There are some that have an ability that lets them make multiple attacks for only 2 actions, but says that each attack has to be against a different target. Why? Did they just think it would be too powerful if they could all attack the same person?
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There are some that have an ability that lets them make multiple attacks for only 2 actions, but says that each attack has to be against a different target. Why? Did they just think it would be too powerful if they could all attack the same person?
The first one that sprang to mind is the Gug and their ability doesn't increase MAP until all four attacks are completed. So 4 Strikes at 0 MAP against one person. Seems like it would be pretty rough.
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Yeah, it is probably to prevent focus firing at one player and taking them out quickly.
There are some player abilities that work similarly. Swipe and Impossible Volley are the ones I can think of immediately.
Focus fire is pretty much always stronger than splitting your damage, and those powers have an additional limitation that they don't get all their attacks if they don't have enough targets to throw them at. For example, if the Gug can only reach two members of the party, then its total multiattack damage goes way down.
It's effectively the martial version of area effect powers.
Having gone against a creature before it was fixed to target multiple enemies, yes, it's way too strong to multi flurry with no MAP increase to a single target.
Combining double slice with FoB in an activity with all the upsides and none of the downsides is crazy powerful. Almost downed a blocking champion in one round, that was a bad fight.
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In the last month, my party fought ten gugs in a very large room, four gugs and a gug shaman in two 30-foot-by-30-foot rooms joined by a wide opening, and three fiendish gugs in another 0-foot-by-30-foot room. This let me see the effects of the gugs' unusual anatomy under many circumstances.
Gugs are large muscular abberations with sideways jaws in place of a head and their two arms splitting into four forearms. They are based on a H. P. Lovecraft story, so they are meant to be frightful, unnatural horrors. They have 15-foot reach with both their claw and jaws attacks and their Attack of Opportunity makes closing in on them difficult. Their Eerie Flexibility makes them hard to hold them back at a bottleneck corridor.
Claws are typically agile unarmed attacks and often accompanied by a rend ability, which the gugs have. But gugs have four claws due to their four forearms. How do the designers make the four claws relevant? By allowing a four-claw special attack. And to feel like four claws attacking simualtaneously, they added, "These attacks all count toward the gug’s multiple attack penalty, but the penalty doesn’t increase until after the gug makes all its attacks."
However, the Furious Claws multiattack is four claw attacks. The gug has a high strike bonus for its level, +23, so we could expect a good chance of critical hits on a claw attack. The claws deal 2d8+13 slashing damage, and 22 damage is moderate damage for a 10th-level creature. Four claw attacks without multiple attack penalty is massive damage in a single turn for a 10th-level creature. Combined with the gug's other abilities, that would make it more powerful than a 10th-level creature should be. Yet a gug is a legacy PF1 10th-level creature with four claws. How can we nerf it?
Reducing the strike bonus or the damage on the gug's claws would make it dependent on Furious Claws for claw attacks. We would prefer that most of the time it Strides to close in, bites with its weird jaws, and follows up with a claw. That would make it feel like a vicious monster. Furious Claws ought to be an uncommon option, so nerf it without nerfing claw Strikes.
Another option would be to make Furious Claws a three-action activity. That is how the natural attack of the PF1 gug worked. In that option the gug would have to stay still, limiting the tactical utility of Furious Claws. Except that the gug has 15-foot reach, so it can probably reach one target anyway. And we want to keep it moving to highlight its Attack of Opportunity. Toss out that idea. Furious Claws will be a two-action activity.
But as a two-action activity, Furious Claws [two-actions] could be combined with Claw Rend [one-action], Requirements The monster hit the same enemy with two consecutive claw Strikes in the same round. Effect The monster automatically deals that Strike’s damage again to the enemy. That's too much!
Making each claw Strike against a different target stops Furious Claws from combining with Claw Rend. It also reduces the tactical utility without forcing immobility on the gug. It prevents the gug from knocking a single PC unconscious in a single turn with four claw attacks. And it emphasizes the flavor that each attack was made with a different claw. That is a workable solution.
How does that work in practice?
In the large room, my party--seven 14th-level PCs and three lower-level NPCs--sent tanky characters to intercept the advance of the gugs and then took down the gugs with ranged attacks and area-of-effect spells. The 15-foot reach with Attack of Opportunity meant that the melee characters slowly stepped toward the gugs and could make only one Strike each. There was no point in a gug using Furious Claws against a single opponent.
In the pair of rooms, the tanky characters tried to form a blockade between the two rooms with the party in the south room and the gugs in the north room. The gug shaman had its own ranged spells, so was unperturbed. But an ordinary gug slipped past the blockage via Eerie Flexibility, slowed down by difficult terrain, and got in one jaws attack on a spellcaster. The next turn, right after the gug shaman cast an area-of-effect spell in that room, barely missing the lone south gug, the lone gug stepped to the center of the 30-foot-by-30-foot room. Guess what a 15-foot reach does in that location? Furious Claws all around on four targets, mostly spellcasters. That was scary.
Except that it wasn't all that dangerous; rather, it only felt dangerous. That is the beauty of the design. Four 14th-level characters were afraid of a single 10th-level monster due to its abilities that took advantage of spellcasters' vulnerabilities. A champion deliberately provoked the Attack of Opportunity (and a 2nd AoO from another gug) while Striding to provide a flank for the rogue, and the lone gug went down quickly to sneak attack and spells. No other gug tried the suicidal Furious Claws maneuver after that.
As for the three fiendish gugs, the party ambushed them for a quick kill. They had learned to respect gugs.