Interesting feats for Crusader

[Invader]

I'm picking feats for a human crusader 6 and I'm open to ideas. I'm taking power attack, extra granted maneuver, and stone power but I still have my 6th lvl feat to choose. Originally I was just going to take combat reflexes but I have a 12 Dex and I'm not really focusing on a lockdown build. I also thought about cleave. I know all the optimized choices for melee characters and crusaders in particular but I dont neccesarily need the best choice but are there any other fun single feats that get overlooked because they're not the most powerful for melee characters out there?

[OldTrees1]

What do you want to do?

PS: Dex 14 is plenty for a Combat Reflexes especially if that is prior to any +Dex items.

[Invader]

What do you want to do?

PS: Dex 14 is plenty for a Combat Reflexes especially if that is prior to any +Dex items.

Sorry that's supposed to be Dex 12, i fixed it.

I'm not trying to do anything particularly well as the other people in my group are pretty unoptimized. As it is I'll probably already downplay him a bit.

I was looking more for some flavorful combat wise as opposed to particularly powerful or useful.

[Izmister]

TROPHY COLLECTOR!!! from players handbook 2
It lets you collect souveniers from defeated foes whose cr is higher than yours and turn it into trophies. You nedd taxidermy (craft) 6 ranks though. You can sell them for 100gp X CR.When you wear them it takes up a body slot, but each will give +1 vs fear, +1 intimidate and -1 diplomacy for the same species as the item, and once per day you can get a bonus for a will save equal to how many trophies you wear. It is my favorite feat ever!:smallbiggrin:

[Invader]

TROPHY COLLECTOR!!! from players handbook 2
It lets you collect souveniers from defeated foes whose cr is higher than yours and turn it into trophies. You nedd taxidermy (craft) 6 ranks though. You can sell them for 100gp X CR.When you wear them it takes up a body slot, but each will give +1 vs fear, +1 intimidate and -1 diplomacy for the same species as the item, and once per day you can get a bonus for a will save equal to how many trophies you wear. It is my favorite feat ever!:smallbiggrin:

Ooh I like this, it's a perfect example of stuff I was looking for!

[Zaq]

Trophy Collector is interesting, but it's also mechanically terrible. First, the monster has to be higher CR than your level (equal-level foes aren't good enough), which is a little annoying. Second, they take for-bleedin'-ever to make: at 100 x CR gp per trophy, it'll take weeks and weeks with the Craft rules to make it, and it gets worse as you level. Finally, when you actually do make them, they give you utterly forgettable little bonuses: +1 to saves vs. fear, and +2 to Intimidate against whatever you made a trophy of. That's barely worth the feat if you could make the trophies overnight, but given how long you have to invest in them? Not worth it. Fluffy, but terrible.

Do you have ranks in K: Religion? If you do, one of my very favorite feats is Fell Conspiracy, from Exemplars of Evil, pg. 24. It's not actually evil, despite the source and the name, and it doesn't require any specific alignment. Anyway, it gives its benefits to the entire party—you can all cast Message at-will, you gain intraparty telepathy with a range of 100', and you get a (stacking!) +2 bonus on Spot and Listen for each member of the party, which basically means that the entire party becomes, at a minimum, competent at Spot and Listen checks, and anyone who actually has them trained will basically never fail the roll again. It does cost 100 gp per day to get the telepathy and the Spot/Listen bonuses, but (1) you're adventurers, so that isn't actually a lot of money if you're actively adventuring and (2) since the entire party benefits, the cost can and should be shared among the entire party, and it's really not much for each character to offer 25 gp per day (less if there's more than 4 people in the party).

It might not make you better at hitting stuff, but if you've got a feat to spare and you've got K: Religion as a skill trained (and it is a class skill for Crusaders), it's a huge help in basically any party.

[Invader]

Trophy Collector is interesting, but it's also mechanically terrible. First, the monster has to be higher CR than your level (equal-level foes aren't good enough), which is a little annoying. Second, they take for-bleedin'-ever to make: at 100 x CR gp per trophy, it'll take weeks and weeks with the Craft rules to make it, and it gets worse as you level. Finally, when you actually do make them, they give you utterly forgettable little bonuses: +1 to saves vs. fear, and +2 to Intimidate against whatever you made a trophy of. That's barely worth the feat if you could make the trophies overnight, but given how long you have to invest in them? Not worth it. Fluffy, but terrible.

Do you have ranks in K: Religion? If you do, one of my very favorite feats is Fell Conspiracy, from Exemplars of Evil, pg. 24. It's not actually evil, despite the source and the name, and it doesn't require any specific alignment. Anyway, it gives its benefits to the entire party—you can all cast Message at-will, you gain intraparty telepathy with a range of 100', and you get a (stacking!) +2 bonus on Spot and Listen for each member of the party, which basically means that the entire party becomes, at a minimum, competent at Spot and Listen checks, and anyone who actually has them trained will basically never fail the roll again. It does cost 100 gp per day to get the telepathy and the Spot/Listen bonuses, but (1) you're adventurers, so that isn't actually a lot of money if you're actively adventuring and (2) since the entire party benefits, the cost can and should be shared among the entire party, and it's really not much for each character to offer 25 gp per day (less if there's more than 4 people in the party).

It might not make you better at hitting stuff, but if you've got a feat to spare and you've got K: Religion as a skill trained (and it is a class skill for Crusaders), it's a huge help in basically any party.

I'm fine if it's not mechanically powerful im really looking for mechanically flavorful.

[Blackhawk748]

I recommend the other Ritual from BoVD,(i forget the name) ask your DM if he will remove the Evil requirement as nothing it does is Evil. I mean how is giving Temp HP to your buddies Evil?

[Zaq]

I'm fine if it's not mechanically powerful im really looking for mechanically flavorful.

My argument about Trophy Collector is that the mechanics are so awkward that you'll never notice that it's there. Go read through the Craft rules and calculate how long it'll take you to actually craft each trophy—or you know what, let's do it together. Let's pretend you took it right now. You're level 6, so you have to fight at least a CR 7 foe to get a trophy from it, so it's worth 700 GP. Let's assume you've got max ranks in Craft, so you've got 9 ranks. We'll toss in maybe a +2 for your INT, and a +2 for your tools, giving you a total of about +13.

Trophy Collector conveniently omits the actual Craft DC that you have to use, so let's assume it's either a "typical item" or a "high-quality item," as described on PHB pg. 71. If it's a "typical item," that's DC 10, so if you take 10 on your Craft checks (total 23), you make 230 sp worth of progress in a week, which is 23 gp. That means that you'd take 30.43 weeks to craft one trophy. You could voluntarily increase the DC by 10 to make it faster, and you'd still succeed if you took 10, so you'd make 46 gp of progress in a week, meaning it would still take you almost four months to make a single CR 7 trophy. (If the trophy is a "high-quality item," you can't succeed on a 10 if you increase the Craft DC, so you'd make 34.5 gp a week, taking you 20.28 weeks to make one trophy.) Since higher CR monsters make more expensive trophies, this is only going to get worse as you go up in levels, unless you find a whole ton of bonuses to your Craft score, at which you're spending character resources on something that doesn't really benefit you that much. And while being The Truenamer Guy has taught me a thing or two about chasing bonuses to meet ever-scaling DCs without actually getting much stronger, that doesn't mean that I think it's a good idea.

I mean, maybe you play in campaigns where you can routinely take more than 30 weeks to craft an item that will give you a +1 to Will, but I've never seen anything even remotely like that. Don't even ask how many magic items the Wizard could make in 30 weeks of downtime. Don't ask how many times you could have leveled up (and gained bonuses to Will just through levels alone) by spending those 30 weeks fighting things and having fun adventuring. The feat would be weak if you could make the trophies overnight, but you can't. You have to spend an eternity making them. I just don't see that as being a viable use for a feat. It sounds flavorful, but the only flavor that will actually show up at the table is your character trying to squeeze 8 hours of crafting into every day for 30 weeks, at which point you'll have a +1 Will. You won't get the flavor of carrying around a bunch of scary trophies for a really, really long time. That just doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

[Doctor Awkward]

Devotion feats from Complete Champion are always fun.
Travel, Law, and Knowledge are good ones.

Shape Soulmeld (Therapeutic Mantle) will boost the effectiveness of your healing maneuvers on yourself.

Stone Power is good at low levels, provided you can retrain it to something later.

Adaptive Style might be mandatory for Swordsages, but it's also a solid choice for any initiator to take.

[Troacctid]

Combat Intuition is kind of nifty. Make a Sense Motive check as a free action to determine someone's CR relative to your level.

[The Viscount]

I rather like shards of granite if you qualify, since it lets you keep penetrating dr even after you've expended mountain hammer or when you fly.