My attempt to band-aid fix THF: Glancing blows overhaul

[doubledge]

So, let's get into it?

This fix is entirely based on the THF tree. Regular old Two Handed Fighting, all the way down to the Perfect Two Handed Fighting feats. The goal here is to improve the power curve of the feats, and bring some of the power that is relegated to Twitch fighting to the rest of the community.

It centers around the Glancing Blows mechanic.

First thing first, they now scale with 100% melee power.

My major change is that glancing blows no longer are applied by certain attacks in a chain. Instead, every successful attack with a two handed weapon has a chance of applying glancing blows to all nearby enemies. This means that if you double strike during an attack flagged to apply glancing blows... You glance twice.

In addition, on a successful vorpal roll, all glancing blows applied by a weapon attack are criticals.

Glancing blows cannot proc themselves, just in case that's a bug that needs to be quashed right away.

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Two Handed Fighting

Passive: Glancing blows deal 10% more damage (Total 30%). +2 combat style bonus to Melee Power.

Glancing blows gain a 3% chance of applying weapon effects, increased by an additional 1% per two Character levels. (Total 18% at level 30)

You have a 50% chance of applying a glancing blow on every hit with a Two Handed weapon.

Improved Two Handed Fighting

Passive: Glancing blows deal 10% more damage (Total 40%). +4 combat style bonus to Melee Power.

Glancing Blows gain a 6% chance of applying weapon effects, increased by an additional 2% per two Character levels. (Total 36% at level 30)

You have a 65% chance of applying a glancing blow on every hit with a Two Handed weapon.


Greater Two Handed Fighting

Passive: Glancing blows deal 10% more damage (Total 50%). +6 combat style bonus to Melee Power.

Glancing Blows gain a 9% chance of applying weapon effects, increased by an additional 3% per two Character levels. (Total 54% at level 30)

You have an 80% chance of applying a glancing blow on every hit with a Two Handed weapon.

Perfect Two Handed Fighting

Passive: Glancing blows deal 10% more damage (Total 60%).

Glancing blows gain an additional 10% chance of applying weapon effects. (Total 64% with all feats at level 30)

Every hit with a Two Handed weapon applies glancing blows on all nearby targets. This includes the original target.

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What's your opinions? Is this enough, or are there more problems I'm not addressing?

[Xgya]

The very first change that needs to happen is allowing Glancing Blows to crit and doublestrike.
Your way of calculating the doublestrike chances pleases me here, I'd probably keep that unless it's simpler to just grant the hit its own doublestrike chance.
Since it already starts off as much weaker than the original hit, no need to downscale the melee power - make it the same as the original attack.

Compare your idea to TWF.
TWF, natively, gets 80% chance to do a single attack that won't doublestrike. On an optimized build, that means +0.4 hits per attack.
(I'm counting an optimized build as having 100% melee doublestrike, so, here, we have 200% base damage per hit, while TWF adds an extra 80%)

Since glancing blows are AoE, the damage should be somewhat weaker in the end. (say, 30%? Since TWF builds get full weapon procs 100% of the time, we don't need to go that much lower)

Currently, we have 0.25 attacks happening 75% of the time, or 0.1875 hits per attack, and those hits can't crit.

My own solution (applying glancing blows as often as we currently do, but full scaling) would bring this up to 0.375 hit per attack, which starts to look rather high. To get to my 30% number, I'd make glancing blows scale with 60% melee power.

[A-O]

The very first change that needs to happen is allowing Glancing Blows to crit and doublestrike.
Your way of calculating the doublestrike chances pleases me here, I'd probably keep that unless it's simpler to just grant the hit its own doublestrike chance.
Since it already starts off as much weaker than the original hit, no need to downscale the melee power - make it the same as the original attack.

Compare your idea to TWF.
TWF, natively, gets 80% chance to do a single attack that won't doublestrike. On an optimized build, that means +0.4 hits per attack.
(I'm counting an optimized build as having 100% melee doublestrike, so, here, we have 200% base damage per hit, while TWF adds an extra 80%)

Since glancing blows are AoE, the damage should be somewhat weaker in the end. (say, 30%? Since TWF builds get full weapon procs 100% of the time, we don't need to go that much lower)

Currently, we have 0.25 attacks happening 75% of the time, or 0.1875 hits per attack, and those hits can't crit.

My own solution (applying glancing blows as often as we currently do, but full scaling) would bring this up to 0.375 hit per attack, which starts to look rather high. To get to my 30% number, I'd make glancing blows scale with 60% melee power.

That assumes 0% offhand doublestrike. And we all know TWF has more than that. Just PTWF and past lives and you're at 16%, and then there are things like tempest capstone for +25%. And ways to get to 100% offhand proc.

A tempest with past lives would have 200% mainhand, 146% offhand, or 346%, or .076 attacks using your line of thinking. And now we're not even counting on-hit effects which have an abysmal proc rate for Glancing blows.

[doubledge]

Thank you Xyga, I wasn't sure whether or not having the melee power scale was important or not. I'll change it to a flat 100%. I did forget to allow them to crit... But the idea of a 'glance' critting seems weird to me. I think I'll have it so when you roll a 20 (Or a 19-20, with Fury of the Wild), all of your glancing blows crit.

Edit: With your solution added, a perfect set up FOTW Barbarian would do 2 hits, plus two glances on their main target with 100% doublestrike at level 30. The glances can't crit without a vorpal, but that should even the score compared to two weapon fighting.

[Xgya]

That assumes 0% offhand doublestrike. And we all know TWF has more than that. Just PTWF and past lives and you're at 16%, and then there are things like tempest capstone for +25%. And ways to get to 100% offhand proc.

A tempest with past lives would have 200% mainhand, 146% offhand, or 346%, or .076 attacks using your line of thinking. And now we're not even counting on-hit effects which have an abysmal proc rate for Glancing blows.

I was going baseline, but you're absolutely right that enhancements helping TWF are far and above THF by any stretch.
If we manage to make the baselines comparable, then make the enhancements comparable, we're left with something decent, but it has to start with a comparable baseline.

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Making the glancing blows only crit on vorpals sounds like a decent compromise compared to my idea of reducing the melee power scaling.
Since glancing blows get their own attack roll, that's where the vorpal should happen though.

[droid327]

Sorry but its still not enough. 80% chance to do a negligble attack that scales with MP is still negligible. Especially if you're still preserving the ridiculously low chance to proc weapon effects.

The best solution is even simpler than you're suggesting, and its something I've advocated for a while: just make Glancing Blows work exactly like Offhand Strikes for TWF. Full attacks, full scaling on MP, crit, full weapon effects, carries special attack effects. But keep the current attack-sequence restriction, or normalize it with a % chance-on-hit for GBs, either way the math comes out the same.

THF is not going to be competitive until its a full-fledged AOE combat style, and that means doing full attacks to all targets.