Power attack isn't sticky

[dolio]

In my fiddling around, I also noticed that unlike fighting defensively, power attack isn't sticky. So you can choose how much to power attack on a per-attack basis.

For an example of where this matters, if you don't mind a lot of tedium, you can power attack on your main hand, but turn it off for your light offhand while two weapon fighting. Power attack doesn't add any damage to a light weapon, but you're supposed to still incur the penalty to hit. Also, if you have iterative attacks, you could power attack on your first attack, but turn it off on the iterative attacks to make them more likely to actually hit.

Not sure how easy this is to fix. The power attack condition has two args, but I haven't looked to see if one is available for stickiness.

[anatoliy-savchak]

Good point overall.

Btw right hand does not involved, see the feat (light weapon).

I'd rather have it as a separate toggle option, which reset's each round.

To be fare - in my TT D&D 3.5 (in-person) I never seen a PC to use Power Attack. They always forget))

[dolio]

I brought up two weapons because it's the only situation I can think of where you'd want to be power attacking with a light weapon. If one of your hands gets a bonus, your other hand is supposed to take the same penalty, even if it doesn't get a bonus. You can choose to power attack with only light weapons, and it will just lower your chance to hit with no benefit, but that'd be foolish. 😄

Making it something you have to enable every turn would be pretty tedious if you want to consistently power attack. That is an option, though.

I guess an additional anti-tedium feature could be that the game automatically decides to power attack for 0 if you're attacking with only light weapons (not counting unarmed). I think right now it actually does the downside-only power attack if you forget to reset it back to 0.

[doug1234]

The DLL docs seem to say power attack has 3 args. Maybe that isn't correct? Seems like only one arg is used in the code. If so, fixing it may not be too hard.

BTW: I've seen power attack used a good bit when playing. But I played with some pretty hard core people. I generally used it when I only got a single attack in the round, especially when I had the extra +2 from a charge.

[dolio]

Oh you're right. Somehow I thought I saw 2 on the condition list.

In any case, I haven't looked to see if the other two spots are actually used for anything. If they aren't, then it's easy to do something about it.