(Very) New Player, a Few Questions for the Pros

Great cleave isn't so great, yeah, unless someone gets a thrill out of fighting lots of goblins at mid/high lvls.

Reach weapons in TOEE are indeed brokenly overpowered, since they're all effectively spike chains or better without requiring exotic weapon proficiency, and more so because the enemy AI can't handle avoiding AOOs.

 

If you're surrounded by 4 injured bugbears you can kill all of them with great cleave, and this goes with other opponents aswell.
It's a great feat, later on you might do 50+ damage on critical so if you have fireballed som bugbears and your fighter get a crit hit he can kill even the toughest

 

Yes, your spellcasters with Improved Initiative go first and lay out some Fireballs, Flame Strikes, Call Lightning, Ice Storms, then your fighter/paladin/ barbarian with Greater Cleave wades in for mop up duty.

 

You can use your feats on whatever floats your boat obviously, but Great Cleave's just not that great (though it might look impressive at times vs stuff like goblins or lower CR bugbears), i.e. for situational mileage cleaning up low CR mooks after a fireball or such. But I suppose for a fighter with INT under 13, it's better than a lot of other choices in the game.

 

Great Cleave is actually an amazing feat, especially with reach weapons. I'm having a hard time thinking of a more suitable feat for non-twf fighters, it's always first priority for me. You do need to be tactical to make most use of it, though.

 

Improved Trip. Power attack. Combat Reflexes. Imp Critical. Quickdraw. Mobility. Spring Attack. Those are tactical feats. Great cleave relies on dropping weak foes or getting lucky rolls.

Heck, I'll even take WW Attack over Great Cleave; at least it lets you make multiple attacks vs something besides mooks.

Great cleave is definitely fine for quickly getting rid of lots of mooks, and is more simple to use than say, spring attack.

 

Power Attack is prereq. for Cleave anyway. Imp. critical fits in just about any build so you don't have to take it *instead* (thought frankly you could just craft keen weps). Imp Trip is a great feat, though not sure whether I'd take it over Great Cleave or not. Mobility is useless if you put points in Tumble and/or watch where you're going. Spring attack is rarely useful because there's usually enough things to kill within 5-foot-step range (esp. with a reach weapon). Combat Reflexes, if anything, is best when used together with Great Cleave, not in lieu of.

The WW feat line is 2 feats longer than Great Cleave, and the ability itself is nigh useless in TOEE.

1. You have to be surrounded by 4 or more mobs to make full use of it (which is bad - flanking, or gods forbid sneak attack). Why? You get the feat at a pretty high level since it has so many prereqs, at which point a fighter would have 2 if not 3 attacks per round. +1 with Haste. So why waste so many feats when you can just use Full Attack action?

2. It takes an entire round. Great Cleave, on the other hand, is basically a free attack. If you line up the mobs right, you could get off several "free" attacks per round. Or even on AoO if you're lucky.

3. Unless this was fixed, TWF fighters only attacked with the main weapon using WW last time I used it. So it's even worse for a TWF build. Now think TWF+Great Cleave. You get just about enough attacks to cut down the stronger enemies and then down them all with Cleave

4. An additional benefit to Cleave - I think it triggers if you finish off an unconscious enemy. So if there's one nearby, here's another free attack.


Bottom line, I suppose tastes differ. But my Glaive-wielding fighter with Great Cleave has had a blast killing bugbear commanders in the Hedrack fight, with swiftness and extreme prejudice

 

The reason why Great Cleave isn't that great as a tactical choice: it's a conditional feat that grants any benefit only if you drop more than one foe in a round, and only then. i.e. in situations when that's likely to happen more often, such as vs mooks, it looks great. Against opponents that will actually prove a challenge, it's not going to fire that often. Simply put, it's heavily dependent on good dice rolls or lightweight foes compared to other feats to kick in, which makes it less than ideal from a tactical standpoint. Tactics is about choices, having options that you can choose from reliably when you need them, more than how much dmg is done or how many foes you can kill, etc.

Certainly the frequency of foes dropping can be increased by twinking out the character with belt of giant str, crafted weapons, heavy buffing, or other means including min/maxing or optimal stats (boring), but if you're duking it out with say, Lord Hungus and his buddy at an appropriate level with a 28 point buy fighter, you're not going to drop both of them in one round very often.

WW isn't a great feat either, you're right. But at least it will let you strike at multiple foes without the above condition for great cleave as a requirement. i.e. the tradeoff is a longer feat chain (dodge/mobility/sa out of which only dodge is of questionable worth - the benefits of spring attack is tactical/choices/options for the entire round, not about getting into position to hit targets) for a feat that can be utilized at will vs multiple targets, vs a feat that triggers only during rounds when you drop multiple foes.

Because TOEE is a relatively easy game, Great Cleave's shortcomings aren't as obvious, especially when people are able to easily get 26+ STR meleers with +3 holy flaming burst weapons and such (i.e. it's quite easy to get fairly high dmg output), but a series of really tough fights in a tougher campaign with less than heavily twinked out characters will eventually show why Great Cleave is overrated; it simply will not fire/trigger often enough to outshine other feat choices.

 

Well, like I said, personal preference, I guess. As far as I'm concerned, you can use tactics to make GC more efficient. Though you are correct - TOEE as it is now is getting fairly easy, perhaps a replay of vanilla is in order for me, with same restrictions as when I first played it, such as limited lists fro item crafting and no weapon crafting (it consistently crashed for me in vanilla).

As for WW, I'm not convinced that it's worth giving up all your attacks to strike surrounding enemies, when you could do almost the same with Full Attack action with full control over it.

 

Id say skip both WW and GC. There are a lot more feats that make the game more interesting then those two. All WW and GC really do is give you a couple free hits IF you are dumb enough to actively try and get your tank flanked. And even if you use a Barb, beyond flanking is the danger of letting 4+ enemies all get attacks.

Yes, they do look impressive. I like seeing my fully armored superhero jump in the air to deliver a roundhouse backhand swipe to the face of nearby enemies, but is the occasional cool animation really worth endangering your whole party?

As previously stated, these feats are only usable a few times in the game and then only when cleaning up rooms full of mooks. When it really counts, such as against boss mobs, you are much better off with focus, specialization, expertise, and other tactical feats.

 

Hell yeaH it is !

 

Well, reach weapons can solve the flanking problem - you can keep enemies in 10-foot range and never get flanked (5-foot-step is too easy, really). I've found that NC has added lots of content that emphasizes mass fights rather than boss fights, so it's helpful to have someone who can take on a crowd. Think anything from Bog to Arena to Verbo encounters. More to come in WotGS. In vanilla you might've been right.

Specs fit into a fighter's feat list anyway. I personally find "tactical" feats useless against boss mobs - CE lowers your hit chance, and boss mobs tend to have high AC.

 

Reach weapons do help; heck, reach weapons make everything better in TOEE as they don't suffer their main pnp drawback: the 5 foot 'donut' of non hitting/non threatened area around them (aside from spiked chain).

Agreed that WW isn't a great choice either; both GC and WW really are rather situational. Much better choices lie elsewhere.

Though I can think of one case where they both would be perfect (especially with reach weapon + combat reflexes): vs swarms of something like stirges who don't have much HP and drop quickly, but are very unpleasant to deal with in numbers because of the con drain.

CE can be great when you need someone to be dodge-y more so than offensive. Again, options give you more tactics to choose from; not everyone in the lineup needs to be a power hitter. Facing a boss that has high ac, high ab, and high dmg? Send someone with high ac including CE to take the brunt of the boss's attention; it doesn't matter if they don't hit the boss, have someone else do the hitting or rely on spells to take him down. Do it well and the boss is handled with minimum dmg to the party. Also CE leads to Imp Trip and Imp Feint

 

I guess my systematic (ab)use of sorcerers with Enchantment or Conjuration spec removes the necessity of a party member who is a classic "tank". I usually try to maximize damage output, and let the charms/summons/animal comps swarm the enemy hard hitters for me. Besides, since social skills have no combat application in TOEE, there's no reliable way to control enemies' attention.

 

Not picking your post apart Aus, but this statement brought to mind a specific example to consider:

My Pally/Fighter tank with Combat Reflex, Combat Expert, Power Attack, Cleave, and Great Cleave stood toe to toe with the Balor without breaking a sweat. Balor's AC is such that nothing but a natural 20 crit would hit so I tacked up PA and CE all the way and started swinging. Using CE in this case didnt cost me any hits yet it saved my tank from getting beat to death when his only real job was to hold the demons attention until my team could wear it down. PA provided that extra POW! when he did connect and was also free to use in this situation.

So not once did cleave help in those major node battles though other feats really shined. My point being that every feat has its place but GC and WW only really have their place when your tank is in up to his neck in a bad spot. I dont actively try to place my peeps in those situations so I rarely have the opportunity to make use of such feats. I guess it all depends on how you play.

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PS> I had scather but found in the first few fights that hitting the balor with that weapon yielded devastating multiple hits but also caused an immediate CTD or the game would just freeze without ending the attack turn. Scather AoO's any time the wielder takes damage and hitting the balor triggers his damage shield which triggers the AoO from scather which triggers the damage shield which triggers scather.... After a few loops everything just locks up.