I still haven't heard a good rationale behind making combat maneuvers more difficult to perform.
Let's leave aside the issue of grapple (which is a bit overcomplicated in 3.5, I guess) and take disarm as an example. All things being equal, a PFRPG character with Improved Disarm is now roughly 30% worse at disarming than he was in 3.5 (DC 15 vs. 1d20, +2 vs. +4 bonus for feat). Why is that an improvement to the game?
I'm not saying it's making the game worse, per se, but I don't see how it's obviously improving the game.
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Disarm and similar maneuvers are incredibly powerful in the action economy of D&D, from the players' perspective. That's good enough for me, right there.
But consider this: in Pathfinder Beta, most of the maneuvers can be taken as attack actions ... and there's no penalty for making them later iterative attacks. That has two big implications: one, the base performance of the maneuver needs to be somewhat harder to perform, and two, high-BAB types have something else to do with those low-BAB iterative attacks ... something that's fairly efficient. (Pathfinder provides other things, of course, like Vital Strike, but I like the encouragement to use maneuvers, too.)
Disarm and similar maneuvers are incredibly powerful in the action economy of D&D, from the players' perspective. That's good enough for me, right there.
Is disarming (or sundering or bullrushing or overrunning) really that good? And even if it is that good (which I haven't seen to be the case so far), do we have really to take everything good away from melee classes?
There are two combat maneuvers that I've seen folks use: tripping and grappling. Mostly tripping. So assuming that those two maneuvers are "too good" (or maybe just tripping is "too good"), shouldn't those maneuvers be nerfed somehow rather than making every maneuver hard to perform?
I guess I'm just curious to know what the official reason is behind it.
But consider this: in Pathfinder Beta, most of the maneuvers can be taken as attack actions ... and there's no penalty for making them later iterative attacks.
It's not at all clear to me that that's actually the case; the CMB rules also mention making an "attack roll" which confuses the issue a bit.