Power attack Question

[BloodySunday]

I am curious about power attack and how often people use it. It seems like 5 damage is nice but just seems like the minus 5 to attack is a pretty big penalty. I'm currently running a 2h build with fighter/bard/RDD and lvl 12.

[Proleric]

Occasionally useful when you can see that your opponent is easily hit by normal attack, even at low dice rolls - especially if they are not taking much damage and have deadly spells or special attacks.

[BloodySunday]

Makes sense, thanks.

[Shia Luck]

Most usually taken because Tomi is an annoying little git and you need to bash open chests in the OC. *grin*

Or because it is the route to Divine Might, or more usually, Cleave, Great Cleave (and on to Devastating critical if your character is having a mid life crisis).

Have fun :)

[wendigo211]

Don't use it unless you're facing an enemy with DR. The damage you lose from lost hits is greater than the extra 5 points of damage. It can be useful at low levels, but once you have iterative attacks that -5 penalty starts eating into hits from your additional attacks and is murder on your critical hit rate.

[Selphea]

Some builds will find themselves with excess Attack, like Weapon Masters or high BAB RDD builds, possibly with Curse Song. Most mods don't design for sky-high minmaxed Attack so those cases Power Attack is used to convert that excess Attack into damage.

For example if you're a Paladin and already have a 100% hit chance unbuffed, if you cast Divine Favor you get +5 Attack and Damage, but that Attack goes to waste since you were hitting for free anyway. So you turn on Power Attack to convert that into +0 Attack and +10 Damage.

And suppose that Paladin was fighting some caster in a robe and Taunted them for that 30% Spell Failure, the caster would also lose up to 6AC and Power Attack would effectively increase their Concentration checks' difficulty by 5 too.

[samadhis]

good thread

[Rifle Leeroy]

If only beamdog allow us to modify the unhardcoded feat as power attack...that is a REAL priority,not the new emotes or new portraits -.-'

[sqwezich]

Good

[Silvaren]

In NWN I'm using it only for smashing chests and I take it every time I play because cleave makes Act I of original campaign bearable and cleave requires power attack.

Power Attack isn't useful if player can't adjust from 1 to 5 damage in exchange for accuracy.

I have strange habits in this game.

I never play with companions or even familiar because of exp reduction. I beat this game like 10 times back in the past, mostly as sorcerer, cleric, monk, rogue and paladin and I never summon anything or hire merceneries (I take them to speak and progress in their quests only for items).

Anyway, I'm playing Pool of Radiance right now and back then in first edition AD&D armor class was rather low. Most enemies are pretty easy to hit. I'm not sure how NWN trasnlates monster manuals from D&D 3, but I find power attack tradeoff useless in most fights.

[🍪]

I rarely use it in the campaign other than to break objects - AB is just too important. I do use it pretty often in some multiplayer modules though. Often the high-level, high-magic ones give you plenty of AB so it's worth making the trade, and even on low-level, low-magic settings it can be good in PvP because you're often only hitting your opponent on criticals anyway. Might as well make them count.

[Bishop]

It could be so much better if there was something like Frenzied Berserk class to utilize it. The default version more often than not just not worth using.

[Swiftereagle]

Like cleave and great cleave, it's useless except at lower levels. To much capped ♥♥♥♥ in this game.