I've implemented house rules stating that most feats grow to include the benefits of their Improved and Greater versions once the prerequisites for those feats are met.
I am considering ruling that Cleave functions more like it did in the days of 3rd edition, where it triggered off of any qualifying attack, rather than requiring a special "cleave attack" as a standard action.
I'm just not sure if combining Cleave and Great Cleave into one feat AND this will be too much.
With this rule in place, you would be able to make a full attack and generate an extra attack off of any successful attacks, and you could trigger multiple chains of extra attacks. Say you have a base attack of +11, Cleave and are surrounded by 8 foes.
Your first attack is successful against the first opponent, you cleave into the second and third and miss through fourth. Then you make your second attack against the fifth opponent, cleave the six, seventh and eighth, and use your last attack to strike whoever you want.
I'm not too worried about giving martials too much power, and the way I see it, you're either scything through chaff or you're surrounded by legitimate threats, so your increased damage output either doesn't matter because the opponents are trivial or it doesn't matter because you may well be dead in a moment.
Where it gets tricky is keeping track of who you can attack and when (you can only cleave an opponent once per round, but you can attack a single target up to as many times s you have normal attacks...but I guess you also can't cleave the opponent that you struck with the regular attack that started the current cleave-chain) and with things like Vital Strike (I'd rule that you get the extra attacks from Cleave, but not with the bonus damage).
Any thoughts on this subject?
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You could get rid of Cleave/Great Cleave and replace them with Cleaving Finish/Improved Cleaving Finsh. Cleaving Finsih triggers off kills, not just hits, but it also doesn't have the stipulation that enemies must he next to each other - just that they are within reach.
OR
Since you're giving a scaling feat-chain at the cost of only 1 feat you wouldn't have to change them. Level 1 someone takes Power Attack and Cleave, they also get Cleaving Finish as well. At +4 BAB they get Great Cleave, and at +6 BAB they get Improved Cleaving Finish. Cleave and Great Cleave trigger off hits, but are also a Standard Action (and restrict you to only enemies adjacent to one another). Cleaving Finish and Improved Cleaving Finish only trigger off kills, but are free actions and can be used to attack any enemy within reach.
Hm. So this Cleaving Finish works like old school Cleave, then? Does it still levy a -2 to AC like the new Cleave?
Yeah pretty much like old school cleave.
It doesn't say it lowers your AC, so it shouldn't. It doesn't really reference Cleave at all except as a prerequisite.
Any thoughts on this subject?
Paizo's Cleave is already WAY better than 3e's, because you don't have to *drop* the opponent to get it to trigger. Cleave is not wimpy. It was never wimpy. (I mean, compare it to WSpec or any other feat that gives you a dribble of extra damage; *none* of them compare to anything that grants extra attacks.)
Pathfinder version Cleave is basically "Poor Man's Pounce Against Multiple Targets" (extra attack with a move+smash, assuming you can hit) that you're qualified for right at 1st-level if you're a martial. Enlarged polearm barbarians get all giggly just thinking about having a murderhobo reach diameter of 50'.
The only martials who feel their Cleave feat isn't pulling its weight are normies w/5' weapons.
Any thoughts on this subject?Paizo's Cleave is already WAY better than 3e's, because you don't have to *drop* the opponent to get it to trigger.
While I don't quite agree with Slim Jim here, I do think it's better than it gets credit for, and Slim has the reason right: More Attacks = Win.
I wouldn't put it on every character, but for characters with bonus feats it's not that hard. If you've already got Power Attack (and you probably should) then to get both Cleave and Cleaving Finish is only two feats. Two feats that give you a reasonable chance of getting an extra attack, and have seperate triggers (yes you can trigger both in the same round and end up with 3 attacks as a standard action). This means even if you only trigger a bonus attack every third round it's going to add up.
Power Attack + Cleave at 1st-level is, I would argue, the only logical reason to have PA at 1st. PA + Weapon Focus at 1st sucks. (Anything) + extra attacks at 1st rules. Extra attacks kill bad guys. Dead bad guys don't butcher your consumables budget and force you to put off gear upgrades because you had to give your money to the CLW wand-salesmen instead.
Cleaving Finish I'm less enamored of, as it's increasingly conditional once enemies gain hit-dice and (tend to) become fewer in number per encounter (i.e., your odds of dropping any particular opponent with any particular single swat steadily diminish), whereas you know that regular Cleave will trigger exactly 100% of the time you hit with a standard when at least one secondary target is within reach. CF is for the professional enlarged multiclass murderhobo only, and even then, there's a lot of other goodies clamoring for the feat space.
I think I'll probably just end up combining the two like I'd originally planned.
Cleave automatically upgrades to great cleave, triggers off of any successful attack and can target anyone within reach.
Old school cleave and cleaving finish are a bit more elegant in that you don't have to worry about one opponent being cleaved multiple times, so I'll need to be careful with the language, but I don't particularly mind that.
Cleaving finish just won't exist, then. If it was redundant before, and it was, it's doubly so now.
one thing that stood out to me was that comment about how, as you increase in level, combats tend to focus on fewer, more powerful enemies. Is that something many people find? Can't say I care for that at all. Then again, there are a lot of reasons that the game seems to start breaking down once you pass a certain threshold.
I've rolled around the idea that Cleave could also passively let you do full damage against swarms of any size as a houserule.
I do think combats tend to focus on fewer more powerful enemies as level increases. I don't think that is necessarily because it has to be that way. But fewer more powerful foes tend to be easier for the DM to run and keep track of to a point. More powerful foes also tend to be more interesting with more options for the DM to enjoy while running things as well as being less familiar to the Players (particularly first time a player encounters foes of that strength).As for the game, and in particular game mechanics, breaking down past a certain threshold, that is an extremely GM and group thing as to when and why that occurs...
That's what I was thinking. At this point in my career as a GM, I try to wrack my brain to make encounters engaging and dynamic. The days of "you open the door and see two trolls. Roll initiative" should, in my opinion, be pushed through and left behind as soon as possible.
Given how regular Cleave is worded is based on when an attack hits.
May I suggest making it once per turn or a stance (require a swift action to enter). That way it would kind of prevent the situation of full attacking and then triggering Great Cleave with every attack.
Also I'm not sure giving Cleaving Finish along with Cleave is a good idea. The reasoning being that if given as soon as you normally could take it, its effectively 4 feats for the price of 1...
I don't see the situation where a full attack can trigger Cleave multiple times as a problem. Maybe a bit tricky, mechanically (keeping track of which attack you're on in your full attack, which opponents have been Cleaved so far), but not game-breaking.
And yeah, it would be 4 feats for the price of one, if I did it that way. But like I said, Cleaving Finish just won't exist. You'll get 2 improved feats for the price of one; from levels 1-3, you'll get one free attack each round against any opponent you threaten whenever you make a successful melee attack against another opponent. At level 4 and up, you'll get the extra attack every time you successfully hit an opponent, and cannot make extra attacks against the same opponent more than once per round.