Talk:Main Gauche (3.5e Feat)

Questionable Rating

I'm honestly struggling to see how this one has such a good score. It has the same prerequisites as Two-Weapon defence, but gives four times the bonus to AC (since TWD is only a +1 unless fighting defensively). It's also an untyped bonus, leading to questions about exactly what bonuses it's able to stack with. The rules on what you have to hold in your off-hand for the bonus raise a lot of questions, since the implication seems to be that you can be holding virtually anything as long as it has mass and substance, and isn't too heavy. It explicitly states that you can qualify while using things that don't incur the usual penalties for fighting with two weapons. You can even use a double weapon, which isn't fitting of the rest of the theming for the feat at all, and seems to be there only to be cheesed. The trade-off, apparently, is that you only get the defence bonus if you attack as a full-round action (precluding many other defensive options that couple nicely with TWD) and give up all your off-hand attacks...which, once again, you don't even need to be getting in the first place.

I realize that this is the second feat relating to fencing style combat I've commented on recently, but this one seems particularly badly written, doesn't make a great deal of sense (it is either ridiculously overpowered for its prerequisites or utterly worthless, depending on how you've built yourself and how you rule some aspects work) and I can't understand how it managed to get such great scores across the board. --KefkeWren (talk) 07:27, 15 April 2015 (MDT)