Mighty Bite, Great Rend: Order Of Operations

[eyelessgame]

The two monster feats in the subject raise a question for me.

Quote:

Mighty Bite: If you deal damage to a creature with your rend ability, the critical threat range of your bite attack becomes 18–20 until the start of your next turn.

Great Rend: If you are able to use your rend ability on the same turn that you also succeed at a bite attack, your rend deals an amount of additional damage equal to half your Strength modifier.

My question is: in what order are these resolved, and how do they both take effect?

Rend typically takes effect if both claws hit. Mighty Bite triggers after the rend deals damage, Great Rend damage has to be resolved after the bite attack deals damage.

I suppose the way to make it resolve without retroactively doing more damage is:

(1) resolve claw attacks
(2) If claw attacks hit and trigger rend, perform (normal) rend damage
(3) resolve bite attack; if rend dealt damage, use 18-20 threat range
(4) if bite attack deals damage after rend dealt damage, apply additional damage for Great Rend

Which basically means Great Rend's additional rend damage is applied with the successful bite, which I suppose makes sense. But it's additional damage caused by the rend ability but dealt/resolved after the bite attack.

I assume I'm reading this correctly? Or is Mighty Bite only useful for e.g. additional bite attacks that might come up as attacks of opportunity? Has anyone dealt with this a different way?

[Diego Rossi]

Great Rend wrote:

Benefit: If you are able to use your rend ability on the same turn that you also succeed at a bite attack,

As written, it is not applied after bite damage; it is applied after a successful bite attack, i.e. after the attack hits.

Mighty Bite requires that the rend deal damage, but Great Rend doesn't have that requirement.

Mighty Bite has several problems:
- as written, the increased critical threat range applies to the bite, regardless of who or what is the target of the attack, not only against the creature that was damaged by the rend attack.
The "fluff" implies the opposite: "Your rending claws expose your opponent’s vital organs to your teeth." but the actual rule doesn't apply any limitation;
- normally, people don't roll the claw attacks, then the rend damage, see if it deals damage (that guy is an invulnerable rager, has DR X/magic, has Stoneskin?), and then roll the bite damage. It is a "great way" to spend 10 minutes on the attack routine of a single troll;
- it triples the threat range of the bite. That is on par with Weapon Mastery, the capstone ability of a Fighter. At the cost of a single feat.

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