Nova
You guys know the Pathfinder feat cleave? I’ve seen some pretty convincing arguments about it being the archetypal “trap feat.” First of all it’s super conditional. Whole sessions will go by where the enemies fail to line up like dominoes, meaning your feat is effectively useless. In exchange for this occasional benefit you’re giving up access to more consistent feats that will affect every combat (weapon focus and dodge spring to mind). Insult to injury, you wind up taking a penalty to your armor class when you cleave. I mean, why would any sane swordsman take this thing? And let’s not even get started on its big brother, the even-more-situational great cleave.
Here’s the thing though. People don’t take these feats because of what they do in reality. They take them for the same reason they buy lottery tickets. If you’ve got cleave written down on your character sheet you’re hoping for the stars to align, for the enemy goblins to advance in perfect formation, and for their heads to all fall off simultaneously in a single badass Conan-inspired swipe.
People take these abilities because they’re exciting. It’s the same reason players like to smite evil with a paladin or (as per our catfolk Magus) spellstrike with shocking grasp. Putting up those big numbers is fun, even if it makes your probability curve a little spiky. After all, no one remembers that one time you did a reasonable amount of damage to the level-appropriate monster. They remember the time you threw rocks, went nova, and unloaded a massive crit against the BBEG.
That brings us to the question of the day. When you’re building your characters, how much consistency are you willing to give up for the chance at a big, flashy hit? Would you rather build for all-around effectiveness, or for occasional exciting moments of awesomeness? Let’s hear it in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
I hate being useless, I don’t like being around useless characters in combat either. I prefer to make well thought out characters with consistent performance. Sure the occasional big strike is nice, but nothing EVER goes as planned. Like with what you say with cleave, the same apples to combat reflexes; It’s almost never used, unless you have ways to force attack of opportunities.
On the subject of Cleave… Honestly, it should be reworked in a way to give martials more area damage. Say, a -2 to attack to be able to inflict a glancing blow for minimum damage against the target or targets next to the enemy in the middle. Improving upon that, Great Cleave deals up to half your maximum damage to the adjacant targets. If there were a third tier to Cleave, I would say you deal full damage to the adjacant targets.
But, alas, the poor martial remains with a crappy area control entirely reliant on the things around them having low enough health to drop in one swing like it’s lv1-3 all over again, fighting rats and skeletons.
Consistency can be achieved fairly easy with combat reflexes. All you need is a Martial who wields a reach weapon, a few trip feats, and a size increase. Now you threaten a massive area, and any AoOs let you trip enemies from a range, and with greater trip those AoOs provoke even more AoOs.
It’s all about that mithral breastplate. Get out of range with Acrobatics, lay down your choice of standard action, and then get ready to reengage with another round of AoOs.
Interesting ideas for the still-hypothetical Pathfinder 2e, but cleave is one of those long-standing feats that’s been around since the CRB. The solution Paizo actually took is interesting to me. A little further down the page Will mentioned Goblin Cleave and Orc Hewer. There’s also the cleaving finish line, both of which transform cleave from a “bad feat” into a necessary prerequisite for a specific kind of build.
5e just makes it a non-descript bonus action attack with the Great Weapon Master feat. It’s nice because you can use it to cleave narratively, or you can just move and attack again. It’s much less situational that way.
I love the GWM feat, but that idea had never come to mind. I’d been disappointed in the lack of a good way to cleave in 5e, and now your idea completely makes sense to me. It’s the simplest re-flavoring, without losing anything. Thanks for the idea!
As will likely come as no surprise to you, I prefer consistently useful over super-situational stuff. It’s the same issue as going super combat focus with nothing into skills and interaction: yeah, you’re awesome when you’re doing what you invested in, but when you’re not you suck. Going super situation makes it even worse, since now there are even fewer times when you can meaningfully contribute.
As for memorability, for me a lot of that can be attributed into clever play and how your actions are described. After all, if the dice align and you cleave two enemy gnolls and it’s just described as “You cleave two enemy gnolls for 10 and 12 damage,” it’s not memorable even though it’s that moment you specifically took the feat and waited for. A DM who is liberal with “How would you like to kill him?” helps a lot.
As an example, one time I was running a game of Mutants and Masterminds where my players fighting Mongo the chainsaw-chuck wielding super-ninja* on their space pirate ship. The fight ended with the speedster landing a generic attack on Mongo, but thanks to player creativity in how she killed him, instead of just punching Mongo out, she grabbed a length of rope, wrapped it around Mongo’s neck, and used her momentum to hurl him over the aft into the engine exhaust. Mechanically the function was the same, but now we get a very memorable moment without having to burn resources on traps like Cleave.
The one exception is when you get flexibility in gaining those very niche features. Niche feats like Catch Off Guard, Cleave, or Jawbreaker becomes a whole lot more awesome for the Brawler, who’s martial flexibility lets her gain the feat specifically when she needs it/it would be the most awesome, and not have to worry nearly as much about the opportunity cost of choosing cleave instead of something else. M&M has this built into the system, where you can use extra effort to do that alternate effect that’s too niche to spend character points on but would be really cool and awesome to do right now. Without innate flexibility like that though, I usually just ignore the super niche picks.
*Good DMs are inspired, great DMs steal. And Dr. McNinja has so, so much to steal for Mutants and Masterminds
Why you cheeky… Damn you for using my own arguments against me! 😛
I guess I’d argue that it’s more of a quality vs. quantity situation here, with highly specific interactions having a bigger effect on the game when they come up. For me, it comes down to a question of degree. My own taste runs towards a dislike of save or suck type spells. I never take phantasmal killer, for example, because I’m either wasting my turn or ending the encounter in anticlimax. I’m a lot more likely to go for Profession (crit-fisherman) though, because I’m contributing to the group’s success even when the big flashy crit fails to materialize. Does that make sense?
Personally, I think the best way to make the “awesome when it happens, if happens” work is to make sure the condition happens quite often. Profession (crit-fisherman) become a lot less niche when you’ve got a half-elf barbarian (bear totem)/fighter (champion) with elven accuracy and great weapon master to reliably ensure those crits are happening while still not being pigeonholed to only critting. Similarly, save-or-lose spells become a lot better when you either have a way to make sure they lose (e.g. Diviner’s portent) or can make sure the save is made several times (e.g. eye-bite, hypnotic pattern on a horde).
There is no reason why a big flashy hit can’t be decisive in combat, just as there is no reason why moderately situational abilities can’t be useful in combat. You just have to plan around them. A while back you mentioned Profession (crit-fisherman) and that is pretty much a good example of what I’m talking about. Critical hits should by all means be situational things that are just a flashy bonus for getting lucky, but people focus on them like they’re a consistent thing – they build their entire character’s combat around them. I’m not say one should polymorph the enemy into an ogre for that +5 ogrebane, but making situational abilities more effective by setting up beneficial situations are a great method of being both flashy and somewhat consistent.
As for me I like to be on both ends of the spectrum: have a big flashy attack and something that can be used at any time. Each wizard I take Maximize Spell on, I grab a Fiery Burst or some other reserve feat just so I’m never really left unarmed (or in this case un-magiced).
There’s a reason today’s comic features a magus with an 18-20 x 2 rapier. Profession (crit-fisherman) is on point. If we’re looking to build the most effective possible character, I tend to shy away from characters that bring damage spikes to the table. My big optimization problem with critical builds is that a lot of the damage tends to get wasted. For example, critting a guy for 72 damage when he’s only got 12 hit point left is a big waste of resources. That’s not the point though. When I make a crit build it’s because I want to point at the die with one hand, pump the other in the air, and shout BOOYAH! It may not be the world’s most perfect strategy, but goddamn if it isn’t fun.
Have you tried Laying Waste crit generator on d20pfsrd? Makes some of those crits even more fun. We started rerolling the insta-kills though…
I’ve got a buddy that likes critical charts. Thanks for the link! I think he’s gonna dig this.
Come level 17 for Sorcerers and you gain the coveted 9th level spell slot. You can get Wish and be able to replicate any 8th level spell of your choice or have that one moment where all seems lost and you (hopefully) change the situation completely around.
Or you can get Meteor Swarm and have a spell that can wreck armies and cities by dropping 4 goddamn meteors wherever you want in a mile range that you can see.
Yeah, it’s just a little bit difficult.
Somewhere out in Handbook-World, I’m convinced that Sorcerer is in some arcane laboratory agonizing over this decision.
Wish seems the better choice, particularly because Sorcerers can only reduce, not eliminate, friendly fire damage with Careful Spell. If you need to wipe out an army, you can use Wish to cast Earthquake or Tsunami, both of which lack Meteor Swarm’s raw damage, but would both easily wipe out an oncoming massive of comparatively low-level soldiers. Firestorm, Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere, and Destructive Wave also have some merit in that department.
Sorcerers get 9th level spells at 18th level due to being spontaneous casters with delayed spell progression.
Not in 5e.
I know it’s a couple more feats in, but a Dwarf (or adopted Human) can get Goblin Cleaver and then Orc Hewer which let you cleave anyone you threaten regardless of position as long as (with Goblin Cleaver) they are smaller than you, and then (with Orc Hewer) they are the same size. I once built a Brawler Dwarf with Longarm Bracers for this, so he went full One Piece noodle arms. Add onto that some Fluid Form, via a helpful caster and then go to town.
For me it varies which between characters. I had my noodle arm dwarf who hits all the things (I hope) on the one hand, and then on the other I have my Hedgewitch from Spheres of Power who can pull several different Combat Feats or Sphere Talents out of thin air. Then there is my Kobold Slayer who started out as musket vital strike every round, and now can bounce shots off walls to get around cover, deny armor bonus, treat as flat footed for sneak attacks, or still just vital strike the things. He also has better CMB now that he took Agile Maneuvers.
BRB. Making my own Stretch Dwarfstrong PC.
LMAO!
My GM once made (I think just in theory) a Dwarf Bloodrager who did that, with the Aberrant Bloodline, Long Arms, a reach weapon and some other things to get an effective reach of 35 feet with a bunch of of AOOs. In his words, his strategy would be to stand in the middle of the room and
“*poke* *poke* *poke*”
That with greater invisibility would be madness. Especially if activated before you got in the room. “WHERE ARE THEY!?” “Ah! One just hit me too!” Might make a good boss fight. ;}
I think by the level the whole build came together, anyone worth their salt would have access to See Invisibility. Nevertheless, it’s a funny idea for a fight.
Player 1: “What do we do?”
Player 2: “Everyone! Total defense and five foot steps! Let’s find him!”
Player 3: “Screw that! Fireball! Fireball! FIREBAAAAALL!!!”
Boss/DM: “(Thank you, Ring of Energy Resistance.)”
Useful bonuses are…useful, but they’re not any fun. A slight mechanical advantage is so boring, though. I’d rather take a feat like Cleave that gives me a new option in combat to do something more interesting than “I do the same thing I did before, but now my number is one higher.”
It’s all about how you want to play the game, you know? We’ve all got different levels of optimization and flavor battling it out for supremacy, both in our minds and on our character sheets. The common knowledge is that +1 to hit and damage is always the correct choice, but all those wonderful-weird abilities like limning and glamered are so charmingly novel! I never have an easy time figuring it out.
The idea that Cleave and Great Cleave are weak is highly amusing to me, as most of my 3.5 experience comes from Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, where those feats are absolutely amazing. I had one build that was Rogue/Frenzied Berserker for incredible Great Cleaves, 2 free Sneak Attacks against all enemies within range as long as I keep killing. Likewise, a Weapon Master with like 10-20 crit range for 3x damage and a ridiculous DC save or die can Cleave all day long.
Anyway, I like characters that will have a useful and reliable shtick, but I always value abilities over numerical increases. That’s why I love 5e’s martial feats, they always fundamentally change the way you play your character. Many of my characters never increase their ability scores over their entire careers. The exception is with spellcasters; they have some good feats, but since they already come with a wide variety of features you can activate in the form of spells, it is fairly worthwhile to invest it making sure those spells succeed to their fullest potential.
In short, martial get feats and then ASIs, casters get ASIs and then feats.
I think that 5e did some absolutely amazing things with their feat design. Every single one of them feels like a viable choice, and nothing feels like a “feat tax.” Of course, you get far fewer of the silly things, and in the same way that the common wisdom holds that enhancement bonuses are better than more flavorful abilities on weapons, my impression is that the optimization folks seems convinced ASI is the way to “build correctly.”
I am a proud member of the optimization folks, and generally speaking my guideline is also the method of optimization.
Casters need ASIs immediately, as everything they do relies on their spellcasting ability. Spellcasting feats are for niche builds and casters who are already good on their casting score and Dex, Con, or both. More often I see those feats used on martials and gish types than pure casters.
Meanwhile, a martial has to choose between +1 accuracy and damage with Strength, or doing +10 damage and scoring extra attacks with Great Weapon Master, or getting advantage with Shield Master. If they want to tank, they’ll also strongly consider taking Sentinel, Polearm Master, or both. Ranged weapon users will usually opt for Sharpshooter, Crossbow Expert, or both before going with ASIs, because their defense is in not being attacked and their accuracy is already high thanks to the Ranged fighting style. Dex melee is the most typical exception, as both offense and defense is tied to Dexterity for them, and there are fewer worthwhile feats available to them. Still, they might want to opt for the safety of Mobile or the myriad benefits of Magic Initiate while they make their way to 20 Dex.
I think a big part of why casters take fewer early feats is that they have many fewer options in terms of useful feats. GWM and SS have no magical equivalent for example.
Well there’s some interesting design space. Assuming that the much-more-experienced-at-5e-than-me MSK is correct (a pretty safe assumption), then what kind of feat would it take to make casters consider picking up an early feat rather than an ASI?
It may seem like there are no trap feats in 5e, but I can assure you that that is not the case. I consider myself something of a grappling connoisseur, and the grappler feat in particular stands out as worthless in 5e, especially compared to tavern brawler and shield master, which are both much better for grapple builds IMO.
The only feat that I can see taking early in the game as a caster (prior to upping my casting stat) is Resilient(constitution) or war caster, to help with those concentration saving throws.
Grappler needs to be fixed. It was balanced with the playtest rules, but simply chopping off the third bullet point was not a good fix.
A simple solution would be to make it a “half feat”, giving it +1 to Strength on top of the other benefits.
Another might be to allow you to grapple creatures two sizes larger than you instead of 1, or perhaps reducing/eliminating the movement speed penalty while grappling.
I wasn’t around for playtesting. What was the third bullet?
In the playtest, creatures one size larger than you automatically succeeded their grapple escape check. Grappler removed that, so it made you much more capable of grappling larger creatures. For a long time, many folks assumed they would eventually change it to allow you to to grapple an extra size class up, but they just dropped the bullet instead.
Honestly imo it sounds like you have no idea what you’re talking about with Cleave. The people that build into cleave generally do crazy amounts of damage in a single hit and melt targets crazy quick. Unless most of your fights have zero mooks you’ll see a lot of use out of Cleave.
Here’s the thread that got me thinking about the subject:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/1ejbvs/why_cleave_sucks/
I’ve personally seen a two-handed fighter train out of cleave after realizing its limitations.
I tend not to mind the feat, especially since cleaving finish and orc hewer exist. Still, a lot of folks will points towards it as the poster boy for “trap feats.” YMMV. *shrug*
To me at least there are two types of front line fighters, the sweepers and the bruisers.
Sweepers are designed for trash mobs, they take out the small minion like enemies and have enough mobility to constantly keep them on their toes at all times. Consider Unchained Monks with the Flying Kick style strike or thrown weapon rogues with the quick draw.
On the other hand Bruisers are all about single target damage, only bosses should require more than one full attack from them, but they lack the ability to reasonable target more than one person. Consider two-weapon fighting rogues and titan mauler fighters.
Right on. That’s a neat paradigm to noodle with. Here’s one of my favorites:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2p576?On-building-a-balanced-group-working-out-just
Question though: You say that sweepers are a type of “front line fighter,” but then you mention rogues as an example. I don’t usually associate rogues with the front line. Would it be accurate to say that “sweepers” is synonymous with “skirmishers?”
That’s probably a better term, “Sweeper” has other gaming associations that make the term a bit confusing.
Why choose between consistency and spectacularity when your spell book can offer you both!
Months ago, I’m sure I wrote about the Wall-of-Iron/Celerity/Fabricate combo, but that wasn’t really damage related. So! My own personal favorite nova moment in a game was simply the application of Telekinesis Sianghams. It’s easy to find the optimum telekinesis payload online, you just use as many Colossal Sianghams as you can pick up with your mind powers, based on weight to damage ratio. Actually using them, though…coupled with several days worth of doing nothing but blowing all sorts of 3rd and 4th level spell slots on Extended Shrink Item to be able to fit them all in a little bag…it was pretty good. Airborne combat, I had my Overland Flight on and some succubus was taunting a bunch of townies, self included. Opening up the bag to let a bunch of little pokers fall out and then dropping the bag like I’m dropping a mic, the crowd reaction to a veritable Hwacha of anti-air ordinance skewering her was a very precious moment in my wizard’s stay in the country.
Oh. Dammit. That’s how you do it. I always figured folks were playing fast and loose carrying a bunch of telephone pole sized sawtoothed sabres around. How do you calculate weight though? I always figured a colossal weapon would weigh a bit more than 25 lbs.
Hearing Cleave and Great Cleave described as anything other than “necessary” or “OP” is bizarre to me. Of course my knowledge comes from 3.5 and involves people who knew that the appropriate thing to do was to bring a sack of rats with them into battle.
Myself, I very much favor consistent damage. I’m not sure I’ve ever once made a crit-focused character or such outside of videogames (and only in games where I’d already gone through the game two or three times).
Personally what I thing is great is things that give you something consistent AND give you something circumstantial/luck based. The Fell Handed Feat in the 5e Feats UA being one of my favorite examples.
Goddamn 5e feats are good at that. The idea of grabbing a suite of powers rather than one new trick is just so appealing. You can see a little of that in 3e Exalted charms or the Pathfinder equipment tricks, but the scarcity of feats in 5e means that design is free to make each feat do more. That just feels good as a player.
Brother, I ask for but one thing: a cast page. For I don’t see most of the cast enough to solidly identify them. Fighter, Wizard, Thief, Cleric and Vigilante all have quite a bit of screen time, and we’ve got a great feel for them. I have no idea who the rest of them are, despite going back into the archives. The TVTropes page is likewise bereft of the other archetypes.
I may or may not have written a Bestiary of Characters up over the weekend. >_>
While that is possibly (or possibly not!) being turned into an actual page on the site, you can reacquaint yourself with Magus and the rest of the Team Bountyhunter beginning here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/evil-twins
Their introductory mini-arc is five pages long.
This is more-or-less what I was looking for, thanks.
It gets doubled for every size category. So a 1 lb normal sized siangham makes (in pounds) 2 for large, 4 huge, 8 gargantuan, and 16 lbs colossal. They’re basically ballista bolts at this point, as the damage goes from 1d6 to 1d8, 2d6, 3d6, and finally 4d6 per bolt. They weren’t cold iron and didn’t bypass DR, but they were more than enough to turn her into a succubean sieve.
Apparently my reply to your reply got shoved down here. Oh well.
Gotcha. I remember looking into this and then deciding that a wizard carrying around 15 polearms was silly. The shrink item bit is a solid solution.
Why not go with chakrams though? They’re 1d8 damage at medium and weight that same 1 lb.
That would have been even more amazing. Let the bag drop, and suddenly enormous murder frisbees from the forest below making demon sashimi.
Sadly, this was 3.5 and I don’t recall any of the allowed books holding chakram in their weapon lists.
Blargh! I keep telling myself to make sure of what system I’m talking about, and I keep screwing it up. It was a Pathfinder game where I tried to pull off the trick. The best I ever got was throwing dwarfbane manacles (homebrew) at some duergar for 3d6 a pop. At 12th level I missed about half, which means I wound up doing 18d6 to a single target. That’s respectable damage I guess, but I felt like it wasn’t enough to attempt the repeat performance.
With fifteen 6d6 shrunken chakram in my back pocket though, I might have to revisit those shenanigans.
I’m open to a certain amount of uncertainty/coolness as long as you can provide at least a baseline of effectiveness overall. But unless you’re doing really high-level play, if you’ve got okay BAB or one or two useful spells, you should be able to contribute enough to permit a crazy once-in-a-blue-moon trick or two.
I have a party member who is a Master of Many Styles Monk (1 level of Unarmed Fighter). He’s a grappling build, and he’s REALLY good at it. We’ve had one or two bosses that have been able to survive a round of him maintaining his grapple for damage, but not many. Pretty much anything else has ended up as a one-hit-kill.
The problem is, like the move Solarbeam from Pokemon, these are all two-round attacks. On round 1, he moves to the enemy and grapples them, and then he has to survive an entire round until his neck turn, when he can do ludicrous damage to them. The number of things that have gone wrong in that intervening round is astonishingly high, from the grappled foe KOing the Monk with a critical hit, to the grappled ghoul paralyzing him (despite the ghoul being blinded, mind you), to the Monk rolling a 1 to maintain his grapple, to another party member Vital Striking the grappled foe and killing it. This Monk, despite having the party’s highest AC and a big load of healing potions, also seems to attract damage like a magnet, and has gone down more times than anyone else in the party. But when the stars align and he maintains his grapple on the second turn… snap.
On a different but related note, my first PC, the half-drow Magus you’ve probably heard me talking about before, was not a terribly optimized build. Beyond the AC problems of a STR-based d8 light armor frontliner without a shield, my 1st and 3rd level feats were Half-Drow Paragon and Dark Adept, thematic feats that, mechanically speaking, just give me three once-a-day spell-like abilities: Detect Magic (which I already had as a cantrip), Levitate and Feather Fall, in addition to my other Half-Drow spell-likes of Dancing Lights, Darkness and Faerie Fire. My little noobie brain justified all of this with the inclusion of Feather Fall, the spell you rarely need but REALLY need when you do. Over a year of playing goes by without any of these abilities ever coming up once. Then, over the last couple of sessions, they’ve starting being relevant. Feather Fall has proven useful both when our Sorcerer fell off a 100-foot balcony, and when the above-mentioned Monk killed an enemy who was flying over a spiked pit (long story). Levitate helped me get over a trap we’d detected without having to use my effectively-0 Acrobatics score, and Faerie Fire proved very useful against a boss using Displacement. So, all in all, not a terrible investment, it seems. And the party has enough darkvision that I’m sure Darkness will be useful SOMETIME.
Rapid Grappler, man. Shit’s bananas.
Glad that your situational abilities are coming into play. Like I said back in this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/betrayal
…It’s pretty tough to build a character with zero combat effectiveness. Solving encounters with your bag-of-tricks type abilities feels amazing though. I think you and I might have the same tastes in terms of character construction. The idea of “baseline effectiveness” is particularly interesting to me. It’s something I’ve been noodling with for a while, and I’ve been keeping an eye out lately for systems that take that as a design philosophy. Starfinder’s item level system seems like a move in this direction, for example.
Normally I like a good consistent build, but every now and then I like to go for the crazy stuff.
One of my favourite characters, an Undead Antipaladin named Shade (who was actually one of the BBEGs for the living world campaign he was in) was sort of like that. Now, he was already massively overpowered (because he had to fight parties of adventurers) so he was a few levels higher than anyone else plus had a Mythic Tier, but I also gave him some stuff to every now and then have SPECTACULAR crits. He used a Scythe, and had that Paladin feat that lets you burn uses of Lay on Hands for bonus damage on a hit. I never got to crit with one of those attacks, but it was the dream I was living for.
Leadership… crit-fishing cohort… butterfly’s sting. I too dream of critting with a scythe. Now all I need is a GM willing to let me take leadership. I’m not sure those exist. 😛
Shade had Leadership, actually. Well, Vile Leadership anyway. This was in the amazing living world campaign I was in that shutdown.
Well then. Vile Leadership is ridiculously amusing.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/vile-leadership/
I guess it’s tough to be EEEEVIL and require your minion to worship Desna. Sad times for butterfly’s sting shenanigans.
It sounds like cleve has been heavily nerfed in Pathfinder. In 3.5 the extra attack can be against any creature within reach and isn;t at a penalty.
The first line of this post was originally, “You guys know the 3.X feat cleave?” After some hasty Googling, it turns out they’re VERY different feats. Teach me not to do my research.
my dwarfen Wiz3/Rog3/Mon1/arcane tricster traded the uncanny dodge at level 4 specifically for the stunning fist and flurry of blows. The DC may suck but sneaking a stunned enemy with the rest of the flurry attacks every once in a while is SO worth it.
Nice! I’ve always wanted to try a rogue/monk for exactly that reason. The to-hit looks awful, but the spikes must be a mile high.
What’s your damage output like at level 7?
Human Fighter (Two-Handed Fighter)
18 base Strength
Literally any Keen 18-20/x2 two-hander (I prefer the Nodachi reflavored as a Knechtmesser)
Racial Heritage (Dwarf)
Power Attack
Cleave
Goblin Cleaver
Orc Hewer
Cleaving Finish
Great Cleave
Improved Cleaving Finish
Giant Killer
Weapon Focus/Weapon Specialization/Greater Weapon Focus/Greater Weapon Specialization (Nodachi/Knechtmesser)
Improved Sunder/Greater Sunder
Critical Focus
Sundering Strike
There you. A good cleave build. Completely done by 14th level.
Seems solid to me. I’d certainly enjoy playing this guy. But look at everything that turns off the moment you get in a single-monster fight (e.g. party vs. a huge dragon).
Racial Heritage (Dwarf)
Cleave
Goblin Cleaver
Orc Hewer
Cleaving Finish
Great Cleave
Improved Cleaving Finish
Giant Killer
Improved Sunder/Greater Sunder
Sundering Strike
That doesn’t make it a bad build, but it does mean you’re set up for a very specific kind of fight. That’s exactly the trade-off I’m talking about. In a best case scenario you’re fighting a bunch of fire giants, breaking their greatswords and smashing their faces like a boss. That’s a cool moment to hope for, but it’s not going to come along every fight.
Recently, in DnD5e, I played a Blade Pact Warlock (an underpowered design in most circumstances!) whose main gimmick was booming blade.
In order to get the proper damage out if that she needed to specifically lure an enemy to move from their space -the mobile feat helped- but she also need to coordinate with her party to not have them just toe-to-toe the enemy! Suffice to say that, though wonderful when it works, it usually didn’t – and then she was a melee fighter dropping only 1 attack per round with the limited bonus of +d8 sonic damage.
I hear a lot of folks singing the praises of booming blade, but I’ve not really seen it in action myself.
What was the most spectacular booming blade you managed to get off in your blade lock career? Any boss monsters?
Booming Bladenis fun, and along with Green Flame Blade it’s great if you want to build a “battlemage” type character. But in the world of cold hard mechanics that’s not a very efficient build, since you are either a 1-attack caster who is unlikely to have a high melee attack stat and defence; or you’re a multi-attacking eldritch knight who would probably rather be walloping 2 or 3 times a turn instead of just once. (Or you could have the Arcana Initiate feat I suppose, that might be where its most effective users come in). But to hell with effectiveness, I wanna play a bladelock, and Cassia was cool.
But did I have any spectacular uses of it? Not so much. A mid-boss slaadi was probably the best use of it, thanks to my having the feat that meant the Thunder damage ignored his nasty resistance. And a gelatinous cube (someone’s escaped pet, as it happened) that had eaten two party members. On the whole though, it was a fun gimmick that mostly just gibbed the odd mook.
The campaign ended incomplete though, and I would like to bring Cassia back again for a new campaign if the chance arises, so who knows she may yet have her day.
On my experience, booming/green flame blade is best on arcane tricksters (as their one low-level out-of-school spell, or a different class plus Magic Initiate feat), or gishes without Extra Attack (low-level eldritch knights &c, sorcadins with just a dash of paladin, etc). If you’re attacking frequently and can’t multiattack anyways, why not?
I usually prefer booming blade’s control effect (especially combined with Warcaster), but GFB is better for stealth…as my recent rogue/eldritch knight found out.
Also, let me just say that I absolutrly love the frost giant’s bunny slippers, and that he’s braided his beard to go to bed. XD
They must have been dire bunnies.