Coup de Grace??? Any chance?

[voodoogroves]

all those things you listed require skill or require a respectable level and all of them can fail

Coup de grace can be used by just about any level if I remember right..and it never fails
from a gamer point of view...I win button

sleep mob, walk up..instant kill mob
hold mob..walk up instant kill
paralyze weapons become instant kill weapons, mob is para - next strike instant kills

what is the fedish with instant kill ? a bunch of players have developed a desire for
'God' mode

Maybe the epic levels will be a bad idea in the long run

Totally not how it works. Have you ever actually used it in PNP?

- Full round action. Not an attack, full round action ... stand still, do nothing, get hit. In DDO, this needs to correspond to a lengthy animation sequence, not simply a "swing".
- Target must be helpless. "real" stun, not the daze-stun some things generate or the silly paralyzing weapons that are *not* generating a helpless state. You know this, right?
- You automatically hit and it's automatically a critical. Target takes this damage. Note this is likely LESS DAMAGE than if you'd done a full round attack on it.
- As this is an auto-hit, it would (technically) disallow the use of attack-roll modifying stances in PNP (CE, PA, etc.)
- Target then makes a save with a DC based on the damage dealt; if it fails, it dies. Obviously the save would need to be scaled for DDO.

[SealedInSong]

This is not true really. Plenty of examples in each directions. For example, drow mobs have amazing spell resistance. Player drow dont. Players have great fortitude. Mobs only recently got the AI to effect it to some extent, nowhere near as much as players can effect mob fort. Mobs may have sunder, stun, and coup de grace, but that does not mean they are scripted to use intelligently. Finally, players have 100 percent fort by around 10th level. Mobs rarely have near this much until much later, and even then we are talking raid bosses and even then it is not as high. Mobs use vorpals and death spells that kill players even quicker than this effect would. Let's face it, a held mob has only a couple second life span anyway. What harm is there to let melee kill it in one second? All of this polarization of melee and arcane really revolves around kill count and lack of it.

Let's not even talk about death ward. Active death ward,... no insta kill. So, I have to pretty much respectfully disagree with all of your comments.

I have to completely agree with the notion of implementing coup-de-grace. I know that real world logic normally does not extrapolate to this game at all, but considering:

1) Casters can instakill from afar. They can instakill en masse.
2) Rogues can achieve expert training in assassinating at close range (prestige).
3) Monks inherently get the ability to kill their enemies with precision strikes (quivering palm) and expert training (void IV).

So really, certain melees already have the ability to instakill and casters have always had superior instakill abilities. In my opinion, it would add a lot of tactics, variety, and flavor to implement a mechanic for melees (and perhaps some ranged characters) to instakill without the use of vorpals/banishers/smiters.

Players could attempt to CDG an enemy when they're either helpless (stunned, held, sleeping, etc.) *or* inhibited (paralysis, prone, feared, etc) but would only receive a DC bonus for cases of helplessness.

E.g.:
Helpless DC = 10 + attack mod (dex if using weapon finesse feat) + (possibly) bonus for using vorpal weapon
Inhibited DC = 5 + attack mod + special modifiers

Hearkening back to dev comments about CDG used against players:

Originally Posted by Eladrin in 2008
Auto-criticals when struck while helpless are intended to simulate the coup de grace rule, without requiring a one round wind-up or a forced death check. We also don't do the "make a DC 15 Fort Save or die" for massive damage. Adding a death check in either circumstance would greatly increase the amount of random player deaths - getting held is often bad enough.

I think there are a number of workarounds for this, most notably giving players a feat called "Coup de grace" which allows them to take a long action (similar to the duration of an unquickened Heal spell) to slit their opponent's throat or stab them through the heart.

Enemies immune to critical hits should obviously be immune to CDG.

If people were STILL concerned about balance issues (i.e. this ability not requiring spellpoints), they could put a cooldown on it of, say, twenty seconds. That would prevent having a caster be relegated to hold-bot while barbarians saunter through the mob and CDG everything in sight.