Barbarian rage power - strength surge

[Mathias Gehl]

I'd suggest toning this power down for offensive combat maneuvers.

Consider a 10th level raging barbarian with the Improved Disarm feat (CMB +18 (STR 18)) against a 10th level fighter (CMB +14 (STR 18)).

The barbarian rolls d20+18 against DC 29 - 50% chance of success. Then the barbarian activates Strength Surge. Now the check is d20+28 against DC 29 - only a natural 1 fails. The barbarian even has a 50% chance of breaking the weapon out of that fighter's locked gauntlet. The disparity is even worse at higher levels, as the barbarian's bonus increases. For other combat maneuvers, there aren't any locked gauntlets to protect you from being tripped, and consider how easy it would be to bear-hug a spellcaster until all his allies have been dealt with.

My suggestion would be that this power adds level/2 (or less) to a combat maneuver, but keep the whole +level for feats of strength and CMB defense - easily ripping a door off its hinges or pushing the kraken's tentacles away before they wrap around you is appropriately heroic in my opinion, but it's unbalancing as an offense.

In that case, the barbarian goes from 50% to 75%

[Biggus]

I agree. By level 15-20 it gets silly - even against an opponent with a locked gauntlet the disarm is very unlikely to fail. And as for sunder, well, you just better have an adamantine weapon...

I suggested suggested reducing it to 2 + 1/2 level on this thread, on the basis that it would still be worth doing at lower levels, but would not get OTT until very high levels.

I had meant to reduce it for all applications, but you are correct that it's only offensive CMB which is really a problem. It doesn't really make sense to me however that it would affect offensive and defensive CMB differently. How about if it added their full level to strength checks and half level to all CMB checks?

[Mathias Gehl]

Sorry I missed the previous post. I agree, adding the same amount to offensive and defensive combat maneuvers is more logical, and adding a fixed amount along with the 1/2 level solves the problem that with just half level, the ability isn't really worth using for a low-level character.

[Bikis]

I playtested this with the new rule, with it as an immediate action instead of rage power use, and with a 10 round limit once it is used.

I found this somewhat limited because it switched from use whenever to basically use once per encounter. As a third level barbarian this limited my first rage power to use one per encounter, which kinda sucked.