Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5457964" data-attributes="member: 58197">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:<ul>
<li data-xf-list-type="ul">Feats that could be comboed with a class ability or magic item. Typically these were feats of the form &quot;When you do X, Y happens as well.&quot; 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.</li>
<li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li>
</ul>Essentials saw the basic crappiness of most &quot;situational&quot; 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 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.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5457964, member: 58197"] 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: [list][*]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.[/list] 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 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. [/QUOTE]

Verification