Bear warriors natural attacks

[el minster]

How do natural attacks work, specifically bear warrior but also in general?

[Darg]

First of all natural attacks are simply attacks using dedicated body parts such as claws, bite from the mouth(s), wings, tail, etc. Many types work in pairs (2 front paws with claw = 2 claw attacks but 1 mouth = 1 bite attack). In general you have to choose between making attacks with a manufactured weapon or natural weapons. If you have multiple types you choose a primary and the rest are secondary. In the case of Bear Warrior, the Bear Form description gives you 2 primary claw attacks and 1 secondary bite attack. Primary has no attack penalty while secondary attacks incur a -5 penalty. Despite what bear form says you could choose to make the bite attack primary, but generally that would be a weaker option. Some one else might be able to explain it better than I did. I do know there are a couple item options available to provide enhancements to your natural attacks. Standard attack and full attack rules still apply.

[el minster]

but can I attack with unarmed strikes and natural weapons?

[Darg]

Unarmed strikes are natural weapons (your fists/hands). The improved unarmed strike feat lets you use them as a manufactured weapon which gives you iterative attacks based on BaB and makes the hits lethal. You can not however decide to combine or make extra attacks with unarmed strikes and claws at the same time. You choose to either make an unarmed strike or claw attack (dragon has a feat that combines this damage as one attack).

As far as I understand it, your primary attack would automatically be your manufactured weapon pair and secondary attacks are the left over. If you had hands and could make claw attacks with your hands you could choose to make an unarmed strike with iteratives and a single claw attack with dual wield penalties (two weapon fighting decreases the penalty but does not increase the number of attacks with natural weapons), plus your bite attack. Bear warrior polymorphs you into a bear which doesn't natural possess unarmed attacks so this doesn't really apply.

[el minster]

That's weird I heard spome people saying Fist of the Forest works well with Bear Warrior because you get extra attacks

[Darg]

An extra attack. Feral trance simply gives you a bite attack. You are still making your normal unarmed strikes. If you try to combine Bear Warrior with Fist of the forest the polymorphing takes away your class features which means Feral trance won't be available while a bear. If your DM updates the Bear warrior to 3.5 and makes the the transformation follow the wild shape rules then you could combine it and get an extra bite attack. Still, claw attacks aren't unarmed attacks so take that into account when applying bonuses from Fist of the Forest.

[Gruftzwerg]

but can I attack with unarmed strikes and natural weapons?

there are different options with different outcomes:

1A) Unarmed Strikes (US) can be done with other parts/limbs than your claw and bite is on. So we don't have a conflict here. You can use your US (incl. those from high BAB) as primary attack as regular and all you remaining Natural Attacks (NA) as secondary attack (-5 unless you have Multiattack feat which lessens the penalty for secondaries to -2).

1B) You could even go for primary claws and secondary everything else, but that isn't favorable most of the time. You would get the 2 claw attacks at max BAB, but would get -5 for US and no extra attacks from high BAB anymore.

2) Beast Strike Feat, lets you do Unarmed Strikes and add your claw dmg on top. You wont attack as much as with th other options but each attack will hit harder. You get you regular US attacks from high BAB (and that's it..^^).

[YellowJohn]

I statted up a couple of relevant high level characters recently: an Unarmed Striking Bear Warrior and a Wild Monk, and spent a lot of time reading up on exactly how unarmed strikes, natural attacks, and the various shapeshifting shenanigans worked and interacted. Some things have been said which are flat out not true, so I'm going to weigh in with a fairly comprehensive guide to how it all works.
If you think I've got something wrong, I am more than happy to be corrected - but please cite your references

As a Bear, you have three natural attacks: your claws and your bite.
The Claws (both of them) are the primary, and the Bite is a secondary attack. As far as I am aware, there is no rule that would allow you to change this except perhaps a spell of some kind. If you only attack with your natural weapons, your claws (primary) will use your full BAB, and your bite (secondary) suffers a -5 to hit penalty and gets only half your strength bonus to damage. You do not get any extra attacks for a high Base Attack Bonus like you would if you were wielding a sword.

Unarmed strikes lie in a weird middle ground between Natural and Manufactured weapons, and mostly use the rules for the latter. You can make an unarmed strike with any part of your body, not just your fists (PHB 121, listed under Strike: Unarmed rather than Unarmed Strike for no very good reason), so you can happily add Unarmed Strikes to the attack routine of your bear form, and it is quite reasonable that you can also make your claw attacks*. If you add Unarmed Strikes to your attack routine, your Claw Attacks are downgraded to secondary natural attacks and thus take the -5 penalty to hit and apply only half strength to damage.
You do not suffer two weapon fighting penalties for this.
You can do this even if you don't have the Improved Unarmed Strike feat - but if you Don't have the feat you will only deal subdual damage and you will provoke an attack of opportunity for every swing you make so it is not advisable...

Let's take a worked example: Barbarian 7/Bear Warrior 5 (Base Attack Bonus +12) with Improved Unarmed Strike.
When in a Bear Rage, his Full Attack routine could look like this:
Unarmed Strike +12/Unarmed Strike +7/Unarmed Strike +2/Claw +7/Claw +7/Bite +7

Fist of The Forest (CC) works well by making your Unarmed Strikes have decent base damage (d10 instead of d3 - going up to 2d8 if your bear form is Large). Plus, Con to AC is never going to be bad for a bear.
If you plan to go down the Unarmed Striking Bear Rage road, consider the City Brawler Barbarian variant from Dragon 349 - you get Two-Weapon Fighting while unarmed in exchange for your Medium Armour and Shield proficiencies.
A three-level dip into Warshaper is also worth a look.

Changing into a bear doesn't remove any of your class features. Effectively, you become a bear with whatever class levels you had before; so if our sample character had Fist of the Forest levels they could Feral Trance in Bear Form just fine. Do be aware, though, that the loss of some racial abilities (like the Human bonus feat) may have far reaching implications. As an aside, Bear Warrior was updated to 3.5 in Complete Warrior, but the original OA version was better.

If you are going to be playing something like a Bear Warrior, it is worth reading up on exactly what your shape-changing ability does and does not give you. I did this by starting with the text for Alter Self and then making all the changes listed in the Polymorph spell (which functions like Alter Self, Except that...), and then making the changes listed under the Bear Warrior ability in a similar way. Shape Changing effects can be complicated.

One important take-home is that Polymorphing doesn't remove your equipment if your new form could wear it - so you *should* keep all your magical gear except weapons and armour.

Have fun



*If you take the Beast Strike feat mentioned below, then you *are* making unarmed strikes with your paws, and your unarmed strikes will need to replace one claw attack. Fighting with Unarmed Strike & Claw *still* doesn't incur two weapon fighting penalties. Natural Weapons are weird.

[Hiro Quester]

YellowJohn has it right. I played a wildshaping Druid with a one level monk dip, in our previous campaign. I did a lot of research on how this works.

With UAS feat you make iterative strikes with elbows, knees, head butte, etc. then all your natural weapons (claw, claw,bite) at -5 (or -2 with multi attack feat).

UAS with natural weapons is a great way to become a melee monster.

There’s a description of the way UAS feat and natural attacks work together in the Rules of the Game article on UAS’s part 3

Note that spells like magic fang are your friend here, enhancing all your natural weapons and UASs. Also an amulet of mighty fists does the same. It’s expensive, but worth it when it enhances all of your many attacks.

[Darg]

Thanks for pointing out there is an updated version, I'm not familiar with bear warrior so I used the first google entry. Although reading from complete warrior seems to have buffed bear warrior. In OA you limited to transforming to a number of times per day 1/2/3. In CW you are only limited by the number of rages and in addition can transform without duration up to 3 times per day. They might have intended the duration be equal to the polymorph spell, but an ability is not a spell. This leads to the question of dismissing supernatural abilities.

[el minster]

Thanks YellowJohn you completely cleared it up for me

[liquidformat]

1B) You could even go for primary claws and secondary everything else, but that isn't favorable most of the time. You would get the 2 claw attacks at max BAB, but would get -5 for US and no extra attacks from high BAB anymore.

This is just flat out wrong see natural weapons and Manufactured Weapons entry right above it. You can't arbitrarily choose to use a manufactured weapon (which unarmed strike counts as) as a secondary weapon. The only situation where a manufactured weapon can be used as a secondary attack is if you are a monster that has that in their monster entry besides that your manufactured weapon must be your primary attack. Heck according to the natural weapon rules I think it is reasonable to say as long as you are wielding a manufactured weapon all your natural weapons are secondary even if you don't attack with your manufactured weapon. Which also means taking the improved unarmed strike feat automatically makes all your other natural weapons secondary.

Interestingly even when you are wielding a manufactured weapon your primary natural weapon should still use your full strength on damage assuming your manufactured weapon doesn't replace your natural weapon and the monster entry doesn't explicitly say otherwise.

[Darrin]

How do natural attacks work, specifically bear warrior but also in general?

Hmm. Apparently Keld's old "Natural Weapons and You: a Miniguide" has been eaten by langoliers. However, here's a Wayback URL for it.

Briefly:

1) Natural weapons can only attack once per turn. This is different from manufactured weapons, which get "iterative attacks" based on your BAB (one attack per +5 BAB).

2) There are two flavors of natural weapons: primary and secondary. A primary natural weapon is what the creature normally attacks with when it just gets a standard action, usually it's strongest. Primary weapon gets full BAB and full Str bonus. Sometimes the primary gets x1.5 Str bonus (particularly if it's a bite), but the stat blocks are very inconsistent about this.

3) Secondary natural weapons are any natural weapons that aren't a primary. When a creature uses a full attack, all it's natural weapons (that aren't currently occupied) can attack once, but all the secondary attacks have a -5 attack penalty and get x0.5 Str bonus on damage.

4) Sometimes a primary natural weapon is "paired", usually claws. This allows them to full attack with full BAB and full x1.0 Str bonus. This is the case with bears. (Whether or not a creature gets a "paired" primary attack is up to the designer.)

If you have access to Brown Bear or Dire Bear forms, then it gets a little more complicated with Improved Grab. Whenever you hit with a claw attack, you can make a grapple check as a free action. If the grapple check is successful, then... the grapple rules are infamously confusing, but I think you can continue to make "attacks" as grapple checks if you have any remaining natural weapons that haven't attacked yet.

[el minster]

I'm still not getting it can somone just show me what a full attack as a10 level bear warrior with 3 levels in fist of the forest looks like please?

[Darg]

Changing into a bear doesn't remove any of your class features.

WotC is stupid: http://archive.wizards.com/default.a...060501a&page=5

Polymorph the spell doesn't follow the rules for Polymorph. Baleful polymorph follows the the rules and so do other "beneficial" abilities. I think WotC made the new abilities after the rules came out simply as a joke: "haha, you thought that changing into that monster would actually provide you some actual benefit."

Either way, despite my jealousy, Bear Form does indeed work like the spell and not the subschool. Feral trance is indeed usable in a rage, but up to the DM for Frenzy if you go that route.

[YellowJohn]

I'm still not getting it can somone just show me what a full attack as a10 level bear warrior with 3 levels in fist of the forest looks like please?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by a 10 Level Bear warrior. I will assume your build is for a 10th level character rather than a character with 10 levels of Bear Warrior, which means Barbarian 4/Fist of the Forest 3/Bear Warrior 3.
This gives you a Base Attack Bonus of +10, and Black Bear form which means you are Medium sized in a bear rage.

Your Primary Weapon is your Unarmed Strike, your natural weapons (claws and bite) are all secondary attacks.

You get Five attacks on a Full Attack:
Unarmed Strike +10/Unarmed Strike +5/Claw +5/Claw +5/Bite +5
Your unarmed strikes deal d10 + Str
Your claws deal d4 + 0.5*Str
Your Bite deals d6 + 0.5* Str

Hope that helps

========

Thanks for pointing out there is an updated version, I'm not familiar with bear warrior so I used the first google entry. Although reading from complete warrior seems to have buffed bear warrior. In OA you limited to transforming to a number of times per day 1/2/3. In CW you are only limited by the number of rages and in addition can transform without duration up to 3 times per day. They might have intended the duration be equal to the polymorph spell, but an ability is not a spell. This leads to the question of dismissing supernatural abilities.

I will admit I didn't read into the OA Bear Warrior in depth since I knew there was an updated version - I just saw the table and noticed you got your Bear Forms earlier, and an extra rage.
The text in Complete Adventurer is a mess though - the editors seem to have mangled the copy paste from OA. The errata clears it up:

Whenever a bear warrior enters a rage or frenzy, he can choose to assume bear form (similar to the polymorph spell). He must remain in bear form until the end of his rage or frenzy. When his rage or frenzy ends, the bear warrior immediately returns to his own form. The number of times a bear warrior can assume bear form is the number of times per day he enters a rage or frenzy. Ignore the conflicting limitations specified in the third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of the bear form description.

[el minster]

So you just get natural attacks in addition to your unarmed attacks

[Darg]

Yes. The transformation is based on the polymorph spell and not the sub school rules. You don't replace your stat block and it says you gain the natural attacks. Obviously you can't wield a weapon in that form unless you use a specialized weapon like bear barding with armor spikes or something like that. This means you keep your unarmed attacks.

[el minster]

I'm gonna make a GREAT build with this!