Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Norfleet" data-source="post: 1105374" data-attributes="member: 11581">Skill increasing feats aren't generally worthwhile for anyone who doesn't have a buttload of bonus feats or needs them for a PrC, and even then, it's very very questionable.The benefit of a skill increasing feat is effectively a miniscule bonus that doesn't scale with level, and only makes a difference at all during a brief period of midlevel play. At low levels, even with a +2-3 bonus, the skill function is still dominated by noise. At high levels, the amount of skillpoints you've plowed into the skill will start dominating any effect gained from +skills. As skill increase is only useful up to the point that the noise is overcome, over the long run, you're probably shooting yourself in the foot.Some have suggested their use for cross-class skills: I find this laughable, since a cross-class skill at anything other than very low levels will quickly lag behind any real use, and likely will never acquire the amount of points needed to even partially overcome the noise factor involved in usage. Cross-classing is typically done only for a select few skills where the target DCs are low, so noise is overcome with only moderate values, or to qualify for a PrC: In those cases, the skill is generally abandoned afterwards, particularly if (cough 3.0 Blackguard cough) it doesn't appear on the class skill list, or is simply not useful for the deployment of the class you had in mind: In all cases, the skill boosting feat does nothing to help, because skill boosting feats do not make any contributions towards actually qualifying for these classes. If they *DID*, they might become viable considerations for allowing builds which otherwise couldn't qualify for something in time to do so, but since they do not, they are largely useless.For instance, SF: Concentration is a +3 boost. At low levels, this doesn't do squat, because the DC for a Def-Cast is 15+Lvl, which means a wizard casting an L1 spell defensively is up against DC16 and needs a +15-ish concentration to pull this off. Damage cast is only slightly better, 10+D+L. Figuring an average damage of maybe 4, that really isn't any better. Since +15 is out of reach for any sane character, it's safe to say that SF:C is more or less meaningless at low levels.</blockquote>

Verification