Why no Full action spells?

[Red_Rob]

In 3rd edition the paradigm for Warriors is that after lvl 5 they have to spend a full round action to get a fully level appropriate attack. They can still get a normal attack for a standard action but to get the full goodness of their multiple attacks they have to stand still (apart from a 5' step).

So why are 3rd level and above Wizard spells not Full actions too? Why was the decision made that they can move and get a level appropriate action but Warriors have to suck it?

Even more than that, why are spells all either standard action or go off next round? I expected to see some full round action spells but they don't exist.

Why?

[Roy]

In 3rd edition the paradigm for Warriors is that after lvl 5 they have to spend a full round action to get a fully level appropriate attack. They can still get a normal attack for a standard action but to get the full goodness of their multiple attacks they have to stand still (apart from a 5' step).

So why are 3rd level and above Wizard spells not Full actions too? Why was the decision made that they can move and get a level appropriate action but Warriors have to suck it?

Even more than that, why are spells all either standard action or go off next round? I expected to see some full round action spells but they don't exist.

Why?

Better question: Why can't warriors continue to move and get their damage off without having to resort to extra actions or Pounce as a workaround?

Answer: Because Fighters Do Not Get Nice Things.

Solution: Full attack is a Standard action.

[TOZ]

So why are 3rd level and above Wizard spells not Full actions too?

Why would you nerf the weakest class? Look at that BAB and HD! </Stupid WotC Designers>

That is a major houserule in the PF game I play in Houston. Most spells except for evocation are full-attack actions. Of course, since we haven't gotten past 5th level yet the change is kind of moot for now.

[TheFlatline]

Now that'd be interesting... You get a single attack as part of a full move action, and your full attack is a standard action. Jesus that would increase a Fighter's damage output like crazy.

[Archmage]

Now that'd be interesting... You get a single attack as part of a full move action, and your full attack is a standard action. Jesus that would increase a Fighter's damage output like crazy.

You mean it would make a Fighter's damage output possibly matter without them having to resort to stacking damage multipliers on a Charge?

[Lich-Loved]

Now that'd be interesting... You get a single attack as part of a full move action, and your full attack is a standard action. Jesus that would increase a Fighter's damage output like crazy.

I have been running with the following house rule for fighters for the last two years in a campaign that has thus far run from 3rd to 17th (Paizo AoW):

Fighters may, as a standard action, make all attacks available to them as if they were making a full-attack action AND each attack is at the fighter's highest bonus. Example: At 6th level, a fighter makes two attacks as a standard action at +6/+6 BAB; at 12th level this becomes +12/+12/+12 BAB.

The result has been fantastic: fighters actually beat the living hell out of things, especially with power attack, which becomes much more reliable now with the flat bonuses. Also, the math is faster (the total to-hit mod need only be calculated once) and all attack and damage dice can be rolled together. Sure, the fighter is still gimped in all the usual ways, but when he gets his turn, he puts the hurt on foes.

IMC, the 17 fighter uses cloak of displacement and has boots of flying, relying on a haste buff to further push his damage up. Add a +2 adamant holy heavy mace used two-handed and he absolutely ruins the undead and dragons. I think he has a strength of 24 so his to-hit against an evil foe is 17+2+2+7 = 28. Typical ACs are under 40 and average about 33, so he often puts 5 points into power attack, dropping his to hit to 23. Hitting the foe does 1d8 + 4 + 2d6 + 9 + 10 = 34 points per attack on average with 4 attacks per round (5 hasted) for somewhere around 125 - 170 points with a 60ft (flying) move. Of course crits confirm more often and some creatures are power attack bait so he is definitely effective.

[Lago PARANOIA]

To the OP:

Probably because it doesn't make a lick of difference?

Sure, it would probably make spellcasters who somehow finagled the tumble skill slightly more vulnerable to creatures with reach weapons, but seriously, who cares?

[Psychic Robot]

Fighters may, as a standard action, make all attacks available to them as if they were making a full-attack action AND each attack is at the fighter's highest bonus. Example: At 6th level, a fighter makes two attacks as a standard action at +6/+6 BAB; at 12th level this becomes +12/+12/+12 BAB.

That works at low levels, but not at high levels. Pathfinder fighters are autohitting everything at higher levels. I'd change it to a -2 penalty per iterative attack. So a high level rogue would make his attacks at +11/+11/+11 while a high level fighter would make his attacks at +14/+14/+14/+14.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Question: What is wrong with fighters autohitting at higher levels?

[Archmage]

Question: What is wrong with fighters autohitting at higher levels?

From a power level standpoint, probably nothing.

From a gameplay standpoint, it's kind of boring to auto-hit everything, although the penalties on subsequent attacks past the first (which obviously apply in most games, and certainly in default PF) mean that at least there's some uncertainty about the outcome of an attack.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Perhaps I'm just biased because I cut my teeth on JRPGs, where the combat-focused classes only rarely missed, and it usually was due to a statistical outlier or it meant you were fighting something you weren't supposed to beat/ beat only with great difficulty.

I have no problems with the Fighters, Monks, Thieves, and Red Mages of the world pretty much being able to just roll damage, with white and black mages missing frequently.

[Kaelik]

From a power level perspective, how about the fact that things already die in one hit, so auto hitting on your one hit... means you might as well just stop playing the game.

[For Valor]

So is the solution is spells as full action or full attacks as standard actions?

Or should we change nothing? I thought the [Tome] material had worked around this problem.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I fucking hate that jRPG shit where attacks mostly hit.

That's not exciting or engaging. That's just the game designers realizing how awfully shitty their game is and deciding to take mercy on the player; rather than forcing them to spend 10%-30% extra time grinding, they just cut it out.

I think 4E's hit rate of 50-65% is too low--I'd rather have it about 75-85%. That way attacks are reliable but there's still the threat of Murphy's Law to keep things exciting.

[Red_Rob]

To clarify, I wasn't saying that full round spells should be implemented. I was just curious why the Full action seemed to be reserved for high level Warriors.

I was wondering if Monte et. al. had ever expanded on this design decision.

[Psychic Robot]

Question: What is wrong with fighters autohitting at higher levels?

It's boring.

[Shazbot79]

I fucking hate that jRPG shit where attacks mostly hit.

That's not exciting or engaging. That's just the game designers realizing how awfully shitty their game is and deciding to take mercy on the player; rather than forcing them to spend 10%-30% extra time grinding, they just cut it out.

I think 4E's hit rate of 50-65% is too low--I'd rather have it about 75-85%. That way attacks are reliable but there's still the threat of Murphy's Law to keep things exciting.

I think that scaling for 3.Pathfinder's iterative attacks from Always Hit to Almost Never Hit makes sense.

I also think that it makes sense in 4E, which generally doesn't have iterative attacks, to have a lower hit rate. However, the baseline hit rate in 4E is entirely TOO low.

To my mind it should scale from a baseline of about 50% at 1st level to about 70% at 30th.

[Murtak]

3E spans too many levels of power and paradigms to easily fix. It features A) the pregenerated fighter, B) the reasonably optimized single weapon fighter, C) the charger and D) the counterattacker. Quadrupling his damage won't help A, but it would work fine for B. It is pointless for C. D on the other hand does not care about getting an extra attack or three during his turn. And all of them still suck, with or without fixes, because all they do is deal damage from melee range. Whatever fix you apply will invariably help one type of fighter, not matter to another and ultimately not turn them into a decent class.

And on the other end of the power curve you have wizards. Wizards aren't awesome because they deal a gadrillion points of damage, they are awesome because they have a specialized spell just for you that ignores all of your defenses. And that crap needs to be cut way the fuck down, or failing that, fighters need some insanity too. I mean, just look at that fucking spell list. Charm Person, Minor Image, Magic Circle, Polymorph, Magic Jar, Antimagic Field, Forcecage, Discern Location,
Gate. Rules? Fuck the rules. Defenses? What defenses? All that wizard voodoo just works, ignoring a random combination of target defenses, game rules, world cohesion and sanity.

But hey, lets ignore wizards for a second. Look at monsters instead. Ignore monsters that look like wizards, at least for now. Just look at the brutes. Yes, those things that do about the rogue's entire hit point pool per attack and that come with 6 attacks. Now see how many of them can actually take a single round worth of attacks from a fighter without exploding. Given an optimized fighter this number is quite small. So why even care about more damage for fighters? Heck, ignoring monsters altogether, it is not like there is no one else to do damage in the party. If anything fighters need abilities to stand up to monsters (and wizards), not more damage. If everyone deals a crapton of damage we get one-round fights. Last time I checked that kind of sucks.

And yet the solution is "fighters need more damage" or at best "fighters need to do more stuff in fights". And that just is not going to cut it when the wizard can opt to flat out ignore fights or win them automatically. Either the fighter needs more crazy or the wizard needs less. And then the fighter needs something to do outside of combat. And then he needs something interesting to do during combat. And then he needs more defenses, so his most important stat can be something other that his initiative score. And then, maybe, it is time to look at his damage output. But until all the other points are addressed, upping his damage output is nonsensical. Damage output is the only thing fighters can be ok at. Sure, it is way too easy to be bad at dealing damage on top of everything else. But at least killing monsters by hitting them with a pointy stick is something fighters can be good at. It is the rest of the game they suck at.

[erik]

If monsters get to use the same full attack on a standard action rules, then doesn't the party fighter just become a glass cannon who gets squished by giants... basically putting things back to square one?

[RobbyPants]

Yeah, you can't just look at any of these aspects in a vacuum. You end up needing to rewrite the whole thing anyway.

[Roy]

Lol at people complaining about Fighters auto hitting. Um, they've always done that. Their problem has been hitting hard enough to make things care that they are being hit. As fun as it is to bash the Paizils for everything they do wrong, 'Fighters auto hitting' is simply something they haven't gotten around to breaking yet. It is not a change they implemented.

Though several people here are well on their way to doing it for them.

[Psychic Robot]

Lol at people complaining about Fighters auto hitting. Um, they've always done that.

And it's always been a problem.

[Murtak]

Lol at people complaining about Fighters auto hitting. Um, they've always done that. Their problem has been hitting hard enough to make things care that they are being hit.

Bullshit. As I just explained at length fighters have plenty of issues. Lack of damage however is not one of them. A well-built fighter will destroy anything he can attack. Unfortunately "well-built" pretty much means a charger, power-attack-abuser or archer. Your feats will be more or less fixed, your skills set 5 levels in advance, your class and prestige class progression very rigid and if your DM is at all stingy with magic items you will suffer - but killing monsters is not an issue.

[Psychic Robot]

It all depends if you're cheesing or not. Which, of course, has always been a problem in 3e. Fighters should not be able to do enough damage in one hit to kill an equal-CR opponent. Likewise, wizards should not be able to cast a spell that one-hits an equal-CR opponent.

For the average player, the fighter is going to do acceptable damage. 50 damage a hit is pretty good, especially when you're making five attacks. The problem is the disparity in power between optimization and non-optimization. And crits and non-crits. Being able to one-hit a balor is not something that most DMs are expecting to deal with.

[MGuy]

3E spans too many levels of power and paradigms to easily fix. It features A) the pregenerated fighter, B) the reasonably optimized single weapon fighter, C) the charger and D) the counterattacker. Quadrupling his damage won't help A, but it would work fine for B. It is pointless for C. D on the other hand does not care about getting an extra attack or three during his turn. And all of them still suck, with or without fixes, because all they do is deal damage from melee range. Whatever fix you apply will invariably help one type of fighter, not matter to another and ultimately not turn them into a decent class.

And on the other end of the power curve you have wizards. Wizards aren't awesome because they deal a gadrillion points of damage, they are awesome because they have a specialized spell just for you that ignores all of your defenses. And that crap needs to be cut way the fuck down, or failing that, fighters need some insanity too. I mean, just look at that fucking spell list. Charm Person, Minor Image, Magic Circle, Polymorph, Magic Jar, Antimagic Field, Forcecage, Discern Location,
Gate. Rules? Fuck the rules. Defenses? What defenses? All that wizard voodoo just works, ignoring a random combination of target defenses, game rules, world cohesion and sanity.

But hey, lets ignore wizards for a second. Look at monsters instead. Ignore monsters that look like wizards, at least for now. Just look at the brutes. Yes, those things that do about the rogue's entire hit point pool per attack and that come with 6 attacks. Now see how many of them can actually take a single round worth of attacks from a fighter without exploding. Given an optimized fighter this number is quite small. So why even care about more damage for fighters? Heck, ignoring monsters altogether, it is not like there is no one else to do damage in the party. If anything fighters need abilities to stand up to monsters (and wizards), not more damage. If everyone deals a crapton of damage we get one-round fights. Last time I checked that kind of sucks.

And yet the solution is "fighters need more damage" or at best "fighters need to do more stuff in fights". And that just is not going to cut it when the wizard can opt to flat out ignore fights or win them automatically. Either the fighter needs more crazy or the wizard needs less. And then the fighter needs something to do outside of combat. And then he needs something interesting to do during combat. And then he needs more defenses, so his most important stat can be something other that his initiative score. And then, maybe, it is time to look at his damage output. But until all the other points are addressed, upping his damage output is nonsensical. Damage output is the only thing fighters can be ok at. Sure, it is way too easy to be bad at dealing damage on top of everything else. But at least killing monsters by hitting them with a pointy stick is something fighters can be good at. It is the rest of the game they suck at.

I think, and have stated before, that things should meet in the middle. Fighters,and anything that only has the option of -get in melee --> Full Attack- isn't enough. And the wizard's ability to hit an -I win- button at anytime is too much. A middle ground (for both casting monsters, brutes, magicless fighters and casters) should be found.