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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5501609" data-attributes="member: 3820">I basically disagree, mostly because the definition of "good" has changed. The difference is between "you can achieve a hard DC about 50% of the time if you're trained and have a good stat" to "you can achieve a hard DC about 50% of the time if you're trained, have a good stat, spent a feat on Skill Focus and/or took a race that complements the skill in question and/or have an appropriate paragon path and/or have a magic item that will make up the difference." So if you're trained in a skill you have a strong stat for, you've moved from being defined as "good" to "better off than you would be if you were untrained." Or at least that's how it feels to me. Of course, this complaint's pretty minor; I can just go ahead and use the DMG2 DCs instead of the Essentials-era DCs. If a skill optimizer player were to emerge, I'd probably just start introducing "excruciating" difficulty tasks that get even better results than "hard" in order to challenge them instead of shifting the goalposts for the entire group. Might work, might not: but my most regular closest-to-optimization guy at the moment plays a goliath bard, and I'd rather not adapt the campaign so that he should reroll as an eladrin if he wants to keep making hard Arcana checks on a regular basis. I freely admit this disagreement is likely at the heart of the matter.Well, we're just getting to mid-paragon right now, but I can tell you right now that the three choices that are appealing most to me (and I can think of about six others on top of that) are (a) Clever Tail [adds a new trick](b) Agile Athlete [makes attempting combat stunts more feasible and appealing](c) a math feat like Paragon Defenses or an Expertise feat.The only thing that makes me consider (c) is the gnawing sense of obligation to the math. I'm just not fond of that as a motivation to pick something for my character; it doesn't reflect any of the choices the character would make, it just reflects a metagame necessity. And when I tell myself "(a) or (b) would accurately reflect the character's actions and interests, but I should pick (c) to account for monster scaling," it feels kind of like something's gone wrong.It isn't necessarily desired, but yeah, that depends on the player. Locally, it's pretty desired. My wife's more prone to say "there are just too many cool feats and not enough slots." And even if you might have 17 feats at 30th level, the ones you take latest are the ones you'll use the least. It's one more incentive (for our group's playstyle, of course) to focus first on the ones that add interesting capabilities and reflect the character's personality.</blockquote>

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