Community

At work, so can't fully go in depth, but if you're doing sneak attack you're forgetting one major feat:
Craven.

It adds 1 damage (per character level, so at 20th, +20) to all attacks that are sneak attacks.  It scales as you level, making it (IMO) almost a required feat. 

Seconding Maat's remarks, particularly regarding skill tricks and Deft Strike's effect. (Action types and use limits are important resources in D&D.) You've registered the basic principle of sneak attack - namely, bonus damage per attack combines really well with extra attacks - but there're some snags in how you pulled it off.

Additionally, it's unrealistic to consider AC 10 at level 20; the average AC is closer to 36 at that point and often much higher. A sneak attack could deal insta-kill damage and still be worthless if it can't hit. Your attack bonus really matters.

The best sneak-attacker I've ever been able to build is actually a swashbuckler, using Martial Stance (Assassin's Stance) to qualify for Daring Outlaw. It got that powerful entirely because it had a high attack bonus - this was compared to actual monster benchmarks. (I.e. I figure out the chance for each attack to hit average monster AC, then compute average damage per hit, then multiply and add them up to get an expected damage result - this is much more involved than you need to get, just letting you know the lengths to which I went.)

Similarly, a good rule of thumb on bigger-damage-for-lower-attack is that +2 damage is roughly on par with +1 attack. (This varies a lot depending on the character and the opponent, but it's a rough balance.) So consider Deadly Defense - two feats invested in a character with no real bonus feats. It gives you -2 attack (or more) in exchange for +1d6 damage; a d6 averages 3.5 damage. -2 attack for less than +4 damage is not a good tradeoff, and it only gets worse if you use higher Combat Expertise.

If you want to do the "I attack a nil AC all the time" stunt, the usual way to do that is to use Wand Chambers (CAdv, I think) with wands of Wraithstrike (Spell Compendium) in your weapons. (The Rules Compendium clarified that using a wand of a swift-action spell is itself a swift action.) This is remarkably cheesy, though, to the point where Wraithstrike is one of the most frequently-banned spells in the game due to that trick. (Unjustly so in my opinion: many DMs ban it because they think high damage is the worst thing in the game. Meanwhile they tend to allow the Celerity spells, which break the action economy wide open, and actions are far more important than HP. But I digress.) To counter the lower AB if you don't want to use Wraithstrike, the usual trick is to use Swords of Subtlety (DMG) or weapons which mimic its enhancement; these grant a fat +4 bonus on attacks and damage rolls when used to make sneak attacks. 

Dang, thanks for all the input, being new at all of this jazz- I didn't realise at first how many things you need to take into account.
It's still all good fun, though the endless possibilities are sometimes really hard to overlook and consider.

Anyway, thanks for all the tips. :D
I have a whooooole lot more reading to do.

May 6, 2012 -- 3:13PM, aelryinth wrote:

Tempest, where's that thread where we were combining Sneak Attack damage against one another?

That should REALLY give him some ideas.

...

==Aelryinth

Here's the thread, although it's kind of hard to follow, because we were churning out builds and revisions to builds so quickly we used jot notation.

As I recall, you tended to use straight-up fighter (since the discussion started with your claim that a high AB, TWF fighter didn't need more bonus damage than the fighter-exclusive feats to dish out comparable damage to sneak attackers) while I alternated between rogue and rogue/Nightsong Enforcer  (to play around with different parameters on sneak attack TWFers). The eventual switch to Fighter or Swashbuckler using Assassin's Stance etc. was just trying to get the numbers obscenely higher.

The eventual 'best' winner wasn't decided because we disagree on how to apply Weapon Supremacy's once-per-round effects, but they actually worked out pretty similar (both in terms of damage effectiveness and build: TWF tree + (some Shadow Hand martial study; I think we usually used Cloak of Deception) + Assassin's Stance + Shadow Blade + Craven + Shadow Hand Short swords* of subtlety; the swashbuckler used Daring Outlaw while the fighter went up the Supremacy tree.). If you're playing from low levels, though, I think the swashbuckler would be more interesting due to its higher skill points lending it to be more useful in non-combat situations. (Doubly so if you use the Dead Levels article.)

*Well, there was this argument about using Sun Blades, specifically if you could simultaneously use them as bastard swords (non-Light weapons, to gain the full Power Attack bonus) and short swords (Light weapons, to avoid the worst TWF penalties), but I think I eventually conceded the point for the sake of argument.



The issue I'd take with this approach for a new player is that it's VERY immobile, highly reliant on full attacks and flanking to get its sneak attack damage output, and build-wise they rely on not making any mistakes (or having a forgiving DM with the retraining rules, which - as we've seen - isn't always a safe assumption because Fighters Can't Have Nice Things, y'know.). Using a martial adept is probably easier for a newer player (Diamond Mind / Iron Heart warblade has very much the same feel as a swashbuckler), but then again I usually find myself defaulting to that position.

Something just came to mind - 

What if you used a pounce type character, met the pre-reqs for Revenant Blade and used the double bladed scimitar (TWF chain) with Power Attack and Sneak Attack?