D&D 5E Moar Feats

[fanboy2000]

Given how optional feats are, I'm ok with them being sub-optimal in so many situations, because you can always just take bonus to ability scores.

 

[Psikerlord#]

I disagree with the assumption that all half-feats will suck. In the alpha, Resilience gives you a save proficiency, which even multiclassing doesn't do anymore, and is thus the only way for non-sorcerers to get proficiency on concentration saves. (Not a bad idea to get dex saves either.) Armor proficiency feats are half-feats too, and you're probably bumping your AC by at least a point or two if you're taking one of them. Even Tavern Brawler allows you to grapple as a bonus action - that alone can be a huge benefit, especially in conjunction with sneak attack or a monk unarmed strike, or even just punching a wizard in the face to force a concentration save.
?
So I think we're back to saying that a few feats are going to be awesome and nearly mandatory for min-maxers (Great Weapon Master, maybe Sentinel, some others); many will be good but situational or build-dependent; and some will be more specialized or just sucky. (I'd argue that elemental adept and durable both fall in the "specialized" category.) half-feats will probably tend towards that second category.

?.. not the only way to get con prof. Start as a fighter or barb, you get their profs, then mc to caster for the remainder of your career. I guess you give up the casters profs, and possibly a level of casting, but con might well be more important, if you intend on playing a concentration caster (plus you get heavy armour and shield...)

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

?.. not the only way to get con prof. Start as a fighter or barb, you get their profs, then mc to caster for the remainder of your career. I guess you give up the casters profs, and possibly a level of casting, but con might well be more important, if you intend on playing a concentration caster (plus you get heavy armour and shield...)

True. You could also start with a level of sorcerer and then switch to your preferred class, so you'd keep up on spell slots.

 

[Psikerlord#]

True. You could also start with a level of sorcerer and then switch to your preferred class, so you'd keep up on spell slots.

Yes very true...

 

[JamesonCourage]

Feats are meant for specializations, not some grab bag for everyone.

I'm really not impressed with the mechanics of how these feats let you specialize. They're all fairly weak or uninteresting from where I'm standing. Which is too bad, because I think all of them could be tweaked to be a lot more fun or interesting (and more mechanically sound).

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I'm really not impressed with the mechanics of how these feats let you specialize. They're all fairly weak or uninteresting from where I'm standing. Which is too bad, because I think all of them could be tweaked to be a lot more fun or interesting (and more mechanically sound).

It is why I am dissapointed Tavern Brawler no longer gives advantage against Intoxication. Power level yhe feat is fine without it but is was a very flavorful addition.


I hope new feats will come out after we have this set in play that are more varied.

 

[Li Shenron]

Out of curiosity, is there a reason we're talking only about wizards with this feat? Yes, they'll statistically benefit from it more often than, say, Barbarians, but I'd guess that UNLIKE the damage rolls that benefit from the Elemental Adept feat, a low roll on HD recovery can be a fairly big deal, especially in a low-magic setting. My level 10 fighter with 19 Con might like the idea of getting a minimum of 10 HP back with every hit die, if potions don't exist and there's no cleric in the group.

Because Durable is more beneficial the lesser your HD is, so it's more worth for the d6 Wizard than the d12 Barbarian (assuming they have the same Con).

Now that I think about it, I don't think this feat is well-designed. Once again we're back to the Toughness problem in 3e...

It's not generally a problem if some feats are more beneficial to some characters than others. However, the more characters they are beneficial to, the better they are for the game because the number of valid choices for everybody increase. And it would have been easy to make this feat more beneficial to high-HD classes.

But this makes it potentially a little bit of a "trap choice" for beginners. You're playing a tough hero, say a Fighter or Barbarian, you look at the list of feats and read "Durable" and think "well, my PC is tough, I want it even tougher, let's pick this feat, it'll certainly do me good".

And by the way [MENTION=54843]ZombieRoboNinja[/MENTION] your Fighter might be one of the least character to benefit from this...

- You normally get back d10+4 per HD (5-14, average 9.5).
- With this feat you get back 8-14, average 10.1!
- You also have Second Wind, d10+10 (11-20, average 15.5) per short rest, no daily limit.

If I've done my calculations right, you get 0.6 hp more per HD (6hp per day) on average, not exactly a boon especially since 1 extra hour of rest is more than twice that much thanks to Second Wind.

Finally, the feat is unnecessarily complicated with its dependency on the Constitution score. Not so complicated as being a burden, certainly. But this is not the kind of complexity that results in more interesting in-game tactical choices for those who want that (e.g. the complexity of Battlemaster's expertise dice), so it's pure redundancy.

 

[jadrax]

It is why I am dissapointed Tavern Brawler no longer gives advantage against Intoxication. Power level yhe feat is fine without it but is was a very flavorful addition.

Intoxication no longer exists as a condition so it would have been a somewhat confusing ability. ;o)

 

[Mistwell]

?.. not the only way to get con prof. Start as a fighter or barb, you get their profs, then mc to caster for the remainder of your career. I guess you give up the casters profs, and possibly a level of casting, but con might well be more important, if you intend on playing a concentration caster (plus you get heavy armour and shield...)

You would need to qualify for both classes though in terms of ability scores.

 

[evilbob]

It would increase the average damage to 32 if it was rerolls 1s. (1d6 reroll 1 is equivalent to 1d5+1, average 4). But the feat doesn't do that, it merely flips a rerolled 1 to a 2. Thus the die distribution is {2,2,3,4,5,6}, which averages out to 11/3, or 3.67, a 1/6 increase on average. So an 8d6 fireball now does 29.33 on average.

Oh, wow, you're right. I was also thinking it just raised average damage to 4 on a d6 but it doesn't - it just changes results, not re-roll. Oh yeah that sucks.

I think re-rolling the 1s (so the average actually goes up a meaningful amount) or just giving +1 per die might have been better (since re-rolling a ton of 1s can get tedious). We might run it that way (assuming anyone actually looks twice at this feat, which I doubt). Turning immunity into resistance would have helped, too. I think you could have done both and STILL been a mediocre feat, thanks to - as some have said upthread - the lack of monsters that really have a lot of resistances or immunities. Of course, this is all pre-MM, so we might be wrong.

Guessing that sorcerers still have fewer total spells they can access - warlocks, too - it's really a feat more for them. When you can only choose 1 damage spell, gotta make it count!


Edit: Another factor worth considering is that the fire-line of spells tends to just do more direct damage than others. People upthread have said that almost nothing resists acid or thunder, which is true - but those spells tend to do less damage (or damage more slowly) than fire. So there's sort of a balance going on with more things that resist fire and fire doing more damage, which this feat changes.

I still think making it "reroll 1s" AND changing immunity to resistance wouldn't overbalance the feat.