Johhnie's page

This is a very helpful table.
Looked up on this a few times for character builds. Thank you.

TL;DR: Yes, you can deal double damage and take 5 foot step.

"You can ready a standard action, a move action, a swift action, or a free action. To do so, specify the action you will take and the conditions under which you will take it. Then, anytime before your next action, you may take the readied action in response to that condition. The action occurs just before the action that triggers it. If the triggered action is part of another character’s activities, you interrupt the other character. Assuming he is still capable of doing so, he continues his actions once you complete your readied action. Your initiative result changes. For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately ahead of the character whose action triggered your readied action.

You can take a 5-foot step as part of your readied action, but only if you don’t otherwise move any distance during the round."

Readying an action for bracing is a standard action. As part of this readying, you can take a 5 foot step at any time during that round. You even can attack the charging creature on your ground and then take a 5 foot step afterwards (if he charges you etc.). As long as you don't move that round, you can make a 5 foot step to meet your enemy or position yourself afterwards, as long as you don't make any other movement that round.

Remember that any character can ready an attack against a charge. Your weapon with the "brace" just doubles your base damage, as per your weapon's feature. It's all the same for any character otherwise.

Example scenario:

*You have the initiative.*
- You spend a move action on drawing your weapon.
- You ready a "brace" action as a standard action and say "I will take a 5 foot step before my attack, towards the charging enemy."

*The charging creature's turn*
- He charges to one of your allies next to you.
- Before he makes an attack, your character takes a 5 foot step towards him and makes an attack to the charging creature (not an AoO, attack action). If it hits, your braced weapon deals an additional base weapon damage (+1d8 for longspear, regardless of x3).
- If the charging creature doesn't die, he proceeds to charge your ally and deals damage.

next turn.......

Try using one in combination with something like lunge, enlarge person, etc. Once you threaten 15+ feet you can effectively pin a mage/archer until the levels where point blank master or trivial concentration checks become a thing.

As for the melee guy, you'll get one aoo as he closes. Sure after that it would be the 5 ft dance. But even then you could probably find some method like the grace spell to get 10 feet back. Thus giving him one attack to your two.

Actually Lunge is a great feat but as a 3/4 BAB class I won't be getting it until lvl 8 (6 for fighters). At that point they must already have Point Blank Master (level 5-ish).

As for the melee, why does he provoke AoO? He was already in my threatened square because he was 15 ft away for that round no?

I'm looking for suggestions / advantages here.

I really would like to play with a spear but in %99 of the cases, 10 feet reach weapons (such as longspear or fauchard) seems completely worse than their normal counterparts. Whips can be OK but polearms seem completely useless.

Consider any melee character with a reach weapon. There are 3 cases:

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1) Attacking an average melee character, aka Sloppy Joe:

So we have 10 feet reach and he has 5. On each round, we take 5 feet steps away from him and make full attacks. He also full attacks by taking 5 feet steps towards us. In terms of AoO, when we are 10 feet away, we can make Attacks of Opportunity he can't. If he's near, we can't, he can. Completely evens out (unless we're against a wall or a cliff etc., then we're worse).

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2) Attacking a melee character with the "Step-Up" feat, aka Achilles

Now we really should just drop the polearm and use our fists. Combat goes like this:

Player: Takes a 5 foot step away, intends to full attack.
Enemy: Uses immediate action, makes Step-Up towards player (could also get an extra attack with a feat).
Player: Can't attack due to reach wep. Runs away by provoking AoO or just drops the weapon and uses unarmed strikes / gauntlets whatever.

So we can't even attack with our reach weapon, EVER. The only sensible option is to use a combat maneuver, which requires extra feats, stats and involves risks. Much worse when you are attacking creatures of a bigger size category / multiple legs for trip / high CMD etc.

IF you take the "Polearm Master" archetype, then you can attack with -4 attack penalty (which is huge) but the enemy doesn't have any penalties and proceeds to wrecks face (+ weapons like greatsword have much better damage output anyways). ALL other classes and archetypes in the game suffer much worse.

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3) Attacking any ranged character (spell casters or ranged wep users), aka Sloppy Tony

So you're against a spell caster. Combat goes like this:

Player: Attacks from 10 feet way.
Enemy: Takes 5 foot step towards or away from us. Casts spells or makes ranged attacks and does the full damage. Casters that utilize touch spells have derpy faces right now.
Player: Dies or fights until he dies. But he eventually dies OK?

Feats like Distruptive doesn't work, enemies never provoke any Attacks of Opportunity. Step-Up doesn't work with reach weapons. We can at least full attack but they have been able to attack from range anyway (could be 2+ rounds). Spell casters could cast spells and take move actions to run away during initial rounds. That's at least two full attack advantage (1 missing from us, + the 1 they do).
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Reach weapons have worse damage outputs compared to normal weapons as well. The only advantages I can think of is as follows:

1) If you take Reach combat feat, only on the initial round (with initiative), you can attack at 15 feet with -2 AC. Melees will attack once on that round while you full attack and it'll be the same as above for the remaining rounds.
2) IF YOU HAVE LONGSPEAR: Brace effectively prevents charges. Although you better kill a fighter with that or you're screwed.
3) IF YOU HAVE A LANCE: Your charges with a mount hurt twice as much. And that's if you are on a mount. Useless on tunnels, tree tops etc.

These are very situational and minor benefits to what costs to use a reach weapon. Should we just house rule that spears are non-reach weapons to attain the flavor and NEVER play in PFS?

Am I missing something here?