D&D 5E General Feats Discussion

[SilverfireSage]

Why would that be the point? How is it good game design to present flavorful trap options? Why should someone who wants to play an Actor be forced to gimp their character a little bit?

I love the design of the feat system: balancing against +2 ability forces feats to be significant and character-defining. It's the feats themselves that fall flat, most being too weak to consider. This reduces feats to minor mechanical upgrades you might give your PC at 12th or 16th level, after you've maxxed the ability scores you care about.

The point is supposed to be that the feats are an equal option, not that they are better than a +2 to a skill. And in many ways, they are significantly better than taking a bonus to an ability score. What if you have a fighter that has a 19 on their strength, but wants something better than a +1 to another ability score? Well now you have heavy armor master you can pick, which has an automatic damage reduction added into it. In fact, most of the feats seem tailored specifically for a fighter. A fighter will have their primary ability score at 20 by level 6, and by the time they get to level 12 they'll have a second one at 20 as well. At that point, the way that a fighter will differentiate themselves will be to gain a few feats, since they have so many more ability score improvements than everyone else.

 

[77IM]

Actor is an awesome feat if you have access to any kind of illusion magic. Play a warlock with the invocation that gives you disguise self at will, and Actor is incredible--being able to fake voices and having advantage on your Deception and Performance checks allows you to impersonate pretty much anybody, any time.

Is this competitive with +2 Cha which gets your warlock +1 to those same skills all the time, plus +1 to attack, damage (with agonizing blast) and spell save DC? Actually Actor gives +1 Cha which means if you somehow start with an odd Cha you'll get both benefits, so that's something.

A lot of people are saying, "feats are great once your main stats are maxxed." If a feat is important to my character concept I want to take it at low levels, and not feel gimped. If a feat isn't important to my character concept, I don't want it at all and it shouldn't exist.

Some feats don't have a clear concept to me either. Like, how is Durable different than Tough different than a high Con, or Alert different than Observant different than a high Perception? Don't even get me started on Savage Attacker -- it seems roughly balanced, but it sounds like a great way to slow the game down, and there's nothing "savage" about it.

 

[Dausuul]

Is this competitive with +2 Cha which gets your warlock +1 to those same skills all the time, plus +1 to attack, damage (with agonizing blast) and spell save DC? Actually Actor gives +1 Cha which means if you somehow start with an odd Cha you'll get both benefits, so that's something.

If I'm playing a warlock, I'm likely going to be playing a human (variant), a tiefling, or a half-elf*.

If I'm a human, I have a feat at 1st level which can't be swapped out for an attribute bonus. I'll make my base Charisma 14 instead of 15 (giving me two attribute points to spend elsewhere), put one of my human +1s in Charisma, and then get Actor as my bonus feat for a total 16.

If I'm a tiefling or a half-elf, I'll put the maximum in Charisma, which gives me 15 base and a +2 racial bonus. That's a 17. My first ability boost, I will trade for Actor to get to 18, since there is no advantage in going to 19.

[size=-2]*Unless it's a bladelock, which is a whole different ball game.[/size]

 

[Xodis]

Yeah, I can see all the feats contributing to a character type. Take Elemental Adept for instance, sure to a Wizard with an endless flood of knowledge and spells its pretty weak sauce, but what about all those classes and Subclasses with very limited spells? They need something like this so they can focus on a type of damage and even boost it.
There are feats for "Flavor" and there are feats for "Crunch", its hard to justify Actor against something like Heavy Armor Mastery, but Actor is always useful while HAM can be negated with a simple +1 Dagger, and people who would take one of these 9/10 times isnt planning on taking the other.

 

[Mr Fixit]

Yeah, I can see all the feats contributing to a character type. Take Elemental Adept for instance, sure to a Wizard with an endless flood of knowledge and spells its pretty weak sauce, but what about all those classes and Subclasses with very limited spells? They need something like this so they can focus on a type of damage and even boost it.

You want to highlight a principle, I get that. But, man, you could've picked a better feat as an example. Elemental adept is just hilariously weak, unless you're playing in a campaign where bazillions of monsters are resistant to this one elemental damage type and for some reason you just have to use spells of exactly that element.

Damage boost is simply laughable. For instance, this feat will increase fireball's average damage on a failed save from 28 to 29.3. Peachy, right?

 

[Psikerlord#]

I feel like I'll probably be alone in saying this, but... I think most of the feats kind of suck. A few are quite good (Heavy Armor Mastery) but most do NOT seem worth taking instead of just getting +2 to your primary ability score.

I'm the opposite. I think most of the feats are awesome, and dont anticipate ever taking a +2 stat bump in lieu. This is especially true given bounded accuracy, where you hit most of the time with a 16 in your main stat anyway... there is no need to max to 20. And feats give a lot of flavour and sometimes options to your pc.

I agree with an earlier poster that there appear to be less nice feats for spellcasters than fighter types, but even for casters, you have at least 10 decent options, and you only get about 5 feats or something by level 20.

 

[Xodis]

You want to highlight a principle, I get that. But, man, you could've picked a better feat as an example. Elemental adept is just hilariously weak, unless you're playing in a campaign where bazillions of monsters are resistant to this one elemental damage type and for some reason you just have to use spells of exactly that element.

Damage boost is simply laughable. For instance, this feat will increase fireball's average damage on a failed save from 28 to 29.3. Peachy, right?

LOL, yeah it is definitely not a feat for everyone, but really helps those "Pyromancers" "Cryomancers" and other elemental specialist out a lot. Elemental Adapt: Fire, will probably be the most useful as there are more Fire spells than most other types and fire protection is more common than others.

 

[Mistwell]

Saw some discussion of Feats scattered around the forums, and thought that it would make more sense to have a centralized discussion thread.

So. Feats! Which ones do you like? Which do you hate? Which ones are you unsure how to interpret? Which ones do you plan to house-rule the bajeezus out of?


I'll start off. Grappling and the Grappler feat really gets my gaming-nerdery butting heads with my fighting sport-nerdery, and I'm not sure if I'm not interpreting it correctly or what. I think that the takedown-to-pin itself should do at least a little bit of damage to the target (ever taken a hard harai goshi or gut-wrench suplex onto the mat?.... now add cobblestones, and replace your opponent with some fantasy super-warrior... that's worth at least 1 point of damage). I think the character pinning an enemy should be able to attack with one handed weapons.


I plan on house-ruling it all so that;

A character grappling without the Feat can;

- Grab an opponent, reducing his movement to 0. Neither PC nor enemy can attack. ( Basically, a boxer's clinch)

- PC's allies get advantage to attack the grappled enemy during this grapple. Enemy's allies get advantage attacking PC.

A character WITH the Grappler Feat can;

- Grab an opponent, reducing movement to 0.

-Attack opponent with advantage with one-handed melee weapons.

-Pin opponent, doing unarmed damage (which scales with the Tavern Brawler feat).

-Attack opponent with one-handed melee weapons with advantage while pinning.



Essentially, I think a professional warrior, trained as a Grappler, should be able to clinch, grab-and-stab, throw, and ground-and-pound.


What do you guys think? Also, what do you think of any other feat?

I think Grappler doesn't work very well as a feat. It's better to shove someone down, and then grapple them. Now, their speed is zero, so they cannot get back up. In addition, the third portion of the feat currently does exactly zero. It was a mistake - a hold-over from an old playtest rule that never made it into the rules. My hope is they correct this to allow you to grapple a larger sized creature.

 

[Joe Liker]

You want to highlight a principle, I get that. But, man, you could've picked a better feat as an example. Elemental adept is just hilariously weak, unless you're playing in a campaign where bazillions of monsters are resistant to this one elemental damage type and for some reason you just have to use spells of exactly that element.

Damage boost is simply laughable. For instance, this feat will increase fireball's average damage on a failed save from 28 to 29.3. Peachy, right?

Don't know if you've actually looked at the Monster Manual, but pretty much ALL fiends are resistant to a broad spectrum of damage types -- nearly always fire, cold, and lightning at the very least.

So if fiends of any kind appear in your campaign with any frequency, it's a very important feat, indeed.

Of course, fiends aren't the only example, just the broadest category that sprang to mind.

 

[Mr Fixit]

Don't know if you've actually looked at the Monster Manual, but pretty much ALL fiends are resistant to a broad spectrum of damage types -- nearly always fire, cold, and lightning at the very least.

So if fiends of any kind appear in your campaign with any frequency, it's a very important feat, indeed.

Of course, fiends aren't the only example, just the broadest category that sprang to mind.

Well yeah, I agree. I said it was a feat that could be helpful in certain conditions, if your campaign includes a -ton of monsters with one particular resistance and your character is for some reason married to one damage type (maybe a sorcerer with his small number of spells known). Other than that, it's way too situational.