The Pointlessness of Power Attack

Of all of the options presented by feats in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, there is one feat that is certainly not optional for those wishing to be melee fighters. That feat is Power Attack. This feat, along with its ranged combat companion in Pathfinder, Deadly Aim, allows you to take a penalty to hit to add to your damage if you do hit.

At first, this may sound like it's only meant to be used against creatures with low Armor Class but plenty of hit points, such as oozes. Often Power Attack is looked at by new players as merely a gateway to the more exciting Cleave feat. After all, no one likes missing. Why would you ever want to take a penalty to hit? 

It turns out that you nearly always do.

In 3.5, Power Attack involves a choice. You take X off of your to-hit bonus, and add X to your damage (or double X, if using a two handed weapon). This is for all of your attacks until the start of your next turn. In Pathfinder, it is a simple on/off switch. You are either Power Attacking, or you aren't. You take a penalty roughly -1 per 4 levels and get twice that, or thrice with a two handed weapon, to damage.

On paper this seems almost like an even trade (or advantageous for two handed weapons). But it is even more advantageous than it seems, due to the fact that attack rolls and damage rolls use different dice. Thus a -1 to hit and -1 to damage do not mean the same thing. A +1 on a d10 roll is a 10% increase, roughly. A +1 on a d20 is half as significant. Moreover, the surfeit of attack bonuses granted to D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder character ensures that Power Attack becomes an outlet for pent-up, excess attack bonus. As a result, it is almost always advantageous to Power Attack a foe, and in 3.5 with its variable calibration, especially so. If not using an option is almost always suboptimal, is there any purpose to the option? Shouldn't an option represent the exception rather than the rule? It is no wonder that many 3.5 and Pathfinder players consider Power Attack to be an inverse "trap option"; rather than being there as a bad option to trap new players, it is there as a bad option not to choose it. The list of effective fighters who don't use Power Attack is quite short, and mostly concentrated at lower levels where it is not as necessary. 

There are many unintended (probably) side effects of Power Attack. One is the absolute dominance it provides to two-handed weapon users. It is twice as effective in the hands of such a warrior. In Pathfinder, this is lessened somewhat, to being only half-again as effective, yet this still tips the scales so heavily in two-handed fighting's favor that the +2 to +8 bonus to Armor Class a shield can provide struggles to justify the loss of so much potential damage. And by the time that +8 comes into play, Armor Class is all but irrelevant anyway. 

Two-weapon fighting also becomes obsolete before the might of Power Attack, as do "finesse weapons" (light weapons, rappers, and spiked chains which benefit from Weapon Finesse). Pathfinder included a way for these weapons to benefit from Power Attack with a separate feat, but 3.5 had no such options. The other problems of two weapon fighting in 3.5 weighed it down, but Power Attack hammered the nail into the coffin. 

Thus, Power Attack as a feat:

- invalidates multiple other fighting styles 

- is a prerequisite to deal effective damage in the game (for most melee fighters)

- is needed to convert excess accuracy into damage (a flaw in the game's math)

- is used (or should be used) in 95% or more of attacks made in the game.
- lastly, and most importantly, needlessly bloats the damage of the game

These points also go the same (save for perhaps the first) for Deadly Aim, Power Attack's ranged counterpart in Pathfinder. 

Thus the question becomes: why include Power Attack as a feat at all? 

Some Gamemasters take this question at face value, and remove Power Attack as a feat. Instead, anyone can power-attack, making a combat option rather than a special ability. Yet this only solves half the problem. 

The in-world concept of Power Attack is certainly a puzzling one. The idea seems to be that you are swinging as hard as you can, at the expense of accuracy. But surely there is an upper limit to how much physical force your muscles can exert. The feat requires a Strength score of at least 13, yet allows a high-level character with that Strength score to cleave a bear in half in a single blow with almost the same efficacy as someone with 18 Strength. This divide is lessened in Pathfinder but still somewhat present. This feat clashes with the dual abstraction of D&D's hit points, as luck and skill for characters and sheer physical toughness for (big) monsters.

Maybe, Power Attack represents a sort of "called shot"; aiming for a weaker area, more likely to miss but dealing more damage on a hit. If this is the case, why is Strength involved? And for that matter, what do feats like Weapon Specialization represent, if not just increased ability to deal damage?

Perhaps instead of being a feat, even a bonus one, Power Attack ought to simply become a feature of the "martial" classes in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder (the ones with full base attack bonus). Curiously, in Pathfinder, the Power Attack penalty and bonus nearly match a three-quarters / one-half level attack / damage progression when used, since the penalty increases by 1 for every 4 levels (subtracting 1 from +4 for 4 levels of full base attack, for a 3/4ths effective base attack bonus), and the damage bonuses increases by 2 in that time, a +2 bonus spread over 4 levels approximately equaling half your level as a damage bonus. This ignores the initial level 1 penalty but is close enough for the sake of argument.

This change would narrow the gap between fighting styles at higher levels; or even lower ones. Two-weapon fighting would gain slightly more viability, other than as a way for rogues to double up on sneak attack. Single handed fighters would still lag behind in damage, but less severely. Of course, monsters' hit points would have to be adjusted to compensate if Power Attack were removed. 

A direct damage bonus would represent a warrior's improving skill at wearing down or wounding an opponent. This makes sense (as would a level-based increase to Armor Class, but only D&D 4th edition seems to have thought of that), much more than simply increasing attack bonus endlessly, until hitting is all-but-automatic (a natural 1 always misses) and feats like Power Attack become necessary in order to make use of that wasted potential. 

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D&D 5e made many changes to the 3.5 system that helped the issue: removing the standard attack and full attack distinction that hampered two weapon fighters (and melee fighters in general), removing the many feats required to be an effective two weapon attacker, adding fighting styles to help give sword-and-shield fighters a chance to still do comparable damage to greatsword wielders, and reducing the rapidly-scaling attack bonuses of 3.5 and Pathfinder to a slow crawl between +2 and +6 (level-based-wise, at least) and removing the various supplemental ways to increase attack bonus. As a result, things are much more equitable between the different fighting styles. Yet 5e's own versions of Power Attack, the feats Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter, present a similar dilemma to D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, despite the attack bonuses being far lower. They still provide a numerical bonus to damage output overall, partly due to the 2-for-1 they offer, making them a direct upgrade in almost all situations (save for fighting will-o-wisps and the like) rather than a situational trick. This heavily biases the game in favor of the two fighting styles it can be used with (two-handed weapons and ranged weapons), but to a much smaller degree, as I cover in another article.