Faith feats from complete divine

[Thoughtcandle]

Came across these doing research for my cleric.

• Pious defense
• Pious soul
• Pious spells surge

All out of complete divine.

These feats seem awesome to me, but I can’t find discussion about them practically anywhere.

Is there a reason they’re not discussed? Are they considered bad for reasons I’m missing?

[Lilapop]

1) They are presented as a variant rule, so discussions an this and similar forums will assume less likely to be available.
2) The guidelines in the DMG point at something like 13-14 encounters per level, which makes this a less than 1/encounter power, especially when you consider that you'd be using them on rolls outside of encounters too. And you are heavily relying on a favourable DM for your points.
3) Outside of pious defense, the bonuses you get are numerically unreliable and (on average) numerically unimpressive. Spell focus, which can potentially affect every spell you cast with a +1 on the DC instead of only a few castings with a +1d6, is generally considered weak too.
4) These feats, once again outside of pious defense, don't really allow you to do things you couldn't do before or can't do easier through other options, while being more restrictive in qualification, roleplay and resources than the alternatives.
5) Pious defense, while not suffering as much from the earlier points, is a purely defensive option in a game that rewards a rocket tag mindset. And it is still numerically unreliable - if the hit that takes you down is powerful, it is a significant reduction, but if you tick down from a DoT, it might just change the outcome from -1 HP to 0 HP.

[Troacctid]

Yeah, they're good. Getting more faith points is pretty easy, and the effects are nice. They're kinda generic, boring effects, though, so it doesn't surprise me that they don't get much buzz.

[Endarire]

Divine Metamagic stole their press.

[Fizban]

They're basically action points, but tied to roleplaying and feat requirements and with fewer uses. I feel like many people don't (or didn't) respect the increase in power that action points give- IIRC, Unearthed Arcana gives them a measly gp value if you want to count them against WBL (far below what they're worth as I recall), and Eberron gives them to everyone, albeit with some of the busted UA options removed (and then replaced with new busted stuff).

So if people consider action points nice but not a significant change in power, a set of feats that are effectively even more limited action points that also cost feats, will not garner much attention at all.

But they're perfectly decent feats, and as such illustrate the fact that action point systems are a definite increase in power in a more obvious way. Of course, plenty of people allow "flaws" or even just give out free feats, so it comes full circle.

The usefulness can vary wildly between groups for the simple reason that your reliable point recovery is limited to 1/session. How long are your sessions? How many combats do you have per session? Do you have sessions of no-combat between those with combat? One person might be getting two or even three points per combat even if the campaign has nothing to do with their faith or religious rivals, while another might look at the table and see one point per four combats.

Pious Defense is the biggest one I think, since its value literally gets bigger as numbers get bigger, and it's something that is actually pretty hard if not impossible to duplicate. Oh, high level play says that spells/abilities/whatever can just suddenly deal more than half your hit points, maybe even all your hit points? Now anything that would tip you to zero can be halved. The bigger the hits, the more often you can use it, the more damage it prevents, and the more significant your ability to just refuse to fall over becomes. If they deal a bit more than your full hit points and you halve it, next turn they do it again for a bit less than your full hit points and you halve it again (or you get just a smidge of healing), that might leave you still standing where smaller hits could whittle you down. Granted, the full attack system means that most monsters do use a flurry of small attacks, but spells and Su abilities and maneuvers are often not.

[Telonius]

Pious Defense is the biggest one I think, since its value literally gets bigger as numbers get bigger, and it's something that is actually pretty hard if not impossible to duplicate. Oh, high level play says that spells/abilities/whatever can just suddenly deal more than half your hit points, maybe even all your hit points? Now anything that would tip you to zero can be halved. The bigger the hits, the more often you can use it, the more damage it prevents, and the more significant your ability to just refuse to fall over becomes. If they deal a bit more than your full hit points and you halve it, next turn they do it again for a bit less than your full hit points and you halve it again (or you get just a smidge of healing), that might leave you still standing where smaller hits could whittle you down. Granted, the full attack system means that most monsters do use a flurry of small attacks, but spells and Su abilities and maneuvers are often not.

The closest thing to it is the Rogue's Defensive Roll ability, but Defensive Roll is a lot weaker. It requires a Reflex Save to work, and is only good against physical attacks (not spells). Pious Defense is just a "No" button.

[daremetoidareyo]

The pious feats pair well with 1/week rolls like favored in house, or the nobles favor, or like an artificers umd checks

[sreservoir]

The fact that you pretty much need the DM to be on board with distributing faith points hurts a lot, because if you can get the DM on board with faith points, you could probably get them on board to distribute action points. The 5 + half level benchmark is even the same!

They also have a lot of functional overlap with CS luck feats, which don't demand extraneous DM effort and instead are just straight up daily.

Evaluating Pious Defense from a "hit points saved" point of view is upside-down, I think. It's like Improved Toughness; yeah, its scales up, but the value of the thing it's scaling up goes down? How many copies of Improved Toughness is Pious Defense ever worth?