Buffing Cleave + THF/TWF

[Angelus_dead]

DDO includes four active melee area-of-attack abilities: Cleave, Great Cleave, Whirlwind, and Supreme Cleave. They are not useful enough to contribute to normal combats, for several reasons:
1. Compared to Cleave, most of them have excessive cooldowns, rendering a supposedly more-powerful feat less valuable.
2. Effects which increase attack speed do not improve the activation time or cooldown of these abilities, so they become relatively less helpful as you advance.
3. Important combat improvements like GTHF and GTWF do not give melee AOEs any benefit.

Fixes to the first two problems are self-evident. Here is a suggestion to resolve the third one:

THF and Cleave
When an active melee AOE is performed with a two-handed weapon, there is a chance it will produce glancing blows when each enemy is attacked. The probability is equal to the percentage of your full attack sequence that includes glancing blows. (Note that this implies one enemy could be hit by multiple glancing blows from a single Cleave, up to the number of other enemies caught in the arc).

TWF and Cleave
When an active melee AOE is performed with a weapon in each hand, there is a chance it will produce an offhand attack on each enemy attacked. The probability is equal to the percentage of your full attack sequence that includes an offhand attack.

Postscript
Keep in mind when evaluating changes to these features that damage is less useful when it is distributed across multiple enemies than if it is focused on just one. Inflicting 20% damage to each of 10 monsters is less helpful (in the short term) than doing 100% damage to just one of them, because the latter removes an enemy as a threat to your group. Also remember that the most dangerous and important DDO enemies are generally fought without another monster within reach

[Angelus_dead]

1. Compared to Cleave, most of them have excessive cooldowns, rendering a supposedly more-powerful feat less valuable.

In the recent Lammania release notes, it was announced that this problem will be reduced by buffing Great Cleave and Whirlwind to have the same 5-second cooldown as Cleave: http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=206066

This is a step in the right direction, but I don't expect it to be enough to make these kinds of feats useful enough, especially in conjunction with THF or TWF.

[sirgog]

In the recent Lammania release notes, it was announced that this problem will be reduced by buffing Great Cleave and Whirlwind to have the same 5-second cooldown as Cleave: http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=206066

This is a step in the right direction, but I don't expect it to be enough to make these kinds of feats useful enough, especially in conjunction with THF or TWF.

Agreed. This change doesn't make them worth using - merely lets you make the weak choice of activating these feats more often.

A boost to damage on them would make them worthwhile.