What's the big deal with "feat taxes?"

[Shadeydm]

Also all at wills do epic damage at 1st level,

This is brilliant! I have seen way too many battles drag on painfully because the party is out of Encounter and Daily powers. I think a house rule that if you're out of dailies and encounters your at wills do epic damage is friggin genius. If I ever DM 4E this will probably be my first house rule.

Thank you GMforPowergamers!!!!

 

[GMforPowergamers]

This is brilliant! I have seen way too many battles drag on painfully because the party is out of Encounter and Daily powers. I think a house rule that if you're out of dailies and encounters your at wills do epic damage is friggin genius. If I ever DM 4E this will probably be my first house rule.

Thank you GMforPowergamers!!!!

I hope it works for you...I will admit our ranger scares me....or atleast the one we talked about tonight... twin strike for 2w/2w

Sure, except that in my experience everyone takes Expertise anyway, if it isn't houseruled.

Ok we have diffrent exp then... I know about 1/2 a dozen players who always take them... 1 or 2 that take them alot... a few that never take the same type of feat atleast until 2 or3 characters...and one player who has made it since day one in 4e without ever taking one...

... well, then the rest of the party isn't punished by you being bad at math (unless you're playing a lazy warlord or similar oddball build that either doesn't make attacks or doesn't care about hitting).

You know it is funny...even most power gamers once they get to know me admit I make good characters...and ALWAYS contribute to the group...Some times I take the path less traveled and make good characters that give lots of support and do decent damage...and (shcok) do so without useing the same build everyone eles does...

Both my tac and my resc lords kicked but, gave out some attacks, gave lots of bonuses...and DIDnt take expertise...

No one is punished becuse I need a 12 to hit instead of an 11... or a 15 instead of a 12... in fact more often then not I can quickly come up with good tactics and good postioning that means even if I only hit on a 20 I will still be useful in some way...

Also I often add alot of fun to games... infact I often get singled out as both fun nd 'kick butt'

so no one is ever said that I was not good...except people who look at theory numbers with out looking at the game being played....

No.

See, the thing is that they are not giving free feats, they are giving free boring uninteresting universal numbers (the add on to some of the expertise notwithstanding). In addition, you are not loosing out on anything. You are getting the exact same stuff that is exactly as applicable to your build as anyone else's.

SO if you wanted 7 books, and I wanted 7 diffrent books, and some one gave us both 3 of the books from my list and none from yours it would be ok...even though you did not want to read my 7 books... in fact one that you got is in a lang you dont know (melee training)

or would you ask if you could please trade those books you dont want for ones you do?

 

[Akaiku]

No one is punished becuse I need a 12 to hit instead of an 11... or a 15 instead of a 12... in fact more often then not I can quickly come up with good tactics and good postioning that means even if I only hit on a 20 I will still be useful in some way...

You'd be more effective with expertiese, with all of one base assumption: are we talking about a warlord that swings and are we talking at upper heroic or higher?

There are things better then +1 to hit, not terribly many, but there are, when it gets to +2, there really isn't better. +3 is right out.

And really, you can stand there and just shift for flanking and drop an occasional heal and be an effective warlord. taclords make people hit when they want to, resourceful ones just give out free candy regardless of the situation.

Really, what math people are arguing (at least as I see it) is that barring a build that doesn't have better impact hitting then missing, hitting helps everything combat you do other then exist. Rather few things have that blanket application.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

From my perspective, the real issue with feat taxes is that feats should serve as a way to meaningfully differentiate your character from others'.

A character who takes feats which, say, give a bonus to sonic attacks for one round after making an electrical attack is encouraged via mechanical rewards to approach combat in a certain way ("First the lightning, and then the thunder!").

A character who takes feats which grant a bonus to all attacks is not encouraged via mechanical rewards to do anything in particular.

If all characters tend toward feats which grant bonuses to all attacks, then the level of mechanical reinforcement for interesting mechanical differentiation is reduced. It makes characters more same-y. And with people complaining about how "everyone plays the same in 4E" (as wrong as they may be in practice), additional ways in which everyone is encouraged to be the same should be avoided.

 

[C4]

SO if you wanted 7 books, and I wanted 7 diffrent books, and some one gave us both 3 of the books from my list and none from yours it would be ok...even though you did not want to read my 7 books... in fact one that you got is in a lang you dont know (melee training)

or would you ask if you could please trade those books you dont want for ones you do?

You and several people seem to be talking past each other, so maybe I can help. From what you've said, your assumption is that all feats are nifty little extras -- benefits that are nice, but not necessary. (And this is what WotC told us that 4e feats would be.)

When a DM gives specific feats out for free, whether it be Expertise or Melee Training, their premise is that those feats aren't extras -- they're basic functional stuff that some classes are underpowered for lacking. You may not agree, but consider this: if WotC had simply made MBAs key off of "your highest stat" right in the PHB, nobody would've batted an eye.*

*Except for the "4e is WoW we can't role play a dumbed down board game" type crowd.

 

[Herschel]

Assume you 'need' it to hit half the time in epic, you have a base 35%. That's 42.8ish percent of you base that you get added for a feat. Large difference.

This is absolute BS though because it looks at a vacuum of other modifiers, which doesn't happen in the game, and it's also based on a static defensive number across the board on enemies, which also doesn't happen.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

But maybe someone thinks, that classes without melee training do their job well enough... and spending a feat is just fair and balanced...

(hybrid talent is a feat tax, but it is a cost you have to pay for extra fexibility... intelligent blademaster is the tax you pay for beeing able to dump str and get constitution instead... the other swordmage most probably needs to get toughness...
the battlemind also has to pay the tax for his constitution is his primary stat... but here i would admit, that the battlemind should get an intelligent blademaster like feat...
sometimes taxes are what they are... a price you pay for a different benefit...

 

[Estlor]

Popping in for a moment on something I read a couple of pages back:

The argument was made that Expertise feats are not a math fix because there exists a multitude of other methods - be it charging, combat advantage, or leader power bonuses - to obtain bonuses to attack rolls that continue to expand as you go up in level. This argument is a fallacy.

The mathematical assumption of the system is that you will have approximately a 50-55% chance of hitting a monster at any given point across the life of your PC. The actual behavior of the system (pre-Expertise) is that your chance to hit diminishes across tiers to the point where, in Epic, you're actually looking at a 35-40% chance of hitting.

Combat Advantage, charging, and leader bonuses are supposed to exist to be an ADVANTAGE to the party; they are a tactical bonus that makes it easier than normal to hit a monster. They were never meant to be a necessity to make the system behave properly. I mean, really, having to jump through a bunch of hoops just to have a 50/50 shot of hitting a monster? Yeah, hatching a plot and watching it fall into place its lots of fun, but the game's intent is to reward you for that, not penalize players who aren't clever enough or whose party isn't optimized to each others' strengths. And no argument you can make invalidates the fact that a baseline PC becomes less accurate over time. That's what makes it a feat tax.

Mandatory? No. But, again, that all depends on how hard you want to work for what the system was supposed to give you for free.

I have no insight as to why the designers opted to fix the math with a feat, other than perhaps it invalidated the least amount of previously printed material at the time. I still insist the easiest, most elegant way of doing it would have been to give every PC a flat +1 at 11th and 21st level, such that they end up accounting for 2/3rds of the attack bonus the Expertise feat gives them inherently. After that, the various situational +1 feat bonus to attack feats that already existed would suffice to finish the problem off.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

From my perspective, the real issue with feat taxes is that feats should serve as a way to meaningfully differentiate your character from others'.

I forgot to mention this, but:

This is not a problem unique to 4th Ed (though the particular set of feats is).

It also appeared in 3rd Ed, with a large percentage of feats for any archer also being largely static. Anyone who wanted to be an archer *always* loaded up on Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, and Rapid Shot (often as their first three feats out of 7 baseline feats alloted). Manyshot was also taken pretty extensively. This made all archer characters tend to look and act pretty much the same.

This is absolute BS though because it looks at a vacuum of other modifiers, which doesn't happen in the game, and it's also based on a static defensive number across the board on enemies, which also doesn't happen.

Actually, it isn't BS, because it's a baseline expectation. Those situational bonuses are supposed to be layered on-top of a fully-functioning baseline.

 

[Herschel]

Actually, it isn't BS, because it's a baseline expectation. Those situational bonuses are supposed to be layered on-top of a fully-functioning baseline.

Except that baseline isn't a set number. That's where the feat tax OCDs have lost their minds. Different roled baddies have different numbers. Claiming it's some sort of God-given right to hit everything at a certain clip is, well, really overboard. There's a very big difference between 'you should hit around 55% of the time' to 'you will hit 55% of the time or more'. The 55% is a general sense, not an absolute sense. The only way to actually guarantee that hit rate is to

1. modify all monster defenses down,

2. make them all even,

3. remove random elements,

4. remove all negative status effects,

5. guarantee everyone is using monsters of that level ...

6. ...against characters only of same said level,

7. remove all proficiency bonuses,

8. and ability modifiers,

9. etc.

Even in as basic of a system as 1e there was weapon specialization and, with Unearthed Arcana, double secret probation specialization. Was that a proficiency tax for fighter classes?

I hate missing as much as anyone, and maybe more than most, but this sense of entitlement because someone glommed on to something said at a seminar is really ridiculous.

Another question: If we weren't meant to miss, why do so many powers have miss effects?