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Jan 23, 2012 -- 2:40AM, Hephalumph wrote:

Oath of Enmity specifically won't interact with Borrowed Confidence*. Still a good find.

You only roll twice per attack, for two attacks... still a high chance of critting (.4375 per attack, two attacks) - so not as much a sure thing, but then again when dealing with dice percentages often fly out the window and a 99.5% chance of infinite recursion is missed something like 30% of the time

A fighter MC avenger can do this, just using an off-hand weapon. Using Bard as the core and then adding in ranger as an extra MC just wastes some feat slots for no good purpose; as you yourself mentioned about the hit chance, [w] damage is also irrelevant when counting on infinite damage.


(*per the OoE power; "If another effect lets you roll twice and use the higher result when making an attack roll, this power has no effect on that attack. If an effect forces you to roll twice and use the lower result when making an attack roll, this power has no effect on that attack either. If an effect lets you reroll an attack roll and you rolled twice because of this power, you reroll both dice." - Borrowed confidence lets you roll twice, not re-roll.)

Borrowed Confidence doesn't tell you to take higher or lower; it just says "roll twice and use either result." I guess that isn't actually addressed by OoE, but in my mind that means roll 4 times and take your pick. Particularly since, if they wanted you to disregard it, OoE would be much more concisely written as "If another effect also lets you roll twice when making an attack roll, this power has no effect on that attack." to cover all the possible bases in fewer words.

(I guess you could also theoretically interpret it as "roll 3 times and take your pick," but that's actually good enough, because crit chance there is still about 58%)

The weapon has to be an axe (for rending) and a light or heavy blade (for Swordmaster), so...it needed to be a khopesh.

Jan 23, 2012 -- 2:48AM, DuelistDelSol wrote:

Also, "expected" and "optimal" are not the same thing.

You are not guaranteed infinite damage from this combo, since you say yourself you have a nearly 70% chance to crit and recover.  Should that 70% chance fall through, the combo ends.

It's a 70% chance per attack, but OR makes 2 attacks. Which is why it can go supercritical (each crit adds 2 more attacks, and the expected number of crits is >1 per attack, so it grows without bound).

Even in practice, it's pretty easy to make this very reliable with some cheap L10 potions of clarity.

Jan 23, 2012 -- 3:11AM, Fardiz wrote:

Except of course the average damage isn't infinite (especially with such a low hit chance). You can work out the number of attacks you would have to make before you failed to crit on any dice (the number is surprisingly for what looks like it should be inifite damage). I looked into this with the rather more simple, though level 30, hurricane of blades + sword of kings + rending weapon, which is 4 attacks, each of which generates 4 attacks when it crits and just make sure you crit more than one 1/4 (barbarian|fighter mc avenger for e.g.).

...What? A low hit chance? And HoB+SoK+rending still only generates 1 new attack per crit, so the number of attacks never grows (unless you add something like Goad of Blood to repeat HoB on each crit...although SoK isn't enough on its own, you need to make HoB reliable as well, using Mul Battle Slave for example; add those two and get your crit chance over 25% somehow, then it'll work).

Here's what happens in this build: you use OR the first time. So, in the first iteration, we will make 2 attacks.

There is a 10% chance that neither attack will crit. Then we lose.

There is a 47% chance that both attacks will crit. Then our next iteration has four attacks (two uses of OR).

Otherwise, one attack crits and the other doesn't so we are back where we started (i.e. this outcome is pretty much irrelevant). If we ignore this possibility, then there's an 18% chance of stopping and an 82% chance of doubling (in iteration 1).


Once we are on iteration 2, there's even less chance of everything stopping, because both uses of OR need to have both attacks not crit.

As the number of iterations grows, we are making more and more attacks each time, until eventually the chance of not critting on any (and ending the combo) is 0.


So overall, with pretty high probability, we will do infinite damage (and the fact that the probability of it exploding is non-zero is enough to make it have infinite expected value anyway...but in this case, it's fairly reliable too).