Talk:Sadomasochism (3.5e Maneuver)

Ratings

	Havvy is neutral on this article and rated it 2 of 4.
	I feel as if there are balancing issues here, what with this being a feedback loop.

Bag of Rats

Just like Blood in the Water, this is a very Bag of Rats-friendly maneuver. Sacrifice a hundred rats with Great Cleaving, and that Dragon is going to die. --Foxwarrior 06:51, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps they should say "up to a limit of +X per initiator level" so even if they bag o' ratted, it's capped. This makes it akin to crusader's Furious Counterstrike. -- Eiji-kun 07:08, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Done. Hopefully it's better now. - TG Cid 21:38, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

This maneuver is very sensitive to balance level in a game. Optimized characters will easily cap out this ability each turn, giving them an unreasonable boost to attack power pretty much whenever they want. The idea is good, but in my opinion it is still too powerful. For high/very high balance level melee characters, dealing ten times their initiator level in damage is easy, especially with the bonuses granted by this stance to help them.--Sulacu (talk) 20:12, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

It's definitely a possibility that even a quick Power Attack character without too much optimization would be able to stack up quite a bit of damage; my initial thought was that taking damage would give it enough risk to balance it out, but since taking damage isn't actually a requirement I see that that is not the case.

I also finally realized what Havvy meant by it being a feedback loop. I definitely think the potential for all the damage to continually stack (that is, every turn gives you are ideally dealing more damage and thus adding higher bonuses each round) makes it potentially unbalanced. I'll think on it, but I have been thinking of redoing the discipline (or scrapping it entirely), so it would likely come as part of a larger effort that I'll need to ponder. - TG Cid (talk) 00:59, 14 July 2014 (UTC)

A possibility would be to keep the bonuses largely as is, have them accrue at a rate of +1 for every X points of damage dealt and/or taken, to a maximum of your initiator level, but have that apply to only a single attack. The user would choose which attack to apply the bonus to, and after making such an attack, the bonuses would reset to +0 and build up again. That way the user would be able to benefit from a bonus to attack and damage rolls whenever it is most needed, but not constantly. --Sulacu (talk) 04:58, 14 July 2014 (UTC)