Usefulness of Cleave and Rapid Shot at high levels.

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I've been wondering - is there any purpose to these feats in IWD2 once you hit high levels? If attacks are capped at 5 per round, then doesn't that make these feats completely worthless?

 

I guess that the answer is "maybe". If either of those feats will not give you an extra attack after you've gotten to a level that gives your character 5 attks/rnd already, then yes, the feat will eventually become useless. Of course, even a pure "warrior" character (i.e. any combo of Fighter, Pally, Barbarian, and/or Ranger) will only get to 5 atks/rnd at 21 levels, so you'll either have to go into HOF or be playing solo (well, maybe a 2 or 3 character party, though not sure).

Knowing this, I guess that the question you ask yourself is this ... is it worth the value those feats bring, while they DO "work", to take them? If you're only playing in Normal mode with larger parties, the question seems moot. Rapid Shot will be worth taking because you do get the +1 atk/rnd for a long, long time.

 

Base attacks per round are capped at 4 even for level 30 fighters, so you still get an extra attack. (But you can't get a 6th attack per round with haste spells.)

Even hasted at high levels rapid shot still grants +3 to hit to all attacks except the first, something similar applies to the cleave feat.

 

No, a 30th level fighter has 5 attacks according to the manual.

-Max

 

That's a manual error. The unbuffed number of attacks is capped at 4 in the game.

 

In the world of useless and/or misleading manuals, IWD2's gotta get at least an honorary title. This misleading tidbit of information is one of them, leading into the false hopes of getting some actual leverage out of warrior levels.

I haven't done any realtime parsing of the combat log to check whether the extra attack from cleave just replaces one of your five allowed attacks per round or does it calculate one of them as a double swing, but this shouldn't be all that hard to check.

Have two guys with maxed attacks per round (one with Cleave, the other without) swing at a bunch of mobs (HOF mode goblins are easy enough) and compare the amount of swings they manage. Easiest to setup by moving them into the crowd, get them surrounded (so that they don't have to move to find new targets to bash) and issue the attack command to both while paused. Since the actual number of attacks isn't important here, just checking if there's a difference, this method isn't all that vulnerable to small timing mistakes either, especially if you let them go at it for several rounds at a time.

Rapid Shot, however, remains plenty usefull even after you max your attacks via other means. Since it actually doubles an attack with your highest BAB, instead of appending one with zero BAB at the end, you'll effectively get +3 to all of your attacks, minus the very first one.

 

That's interesting. Do you remember how you tested it? I may have to check this out, whenever I get around to playing IWD2 again. It suggests that Rapid Shot is a necessity instead of just a perk.

-Max

 

I soloed a druid, a ranger and a barbarian up to level 30. Neither got a fifth attack per round.

 

Another question: Does Improved Initiative have any real effect? And is it useful for spellcasters to take?

 

No, it's a broken feat - even with a patched game IIRC.

 

You recall correctly. I tested it last week with two almost identical characters - the only difference was II - and it did nothing. They hit and cast spells the same rate.

 

II does exactly what it says it does...however it remains useless for almost all purposes.