Is Great Cleave useless?

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Cleave is an extra attack you get if you cause the death of your opponent with your hit. You get to hit, once, any other opponent that you can reach without moving, even if you normally don't have any more attacks.
Hope I understood this correctly.

Now for Great Cleave:
They say the difference is that "Great Cleave provides no limit to the number of times you can use it per round".
Since you automatically "use" Cleave when your hit causes the death of your opponent, I understand that to really benefit from Great Cleave, your "extra" cleave attack *must* kill the next opponent for you to get another extra attack to use on a 3rd opponent that is within your reach.
So you must either be fighting a mob of ants that you can kill with one blow, or Great Cleave is totally useless!
Am I missing something??

 

I don't know if in IWDII the feat works that way, but in PnP it does. IMO, it's pretty well balanced and a bit overpowered feat. A fighter with high strength and greater cleave can sweep away a bunch of orcs or goblins if he's a bit lucky!

 

All cleaves are worth having for that extra kick in the evil-monsters'-butts ! I didn't find it very powerful or at least i didn't notice it lol

 

Its not really that useful to get Great Cleave in IWD2, but its not worthless.

In p&p, great cleave is an excellent feat for very strong fighters using two handed weapons. If your mage can get down a nice softening spell or two, you can really go to town.

However, the fudge they use for getting the feat into the game is a bit awkward. It doesn't actually work like in p&p. What it does is essentially adds to your attack rate for one round and starts a new round immediately. This lets them get around the 5 attacks/round limit of the IE engine. It works very well for cleave, but is a bit subpar for great cleave.

 

I would not say that it is TOTALLY useless, but I will not be spending any more feats on it in the future. It comes in handy when fighting lots of weaker critters. You can wade thru orcs and goblins, but by the time you gain the feat there are not alot of those types around.

 

Thanks guys!
So I did understand it correctly, and hence I think it is definitely not worth taking.

I was hesitating because the sentence I quoted could be understood in a different way, like this:
If you kill your opponent, you get one extra attack if you have Cleave. If you have Great Cleave, you get extra attacks equal to your number of attacks per round (without having to kill the next opponent with each attack).

[ October 05, 2002, 00:52: Message edited by: Quint ]