Level Up (A5E) Need a clarification on devoted assault

Odin11b · Apr 21, 2023

So my dm and I are interpreting the rules differently regarding the Devoted Assault maneuver when you score a critical hit. When you crit you’re able to spend exertion to activate a Tempered Iron maneuver thats either an action or bonus action. Striding swings, stunning assault, and dispelling assault are the only maneuvers that use an action, all saying “When you activate this technique, you take the Attack action and make a weapon attack, as well as any additional attacks granted by Extra Attack.” plus their other effects

my interpretation- is that when you activate the maneuver after scoring the crit, you gain bonus attacks on top of the other effects the maneuver provides

my dm’s interpretation- is that you only gain the effects of the maneuver on the remaining attacks you have left.

so basically what Im asking is can Devoted assault generate extra attacks on a crit

W'rkncacnter · Apr 21, 2023

i would agree with your DM, since your interpretation is pretty broken, and perfect assault from unending wheel exists to give more attacks (which, i should note, is 5th degree instead of 4th, only lets you replace attacks with maneuvers that only let you make up to one attack, completely wipes your exertion pool, and gives you a level of fatigue).

Stalker0 · Apr 21, 2023

W'rkncacnter said:
i would agree with your DM, since your interpretation is pretty broken, and perfect assault from unending wheel exists to give more attacks (which, i should note, is 5th degree instead of 4th, only lets you replace attacks with maneuvers that only let you make up to one attack, completely wipes your exertion pool, and gives you a level of fatigue).

I will disagree myself. Looking at Devoted Assault, if you follow the maneuever step by step, there is no reason that each time you got a crit that you couldn't activate a maneuver that immediate gave you your attack actions worth of actions, as that is literally how those maneuvers work.

Now comparing it to Perfect Assault, a few things to consider:

Perfect Assault just works, meanwhile Devoted Assault requires crits to get all the extra benefit. That is not to be underestimated, anytime a character can do a thing with no restrictions, its always very good.
Perfect Assault drains your exertion, while using it all of that manuever exertion is "free". This means you can be down to 3 points of exertion, but use like 12 exertion of maneuvers if you go crazy.
Perfect Assault can attack multiple creatures, Devoted Assault cannot. So if you go nuts and rip through someone on a high crit, well sorry bud you can't switch targets.

So in comparison, I do think Perfect Assault and Devoted Assault are reasonably balanced against each other for the rank difference. Having players with rank 3 maneuvers in my game, I can say the stuff you start to be able to do is pretty nuts, so I would expect Rank 4 to get each crazier.

W'rkncacnter · Apr 21, 2023

Stalker0 said:
Perfect Assault just works, meanwhile Devoted Assault requires crits to get all the extra benefit. That is not to be underestimated, anytime a character can do a thing with no restrictions, its always very good.

ok, but consider that devoted assault also gives you advantage on attack rolls, and that it's absolutely possible to get a crit range of 17-20 by the time you could get perfect assault (or sooner probably, but i haven't checked) - 2 attacks, advantage, and a crit range of 17-20 gives a 59% chance of critting at least once. a third attack bumps that up to 74%. and if devoted assault also gave you the additional attacks of whatever maneuver you used, we then have to ask if those attacks also allow you to use a tempered iron maneuver on a crit, and so on and so forth.

i will, however, give you the rest. this just, uh...seems kind of insane to me. maybe it'd work better in practice.

Odin11b · Apr 21, 2023

W'rkncacnter said:
ok, but consider that devoted assault also gives you advantage on attack rolls, and that it's absolutely possible to get a crit range of 17-20 by the time you could get perfect assault (or sooner probably, but i haven't checked) - 2 attacks, advantage, and a crit range of 17-20 gives a 59% chance of critting at least once. a third attack bumps that up to 74%. and if devoted assault also gave you the additional attacks of whatever maneuver you used, we then have to ask if those attacks also allow you to use a tempered iron maneuver on a crit, and so on and so forth.

i will, however, give you the rest. this just, uh...seems kind of insane to me. maybe it'd work better in practice.

Idk it doesn’t seem to insane to me if you think about it. Let’s compare a level 12 fighter to a level 12 wizard which would be the soonest a fighter could get devoted assault. Fighters have to use maneuvers and weapons to increase their crit range, if they blow all their resources and crit every single time they could get anywhere from 9-21attacks depending on which maneuvers they chose to use (exertion 1- striding swings 2- dispelling assault 3- stunning assault) let’s say only half of those hits were to actually crit and using average damage that could be that’s anywhere from 80-200 damage while blowing all the fighters resources in one turn against one target. Now for the wizard we’ll say failed saving through would be equal to all the crits the fighter would have to get could with one spell using average damage deal 80 damage against on target in that same turn, also with just one spell being able to deal an average of 300 damage over the course of the spell to multiple targets (sun beam, and Ik fights don’t usually last a min)

W'rkncacnter · Apr 21, 2023

Odin11b said:
Idk it doesn’t seem to insane to me if you think about it. Let’s compare a level 12 fighter to a level 12 wizard which would be the soonest a fighter could get devoted assault. Fighters have to use maneuvers and weapons to increase their crit range, if they blow all their resources and crit every single time they could get anywhere from 9-21attacks depending on which maneuvers they chose to use (exertion 1- striding swings 2- dispelling assault 3- stunning assault) let’s say only half of those hits were to actually crit and using average damage that could be that’s anywhere from 80-200 damage while blowing all the fighters resources in one turn against one target. Now for the wizard we’ll say failed saving through would be equal to all the crits the fighter would have to get could with one spell using average damage deal 80 damage against on target in that same turn, also with just one spell being able to deal an average of 300 damage over the course of the spell to multiple targets (sun beam, and Ik fights don’t usually last a min)

80-200 damage in a single turn is not comparable to 300 damage over a minute (which is 30 damage a turn). also, 21 attacks is almost 300 damage anyway, and that's before we assume at least...wait a second, how did you get an upper limit of 21 attacks? i got an upper limit of 12 (which comes out to an average of 167 damage assuming a greatsword, +8 to hit, crit range of 17-20, and 22 strength [haha, stronghold go brr]). fair point about the multiple targets, though.

again, i wouldn't be surprised if this maneuver plays better then it sounds like it would.

Odin11b · Apr 21, 2023

So here’s the math a 12th fighter has 11 exertion and natural crit at 20, he uses devoted assault (3exertion) then uses dispelling assault (2exertion) leaving 6 exertion left and a crit range of 19-20 if you solely use striding swing (1 exertion) can crit every single time you’ll get 3 attacks from dispelling assault and 18 from the 6 uses of striding swings that comes to 21. for The sake of doing easy math to account misses and getting regular attacks I just cut that number in half and round down, so that leaves 10 critical hits to calculate damage, str of 20 for +5 damage and using a warhammer with the average of 5 for a total of 10 and since its a crit the damage is doubled for 20 making that total 200. You could do dispelling assault till you have a crit range of 17-20 but youd have to drop the number of attacks down and the max damage down.

Stalker0 · Apr 21, 2023

Odin11b said:
So here’s the math a 12th fighter has 11 exertion and natural crit at 20, he uses devoted assault (3exertion) then uses dispelling assault (2exertion) leaving 6 exertion left and a crit range of 19-20 if you solely use striding swing (1 exertion) can crit every single time you’ll get 3 attacks from dispelling assault and 18 from the 6 uses of striding swings that comes to 21. for The sake of doing easy math to account misses and getting regular attacks I just cut that number in half and round down, so that leaves 10 critical hits to calculate damage, str of 20 for +5 damage and using a warhammer with the average of 5 for a total of 10 and since its a crit the damage is doubled for 20 making that total 200. You could do dispelling assault till you have a crit range of 17-20 but youd have to drop the number of attacks down and the max damage down.

I'm not following the "soley use striding swing can crit every single time".

There's nothing about striding swing that gives you some auto crit ability.

Stalker0 · Apr 21, 2023

Now if you wanted to go with a middle ground interpretation, you could say that only the crits from the manuever itself can trigger the effect.

So if I have 3 attacks to start, only those 3 attacks criting can give me more maneuvers. The X other attacks I get from maneuvers, critical hit or not, won't trigger it.

I don't think this is technically correct based on the wording, but I do think its a reasonable interpretation if you think the ability is too powerful.

Odin11b · Apr 21, 2023

Stalker0 said:
I'm not following the "soley use striding swing can crit every single time".

There's nothing about striding swing that gives you some auto crit ability.

Sorrry I wasn’t trying to say it had an auto crit. I was doing a what if situation where if you had crit with all the attacks

Level Up (A5E) Need a clarification on devoted assault

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