Ultimate Combat Preview #2

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

During the preview banquet at PaizoCon this year, I boasted that Ultimate Combat had a gigantic feats chapter, which started off with a seven-page table, summarizing all the feats. While that is impressive, I realized later that I made a mistake—the feats table is nine pages long!

This week we're going to take a look at the feats chapter a bit more closely, since it is such an important part of this book. This chapter contains 256 feats, suitable for characters of every race and class. There are feats to grant bonuses with nets, feats that let you mix a hex with an unarmed strike, and feats that nearly let you rip off your opponents head! While many of them are combat feats, there are a few new feat categories as well. Grit feats modify and amplify the abilities of the gunslinger class, while style feats represent fighting forms and techniques, primarily employed by martial art masters, such as the monk. Take a look at this chain of style feats.

Illustration by Dmitry Burmak

Crane Style (Combat, Style)
Your unarmed fighting techniques blend poise with graceful defense.
Prerequisites: Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +2 or monk level 1st.
Benefit: You take only a –2 penalty on attack rolls for fighting defensively. While using this style and fighting defensively or using the total defense action, you gain an additional +1 dodge bonus to your Armor Class.

Crane Wing (Combat)
You move with the speed and finesse of an avian hunter, your sweeping blocks and graceful motions allowing you to deflect melee attacks with ease.
Prerequisites: Crane Style, Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +5 or monk level 5th.
Benefit: Once per round while using Crane Style, when you have at least one hand free and are either fighting defensively or using the total defense action, you can deflect one melee weapon attack that would normally hit you. You expend no action to deflect the attack, but you must be aware of it and not flat-footed. An attack so deflected deals no damage to you.

Crane Riposte (Combat)
You use your defensive abilities to make overpowering counterattacks.
Prerequisites: Crane Style, Crane Wing, Dodge, Improved Unarmed Strike, base attack bonus +8 or monk level 7th.
Benefit: You take only a –1 penalty on attack rolls for fighting defensively. Whenever you use Crane Wing to deflect an opponent's attack, you can make an attack of opportunity against that opponent after the attack is deflected.

This is one of the easiest style feats to qualify for, but the trick with these feats is that you cannot utilize more than one style feat at a time, and you cannot use the other feats in the chain unless you are using the base style feat as well. While this means you can get some pretty good abilities if you just focus on one chain, getting into multiple chains forces you to make decisions about which abilities you want on a given round.

Of course, the chapter also features some new teamwork feats and a new classification of feats called Performance feats, which give you an edge when fighting in an arena or other theater of blood. Take a look at these two, one from each category.

Shake It Off (Teamwork)
You support your allies and help them recover from crippling effects.
Benefit: When you are adjacent to one or more allies who also have this feat, you gain a +1 bonus on saving throws per such ally (maximum +4).

Murderer's Circle (Combat, Performance)
After savaging your foe, you circle like a hunter ready for the kill.
Prerequisites: Dodge, Acrobatics 4 ranks.
Benefit: When you spend a swift action to make a performance combat check after scoring a critical hit or performing a combat maneuver, and you are adjacent to the target of the critical hit or combat maneuver, you can move to any other space that is adjacent to the target without provoking attacks of opportunity. You must have a clear path to that space and the ability to reach it by spending a move action. If you end this move in any space other than the one where you started, you gain a +2 bonus on the performance combat check.

I must admit, I picked those two to show off due mainly to their awesome names. There are a lot of really great feats in this book and I would love to show off all of them to you, but you'll just have to check them out for yourself when the book releases next week. For our final preview, we're going to take a look at some of the great new rules systems found in this book, including vehicle combat!

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer