Dirty Fighting: Automatic or do you need to activate it?

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Dirty Fighting seems like a really cool feat to choose. Is it automatic, or do you need to activate it for it to work?

 

It's automatic. But IIRC the difficulty class of the saving throw is not very high, so it actually gets through rather rarely. Not a completely useless feat though, if you boost your chances of critical hits.

 

Yeah, I agree with Susipaisti. Asurob Nahoj, my soloing Tiefling Fighter/Rogue, uses it, and while it's nothing to get too excited about, there's only so many feats to choose from. The biggest "con" is that early on in the game, anything you Critical Hit is probably gonna die anyway. For extended combats it's of much more use, though. You'll be glad of it when you do land it on a boss, that's for sure.

 

How do you boost your chances for Crits (I'm kinda new to this)?

TIA

 

Either take the Improved Critical feat (+1 to Critical Threat range), or use Scimitars, which threaten criticals on a natural roll of 18-20. Or both, of course. Although Asurob dual-wields & uses Weapon Finesse, so is stuck with bog-standard Short Swords which only threaten on 19-20. Axes & blunt weapons only threaten criticals on a natural 20, so aren't great for triggering Dirty Fighting. But axes do cause x3 damage instead of the bog-standard x2, and are thus can dispatch tough enemies in one blow! Ahh, I still glow inwardly remembering the palisade battle where my Paladin slew Caballus with one swing of his Halberd... good times, good times...

 

I plan on having my Paladin and Druid use Scimitars in melee, unless/until they find better magical weapons.

 

Sounds cool. One thing, though: IIRC, Dirty Fighting requires 13 DEX to be selected (and a BAB of +2, but that's not exactly difficult to acheive!), which can be a problem for some characters.

 

Thanks for that heads-up, Magpie. I don't think it'll be a problem for my characters, but I'll keep it in mind.

BTW, is Dodge a worthwhile feat? I mean, I'll have the 13 DEX already, and more AC is always welcome, right? Is there anything the Dodge feat does not stack with, making it worthless?

 

Hmm... The only problem with Dodge is the way AC & AB was "balanced" in this game. Basically, AC never seems to be high enough to provide good protection like it does in ever other IE game. Although +1 AC is - in theory - always useful, it doesn't make as much practical difference as you'd hope. It takes real effort to make AC worthwhile, usually at the sacrifice of everything else. Hence why only bizarre characters of the type featured in the JUPP seem to be able to use AC effectively. Which sucks, but it's true. Also, I think that Monks may acquire some kind of pseudo-Dodge feat, which while not displayed, doesn't actually stack with Dodge the normal feat. Which level they get it at I've no idea, because I've never used a monk in IWD2! The "information" tab in the character screen is the best source for such info, I find.

 

Magpie is right. You get action-info like:
Orc takes 68 damage. (chunked to bite sized pieces)
Orc Death.
Orc Slowed.
What happens, you are showered by a rain of slow moving blood droplets

Iff you Crit-hit, you have a chance of slowing or blinding the enemy with Dirty Fighting. Few have enough HP to withstand a crit from a tank (who is the type to take this feat) but if you end up blinding someone who can and it means they miss you and you stay alive for another round to manage to kill them, its worth it.

You improve your chances of crit-hits by taking the Improved Critical feat, using keen weapons and casting Executioner's Eyes.

Take Dodge only if you are making a high AC charecter. 1 point of AC here and there is not enough to save someone who gets hit often.

 

Dont forget the ever powerful force of LUCK which does HEAPS when added to those things that improve critical threat range. I had my wizard with +5 luck executioners eyes, improved critical and mordenkainens sword and he got a critical almost every hit(not to mention full damamge every hit since mordys swords uses lots of low dice rolls which all become 6 with that much luck)!!! but this was battle squares HoF so it took tons of criticals to kill these guys.