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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6054593" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I don't believe that is correct.  What you are describing is a natural by-product of the "feat tax" feats' potency.  It is a 2nd order function of the problem and solution, not the 1st order.  The Expertise Feats and Paragon Feats were introduced in PHB2 after it was discovered, and clearly illustrated and acknowledged, that 4e had math issues as the game scaled.  These feats were fixes and the by-product of those fudged fixes were feats that were "too good not to take".  Monsters and Skill Challenges DCs had the same issues but they went straight to the problem and erratad it and subsequent material produced had the changes.  The issue with PCs wasn't so easy to handle (Attack degrading by 4 over 30 levels - Expertise.  NADs degrading by 4 over 30 levels - Improved Defenses), so they "patched it" with feats - which people decried ever since PHB2 was released.I don't know if wizards message board is an authority on this but it at least meets the chronology demands:<a href="http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/blog/2012/06/13/feat_taxes_and_bloat" target="_blank">http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/blog/2012/06/13/feat_taxes_and_bloat</a><a href="http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/22610077/The_Endgame_Errata:_Updating_the_Levelup_Chart,_Removing_Feat_Taxes" target="_blank">http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/22610077/The_Endgame_Errata:_Updating_the_Levelup_Chart,_Removing_Feat_Taxes</a>So yes, the feats were "too good" as they were produced as nothing more than a math fix to scale the PCs in accords with the challenges they would face.  You see it internally with some Classes (Monk), by way of Class Feature (which has more inherent payload than feats), in order to properly scale the class relative to other classes.  A math fix born to be a straight number-inflater/scalar, which always applies its math, is always going to be better than a situational feat that applies its math here and there or a feat that always provides a less important bonus - such as Healing Surge value versus To-Hit and Defense bonuses.There is another kind of feat that is just "overpowered", but their "overpoweredness" is the 1st order function of their creation.  It is not derivative.  It is part and parcel.  I'm not talking about these in the lead post.In this case, if a combat style does not meet the baseline performance requirements of Great Weapon and Weapon and Shield (which presumably the math is based around) then they would need something external to the combat style to bulwark its performance up to that level.  Alternatively, we could just not have to deal with the issue and they could fix it up front by giving each Combat Style a sliding scale Class Feature associated with it (beyond the maneuvers) to balance them to the baseline (the most powerful one - Weapon and Shield).</blockquote>

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