Wild Shot's Great Draw

[Danuvis]

Hey!

This is something I brought up in the server's Skype chat, but I'd like to bring the suggestion here all the same. I'm biased, of course, having gone for Wild Shot on a character of mine, but I believe the feat in question warrants some adjustments. Considering that Great Draw is essentially the same ability as Power Attack but for ranged weaponry and requires a person to invest in a PrC that won't allow one to reach the improved version, it stands to reason that it could be improved in a similar fashion as the aforementioned melee feat.

What do you think?

[Silver Snow]

I see it as pretty reasonable. As it's a combat mode it isn't going to inherently get more attacks than any melee, and ranged damage suffers enough as it is. Any benefits are always curtailed by a high enough miss chance and the sparse availability of arrows. The strength of ranged is that it's relatively easy to get more attacks but this would be chosen in favor of that.

[Talisman]

I think it would be naive to say that a melee character and a ranged character would receive the same benefit from this. A melee character has to make themselves available to be damaged by melee monsters, whereas a ranged person can just stand there like a turret and not usually need to worry about their attacks being interrupted by a need to move or heal. Also with how available Mighty versions of bows seem to be dropping, I don't really think melee gets that much more of a STR advantage. Especially if you're character is like my Wild Shot and a thrower, which works with STR like a melee weapon.

Now, I'm not saying this would be overpowered, but they're not the same "power level." It really is comparing apples to oranges in this case. Of course, that may be excusable because Great Draw requires a PRC.

[Loreweaver]

Melee does have a damage advantage, both because of the 1.5 multiplier for two handed weapons and because Mighty is usually capped at STR 12 or 14. Darts and axes may give you the full STR bonus but because their base damage is lower than that of many melee weapons you have some ground to make up, and because you rely on DEX to hit you can't focus on STR to the same degree.

This lower damage means the AB penalty of the combat mode is cheaper for ranged attacks. Because of that, using Great Draw is almost always good for your damage output, adding an average +2 damage per round if applied blindly. In contrast, the original Power Attack was almost always unrewarding.

Greater Draw may warrant some improvements however. There are still times where using GD VI is a good idea but the margins compared to GD V are slim against normal targets. That said, when you're trying to hurt something with damage reduction you're not going to want anything else.