Here Are The Most Popular D&D Feats (War Caster Leads The Pack!)

It's time for some more D&D Beyond stats! This time we take a look at the most popular feats! War Caster, Tough, Lucky, and Sharpshooter lead the pack. We recently looked at stats for adventures, classes by tier, subclasses, and multi class combinations.

The last time DDB looked at this, the number of characters using feats was lower than it is now. Once feats come in properly at levels 4-7, over a third of characters choose a feat. By the time they reach 8th level, half of characters are using feats.

These are the most popular feats across all classes. A year ago, the dev says that Great Weapon Master was in the top four.

​

And here we have the top feats broken down by class.

See the full dev video here.

 

[Parmandur]

You can drop your weapon as a free action and pick it up as part of an attack...per RAW. So there is no mechanical impact... Are you saying Paladins are taking Warcasters so they don't have to explain that to their GM each round? Sounds like a strange meta reason for taking an unnessicary mechanical feature and which provides nothing in story or flavor. I was assuming its from one of the other features like a spell opportunity attack.

It's probably a combination of all of the features, or different emphasises for different players: but if somebody plans to cast spells while in melee, the Frat is very attractive. Even if Smite is a better use of spell slots resources.

 

[barasawa]

With the clear favor given to Warcaster it seems likely that one of two things are happening.
Either it is a very powerful and desirable feat.
Or else it mitigates a very strong deficit in those characters.
(Possibly even both.)

I won't state my opinion on which as I'm more interested in what others think.

 

[Kurotowa]

I bet few people think 'I want to play a ranged attacking character, what class and feats do I choose for that'. Rather they look at the theme of classes, backgrounds, races, and choose ones and create a character who they think would be fun to play as. Once they decide on their class, then they look at what sorts of weapons, spells, and such that character would use.

You'd be surprised, every group has its own dynamic.

In my current group we've got a guy who's not big on mechanics. He went to one of those historic recreation towns on his last vacation and got to shoot a crossbow. The experience impressed him so much he decided his next character would be a crossbow user, and the group put our heads together to help him pick the right class for it. Other times we've had someone decide they wanted to play the front line anchor and then shop around for which class offered the style they wanted.

So yes, some people look through the book and pick an option they think looks fun. That's how I usually do it, actually. But there are other people who get their inspiration from outside sources as to the concept or style they want to go with and then shop around for what suits it best. And I've done that too, sometimes. With my latest character I had the concept of "A tiefling healer with holy powers" first and then went looking for how to realize it. I came up with three options, even! Light Cleric, Celestial Warlock, and Divine Soul Sorcerer all delivered on the initial concept while developing it in different directions.

There are a lot of people playing D&D and nearly every one of them has a slightly unique spin on how they do it. Don't underestimate that.

 

[Kurotowa]

With the clear favor given to Warcaster it seems likely that one of two things are happening.
Either it is a very powerful and desirable feat.
Or else it mitigates a very strong deficit in those characters.

I'd vote for mitigation. Once again I'll emphasize the popularity of gish style melee casters. War Caster alleviates two important limitations on gishes. One is that by strict RAW you can't cast spells while holding a weapon and shield, or two weapons, without either a class feature or this feat. The other is that it's a gamble trying to use Concentration spells while you're in melee range and there are a lot of good self buffs that require Concentration that a gish will want to use. Being able to use a scaling Cantrip for your Opportunity Attack is powerful when it comes up but so narrowly situational that it's much more of a side benefit.

 

[Li Shenron]

Most likely explanation is that the people who use Feats and people who play past level 10 or so have a high overlap on the Venn diagram: a fraction of games get to Tier 3, let alone Tier 4.

Ok but the question was why the % of feat-users in Tier 4 is actually slightly lower than that in Tier 3...

 

[abirdcall]

But there are other people who get their inspiration from outside sources as to the concept or style they want to go with and then shop around for what suits it best.

I'm not saying 0 people do that.

I'm just saying that of the 15+ million 5e players, those who do are in a distinct minority.

This is not to say it's wrong, but it is relevant to talk about when we're talking about statistics and why people are doing what they're doing.

I think so many Rangers and Rogues have Sharpshooter because the players want their characters to be sharpshooters. I think the same is true of War Caster. Their characters are 'war casters' so they take the War Caster feat. As for mechanics, I bet not wanting to play the weapon juggling game of dropping and picking it back up again is a big selling point because that isn't heroic.

 

[FrogReaver]

Pelor's Nipples, I'm not trying to prove a detailed scientific case, I'm pointing at obvious broad trends. Sharpshooter is the most popular feat for Rangers and Rogues. More Warlocks take War Caster than Spell Sniper. Those aren't "conclusions" that's just the data itself. I don't know what you think you're showing but you didn't do anything to re-contextualize it or disprove a single thing I said.

You’re claiming based on feat popularatiy on a by class basis that players who want to use a ranged attack character go toward ranger and rogue. I give you a bunch of reasons that you can’t conclude from the data presented that ranged attack players choose ranger or rogue over warlock and you come back with this? pelor’s Nipples indeed.

I happen to think players do choose ranger and rogue more than warlock for ranged which is why I’m not arguing that they don’t. But the data provided offers 0 support for that belief.

To summarize: my primary issue is with your data misuse.

 

[Parmandur]

Ok but the question was why the % of feat-users in Tier 4 is actually slightly lower than that in Tier 3...

That I'm counting down to statistical noise: it's not that different.

 

[Parmandur]

I'm not saying 0 people do that.

I'm just saying that of the 15+ million 5e players, those who do are in a distinct minority.

This is not to say it's wrong, but it is relevant to talk about when we're talking about statistics and why people are doing what they're doing.

I think so many Rangers and Rogues have Sharpshooter because the players want their characters to be sharpshooters. I think the same is true of War Caster. Their characters are 'war casters' so they take the War Caster feat. As for mechanics, I bet not wanting to play the weapon juggling game of dropping and picking it back up again is a big selling point because that isn't heroic.

Yeah, it's pretty commonsensical.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

A few of the numbers surprised me. But the biggest surprise isn't even about feats:

Only 4% of characters are variant human! Since we know from a previous reveal that over 25% of characters are humans, that makes variant-human much less popular than I expected.

I'm not entirely convinced they did the various subsetting properly, or else it means something slightly different than we think.

I don't know for sure but I know that things like this are rather challenging to manage given the nature of the data. In particular, the fact that everybody's account has customizable resources means that a Basic (i.e., free) account has very different access that someone with the PHB and Xanathar's purchased. I'm not saying this is the issue, but I do know that analyzing user data or administrative data more broadly runs into the serious problem of generating comparable cases.