks like, and they can be quite frightening.

[Thomas]

Not frightening, exactly, but yeah; they shouldn't be first-level mooks.

In fact, the basic footman could just as easily be 6th-level, because levels are nothing more than a game mechanic to represent the dramatic importance of particular NPCs, taking into account the power of the PCs. If a squad of regular footmen should in the DM's opinion be a challenge to a 10th-level party, then they can all be 5th- or 6th-level ...

Personally, I don't like presenting professional soldiers as useless mooks anyway. Warrior 1 is fine for village militia who have no combat experience whatsoever, but that's about.

[brian c]

I like great cleave at least as flavor; you could also be surrounded by many low-hp but dangerous enemies, if they have some sort of special ability. In that case it's to your advantage to kill as many of them as possible as quickly as possible.

Great cleave is also a prereq for frenzied berserker, and probably one or two other PrCs.

[Quietus]

Great cleave isn't a requirement for FB. Power Attack, Cleave, Destructive Rage, Intimidating Rage are.

[Ted_Stryker]

I'll second the "Area of Effect spell" point. A wiz/sorc can be at least as efficient in dealing with weenies as a Great Cleaver, if not more so.

[cupkeyk]

Great Cleave is good for mounted combatants, because you should be killing one opponent at a time with you spirited charge. Since you are dropping all your iterative attacks for greater power with a single strike then you might as well get great cleave and skewer as many of them as you can. With Cavalry Charger and Shock Trooper with the Mounted tree, you should be doing a hundred damage at average, by level ten, which should be the average hitpoints of what you will be facing. So great cleave as soon as you finish three feat trees.
LOLz

[Saph]

Great Cleave is nice to have at low levels, and I've seen it used effectively several times. When you're at 1st-4th level and going up against lots of level 1 warriors, it can be very very helpful. A 1st-level warrior is still a threat to low-level characters, especially if they're an orc or something with a +3 Strength modifier. Great Cleave lets you cut them down fast instead of taking down 1 per turn. Unfortunately, you can't tell in advance whether it's going to be useful, or a waste of a feat, which makes it a bit of a risky pick. I wouldn't take it myself, but the dwarf fighter in our party has made good use of it on three occasions.

I've also seen a PC group wiped out BY Great Cleave. An enemy Frenzied Berserker got into the middle of the PCs and . . . yeah, you can figure out the rest. Three out of five went down in one round, the remaining ones the round after.

- Saph

[Arceliar]

There are a number of things to consider with Great Cleave actually...

As Saph pointed out, a frenzied berserker can be deadly with it. This is especially true with weapons that deal high critical damage, such as a Scythe. If a FB uses a scythe while in frenzy and rage, and puts that extra +7 to attack rolls into power attack without touching anything else, they can deal +38-39 damage on each attack roll without sacrificing their chances of hitting. With a scythe and a x4 critical multiplier, that can be rather devastating. If the FB has improved critical, it's not too unlikely to get 2 or even 3 criticals in a lucky round. Against opponents slightly lower level this can be a great opportunity for using Great Cleave.

[oriong]

Actually it's really unlikely to get two criticals in a round, and practically impossible to get 3. I don't think even a 18-20 range base crit weapon like a scimitar or falchion will significantly modify the usefulness of Great Cleave.