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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 5245723" data-attributes="member: 59248">Yep.  By 15, anyway.  But to be fair, there's some differentiation in which feat you take.   Not really, no.  Most characters get Versatile expetise.  But exclusive weapon users who want more flexibility do better with Weapon Expertise, Weapon Focus, and Weapon Master, and class/race combos who can use a racial expertise/focus option -gain- some flexiblity and save a feat (or better) by using the feat.  A bunch of feats were deliberately made irrelevant when they switched expertise over to a feat bonus; the more interesting ones were rebuilt and are still quite powerful.     Swift Blade Style looks fine in heroic; you train it out in Paragon. Improvised Missile is fine; it's not redundant with anything.  Although it should provide a proficiency bonus, not a feat bonus. It's not -good-, but the feat bonus changes don't affect it. Draconic Spellcaster, Feyborn Charm, Gnome Phantasmist are fine.  They were specifically converted over to be alternatives to the weapon/implement based expertise  for dragonborn, eladrin, and gnomes -- and they work just fine in that role for the appropriate classes.   The draconic feat is the foundation of the breath weapon specialist build, even.  And the feyborn charm feat both gives a nifty secondary benefit and deals nicely with the traditional weakness of this type of power by not restricting your damage types at all.  And re Gnome Phantasmist...well, illusions are crazy; they get a huge feat chain that gives you always-on combat advantage (eg, +2 to hit), a crit range of 19-20, and daze on crit in epic, and since most arcane illusion attacks are psychic, you also drop a -2 to hit on anything you hit.    While yeah, mathfix, I don't really see a problem with the expertise feats.  Given the way defenses scale upwards compared to attack bonuses, you can either rely on the crazy power bonuses to attack you're going to have for most rounds of combat in an optimized group from early paragon levels onward -- or you can make sure you can go it alone by picking up expertise and specializing a bit.  The problem is singular attacks -- because, yes, racial attacks don't scale properly and it's not worth taking a feat to make them do so unless you're specializing in the racial attack enough that it's not just a 1/encounter thing.  I'm not sure how much of a problem this is, frankly, as most racial attacks go against a NAD, but the best solutions involve making them auto-scale (more) or making items that boost them available.  Wizards' perspective seems to be that it's fine for characters to drift down to about a 25% chance to hit on the low end, or rise to a 75% chance to hit on the high end -- those are still numbers where missing is a real possiblity and buffs and debuffs have real effects.  But you don't want a character to have a 95% chance or 5% chance to hit (or, really, to drift out of the 6-15 hitbox--per roll; Avengers may have a 75% chance to hit at 11-or-better, but hit them with a -5 debuf and their chance to hit drops to under 44%!) for an entire combat, or the situational bonuses that make a battle feel dynamic will fall flat or ineffective.</blockquote>

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