New Feats

[Ashtagon]

The Armiger series of feats are meant to be individually worthwhile as good (but not game-breaker) feats, but each is slightly less useful than the previous. Taking all three results in a very specialised character. Battle Rush is my take on the fighter who can carry on "forever" while in melee.

Armiger

You know how to use your armour to mitigate damage.

Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +4
Benefit: Your armour provides damage resistance against piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning damage, up to a limit of your BAB or your armour's armour bonus (plus enhancement bonus, if any), whichever is lower.

Improved Armiger

You know how to use your armour to mitigate damage.

Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +9, Armiger
Benefit: Your armour provides damage resistance against piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning damage, up to a limit of your BAB or twice (your armour's armour bonus (plus enhancement bonus, if any)), whichever is lower.

Greater Armiger

You know how to use your armour to mitigate damage.

Prerequisite: Base attack bonus +16, Armiger, Improved Armiger
Benefit: Your armour provides damage resistance against piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning damage, up to a limit of your BAB or three times (your armour's armour bonus (plus enhancement bonus, if any)), whichever is lower.

Battle Rush

Prerequisites: Base attack bonus +3, Constitution 13
Benefit: A number of times per day equal to your Constitution bonus, you an enter a battle rush. This rush lasts for ten minutes. While in a battle rush, half of any damage you inflict on an enemy in melee gets returned to you as temporary hit points. These temporary hit points are lost first when you take damage, and automatically vanish at the end of the battle rush period.

Note: For the purposes of this feat, an enemy is only counted if they are aware of your presence, and have a chance of causing hit point damage to you in that round. It does not count if you hypothetically leave yourself open to attack (only your actual actions that round count), but it does count if they can do so in a way that puts them at greater risk than might otherwise be considered safe.

 

[GunbladeKnight]

Greater Armiger seems useless. A paladin or fighter at level 20 will have an at least +2 or higher full plate, and a barbarian should have a +5 breastplate if he goes for defense. Both give a max of 20 to the feat's DR, which your BAB limits anyways.

And what kind of DR is it? Is it DR/-, DR/magic, or something else?

 

[Ashtagon]

Greater Armiger seems useless. A paladin or fighter at level 20 will have an at least +2 or higher full plate, and a barbarian should have a +5 breastplate if he goes for defense. Both give a max of 20 to the feat's DR, which your BAB limits anyways.

You're right in that Greater Armiger is mostly useless at optimised play levels. However, characters may lose their optimised equipment sometimes, or simply not be in an adventure where it is available - full plate armour is terribly gauche in a large city, and is rather unhealthy in deserts and jungles. Couple this with the fact that I plan on allowing fighters to have feats that can be retrained, and there are definitely situations in which it would be beneficial for them to sometimes take Greater Armiger.

It also gains relevance in campaigns where magic marts are not available.

And what kind of DR is it? Is it DR/-, DR/magic, or something else?

I call it damage resistance. It's a houserule of mine which basically takes damage reduction and energy resistance and merges them into a unified mechanic. The rule essentially functions like energy resistance, except pierce/bludgeon/slash are treated as additional forms of "energy", on a par with acid and fire and so on.

 

[Celebrim]

a) The first feat alone is insanely good. In RAW terms, you are getting DR 4/- at the cost of one feat, and the feat essentially scales with level topping out at DR 13/- or so for just one feat. Compare that with the Barbarian topping out at DR 6/-. It's so good, that I really can't see anyone who wears heavy armor not taking this feat. Improved Arminger lets you wear lighter armor and tops out around DR 20/-(!!!). I would imagine that the expected damage taken in melee against level appropriate monsters would be unreasonably low, and I'd love to see some calculations of how a melee combatant with this feat fares against fights of between CR = CL-2 and CR-CL. My expectation is that these fights would be made statistically trivial, where they would not be if Arminger were replaced with a core feat.
Battle Rush makes it even worse and is arguably the most powerful general purpose feat I've ever scene, with high level characters probably returning 20-25 temporary hit points to themselves each round unsituationally and without a combo of any sort. A character with these feat and arminger could achieve virtual invincibility against monsters with a CR more than 2 or so below his own character level, allowing him to take on armies single handedly, and allowing him to stack up 100's of temporary hit points over the course of a large battle and probably entering any 'boss fight' with a 1000 hit points.

b) Leaving the question of balance aside, my personal feeling is that the longer you stay in a feat tree the better it needs to be. Otherwise, there aren't really any choices in the system. Everyone will dip from the front loaded entry feats in your system and will all basically end up looking very much the same. Additionally, while in this particular case you don't have the usual problem, the more usual problem with feats is that they are underpowered compared to spells and like spells need to scale up in power as they become available at higher levels. Of course, you've got two feats that are each probably better than the Stoneskin spell, so I don't think that usual criticism applies.

 

[Ashtagon]

Hmm, good point on the first feat. It is a little strong, and that despite getting comments that it's not strong enough over on gitp (although I personally feel people there routinely play at levels 15-20 with magic marts aplenty, so yeah). How about if the Armiger tree went from x1/x2/x3 armour bonus to x0.5/x1/x2? That would also make the third feat relevant.

Re-reading the Battle Rush feat, what was I thinking? Is there any way to salvage the basic concept?

 

[GunbladeKnight]

Since temporary hit points overlap, I don't think it's too much of a problem. What does become a problem is if you're focused on delivering that one powerful blow (charging smite paladin on a horse with a valorous lance). You could easily kill yourself if you deal more than double your hp in damage (thus getting more than your hp in temp). Remember, if your temp hp is greater than your hp (or max hp, i forget which), then you need to make a Fort save for each round it exceeds or you die.