Swordplay
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another exciting edition of Extraordinary Feats, where we bring you new feats each and every week to enhance your characters. As you may have heard already, it’s Sword Week here at Necromancers of the Northwest, and as a result, today we'll be looking at a group of feats which go beyond Weapon Focus to help elevate swordsmanship to an art form.
Bleeding Attack (Combat)
Prerequisite: Improved Critical with any weapon which deals piercing or slashing damage.
Benefit: Whenever you would threaten a critical hit with a weapon for which you have the Improved Critical feat, you cause the target to suffer 1d6 points of bleed damage.
Crushing Blade (Combat)
Prerequisite: Weapon Focus with any weapon which deals piercing or slashing damage
Benefit: When you attack with a weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage, and for which you have the Weapon Focus feat, you may choose to have that weapon deal bludgeoning damage instead. However, your attacks are not as effective when using your blade this way, and you suffer a -2 penalty to damage rolls.
Focus Strike (Combat)
Benefit: As a standard action, you may gain a +2 bonus to attack and damage on a single melee attack with a weapon which deals slashing or piercing damage. This attack causes you to neglect your defenses, however, and you suffer a -2 penalty to AC.
Hamstring (Combat)
Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +1
Benefit: As a standard action, you may make a single melee attack with a weapon that deals slashing damage against a single target within reach, which, if successful, deals normal damage and reduces the target’s land speed by 20 feet (to a minimum of 5 feet).
Improved Hamstring (Combat)
Prerequisites: Base attack bonus +6, Hamstring
Benefit: Whenever you successfully use the Hamstring feat, you also inflict bleed damage equal to half the damage dealt with the Hamstring special attack.
Master Parry (Combat)
Prerequisites: Base attack bonus +6, Combat Expertise, Improved Disarm, Parry
Benefit: Whenever you negate an attack using the Parry feat, you may attempt a disarm combat maneuver as a free action.
Parry (Combat)
Prerequisites: Base attack bonus +1, Combat Expertise
Benefit: Whenever you are attacked by a melee weapon attack while you are fighting defensively or taking a total defense action, you may choose to make a combat maneuver check as an immediate action, which, if successful, negates the attack entirely. If you fail the check, the attack against you automatically hits, though the target still rolls an attack roll to determine if the hit is a critical hit.
Riposte (Combat)
Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +1
Benefit: You may ready an action to counterattack a foe that attacks you. If you do, then the first time that you are attacked in melee before the beginning of your next turn, you strike first: as an immediate action, you may make an attack roll against your attacker with a single melee weapon you are holding that deals piercing or slashing damage. This attack is made before the target’s attack resolves, and if your counterattack is successful, in addition to dealing normal damage, the target suffers a -2 penalty on the attack roll.
Run ‘em Through (Combat)
Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +1
Benefit: As a standard action, you may make a single melee attack with a one-handed weapon that deals piercing damage against a flat-footed target within reach, which, if successful, deals normal damage and causes the target to become nauseated for 1 round.
Swordplay (Combat)
Prerequisite: Weapon Focus with any weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage.
Benefit: As a standard action, you can make a single melee attack with the weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage for which you have Weapon Focus. This attack treats the critical threat range of the weapon as though it were 1 more than normal (For example, a longsword with a normal threat range of 19-20 would instead threaten on an 18-20, while a scimitar with a normal threat range of 18-20 would instead threaten on a range of 17-20). This expanded threat range is applied after any other effect which would increase the threat range, such as the Improved Critical feat (For example, a longsword affected by the Improved Critical feat would have its threat range doubled to 17-20, and then improved by 1 to be 16-20).