D&D 5E What To Do With Racial ASIs?

[Charlaquin]

Personally, I'll use ASI's anywhere from 0 to 1 time, depending on what my stats are and what feats I'm looking at. There are a lot of feats that are better than ASI's. Look at War Caster, Sentinal, GWM and the bow version, etc. What you get from those feats is much better than +2 to a stat or two +1's.

It depends, really. GMW, Sharpshooter and PAM are definitely the three feats that are closest to an ASI in terms of pure combat power, and may actually be the better choice depending on your build. But you do have to build around them a bit to take full advantage of them, where an ASI in your primary ability will always be useful no matter your build. Again, I think WotC struck a pretty good balance.

 

[Helldritch]

In general, from what I can see my players and many others do in my area, feats are taken only when the character has an 18 in his primary stat or immediately at the start with variant humans. Then, by level 12 (or sooner if fighter or thief) main stat will be at 20 and feats will start comming in. The goal of 5ed seems to have been to have characters have 1 to 3 feats by the end where most campaigns end. That is level 15. I do believe that it was a sound design idea.

 

[Maxperson]

Max, corporations want to make money.

DnD makes money by selling books to people, books which include new rules

Feats make an excellent source of new rules that are easily plugged into the game.

There are many avenues to make money, and the corporations make the choices on which way to go. If they do a lot of feats, they go bloat, which WotC views as bad. It makes perfect sense that they would put out the narrative that feats aren't used much in order to keep trucking along the avenue that they have chosen. And it could even be an avenue that makes them less money. They wouldn't be the first, or even 100th corporation to make a mistake.

 

[Maxperson]

It depends, really. GMW, Sharpshooter and PAM are definitely the two feats that are closest to an ASI in terms of pure combat power, and may actually be the better choice depending on your build. But you do have to build around them a bit to take full advantage of them, where an ASI in your primary ability will always be useful no matter your build. Again, I think the’ experience struck a pretty good balance.

Being able to pin a creature down and keep it from going after someone squishier or engaged in concentrating on a great spell is huge. Advantage on concentration is huge. Being able to cast a spell as a reaction is tremendous.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I actually think they’ve done a pretty good job balancing Feats with ASIs. Like, yeah, taking the ASI in your primary ability is usually the better option, and some Feats are duds (I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take Linguist, for example,) but many of them are strong enough to be tempting, and for folks like me who would rather take the option that gives a new cool thing you can do over the option that lets you keep doing the same stuff with higher numbers, they often do feel worth the tradeoff. Bounded accuracy helps a lot with this, as as long as I can pull a 16 in my primary ability, I don’t feel like I’m gimped by taking a Feat over getting up to an 18. I also think “half-feats” really shine, because they don’t force you to choose between a stat increase and a new ability. You can get that starting 17 up to an 18 and get a nifty new ability at the same time.

I agree it should work that way, but being better at what your class does is a heck of a siren song. I almost think it would have been better to have feats be a straight add (like magic items), so people who want cool tricks don't have to compromise general effectiveness.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It depends, really. GMW, Sharpshooter and PAM are definitely the two feats that are closest to an ASI in terms of pure combat power, and may actually be the better choice depending on your build. But you do have to build around them a bit to take full advantage of them, where an ASI in your primary ability will always be useful no matter your build. Again, I think the’ experience struck a pretty good balance.

The balance between the strongest feats and ASIs is decent, but strong feats like that are thin on the ground.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I agree it should work that way, but being better at what your class does is a heck of a siren song. I almost think it would have been better to have feats be a straight add (like magic items), so people who want cool tricks don't have to compromise general effectiveness.

I mean, yeah. Good comparison with the magic items, they make your character more powerful too and still are an optional add-on instead of a trade-off.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The balance between the strongest feats and ASIs is decent, but strong feats like that are thin on the ground.

Internal balance of the feats is pretty terrible.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Yep. I think feats competing with the ASIs and most campaigns not going to high levels in effect result most players not using feats. I think making the feats and ASIs to use the same resource was a mistake.

We agree on something!

(Well, plus all the racism topics...)

 

[Charlaquin]

Being able to pin a creature down and keep it from going after someone squishier or engaged in concentrating on a great spell is huge. Advantage on concentration is huge. Being able to cast a spell as a reaction is tremendous.

Y... yes... I didn’t claim otherwise.