D&D 5E D&D Beyond Revisits Popular Feats

The folks over at D&D Beyond have revisited the stats in the most popular feats used by class on the DDB platform.

It looks like the percentage of characters using feats has increased slightly.

Here are the most popular feats in 2018 and now.

And here are the top feats for each class in 2018 and now.

 

[RogueJK]

My 2nd takeaway is that certain feats are more likely to be banned than others - which may actually impact the numbers we are seeing on there.

Yep. Also affected by some of the feats not being in the core rules, so you have to own a digital copy of the book in order to utilize them on D&D Beyond. (Or at least be in a D&D Beyond campaign with someone who's sharing the book with the group.)

So the numbers on a feat like Elven Accuracy are likely being held down a bit by both of those factors.

 

[FrogReaver]

It's not free. They must use 1 attack per creature.

Minor quibble.

D&D is a skirmishing game. There are an average of 4 characters per party.

That's not a line.

OA's work well enough in tier 1 and tier 2 to discourage movement away from melee characters.

Sure, if the DM just has monsters only attack the heavily armoured characters then, yes, okay. But in that case it's an easy game right so it doesn't matter?

Many times enemies attack what they can reach this turn. When your Fighter runs forward into battle and your ranged allies fall back even further that typically leaves the fighter and those that rushed forward like him the only ones that can be attacked this turn.

I think the biggest thing people are skimming over when it comes to Mobile is that it is an entire feat. That's a huge deal. It's a big cost for such minor benefits.

It's really not a huge cost and plays great in the skirmishing game.

If I'm taking a feat I want something that will either shore up a weakness of my character or let me do something new. I don't want to invalidate abilities I already have to have slightly better ones.

Mobile does shore up a monk weakness. Monks are a bit fragile compared with other melee classes and must sacrifice quite a bit of offensive capability for defense to survive in melee. Mobile mitigates that.

 

[Celebrim]

The more I've run tables over these last 5+ years, the more I've found that the addition of all the class and subclass features plus additional character options like feats have greatly reduced the number of times magical item effects have been used or cared about by my players.

That's interesting because when running 3e I noticed a big drop in the enjoyment of acquiring loot compared to 1e. Magic items were still welcome, but non-magical valuables were largely just 'meh' rather than central to the experience of the game the way they were in 1e.

 

[FrogReaver]

My 3rd takeaway is that most of the feats not geared toward a specific class are taken much more often than ones geared toward a particular stat or particular weapon group. This makes sense when you think about it.

Only a handful of classes might ever take PAM or GWM. Since GWM applies to more weapon types it's taken more often than PAM. Toughness applies to all characters so you see it take overall quite a bit. Just a few examples.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think this is completely true.

The group is far more important than any individual character. I think this is why I'm often at odds with 'optimizers'.

Damage is a big one. It should be calculated as a group not per character. Going from 10 to 12 damage is a huge deal for an optimizer. But it isn't actually that much if you see that it is actually going from a group damage of 48 to 50.

I would make the same point and instead say optimize differently. You make that point and say don't optimize at all.

 

[Nagol]

That's interesting because when running 3e I noticed a big drop in the enjoyment of acquiring loot compared to 1e. Magic items were still welcome, but non-magical valuables were largely just 'meh' rather than central to the experience of the game the way they were in 1e.

I noticed even found magic items became somewhat meh under 3.X. I remember when the group managed to recover a Mirror of Mental Prowess and immediately set about trying to find someone who wanted it because they wanted the cash to fill out their preferred magic items.

 

[gyor]

Honestly Ritual Caster is my favourite feat.

 

[RogueJK]

I'd probably put Resilient (Wisdom) higher than Resilient (Constitution), too.

Resilient CON is kind of a no-brainer to take at some point for just about any caster with an odd CON score (with the main exceptions being Sorcerers or multiclass casters that start out with 1 level in Fighter, since they get CON proficiency already). More HP and much better Concentration, together in one feat. It's a very efficient and useful use of a feat, and it's so relatively common as a result.

But I agree that while it's not taken as often, Resilient WIS is certainly a solid choice for many characters who have an odd WIS and doesn't already get WIS proficiency from their class, since WIS saves tend to cover most of the more common and nastier charm/confuse/paralyze/dominate/etc. type of severely disabling spell effects and monster abilities.

While DEX saves are the most common types of saves, they typically only result in straight HP damage when failed, which isn't nearly as catastrophic as failing a WIS save and being totally disabled, or as frustrating as losing or "wasting" an important spell from failing Concentration.

 

[Don Durito]

The more I've run tables over these last 5+ years, the more I've found that the addition of all the class and subclass features plus additional character options like feats have greatly reduced the number of times magical item effects have been used or cared about by my players.

When you can do entire suites of special abilities just from your character itself, the stuff you get from magical items just no longer holds an interesting or ultimately useful place in the game. On the one hand that's good because you are now no longer beholden to the whims of the DM and can make your character the way you want to... but on the other, it does reduce the amount of "reward" a character can get for adventuring other than just strict XP. If the stuff you get from XP through the level-up process is just as good/useful as any item you might acquire... the narrative aspect of adventuring kind of gets lost. They adventure to get better at adventuring, not for any tangible rewards. But if you didn't use feats and instead put all the special features you could get from feats into various magical items... you could possibly get the best of both worlds.

Not insurmountable by any stretch, but it does affect the focus of the game and the way characters approach the world.

One way to respond to this is with the idea of wondrous boons from 4E. These are basically magic items that are not items, but may represent training by an elite weaponmaster passing on a technique, or a blessing from a god, or superpowerful being.

 

[Eltab]

Monks are "battlecruisers" not battleships; they lack the AC and HP to stand where Team Monster can pound on them over and over, every turn. The best-known way to increase a Monk's AC is via ASIs, which is s-l-o-w. The alternative is to make it so Team Monster cannot get as many attacks in the first place; running around under the protection of a Disengage accomplishes that nicely. The only Monk who can be a Monk at range is the Sun Soul; everybody else must go up in melee.