If you're going down that route, I don't think throwing more AB or damage at a class is a good solution if the underlying problem is redundancy. There's light-touch changes and there's heavy-handed changes. Tweaks like those are starting to lean towards the latter and we start going into complex questions that I don't care to go into, like in this case, whether the basic BAB system is so inadequate that every melee class needs an AB booster.
If Dwarven Defenders and Barbarians are redundant, then buffing Rage by doing something like making it an actual AB/damage boost or even just flat out given a bonus to AB/damage to Barbarians would eliminate the redundancy. Barbarians get some minor defensive benefits but focus on sheer offense during Rage while DDs are purely focused on defense.
Giving the Assassin more damage would eliminate its redundancy with Rogue.
I don't see how something that that is a "heavy-handed' change. A Heavy Handed change is like...removing the AB/damage bonus from AAs and making them solely focused on special arrow abilities.
Suppose you buff Fighter AB for example, wouldn't Blackguard be justified in getting a similar AB boost, and why is the advantage of being a high BAB class so negligible that changes like this need to be made across the board?
No, because Blackguards get Sneak Attack, some spell-like abilities, and the ability to summon demons.
The problem is that Fighters run out of good feats to pick up by level 40. A pure Fighter is much better on a level 30 server, for example.
The problem with AB, frankly, is that I've never seen a module that isn't my own actually tuned around any kind of DPS check. Which means doing 10% or 25% or 50% or 100% more damage is usually irrelevant, what matters is being able to survive.
Also, Point Blank down to Blind Fight is 5 feats, then Curse and Called Shot make 7. You'd have to drop both Extend and Lingering. Losing Extend Spell means the duration on key buffs like Haste and War Cry are 1/2 to 1/3 of what they could be, along with DPS downtime due to needing more frequent rests and rebuffing.
Don't you know that 9 = 10? Sheesh.
Anyway, the point of this is whether 4 damage - and the benefit of extra pre-epic feats - is a worthwhile exchange for 2AB. In an environment that, to be fair to other classes, is balanced such that pure Monk AB is viable. Instead of bringing in the math to prove it as you said you could, you brought in an elephant. I don't know what to think about that.
No, I never mentioned the pre-epic feats at all. You're the one who brought that up. Hell, my original statement was talking about 3 AB/3 damage versus 6 damage because I figured you'd try to end on an odd AA level -- though I then changed that to 2 AB/2 damage versus 6 damage given that we were discussing a build that DID end on an even level.
"And 2 AB will be better than 2 damage 99% of the time (at the point at which we're discussing, aka epic levels). Can show the math if you want."
That was responding to MrZork in a situation where he was discussing 2 AB versus 2 damage (not even 2 AB versus 4 damage).
But we can go over the math. We'll assume you have equal AB to the enemy's AC since you're an Arcane Archer. That gives you
90/65/40/15/90/65 = 3.65 hits per round (with Haste and Rapid Shot). Add 2 AB and we get
95/75/50/25/95/75 = 4.15 hits per round, or a 13.7% improvement. Which means you need to be doing 29 damage per shot for the AB to be equal or better.
In this case we have 4.5 base damage plus 10 AA damage plus 3 from Bard Song plus 2 from War Cry plus, shall we say, 5 physical damage arrows with 2d8 bonus damage?
That's 33.5 damage per shot, which is already 4 more than we need -- and keep in mind we're not counting the final 2 damage from the 21st and 23rd AA level or the 4 damage from WS/EWS from the Fighter. So overall that's 35.5 damage at 4.15 hits per round (147.325 damage per round) versus 37.5 damage at 3.65 hits per round (136.875 damage per round). Nor this counting Prayer/Battletide, Sneak Attack feat on gear, Weapon Specialization on gear (like Aielund Saga), or anything else custom.
And that's not even counting Mighty either, which could easily add another 8 damage in a higher magic environment (14 base strength and +12 bonus from gear).
Obviously it's also not counting Damage Resistance either -- if a monster is ignoring 20 damage from all sources or something the larger damage per hit will clearly be better (it's also not factoring in something like Epic Dodge or Deflect Arrows which favors AB).
If we buff up our AB another 5 relative to enemy AC we get
95/90/65/40/95/90 = 4.75 hits per round (with Haste and Rapid Shot). Add 2 AB and we get
95/95/75/50/95/95 = 5.05 hits per round, or a 6.3% improvement. Which means you need to be doing 63 damage per shot for the AB to be equal or better. That's a much harder damage mark to hit -- even factoring in Prayer/Battletide/+8 Mighty we're only up to 44.5 damage. So unless we're rocking arrows with something like +7 physical and 2d12 of two different damage types the the damage will be better (again, ignoring module/server specific stuff like Sneak Attack on items, WS on items, or any other bonus).
The reason this even close/flip-flops is due to the AA's insane AB and relatively low base damage, of course (because archery sucks by default in NWN past the first few levels).
