[3.5] Fey/Fiendish Heritage Feats

[Thurbane]

HI all,

Just wondering what the community thinks of the Fiendish and Fey heritage feats from Complete Mage?

Are six 1/day SLAs that scale with your level worth the 3 feat investment?

Cheers - T

[Dairuga]

THe general consensus, as far as I understand it, is that it is quite decent to have. While it is not -exceptional- to have, much less on a wizard or a cleric; everyone can take this feat chain. It can provide a slew of handy tricks for your average Fighter or Finesse fighter, granting them a few social skills, the limited ability to teleport, and some slight healing ability trough summoning Unicorns through Summon Nature's Ally V.

Furthermore, after taking all these, if you invest in Fey Skin, you can get a very easy DR 4 / Cold Iron, which is most usually DR 4 / --, as in my experience, very few DM's actually give their NPC's cold iron weapons by default, in cases other than demonhunters and the like.

There are varied arguments, wheras three feats granting the ekvivalent of six spells is too much, or too little; but generally speaking, it is not the most optimized of feat chains. But that aside, it is a solid set of feats.

(On a small note, the DR / Cold Iron specifically stacks with similar DR wrought from innate sources (Such as Class, Race, subrace, etc), meaning that if you throw it onto a Warlock, it stacks with the Natural DR / Cold Iron progression from Warlocks. If you throw on a Seelie or Unseelie Fey creature template, you get even -more-. DR 20 / Cold Iron can withstand even the most powerful monsters. )

EDIT: Forgot the Fiendish part of the chain.

While the Fiendish set are much like the Fey set of feats, there are a few differences. The Fiendish resistance feat is pretty much useless, as opposed to Fey skin; given that second level spells can emulate, and emulate -better-, the resistances that fiends get. That being said, having an innate resistance is always good to have, even if it is only 9-12 to Fire and Acid.

As for the Spell like abilities; Having Teleportation as a once-per-day Panic button, or just Quicktravel option on any nonmagical class is gold. Unholy Blight and Summon Monster V, while passable, are not all too good. The Fiendish only restriction puts some dampeners on the SMV, but extra meatshields are extra meatshields. Unholy Blight is simply downright -bad-.

Suggestion and Detect thoughts, while limited in a once-per-day scenario, can also work as a trump card to get yourself out of most any sticky situation; should your Charisma score be high. Having these abilities on non-wizards adds the extra flair of no-one expecting you to actually have them.

Again, it becomes mostly a matter of flavour. They are not horribly optimized, but again; it falls down to whether you want your character to have a decent set of abilities that people won't expect you to have, or whether you want the most optimized build you can get. My general take on the feat is that they are good; not great, but good.

[nedz]

They're good for Mundanes, though the level 9 feat is better than the level 6. Obviously you'd be better gishing it up but still.