Pinpoint Poisoner: Can you make the dart attacks without the poison?


Rules Questions


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I've done a search on this (Ultimate Combat) feat and I haven't seen much discussion about it, so I'm going to post a couple feat descriptions. First off, its parent feat, Adder Strike.

Adder Strike (Combat)

You can quickly apply poison to gloved hands, protected feet, or other protected body parts, delivering the poison with your unarmed strikes.

Prerequisites: Poison use class feature, Craft (alchemy) 1 rank, Improved Unarmed Strike.

Benefit: As a swift action, you can apply one dose of contact or injury poison to two body parts that you use for unarmed strikes. You must still protect yourself against exposure to contact poisons you apply in this way.

Normal: Applying poison to a weapon or single piece of ammunition is a standard action.

Not so interesting on its own, I guess, but the next feat references it so I figured you should know what it does. Now here's the Pinpoint Poisoner feat:

Pinpoint Poisoner (Combat)

You deftly use specially prepared needles to apply poison for maximum effect.

Prerequisites: Poison use class feature, Craft (alchemy) 6 ranks, Adder Strike, Improved Unarmed Strike, Two-Weapon Fighting or flurry of blows class feature.

Benefit: When you use Adder Strike, you can instead poison up to two blowgun darts that you can then use to strike your opponent in melee. (Drawing such darts is a free action.) While holding these darts, you can spend a standard action to attack with one or a full-attack action to attack with both. Such attacks are considered melee touch attacks that deal 1d2 damage plus any bonuses you gain on your normal unarmed strike damage, and they deliver the poison. You can instead throw such darts as if they were shuriken, making your ranged attack rolls against the target's AC.

Normal: Applying poison to a weapon or single piece of ammunition is a standard action.

Now if my reading of this feat is correct, the "plus any bonuses to damage" part means, say, a Vivisectionist with a one-level dip in Monk could take these two feats rather easily and make two Sneak Attacks vs. touch AC provided the conditions for a Sneak Attack are met. It offers an interesting way to play the class (even if the actual effectiveness is brought into question), and I'm not sure if this is intentionally allowed or an oversight on the part of the developers, but the likelihood of them getting rid of this compatibility for no real reason isn't what I'm asking.

I'm wondering if the feat does (or should) let you attack with the darts as a touch attack even without the poison. Of course, having the poison will certainly make it more effective, but you aren't always guaranteed to have poison on you, especially since making your own takes a while even as an Alchemist. It seems like you just need to be wielding the darts, but it's hard to tell if the intent is that they have to have the poison applied to them, due to its link to the feat about poisoning stuff.

I'm not necessarily expecting a solid yes-or-no, but even a discussion on how this would work would be appreciated as food for thought should I decide to try this idea out.

Bonus question: Ammunition is still destroyed if you use it as a melee weapon, right?


Just wanted to bump this, since I using a build with pinpoint poisoner and sneak attack to try and boost the combat effectiveness of a master spy.

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 16, 2012 Top 32

How did I completely miss this feat?

Bumped and FAQ'd.


Zephyr Runeglyph wrote:
I'm wondering if the feat does (or should) let you attack with the darts as a touch attack even without the poison.

I don't see why not. It's like shooting tranquilliser darts without the tranquilliser.

Or just keep a flask of water on you, labelled "poison".
Quote:
Ammunition is still destroyed if you use it as a melee weapon, right?

Right, I think. They're just needles.


Dotting for future reference.

Liberty's Edge

IMHO it sounds like the feat should either be a melee touch attack that delivers the poison (but does not other damage), or a melee attack that delivers the poison and does damage - but not both a melee touch attack and delivers damage.


DigitalMage wrote:
IMHO it sounds like the feat should either be a melee touch attack that delivers the poison (but does not other damage), or a melee attack that delivers the poison and does damage - but not both a melee touch attack and delivers damage.

But then it'd be no better than the prerequisite Adder Strike feat.


Any answer on this? Thread necro plz?


another necro bump

Additionally, could you pre-poison your darts (with the 2 for 1 poison effect) and still be able to do the 1-2 attacks as melee touch attacks?

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