Feat Ban/Change

Rystil Arden said:

These feats are not for everyone, but the problem is that when you choose the right spell to Persistant, it can be devastating (though otherwise it is quite harmless) and ICE when used by an appropriate build (or a monster with more HD than CR) will make them unhittable except on a 20 by any opponent.

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Rystil Arden said:

that's the thing about the feat--it is utterly worthless most of the time, but then it becomes totally broken the rest of the time. There isn't really a common ground. This is particularly true of several spells not in LEW (Wraithstrike is a key offender, since 24 hours of making all your melee attacks touch attacks is, well, scary), but it causes trouble in other places as well. Basically: It should be banned because a player would never take it unless they were planning on abusing it, due to the extreme price of the metamagic. I would suggest perhaps replacing it with something that is more useful but less liable to be abused, perhaps a feat that increases the duration from rounds to minutes, minutes to 10 minutes, 10 minutes to hours at a cost of +2 spell level (and cap the duration this feat could allow at 24 hours) and doesn't work at all on spells that only last one round.

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Rystil Arden said:

Again, ICE is not a feat that is overwhelming for any character in extistance, but any character who would go to the length of taking the feat is probably one of the ones who can get extreme mileage out of it. The idea of Combat Expertise in a 1-on-1 is to play up a character's greater to hit vs AC ratio in order to cause their opponent's chance to hit to become proportionally much lower to their own (in a fight where many people are smacking you, it becomes even more useful, of course), ideally causing any opponent you might possibly be facing to miss you except on a 20, and ICE in combination with increasing ability to purchase defensive items causes that to come true for just about everything you face except bruiser boss monsters. This is a huge problem in many typical situations, especially narrow dungeon corridors or when the ICE player is interposed in front of the squisher party members, and it basically means that the GM cannot expect to challenge the ICE character with mooks, even if the mooks are only 2 or 3 levels below the ICE character. To see an example of ICE in action, trying facing off a Half-Fiend Tyrannosaurus with ICE versus one with the standard Tyrannosaurus feats--the one with ICE will rip the other one into the next world, probably without getting hit while it does so. These are my experiences with allowing a character to take ICE (he once challenged an occupying force that invaded his home city to a duel and won though admittedly Elusive Target helped him out there).

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Bront said:

YES

Assuming #4 is refering to new stuff, not erratta, which I'm assuming it is.

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