D&D 5E Assaying a change to Elemental Adept

[doctorbadwolf]

When you watch players take an agonizingly long time to get enough dice, roll, and add up to determine the damage of a fireball…you desire to remove any possible complexity you can

Do your Wizard players not make sure they have all the dice they need at the start of the session?

 

[clearstream]

This might be called more fairly a rewrite. My aim is to redress the meta in my campaign so that PCs and NPCs can get around resistances if they want to. This was partly inspired by thinking about how Soul Blade might foreseeably nudge the balance across classes and multiclasses (their psionic blades deal psychic). I chose Elemental Adept as it does part of this albeit being somewhat underpowered and considerably narrower.

Elemental Adept​

Increase one ability score of your choice by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Choose two damage types: when an attack or spell of yours would deal damage of one of those types, you can choose to have it deal damage of the other type instead.

Does this feel too strong? Broken? Annoying? Can it be improved?

So the version I will test in play is

Elemental Adept ​

Your affinity with materials that form the planes, results in the following benefits—

• Increase one ability score of your choice by 1, to a maximum of 20.
• Choose one of the following damage types: acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder. Effects you control of the chosen type ignore resistance to damage.

You can select this feat multiple times. Each time you do so, you must choose a different damage type.

After reflecting on everyones thoughts, I landed on feeling that there really is design space for ignoring resistance. (The second part of the original is fiddly, and dealing a mite more damage is not what is unique about the feat.)

I changed the wording in three ways. Firstly to make it clear that what is ignored is any resistance rather than say fire resistance. That is to make it clear it will go through Bear Totem or Oath of Ancients etc. Secondly, to make it a half-feat because generally I've found that makes a feat more likely to be taken.

Lastly, the "effects you control" wording should make it matter to a wider range of characters. I'm not sure if it is justified (or broken) that way! If anyone sees an obvious abuse, please say. Is it always clear what counts as an effect you control?