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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gadget" data-source="post: 6645065" data-attributes="member: 23716">This is a very well reasoned response, let me offer my counter opinion.  I posted up thread that this debate reminds me of the 3.0 haste debate, as the arguments of the "it's okay" crowd sounded remarkably like the ones put forth by the "haste is okay, it makes you burn through your spells faster, after all" group of yesteryear.  Basically, it comes down to "I don't see it in my game" or "so what?  Any DM worth his/her salt can..."  and "It is supposed to give a damage boost, it costs the player a feat after all".  Well sure, if you don't care over much about balance in this area of the game, then of course it won't make much of a difference to you!  By these arguments, almost nothing would be out of balance.I'm not saying that the game must be balanced in every aspect down to a fine hair's worth of difference, that's a fool's errand for sure.  But it does seem that these feats are a little out of whack, probably not to the degree that 3.0 haste was, but there none the less.  In addition to the arguments above my main problem with these feat designs is this:1) The designers obviously intended these feats to have some mitigating factor or cost attached to them (in addition to the opportunity cost of picking the feat in the first place) by attaching the -5 to attacks to go a long with the +10 damage.  This design principle, used often in RPG's over the years, has proven to be fraught with unintended consequences.  From 2e's role-playing set backs in exchange for mechanical benefits to the myriad other ways this idea has been used, gamers have proven that there are many ways to counter act or trivialize the penalty that is supposed to counter balance the mechanical edge of the feat (or whatever other mechanical construct is under discussion) and make it a non factor.  Now this principle can work, especially if the ways to trivialize the penalty are convoluted or very niche, but it is already on shaky ground in my book when it appears.2) The feats grow in power as a character levels (i.e. gets more attacks).  Now there is nothing wrong with a feat that grows as a character levels, most feats are at least designed to remain relevant throughout a character's career, but they should be specifically designed to do so, and I'm not sure these were.  I mean any feat that affects attacks or damage is going to scale as a character gets more attacks, but this one seems to scale better than most, with the mitigating penalty becoming less relevant as well.  3) The ways to mitigate or trivialize the penalty are not that convoluted or hard to come by.  Granted, gaining advantage can be somewhat DM dependent, but there are proscribed ways to do so in the rules, especially through various spells.  It's not like a player has to pull a prestige class from splat book A, a feat from a Dragon Mag. #xyz, and an obscure race/spell etc from some other source to take advantage.  The fact that with bounded accuracy, opponent ACs don't really scale as much, compounds the issue.     Now others may argue that the designers knew how trivial it would be to mitigate the -5, and it was intended to be no more than a mild restraint; or that, yes, there is a balance issue, but the effect on game play is not as great as it seems, but they still seem to be poorly designed feats, IMHO.  If there is one thing that martial oriented players do not lack in this edition (especially THW and ranged styles) is DPR.  In fact, most of the complaints seem to revolve around that fact that this is all they do (particularly fighters), and need beefing in other areas.  Whether or not these complaints are valid is a separate issue, but rather telling on how much this is needed.</blockquote>

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