Tactical Feats

[LOTRfan]

Hello, I'm looking at the various tactical feats created in later 3.5 books at the moment, and I was wondering your opinions on them. Each one grants a character two or three maneuvers, but they tend to be rather specialized. Has anyone with real experience with them found them worthwhile? I'm also thinking about including the feats into the Fighter Bonus Feat list. Does this seem like a good idea?

[Rejakor]

Other than Shock Trooper, who cares?

[Archwizard]

I found most of the tactical feats to be too limited for my taste.

[dextercorvia]

Sun School sees some play combined with easy teleports. It won't hurt anything to add them to the fighter feat list. Many of them are there already. Personally I would add Shape Soulmeld to the Fighter's bonus feats.

[Partysan]

Shock Trooper (for chargers) and Elusive Target (for immunity to Power Attack) are the only ones I've seen in use. (Ok, I've also seen Raptor School but that was decidedly underwhelming.) Oh, and some of the ToB ones like Stormguard Warrior are also decent. And dextercorvia mentioned Sun School for teleports... I think that's pretty much it.

[OverdrivePrime]

Combat Brute is pretty fun too, particularly if you've got Shock Trooper.

[Hirax]

Combat brute would probably see more use if it didn't required improved sunder.

[Partysan]

Gosh, I forgot that. Yes, it's not that great, but in combination with Shock Trooper and an Adamantium Greathammer it can be pretty funny.

[Rejakor]

It's a neat way to pull off your ubercharge even if the initial rush doesn't take down your target... you just momentum swing the bastard, time for round 2. Ubercharge builds usually don't have many feats leftover, though.

[Greenish]

In no order:

Shock Trooper has three excellent manoeuvres, though sadly the Heedless Charge overshadows the other, bull rushy ones (except for dungeoncrashers).

Dancing with Shadows can make for an interesting combo, but sadly offense usually trumps defense.

Ragewild Fighting isn't very powerful, but the prerequisites are also easy (provided you happen to be a shifter).

Speaking of easy prerequisites, Brute Fighting (not to be confused with Combat Brute) might as well have none, though the benefits are pretty minor too (unless Frenzied Attack stacks with itself, which would make it pretty neat for someone with multiple attacks).

Combat Brute has one mostly useless manoeuvre, one decent one and one good one.

Awesome Smite might not be that awesome, but it's definitely quite handy, if you have smites to throw around.

Blood-Spiked Charger's first manoeuvre would be useful for a shield charger, if not for the feat's requirements of two weapon focuses.

Cavalry Charger is amusing but doesn't strike me as particularly powerful.

Clarion Commander is unimpressive unless you have solid melee allies. Rogues would probably love Perpetual Flank, but two rounds set-up eats into it's usefulness. Fear synergy with intimidator.

Stormguard Warrior lends itself to some great combos, and none of the options are outright bad.

[LOTRfan]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Any opinions on the weapon style feats?

[tyckspoon]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Any opinions on the weapon style feats?

Half of them are outright horrible, and they all require too many feats for the limited benefits. Of the ones I can recall: High Sword, Low Axe is alright. Lightning Maces is infamous for its interaction with Aptitude weapons, but is by itself not particularly powerful because light maces kind of suck. The rest of the dual-wielding styles are a waste of a feat, as is Einhander (to the best of my memory.) Three Mountains Style is actually pretty good and works well with the predominant 'grab a two-hander, raise your Strength, smash stuff' paradigm for melee damage.

[Hirax]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Any opinions on the weapon style feats?

Like so many other cool things (feats, prcs), they're made virtually worthless by pre reqs.

[Greenish]

Like so many other cool things (feats, prcs), they're made virtually worthless by pre reqs.Not that all of them were that good to begin with. If I could get Bear Fang with no prerequisites, I'd laugh and give it a pass. If I got it as a bonus feat, well, I still don't see myself ever using it.

[LOTRfan]

If they are not that good then, it wouldn't be bad at all to make all tactical and style feats Fighter bonus feats?

[Hirax]

If you strip the pre reqs off them and make them fighter bonus feats, people might take them for flavor in low op games, because some are kinda cool. Sadly cool=/= effective, and as pointed out, they range from terrible to mediocre.

[Human Paragon 3]

I have a homebrewed tactical feat that plays off of overrun called Combat Juggernaut. For some reason, sunder and bull rush got tactical feats, but not overrun. I can link you if you are interested.

[Greenish]

If they are not that good then, it wouldn't be bad at all to make all tactical and style feats Fighter bonus feats?Most of the tactical ones are, already, and no, it wouldn't hurt.

[Hirax]

You might also get rid of the specific weapon requirements for some of them. I'd love to throw three mountains into trip/knock-down builds, but it requires weapon focus, cleave, and that you use a mace, morningstar, or greatclub. Otherwise you'd have a prone foe limited to a move action, among other things, nausea (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#nauseated)is a pretty good thing to be able to inflict upon someone. Assuming you're fighting things that can be nauseated, that is.

edit: curiosity got the better of me and I perused all the SRD creature types, and none are immune to nausea. Even undead, constructs, plants, aberrations, elementals, and oozes. So that actually makes it pretty useful if you can get around the pain in the rear requirements it has as written.

[Keld Denar]

Don't forget Residual Magic. Its not martial, but it is a tactical feat. Its decent if you want to get more milage out of your wands, and great if you habitually use metamagic. Its simply amazing for Shadowcraft Mage's, and really really really good for Sorcerers using Arcane Spellsurge.

[dextercorvia]

Don't forget Residual Magic. Its not martial, but it is a tactical feat. Its decent if you want to get more milage out of your wands, and great if you habitually use metamagic. Its simply amazing for Shadowcraft Mage's, and really really really good for Sorcerers using Arcane Spellsurge.

This might be a compelling reason not to blanket add Tactical feats to the fighter feat list. Otherwise this becomes easy to pick up with the martial variant wizard in UA. On second thought, the prereqs means you would have to go Wizard 10 to grab it that way, and you would be missing out on PrC levels in the mean time. It's probably fine.

[Talionis]

Lightning Mace is a good tactical Feat for Warblades since they can change it to work with weapons with a larger crit range.

[Greenish]

Lightning Mace is a good tactical Feat for Warblades since they can change it to work with weapons with a larger crit range.When people talk about aptitude lightning maces, they don't mean the warblade class feature (which wouldn't work, I think), but the aptitude weapon enhancement.

[Zaq]

It would be interesting to use Aptitude to get all the weapon style feats at once.

Probably not worth it, especially if you had to pay the prereqs honestly, but it would be interesting.

[Hirax]

I just realized that DotU has one weapon style feat that an assassin might consider: aleval school. Hit with a sneak attack and you reduce one of a target's saves (you choice) for 1 round, effectively adding +2 to the DC of your sneak attack since increasing the DC and reducing your opponent's save are the same thing. It requires weapon finesse though. If your DM is nice, they might allow a feycraft light weapon to count instead. Feycrafted (DMG2) light weapons are treated as though the wielder has weapon finesse with them. Otherwise aleval school has no other feat pre reqs, so yay! No weapon focus!

Along similar lines assassins might consider terrifying strike and sickening strike. More here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=197409).

[Darrin]

I have a homebrewed tactical feat that plays off of overrun called Combat Juggernaut. For some reason, sunder and bull rush got tactical feats, but not overrun. I can link you if you are interested.

Probably because there is never any reason why anyone would ever use overrun. Ever. Nope, not even then.

There are also some tactical feats in Races of the Wild:

Confound the Big Folk. Kneestriker gets a lot of mileage out of the Other Killer Gnome build. Underfoot defense gets a little love in Person_Man's Fine But Deadly (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109429) build. Unsteady footing looks interesting (no size penalty on trip attempt), but it requires a standard action to trip and thus doesn't allow iterative trips. The most blood-boiling annoying thing about this feat is the 10 ranks of Tumble requirement... makes me want to strangle the designer, since this means you generally can't pick up Underfoot Combat until ECL 9 (same prereqs, not a fighter bonus feat), and can't get Confound the Big Folk until ECL 12 (again, not a fighter bonus feat). So yeah, unwritten cardinal rule of feat prereqs: avoid skill ranks that are not divisible by 3.

Winged Warrior. Dustup is a weaker version of something you can already do with the Hover feat if you're large-sized, and since you already took Hover to get this feat... I guess I don't see the point, unless you're medium-sized, in which case you're better off stopping at Hover and just get your hands on some sort of size increase. Dust Cloud (Savage Species p. 33) is much more interesting, but requires huge size. Flying Leap only seems to be useful if you're charging on the ground and need to make jump/balance/climb checks, which seems somewhat counter-productive... you've got friggin' wings, you idjit, what are you doing on the ground?!?! Shroud of Feathers is essentially Improved Feint, which means in most cases it's a complete waste of an action. As a tactical feat, this one's bordering on useless.

Wolfpack. Prereqs include the Trifecta of Suckitude: Dodge, Mobility, and Spring Attack. And to pour salt on the wound, the three options availabe make absolutely no use of the prereq feats at all. EPIC FAIL.

Woodland Archer. I've seen this feat suggested several times in various archery builds, and I'm not quite convinced it's worth it. BAB +6 is a huge bottleneck for archery builds, so much so that you're likely to see this one shoved out to the feat slots at ECL 12/15/18. Adjust for Range is the only thing you might consider a gem here: if you miss your target, you get a +4 attack bonus on subsequent shots that round. This doesn't work with Manyshot (or Greater Manyshot), since those shots are simultaneous. My other concern is... do you really miss that often on your first shot that a +4 is going to make any difference? But I suspect if someone worked out the math, it would probably be worth it. Pierce the Foliage is rendered mostly pointless via a 1st-level swift-action spell: guided shot. Moving Sniper appears to be written by someone who doesn't understand how the Hide rules work, since you can already attack + move + hide without using the idiotic sniping rules. However, since the number of people who don't understand how the Hide rules work basically includes the entire population of the Earth minus Curmudgeon, this may be somewhat forgivable.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

It would be interesting to use Aptitude to get all the weapon style feats at once.

Probably not worth it, especially if you had to pay the prereqs honestly, but it would be interesting.

I built an NPC antagonist that did that in a gestalt game I ran, and his weapons were loaded up with stunning, enfeebling, poison, and other Fort/Will effects. His damage wasn't great, but there were two major benefits: first, he could debuff and get extra attacks like you wouldn't believe, and second, the expression on a player's face when you tell him "He hits you three times, roll 7 Fort saves and 5 Will saves" is priceless. :smallbiggrin:


Woodland Archer. I've seen this feat suggested several times in various archery builds, and I'm not quite convinced it's worth it. BAB +6 is a huge bottleneck for archery builds, so much so that you're likely to see this one shoved out to the feat slots at ECL 12/15/18. Adjust for Range is the only thing you might consider a gem here: if you miss your target, you get a +4 attack bonus on subsequent shots that round. This doesn't work with Manyshot (or Greater Manyshot), since those shots are simultaneous. My other concern is... do you really miss that often on your first shot that a +4 is going to make any difference? But I suspect if someone worked out the math, it would probably be worth it. Pierce the Foliage is rendered mostly pointless via a 1st-level swift-action spell: guided shot. Moving Sniper appears to be written by someone who doesn't understand how the Hide rules work, since you can already attack + move + hide without using the idiotic sniping rules. However, since the number of people who don't understand how the Hide rules work basically includes the entire population of the Earth minus Curmudgeon, this may be somewhat forgivable.

Adjust for Range is mostly useful for volley archers going up against BBEGs; since they tend to have higher-than-average ACs and you're taking penalties for Rapid Shot, Whirling Frenzy, that one targeteer ability that gives you two attacks at -5, and similar "take -X for Y extra attacks" abilities, you might actually have to roll fairly high for your first few attacks to hit.


One of my favorite tactical feats is Combat Panache for any bard-based martial builds, usually bardadins/bardblades/Snowflake Wardance bards. One of the abilities lets you inflict a penalty to one creature's attacks against you for the rest of the encounter equal to your Cha modifier (very nice for a debuffer build with Unseelie Fey or Doomspeak) and another lets you force an opponent to attack another opponent, which is usually easier to get via ToB maneuvers but here can be used at will. It's not super amazing, but it's a good addition to most Cha-spec martial types.