Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Hi everyone1l! Quick noob question: why does everyone take expose weakness? From the way I read it it does your Dex to damage for 4 rounds and lowers enemy AC by 3. So I have a +5 Dex, so 20 damage over 4 rounds no DR? Or am I reading it wrong? Does it add Dex to damage for all of your attacks? Just could use some clarification! Thanks in advance.

The dex damage alone isn't reason enough to take the feat. The feat is good because it lowers AC which makes you do more DPS as a melee/archer class. The feat is best for duel wielders or when you're in a party with lots of people doing archer/melee damage.

Here's a DPS calculator to show you have big of a deal defeating AC is when it comes to doing DPS: http://www.afterlifeguild.org/Thott/nwn/

It can offset the ab lose from feats like power attack.

Expose weakness:

It is an activated ability with 6 seconds cool down. Thus, you can use it once/round.

When you use it, your next attack is going to be using Expose Weakness, the rest will remain as normal. Ideally, you want to time it so it uses your highest AB attack.



Upon hitting the target:

They suffer -3 to their AC. This stacks
They suffer your dex bonus as irresistable damage. This stacks

Upon missing the target:

Due to a bug, you'll still deliver damage, just not the debuff and damage over time. Some PCs pick it just for this reason.


Note:
The maximum you can reduce your enemy's AC by is 15, as the debuff lasts 5 rounds.
The same applies to the Damage over time.

Hope it helps!

OK with it stacking I can see that being huge. Thanks for the quick replies!

I believe the auto damage on a miss was scripted out on BG some time back.

Stonebar wrote:I believe the auto damage on a miss was scripted out on BG some time back.

Never happened. At least as long as i have been here, i didnt see such change

the auto hit is some engine issue and pretty sure its still there, they were trying to review it again tho

the work around was that the ability doesnt do anything if you miss as pointed out, people would take it because it was a guarantee to lower AC, but now if you cant hit the AC normally you get no extra bonuses

people were still wanting the auto hit fixed but it requires rewriting the feat which isnt without its own induced problems

mrm3ntalist wrote:

Stonebar wrote:I believe the auto damage on a miss was scripted out on BG some time back.

Never happened. At least as long as i have been here, i didnt see such change

The auto-hit was solved for a while in 2011-2012, but it was reverted back because it brought a bug which was worst than the auto-hit. (You basically could hit twice with it, it wasn't as a part of your full-roundattack).

Do note that the -AC debuff stacks infinitely. One character can do maximum -15 AC to a target over 5 rounds and keep that up in the following rounds, but if there is another character doing the same to that target it stacks. So two characters with expose weakness can give a boss -30 AC, or three characters give it -45 AC.

As you can see, expose weakness is incredibly powerful because of this. Don't look at the dex damage. It's basically a feat that says "You do double damage now".

It has always been an interest of mine to see how power attack falls off when AB becomes more valuable than dmg against high AC enemies. The DPR calculator posted above uses nwn1 calculations so a few things are off and missing (power attack in nwn2 is different, any options for frenzied berserker PA are not available). I ran some personal tests to see how my character Sveta would stack up in terms of DPR. With using EDM improved power attack lowers her average DPR beyond 36 AC, and about 43 AC when not using EDM. This is assuming using two handed, with a shield power attack would perform even worse. For characters that rely on PA as a primary source of DMG it is expected the inefficiencies of the lost attack won't arise to a higher AC.





You can see the value of Expose Weakness in the middle ranges where a 3 AC difference can mean ~30 DPR.

If there is interest I may put together a functional nwn2 DPR calculator in the Shiny R package.

Seeing how that works makes me realize I need to fit that in my build asap!

Thanks Pia! Those are purdy graphs. I was actually looking at frenzied PA by adding the extra damage outright and comparing it against without the extra damage. But I seemed to have forgotten that NWN1 has different PA specs. There's a damage calculator for NWN2 floating around that uses excel. I dunno if it's any good.