The Dirty Fighting Feat

[Fuzz]

So Dirty Fighting has always been a weirdly mediocre and garbage feat for 99% of characters with melee mages being the sole exception where maybe it's sorta useful but still actually isn't that good.

Given that no one takes it and the fact that as far as I know, Beamdog did not fix it so that you can actually change the way it interacts with number of attacks per round, what if instead it was just either renamed or shifted into a completely different type of maneuver?


My thought is channeling Dale Gribble and turning it into a pocket sand! type ability, which would be really fitting given the current setting.

Basics would be it foregoes ALL damage to instead throw a small cone of sand that can only affect 2-3 opponents directly in front of you, and they make a Reflex Save vs AB-3 or get temporarily blinded for 1d3 rounds if they fail. To balance out the spam potential other than losing all your damage output, you take a -3 AC penalty for the round you use it because you're gathering up sand to throw, and yeah the range needs to be excessively short - you need to be actively engaged with the targets or right next to them. Any targets not actively attacking the user (as in they're facing someone else and attacking them) are either immune or just get a nice bonus to their save.

Another option is to make it trigger Attacks of Opportunity, but I think that would turn it back into being a terrible feat that no one would ever take.

Let's discuss.