Essentials feat too powerful???

[chitzk0i]

I like feats that make meaningful impacts on gameplay.

I remember reading a statement by one of the devs saying something along these lines. 90% of pre-Essentials feats have small benefits, niche applications, or both. The devs were saying that newbies who look at a bunch of feats that barely do anything are not going to see the point of taking any of them.

So, OP: tell your DM that if your players make decisions solely for optimization reasons, then then they're already all taking the same 10 feats. Allowing Essentials will give them a larger pool of 'optimal' choices and they'll have room to make some picks for theme or roleplaying reasons.

 

[Pbartender]

He believes that they are too powerful and everyone's going to take the same feats and will ruin the individuality of each character.

The thing is, no matter what feats, powers or abilities you ban, there will always be a subset of them that are inherently better than the others and that everyone will want to take.

Banning the Essentials feats doesn't stop it from happening, it just changes which feats are the best ones.

But of course, what else would you expect? PCs are professional adventurers in most instances. They should at least be good at what they do, and, even from a role playing point of view, should be choosing to train up the skills and abilities that make them the best at what they do.

 

[Dausuul]

With the new essentials line my DM has nixed them COMPLETELY from our game. He believes that they are too powerful and everyone's going to take the same feats and will ruin the individuality of each character. I completely disagree! I think they are great and give our characters somewhat of an edge that makes it a little more fun for me to play. That's just my opinion, what's yours?

I agree with you, but then I'm an Essentials fanboy.

The way I see it, before Essentials, the vast majority of feats were garbage that no one with half a brain would touch--a small bonus only available in a rare situation. For the most part, there were only two categories of feats worth taking:

• Feats that could be comboed with a class ability or magic item. Typically these were feats of the form "When you do X, Y happens as well." You find some clever way to arrange things so you can do X more or less at will, and then you can actually get reliable use out of Y. Fun, but gimmicky and only useful with very specific builds.
• Feats that gave you a flat, across-the-board bonus. Think Expertise, Weapon Focus, Paragon Defenses, or proficiencies. Effective and useful, but boring as all get-out.

Essentials saw the basic crappiness of most "situational" feats and ramped them up, so now the benefits are big enough that they're actually worth considering on their own. At the same time, it added some nice flavor touches to the across-the-board feats, like the little rider effects on the new Expertise feats.

I find a lot of the Disciple feats a bit over the top. +5 to death saving throws is too much. That makes getting a free healing surge spent on ridiculously low rolls. Some of the others are equally powerful.

I really don't see the problem here. How often are players making death saves? If you're the party tank and the DM has it in for you, you might average 1-2 per encounter. Most of the time, it'll be less than that. Likewise, the fire and cold resists are really quite limited; resist 5/10/15 is not exactly immunity.

When a feat's only benefit is to give you an answer to one specific negative condition (being reduced to 0 hit points, taking a specific type of damage, et cetera), it ought to be a pretty powerful answer. Otherwise it's not going to come up enough to be worthwhile. I'd never consider the death save feat if it gave me less than +4 or +5, and I think the fire and cold resist feats are pretty weak beer.

 

[BobTheNob]

Me essentials fanboy too. I just think essentials design and sensibilities is better thought out.

That said, I actually think that essentials feats are about the right power level and that the pre-essentials stuff isnt good enough. I would actually take the opposite approach to what you DM advised and ban the pre essentials feats that are crappy or have been superseded.

 

[TikkchikFenTikktikk]

Just ban feats period. They're they worst addition to the game since monsters came on hole-punched sheets in a three-ring binder.

 

[Prestidigitalis]

Just ban feats period. They're they worst addition to the game since monsters came on hole-punched sheets in a three-ring binder.

Please

Please

Please tell me you are joking...

 

[Dausuul]

To the OP... which specific feats does your DM think everybody will take?

If the answer is, "[favorite weapon/implement] Expertise"--well, he's not wrong about that one, but that's by design. You're supposed to take Expertise; it's a patch by the game designers to fix the system math at higher levels*, and even the pre-Essentials version is so stupidly good that I don't think I've seen a single character since PHB2 who didn't have that feat. The Essentials versions just add a small, flavorful extra, to make your choice of weapon mean more than just a proficiency bonus and a damage die. In that respect, I would say Essentials adds variety to PCs.

For the rest, I'm really not seeing it. I agree with the poster who said it's pre-Essentials feats that lead to boring, predictable picks. (What he should be worried about is magic items. I cannot understand why they decided to make Bracers of Mighty Striking a common item.)

[size=-2]*Debate continues as to whether the patch was necessary, but it was certainly intentional.[/size]

 

[Mad Hamish]

Oh, there are some astonishingly good feats in the Essentials books, but many of them don't get discussed much.

Superior Will -- start of turn save against Stunned or Dazed, even if it's not a (save ends) effect -- on top of +2/3/4 to Will.

Superior Fortitude -- reduce ongoing damage by 3/6/9 -- on top of +2/3/4 to Fortitude.

Resilient Focus -- +2 feat bonus to saves, including those against death, ongoing damage, conditions, being forced into hindering terrain, being knocked prone (for dwarves), and probably some other things.

Combine Resilient Focus with Superior Will, and a regular "save ends" Stunned will be over before the start of the next turn 95.7125% of the time. (To fail, must roll 7 or lower 3 times - SoT 1, EoT 1, SoT 2.)

at the cost of a couple of feats and still gives you a 35% chance of missing 1 turn.
I don't see this as a real problem.

Combining Cunning Stalker (HotFK) with the feat Opportunistic Withdrawal (PHB3, paragon) allows a great many quick escapes (see diagram). The PC (X) is flanked by two enemies (E), each of which has no creatures adjacent to them other than the PC, so the PC has CA against both. The PC can walk to squares 1, 2, and onward without taking an OA, courtesy of Opportunistic Withdrawal.

I don't see that as a big issue.
Characters who get isolated to try and use the feat will commonly still be in a world of pain as monsters focus on them.

 

[KarinsDad]

Please

Please

Please tell me you are joking...

When feats came out in 3E, my first impression was:

"oh oh. They've opened Pandora's box and it'll never be closed again."


The issue with feats is that they are never good enough. There is a significant "entitlement" mentality within the D&D community that something isn't cool unless it is new and shiny and more powerful than last time.

So, that's exactly what happened with 3E feats, then 3E and 3.5 splat book feats, then 4E PHB feats came out and they were fairly well balanced, but the splat books again made older feats obsolete and newer feats cooler. Essentials just continues that trend.

As an example:

PHB, Paragon feat Iron Will. +2 feat bonus to Will.

Essentials, Heroic feat Improved Defenses. +1 to all 3 defenses, +2 at Paragon, +3 at Epic

Even if this is a math fix attempt, it is SO much more powerful than the original Paragon defense feats that it is a no brainer. Nobody would ever ever ever take the Paragon feats again if they know about the Heroic feat.

 

[Victim]

at the cost of a couple of feats and still gives you a 35% chance of missing 1 turn.
I don't see this as a real problem.

The absolute effect of the feat doesn't seem that important compared the impact of the feat relative to similar means of accomplishing the same goal within the system.

If the other ways to get start of turn saves are epic feats or being a warden, then something similar available from level 1 to many classes looks out of place. Abilities that were rare and powerful are now really easy to get.

Even if this is a math fix attempt, it is SO much more powerful than the original Paragon defense feats that it is a no brainer. Nobody would ever ever ever take the Paragon feats again if they know about the Heroic feat.

Iron Will and its friends were affected by errata to match the Essentials versions, so they're now heroic feats that scale up to +4 with tiers.

That's definitely one way to way to help deal with some of the issues. But it requires a lot of work to maintain consistency. If the new logic is that boosts to defenses and saves need to be more significant, that affects a LOT - changing just Iron Will, Great Fort, and Lightning Reflexes is a shoddy implementation.