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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4704608" data-attributes="member: 82732">This really bothers me.  I'm a business owner so I understand the economic realities but power creep as a sales tool destroys the game.  It's really awful if PHB1 classes are made obsolete by future releases.  The ability to retrain feats and powers could also be a slightly underhanded way of tempting players to buy splat books and "power up" their existing pc's. Personally I'll buy a new book for the variety of pc choices, but if I sense that it's an ever increasing creep I'm much more likely to limit the game to books xyz and not allow any outside powers, feats, skills, items.   taclords are abused on forums as a "modifier" a lot of the benefit from taclords is offset by their personally unimpressive abilities.  If you have a different character not pumping up your striker but doing his own damage your expected average outcome is still probably the same.  The taclord argument fails to subtract the lost utility of 20% of your party in directly contributing to the encounter and just benefits the striker as having higher damage.Exactly.  Hard to reasonably argue at all after 16th level about this feat.Define mechanically.  The mechanics remain the same it's your efficiency that's significantly impacted.  Once you reach +2 to hit, you've reached a point where it's impossible to deny the overwhelming superiority of this feat.  It was already superior at +1 but +2 is off the charts.   over the life of the character this margin starts widen and the law of large numbers make it increasingly likely that the pc without the bonus will die in a situation where the pc with the bonus would not have.The definition of must have is one of the reasons this thread is going on endlessly.  Must have in a utility sense it's obvious that this feat qualifies but must have in a "completes my vision" sense  it's not so cut and dried.  The verbiage "must have" is simply too ambiguous for this forum in this circumstance because it leaves too much room for interpretation. I agree.  This is a clearer way to say "must have". This feat is probably in the top 3 or 4 in terms of "combat effectiveness" in virtually any build.this is sort of disingenuous as it leaves room for interpretation. The more intellectually honest question is something like this: if I'm trying to optimize my pc for combat how many feats could I justify taking before this.The other question allows you to slip in a "concept" as a reason not to take the feat which doesn't really have relevance when deciding if this is a "must have".  Obviously if your concept relies upon a lot of feats then this isn't a must have to meet your "vision".  That argument doesn't change the fact that this feat has more average combat utility than any other.  While I understand your point this isn't the best angle to view things from.  Take for example the fact that there is no possible way to argue that 10 existing feats are better.  There's a problem with a feat that is better or equal than others in 100% of the possible situations AND it's easier to take (no prereqs) AND it stacks.  You can't make any valid argument to support taking nimble blade before this and nimble blade has a pre req and 2 conditions to gain it's benefit. Precise hunter?  combat reflexes?This deflects away from the discussion.  Your comparing flavor to efficiency.  I can make the choice to golf with left handed clubs because I like the challenge or think it's amusing but it won't make me a better golfer.    or just errata +1 to hit at every tier.  Why correct every page of the monster manual when you can add one correction?I too believe most of the best DnD is in the low to mid levels.  Clearly subjective but I would rather be fighting against a band of ogres or a local crime lord than be a demigod slaying orcus, high fantasy save the world stuff and spells like wish kind of break the game in terms of fun and enjoyment IMHO.   Failing to take it will definitely have a significant impact on your relative value to the party.    It's not mathematically accurate to suggest action surge will yield more benefit than expertise.  Not even close in fact.  More importantly, you must be human to take action surge and humans get an extra feat, so if you really felt strongly action surge was the bomb you could take both.   Action surge is usable only once every two encounters and forces you to use your action point on attacking with a daily to gain this benefit. WE is usable on every attack in every combat and this is a factor of about 15 to 1.  Even if you weight the daily as being 3 times as good as any other power this means 15 to 9 advantage for WE.  Forget about the fact that in encounter 2 you might also have a daily to be used. this probably isn't even true in heroic tier and certainly isn't true in paragon or epic and ignores the additional benefit of statuses that more hits also create.  Only the dwarven bonuses are likely to be on an optimized character.  Is eladrin the race of choice for sword mages?  and thus you can only take one of them. This is overselling the position with hyperbole.  The point being made here is that WE has an overwhelming combat effect relative to other powers.  This doesn't just pertain to power gamers it it's germane regardless of your style of play because DnD is pretty combat centric.This seems pretty obvious.  It takes 4 feats (3 of which give no benefit other than allowing you to pick a power from an expanded list) to fully multi class.  If we can agree that each feat has an opportunity cost associated with it, then he term feat sink replies to the very large cost of using 4 feats to gain 1 skill, one bonus and allow 3 powers to be swapped for powers of a relatively equivalent power. You're using a straw man argument.  Misrepresenting the position of the other debater in order to attack the modified version.  We're talking about utility not that you have to min max or power game just that this feat is so superior it's impossible to ignore the fact it's superior.  You're obviously free to choose any feats you want within the rules but it's impossible to deny that choosing other most other feats instead of this one doesn't have a significant impact on effectiveness.   What would convince you?  It may not be better than any feat for any build but that doesn't preclude it from being a problem.  If it's in the top 4 combat feats for every build is that not a problem?  Is there another feat that's in the top 4 combat feats for every build?I agree with this.  Name 3 other feats that give more combat benefit for a wizard.  My wizard took leather armor at 4th because I wanted to play a fire wizard.  I'm at least part power gamer at heart but I like to have a "vision" of my character too so I took astral fire(though not optimal it's the flavor I wanted and goes with my back story) at 1st and multiclass cleric at 2 (a choice with an eye towards surviving combats)two problems with this.  First when you say "probably want to have" that belies the fact that there's simply no other choice that even remotely compares after level 15. Second at level 25 and up this feat is irreplaceable, nothing else is even in the ballpark.  Just because something isn't broken till the upper levels doesn't make it ok.  Characters without it will be attacking at the level of a pc 4-6 levels lower.  If your 7th level pc was hitting like a 1st level pc vs 7th level monsters would you think things were broken? won't the DM have to pump up the encounter difficulty to challenge the pc's who do have this feat thereby keeping the strain on MAD challenged builds?    Sums it up quite nicely.No one said it had to be above all other concerns.  Everything in building a pc has opportunity costs.  The point is this feat is so good that nearly every character will eventually pick it regardless of build or concept.  What other feat has that property? Maybe improved init is close but I would guess it's about 70-80% of all builds will take it.  Expertise has to be above 95% by level 16. the game is designed for pc's to face monsters of up to 7 levels above their own.  If you're playing builds with a 15 in their primary stat and thinking this feat is not that important I can see why you don't want to be involved with encounters like this, but you're really making our point more than yours here. You're disparaging encounters that don't fit the mold you prefer as "grindy" but a lot of people are 180 degrees out from you and feel that encounters that don't seem to have a significant chance of pc's dieing are the real grind.  There's a lot of variables not being accounted for when describing people complaining about epic being too easy.  Magic item's are a big problem at the highest levels of DnD.  They always have been.  More importantly is the DM challenging them and running the monsters in an intelligent fashion?   This is mostly hyperbole and superfluous fluff.  You seem to be purposely misconstruing the obvious definition of "feat sink" in order to muddy the water.No it doesn't.  no it can't.  no, it really doesn't you'll be equally far behind.  In fact it makes less builds viable because it's lowering your feats by 1.no, you'll be equally far behind.this proves that introducing the feat to the game only widens the potential gap between optimized and non optimized characters.  That's bad.Just because you misunderstand a negative doesn't make it a positive it just makes you incorrect.seems pretty straightforward.  this guy is good <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Exactly.I would argue that based upon your play style DnD is primarily a combat game set in a fantasy role playing back drop.  The amount of rules devoted to combat in one form or another is probably 3 or 4 to 1 relative to other rules.On a related note, if you ever read a story from the monsters perspective PC's are effectively a band of thugs raiding and pillaging helpless orc villages <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  HALO 3 monsters all call the hero "demon". Or more simply "good" is us (humanoids) killing/robbing them at every opportunity and "evil" is them killing us...</blockquote>

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