Bugs/Flaws in Shield Bash that make it OP & unbalanced

[Green Monster]

1: It ignores ab penalties from combat modes such as Combat Expertise and Defensive Fighting (it's also ignoring ab bonuses from Heroism and Bless, but that's minor compared to ignoring -9 from the combination of max CE and FD).

2: It gets full strength bonus to damage. As an off-hand weapon it should get half strength bonus, rounded down.

Screenshots of combat feedback demonstrating both of the above are available to the dev team upon request.


So a strength based fighter with shield bash can drop their attack bonus through the floor and still get up to three attacks per round with full ab and full strength bonus to damage. While having maximum possible AC. No wonder it's gotten popular.

Speaking of which, it's unbalanced in terms of builds. None of the shields work with weapon finesse so it has a strength based build bias. I would suggest making the light shield (but not heavy or tower) work with weapon finesse. I'm guessing you wouldn't actually have to include the light shield in weapon finesse, just put in the script that determines the ab of the shield something like "if the shield is light and the character has weapon finesse feat and the character's dex bonus > character's str bonus, use dex bonus instead". Or if using the strength bonus is hard coded then in the aforementioned case add the difference between dex bonus and str bonus to the ab.

[Rhifox]

Shield Bash uses an old script from before we had good functions to get combined attack bonuses. It is definitely due for an update.

It would make sense to have half-strength damage to damage, yes, and for light shields to be counted as finesse weapons.

[Rhifox]

Committed these changes. This isn't a full rework to use our new AB functions, but a short-term fix has been added to address the individual issues of BG's changes to custom PA/CE and Fighting Defensively (along with a few other changes, including half-ability bonus for damage, recognition of Epic Prowess 2-10, and qualification for Combat Insight, Insightful Strike, and Weapon Finesse).

[Green Monster]

Awesome! Thank you so much!

[Green Monster]

So I just tested my rogue and light shield isn't working with finesse yet (haven't tested my str based chars yet). Is it going in next reset or next scheduled update?

[DaloLorn]

Next update. No ETA on it yet.

[Green Monster]

Thanks!

[Green Monster]

Very happy to report that the AB of shield bash is now correctly adjusting for combat expertise and fighting defensively, and that light shields appear to be working with both weapon finesse and insightful strike (I don't have combat insight yet to test that).

Shield bash AB is still not seeming to get bonuses from Heroism and Bless, but imo I think we can probably live with that. No idea about bardic inspiration.

[Rhifox]

Very happy to report that the AB of shield bash is now correctly adjusting for combat expertise and fighting defensively, and that light shields appear to be working with both weapon finesse and insightful strike (I don't have combat insight yet to test that).

Shield bash AB is still not seeming to get bonuses from Heroism and Bless, but imo I think we can probably live with that. No idea about bardic inspiration.

Right, every individual bonus has to be added in manually with the way it's working right now. That should be fixed when I do the full rework later.

[Green Monster]

Very happy to report that the AB of shield bash is now correctly adjusting for combat expertise and fighting defensively, and that light shields appear to be working with both weapon finesse and insightful strike (I don't have combat insight yet to test that).

Shield bash AB is still not seeming to get bonuses from Heroism and Bless, but imo I think we can probably live with that. No idea about bardic inspiration.

Right, every individual bonus has to be added in manually with the way it's working right now. That should be fixed when I do the full rework later.

Thank you for your work on this. It's already made a positive difference in my enjoyment of the feature, bith with my dex character and my strength characters

[Green Monster]

So I've been using it a lot and I think it's pretty well balanced as it now stands. It doesn't get AB bonuses from spells and abilities but I think that's ok because it's so much easier to get than TWF and so much easier to have no AB penalty and obviously has way higher AC than TWF.

The only thing I would add is to put the -2 AB penalty on the shield AB for not having TWF or Agile Shield Fighter. Currently, if you do not have Agile Shield Fighter or TWF and are using a heavy or tower shield, using shield bash imposes a -2 penalty on your weapon AB but not the shield AB.