Alistair MacDonald's page

Just a little thing, really, but traditionally TWF is considered to be a bad choice for melee unless one has significant damage adders for each blow. Thus, fighters weren't really considered a good choice for a TWF fighter, outside a dip for gaining the feats.

I wonder if it's still so?

I'm going to give a very very basic feat chain:

Power attack, TWF tree, Weapon focus+specialization line.

A PF fighter gets this little thing where they gain a total of +4 to hit and damage. With power attack and TWF, this puts them at -1 hit chance from full BAB, thanks to weapon focus. Each primary hit gets a +3 from power attack, while off-hand attacks get a +1. This is, in fact, one point less damage than a 2-handed weapon using fighter would get.
However, they would also only get a total of 32 points of damage from weapon specialization and weapon training, while a twfer gets a total of 56.

On weapon size, the 2-hander probably wins by 1d6, or average 3.5.
So far, the twfer is ahead by 19.5 points of damage.
The 2-hander does win for 0.5xSTR bonus in damage, though.

Other factors - weapon enhancements - While it costs double, a twfer will get 3x the potential weapon enhancement to their damage, meaning an extra 15 points of damage, for an example. As said every point of extra damage on every hit, helps the twfer ahead.

Also, things that launch on every hit help here - such as criticals. Weapon Mastery supports us directly, here, so critical focus, critical mastery and two critical feats might be a decent set of picks.

At this point, we've spent a grand total of 11 feats, meaning only a fighter can really get all this, with any amount of leeway.

With a 25% crit chance, and three extra crits, you're pretty much guaranteed to crit. ( which always makes me lust for Blood in the Water stance. )

So... presuming a STR score of 24, full power attack and boring +5 weapons, we're looking at a haste-less damage output of dice + 33 on primary hand, and dice + 24 on off-hand, for a total of 7xdice...

have you considerd weapon finesse and using a rapier with high dex character as main and poss kukri as off hand weapon, both have high crit ranges and if you get keen weapons coupled with feats above, possible havoc. just a thought

al