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mcv wrote:

Opening Volley (UC): This has got to be the ultimate switch-hitter feat. Your ranged attack gives you a bonus on your next melee attack. No idea who would use this other than a switch-hitter. Of course you're only going to get this bonus once in most combats. Unless you've got a back up ranged weapon.

Opening Volley is a really cool and flavorful feat concept, which to my mind doesn’t quite work out in practice.

The feat provides:

Whenever you deal damage with a ranged attack, you gain a +4 circumstance bonus on the next melee attack roll you make against the opponent. This attack must occur before the end of your next turn.

Sounds cool! But consider the myriad of very common circumstances when you won’t be able to pull it off:

1. Your initial ranged attack misses the foe.

2. Your initial ranged attack kills the foe.

3. Someone else in your party kills the opponent off before you can make that melee attack.

4. You can’t reach the foe to strike with a melee attack before the end of your next turn.

5. You can’t reach the foe without drawing an attack of opportunity and you’re not prepared to risk it (the route is not clear or perhaps you are based by another foe in the intervening period).

I do think this feat concept was on the right track, but I’d like to see it re-worked so that it has more practical use before I'd select it over another available option. Perhaps conferring the melee attack bonus whether the ranged attack hits or not, or have the bonus last longer removing the “end of next turn” requirement. Those suggestions might cause the feat to become overpowered rather quickly though.

As an aside, one of the reasons I dig this feat is it's one of the few combat feats that has no prerequisites. I don’t know why, but I always find that cool. That should happen more often.

resurrecting a slightly old thread (3 months)

Opening Volley, or at least my and my GM's interpretation of it, is much better than what you suggest.

Here is the wording for it:
Whenever you deal damage with a ranged attack, you gain a +4 circumstance bonus on the next melee attack roll you make against the opponent. This attack must occur before the end of your next turn.

Our interpretation, especially with the wording being how it is, is that that +4 bonus works for every ranged attack until the melee attack in the next round. So for a level 6 ranger with manyshot and rapidshot for instance, you would be shooting 4 arrows in the first round., If all of them hit/damage, you gain a +4 circumstance bonus on each one, thus a potential +16 since circumstance bonuses stack. On the next round (the one where you need to use your melee attack), you can then shoot manyshot and rapidshot again in your first attack for another potential +12 to melee, and for your second attack, switch to melee and attack with a potential +23 (+28) to your melee attack (-5 BAB since it is your second attack). Couple that with cleave and you are almost guaranteed to get that second blow with the melee.

The feat can continue as well. The third round you start in melee, so you hit like normal and take your 5 ft step back out of combat. You can then do it all over again

Another way of using it is all in one round with your 3 shots (manyshot/rapidshot) and taking your 5 ft step into melee for a potential +12 on your melee. This gives you the option though of staying out of melee if you don't do damage and instead using your fourth attack being archery, thus repeating option 1 again.

So that takes care of point 1. It isn't Just your initial shot - it is any damage done by ranged attack until your next melee attack (which must be done by the next turn).

point 2 is valid, however if you kill it anyway, most feats would be pointless in this circumstance unless they let you hit another enemy. Most feats concentrate on increasing your damage or attack rolls. On the other hand, you can always switch targets with your second attack and still get a potential +4 or +16 on the next melee attack if that opponent is still alive next round.

point 3 is also valid, but can be easily overcome with tactics. Don't go after enemies that are near death or will probably be dead next turn. If you are fighting in those circumstances then it really shouldn't matter what feats you have because everything died so easily.

point 4 is again a matter of tactics. Most feats require tactics to be able to maximize their potential. I'd say a good 50+ or more feats are circumstantial to varying degrees but many of them can be used in most circumstances with the appropriate tactics.

point 5: see points 3 and 4 - Tactics.

I see your point, but when I see the list of feats out there I primarily see a good chunk of them being circumstantial. It is a matter of putting yourself in a position to have the maximum potential. Look at power attack for instance - a feat that most people agree is almost a must have for a melee character. Even that is circumstantial because you are not always guaranteed to be in melee. What if your character can't get into melee? What if he is holding a throwing weapon and can't switch to melee? What if he is fighting an enemy with high AC and can't risk the negatives to attack? Again, the feat is circumstantial to a degree. You can make a list of whatifs for every feat out there.

Personally, I think it is an awesome feat with a huge potential if used correctly. Even just using normal bow attacks (no archery feats) you stull have a potential of a +12 melee attack with no negatives to your archery attacks.

I do exactly as Phelan does - I create my own spreadsheet for use.

1 reason I do it is exactly why Phelan does it. It is so much easier to use yes or no questions for situations. I play a switch hitter ranger and thus have favorite terrains to take into account, favored enemies, animal companions, feats, etc... and all of that is easy to forget to ask during the heat of battle. Having it in a yes or no checklist format allows me to ask those questions to the Gm at the start of combat and helps to make sure my stats are what they should be. Like Phelan, I also list any items with magical effects and what those effects are.

It also helps keep track of conditions, spell effects, etc... I don't go so far as to list every spell in the game and it's effects, but I have a block on my spreadsheet where I can total up the effects of uncommon spells and the spreadsheet takes that into consideration and changes my stats accordingly.

A second reason why I enjoy the spreadsheet is (and this is especially true as a new player) it forces you to research how the game mechanics work. When you make the spreadsheet you get to see just how much a -4 stat modifer makes and everything it affects. For instance, a -4 str modifier affects much more than just damage dealt.

A third reason I enjoy spreadsheets is that if a GM ever questions how your bonuses are determined, you have the hard data behind it and can easily show them in seconds.

If you suck with spreadsheets, there are ones out there that are already premade. YAPCG for instance does it. I started out using YAPCG but found making my own better for me so that I could make it work for me. YAPCG still forced me to do some calculations on my own such as the favored terrain or favored enemy. It is also a fairly slow spreadsheet as it has every book for every class for every race while having a personalized spreadsheet should only have stuff specific to you which in turn makes the calculation pretty much instant.

In my gaming group I am the only one that uses apreadsheets for my guy and I can tell you it makes the game go by so much faster. If they get hit by a debuff, they have to go search through tables in books to see just how much was affected. For instance, last game we were hit by a dexterity debuff so they spent about 4 minutes tring to figure out what their new attack rolls were, what their different AC's were, etc... It took me 3 seconds.

I also have a tab on my sheet for loot calculations since I am the groups loot carrier. I can type in the name of the loot and how much it typically sells for (our GM has already given gudielines on loot for us, so it is easy to calculate its price), any loot that players are keeping for themselves, and then it automatically figures out what the cut of the loot is for everyone to include subtracting the share of the person that took some from the group. Again, that happens instantly so when we hit a town we name off the loot, figure out who wants what, and in the course of about a minute we know much much we have to spend.