What are the PHB feats that break the design assumptions of a featless game?

[x3n0n]

As in the title--what are the PHB feats that "break" the design assumptions of a featless game?

In particular, the game expects a given challenge (combat or otherwise) to be "roughly this difficult" for characters of a given level to deal with, assuming no feats or multiclassing.
What are the feats that regularly make those challenges much easier than they "should" be? (That is, much easier than they would be if characters could only spend ASIs to bump ability scores.)

The obvious candidates to me, in rough order of "how badly they violate the game's assumptions":

"Characters are expected to regularly deal 'this much' damage": Crossbow Expert, Sharpshooter, Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master
"Caster concentration (other than Sorcerer) is reasonably easy to break": War Caster and Resilient (Con)
"Every character will have at least one important weak saving throw": Resilient
"The party can be ambushed and don't reliably win initiative": Alert
"(Sub)classes without medium armor and shield proficiency (especially arcane casters and non-martial Bards) don't have great AC": Moderately Armored
"A small number of high-leverage d20 rolls will have the expected probability curve": Lucky
"The party has roughly <this many> hit points available per day": Inspiring Leader


My personal line for "this feat violates an important constraint on PC/party strength" is probably somewhere between Alert and Lucky on this list.

Related question: what feats do you consider "must takes" purely for power reasons, not because they enable a character concept?
Is the list generated by that question different from the list generated by the question above?

[animorte]

If a class feature or spell can easily replicate one of these Feats, I don't think it's too strong.

In the case of Lucky, it is widely considered one of the strongest in the game as it almost resembles a Legendary Resistance. D&D's get-out-of-jail-free card, so to speak.

Alert, on the other hand, is seen in several subclasses that allow you to add different ability stats to your initiative. The matter here is that going first can be extremely decisive.

Keen Mind, something we don't have to get into because it has greater prerequisites to function properly, can be powerful.

[RogueJK]

Related question: what feats do you consider "must takes" purely for power reasons, not because they enable a character concept?


Warcaster/Resilient CON on any primary caster. This one is downright mandatory, except in a few cases, like a Sorcerer/Artificer who already is proficient in CON saves, a Warlock with access to Eldritch Mind, or a multiclass caster that started out with a Fighter dip.


Also Fey Touched (or occasionally Shadow Touched) on a caster with an odd casting stat and no need to also round up a second odd stat or set themselves up for a second half-feat. Even more impactful on Warlocks and half-casters, to boost their limited casting.


And Elven Accuracy, if they qualify racially, have an odd DEX or casting stat, and will frequently be making qualifying attack rolls. (Clerics need not apply.)


I do typically take Sharpshooter on almost all archers, and GWM on almost all 2H weapon users, though these aren't as necessary as something like Warcaster/Res CON, especially at lower optimization tables.

[H_H_F_F]

Some of these are very level dependent. Lucky is equally "game breaking" throughout one's career, but crossbow expert is truly expectation breaking at level 1 (basically doubling the expected fire power of an archer with very little opportunity cost) while being just a good tool at level 20 (50% increase in attacks AT MOST, way harsher opportunity cost, damage is negligible compared to what the casters can do).

[diplomancer]

I feel Lucky is only overpowered on games that already don't follow design assumptions (i.e, "5 minute adventuring days"). If you have about 25 rounds every day, getting better at 3 of those is not too good, just good.

The "must-take" feats are Res (con) and/or Warcaster for casters, and for Warlocks even more.

The damage feats are all fine, except Sharpshooter; and not because of the damage; getting rid of disadvantage at long range and ignoring cover is just boring from an encounter design's perspective.

[Amechra]

Honestly? All of them that offer a mechanical benefit other than "+1 to a stat, fun flavor ribbon" like Actor. Even stuff like Dual Wielder "breaks the design assumptions" by effectively giving two-weapon fighters +1 AC and +1 damage.

One of the problems with feats-as-written is that they offer you everything from "speak more languages, good at writing codes" (Linguist) to "here is a completely distinct way of approaching combat" (Polearm Master, Warcaster).


The damage feats are all fine, except Sharpshooter; and not because of the damage; getting rid of disadvantage at long range and ignoring cover is just boring from an encounter design's perspective.

The damage feats are "fine"... until you combine them with something that gives you a reliable source of advantage. Then they violate the expected amount of damage by a mile.

One of the big differences between games where feats are allowed and ones where they aren't is how much damage martial characters deal. In a featless game, most fighting styles are viable because they all deal roughly the same amount of damage — featful games break this by making two specific fighting styles (ranged combat and heavy weapons) deal far more damage than their compatriots.

[Frogreaver]

I'd mention sentinel, healer, ritual caster and magic initiate. Also in certain campaigns Keen Mind can be spectacular.

Shield master can be great with solid teamwork. Knocking an enemy prone before your GWM ally has his turn is really nice.

Moderately armored can be really good for characters like bards or non-hexblade warlocks.

I think any of them can be viewed as breaking design assumptions.

I'd say the damage feats SS+GWM+CBE+PAM break the least - because they typically don't make party damage go up drastically.

[diplomancer]

Honestly? All of them that offer a mechanical benefit other than "+1 to a stat, fun flavor ribbon" like Actor. Even stuff like Dual Wielder "breaks the design assumptions" by effectively giving two-weapon fighters +1 AC and +1 damage.

One of the problems with feats-as-written is that they offer you everything from "speak more languages, good at writing codes" (Linguist) to "here is a completely distinct way of approaching combat" (Polearm Master, Warcaster).



The damage feats are "fine"... until you combine them with something that gives you a reliable source of advantage. Then they violate the expected amount of damage by a mile.

One of the big differences between games where feats are allowed and ones where they aren't is how much damage martial characters deal. In a featless game, most fighting styles are viable because they all deal roughly the same amount of damage — featful games break this by making two specific fighting styles (ranged combat and heavy weapons) deal far more damage than their compatriots.

If you're not banning (or nerfing) Fireball because it's overpowered, the damage feats are fine; damage feats are the main reason to play martials like Barbarians and ranged Archers.

[Amechra]

If you're not banning (or nerfing) Fireball because it's overpowered, the damage feats are fine; damage feats are the main reason to play martials like Barbarians and ranged Archers.

This isn't a matter of it being "overpowered", this is a matter of it breaking the design assumptions of a featless game. In a featless game, most of the fighting styles deal comparable damage — as a result, the assumption in a featless game is that each fighting style will deal comparable damage as long as you bump the appropriate ability scores and take the appropriate fighting style. The inclusion of GWM and SS violates that assumption, since now those two specific fighting styles deal far more damage than the other styles, meaning that you can't, say, decide to be a sword-and-board fighter and still expect to deal level-appropriate at-will damage.

Now, you could argue that that the amount of at-will damage that featless characters can put out is too low, and that GWM and SS make them deal more appropriate amounts of damage... but that doesn't change the fact that it violates the assumptions of a featless game with gusto.

...

On a slightly different note, I feel like they balanced the damage for stuff like Fireball with the assumption that they'll show up maybe once every other fight. I don't have any hard numbers behind this or anything, but I feel like non-at-will things were priced as if they were scarcer than they usually end up being.

[x3n0n]

Ok, maybe I'll sharpen up the assumptions a bit.

You're designing adventures targeted at Basic Rules 4-character parties of Champion+Thief+Evoker+Life Cleric, with no feats and no multiclassing. You typically run close to the DMG adventuring day (say 2 short rests and 9-12 encounters that add up to the party's XP budget).

You run many adventures across levels 1-15 for many Basic Rules parties, and they generally have a great time and are appropriately challenged.

After you open up PHB feats and variant human, your players start complaining that the previously-satisfying adventures are too easy.

What PHB feats are breaking your game?

[Frogreaver]

Ok, maybe I'll sharpen up the assumptions a bit.

You're designing adventures targeted at Basic Rules 4-character parties of Champion+Thief+Evoker+Life Cleric, with no feats and no multiclassing. You typically run close to the DMG adventuring day (say 2 short rests and 9-12 encounters that add up to the party's XP budget).

You run many adventures across levels 1-15 for many Basic Rules parties, and they generally have a great time and are appropriately challenged.

After you open up PHB feats and variant human, your players start complaining that the previously-satisfying adventures are too easy.

What PHB feats are breaking your game?

May I make a suggestion that we leave out variant human as we can never say for sure whether it was due to variant human or the feat itself that caused the problems?

[H_H_F_F]

On a slightly different note, I feel like they balanced the damage for stuff like Fireball with the assumption that they'll show up maybe once every other fight. I don't have any hard numbers behind this or anything, but I feel like non-at-will things were priced as if they were scarcer than they usually end up being.

They've consistently done this for decades now. And each time, later into the addition, they start trying to pull back on this - only to do it again next edition.

[Skrum]

Well I'm not going to a pick a fight with the entire thread, but I wildly disagree with most of this.

So, if I'm understanding the question correctly, my picks would be -
GWM
SS
PAM
Fey Touched (if silvery barbs is taken as the 1st level spell. Otherwise, no)

Skill Expert is worth a mention for it's ability to turn single class rune knight fighters or barbs into effectively uncontestable grapplers

At higher levels, like 12+, I can see the case for Lucky and Resilience: Con, but I'm not totally sold

And that's about it. Unless I'm forgetting something obvious...but yah, the majority of feats are of limited overall impact, or are only very good in very particular circumstances. That's not a meaningful increase in character power, not the way GWM massively increases the damage of a barb, or SS for an archer. When you say "break the design of the game," +5 initiative rolls or 10 temp HP just ain't it.

[x3n0n]

May I make a suggestion that we leave out variant human as we can never say for sure whether it was due to variant human or the feat itself that caused the problems?

Sure! I just figured it was natural to include v.human as the only way to get a level-1 feat once we include feats.
It's a thought experiment, so take it as you will. :)


Well I'm not going to a pick a fight with the entire thread, but I wildly disagree with most of this.

That's fine. I'm glad to hear you weigh in. :)

Perhaps I should give another explanation for why I care: IMO, a reasonable goal for the design of the game is to have the best feat you could select at any time be in the same general power "band" as the best choice of ASI that it replaces. If introducing feats into a featless game makes a big difference in what challenges are reasonable to throw at the party, that's not great for a few reasons, not least of which is adventure design: do you target difficulty to the featless game or to the game with feats?

I'm curious about people's opinions on what feats (especially PHB feats) change that calculus significantly.



So, if I'm understanding the question correctly, my picks would be -
GWM
SS
PAM
Fey Touched (if silvery barbs is taken as the 1st level spell. Otherwise, no)

Skill Expert is worth a mention for it's ability to turn single class rune knight fighters or barbs into effectively uncontestable grapplers

At higher levels, like 12+, I can see the case for Lucky and Resilience: Con, but I'm not totally sold

And that's about it. Unless I'm forgetting something obvious...but yah, the majority of feats are of limited overall impact, or are only very good in very particular circumstances. That's not a meaningful increase in character power, not the way GWM massively increases the damage of a barb, or SS for an archer. When you say "break the design of the game," +5 initiative rolls or 10 temp HP just ain't it.

So that sounds like agreement about 3 of what I think of as the 4 core martial damage feats.
My impression is that Crossbow Expert deals as much damage as PAM does, so I'm not sure why it's not on your list and would be interested to hear.

SS/GWM seem to warp things quite a bit around the "when I can do this, it's a LOT of damage" minigame.
PAM and Crossbow Expert grant an always-on bonus action attack to characters that were not expected to have any in a featless game, and combo with SS/GWM for even more unexpected damage.
(As a side note, each of these feats has things that I perceive as downsides *beyond* just dealing more damage than the system expects, like devaluing cover, devaluing the "traditional fantasy" weapon choices, and devaluing the core options that expect their good always-on bonus-action attacks to be relevant and not easily replicated, like Monk and the TWF fighting style.)

The other ones I mentioned are mostly in the cluster of "nobody (including Wizards and Bards) is good at everything--they all have weaknesses that have to be shored up by help from other party members that didn't specialize the same way."

In a no-feats, no-multiclassing game, that's reasonably true:
* Wizards, Sorcerers, non-martial Bards, non-Hexblade Warlocks are all limited to no armor or light armor, so their always-on AC is at best 13+Dexmod
* all of the full casters except Sorcerer are locked into 10+Conmod as their always-on Con save
* each class lacks proficiency in at least one reasonably-frequent and potentially-crippling save
* characters that specialize in ranged combat are disadvantaged (ha) in melee
* characters that don't prioritize Dex aren't going to consistently act first
* characters that don't prioritize Perception are going to get surprised during ambushes
* characters have roughly (HD+Con)*lvl*1.5 HP available per day (full HP plus half your HD recovered in at least one short rest)

War Caster, Resilient, and lv1 dips are all ways for arcane casters to greatly improve their Con saves.
Dips and Moderately Armored (especially via v.human) grant unexpectedly good AC to casters.
Lucky effectively grants advantage on your key saves for the day.
One PC with Inspiring Leader or Healer effectively grants an additional (level+a bit)*(2 or 3) daily resourceless HP/THP to every character in the party.

As far as which of those assumptions are important enough to "break the game", that's part of why I'm asking the question--to gather opinions.

If we should expect parties that use just the PHB without feats and without multiclassing to deal well with published material, how does that inform our adventure design?
What character options (especially PHB feats) reliably turn challenges that are appropriate for featless parties into cakewalks?

[Skrum]

What character options (especially PHB feats) reliably turn challenges that are appropriate for featless parties into cakewalks?

By itself, probably none. Arguably SS and GWM because of how much damage potential they have, but even then paladins with smite or rogues hitting a crit can easily surpass that, and that doesn't take a feat at all. But if I take your words literally, turning a challenge into a cake walk - that's far more impacted by the die, or idiosyncratic interactions between some random class ability and the threat the party happens to be facing. A cleric using Turn Undead trivializing a group of zombies, for instance.

My point is that feats are simply not as impactful as all that. They're fun and make your character feel more unique and do make stronger characters, but on the level you seem to be talking about? No. Not even close to that strong. Multiclassing, absolutely. But not feats.

Having a high dex has only a marginal impact on your place in the initiative order. The dice mean far more than 18 Dex. Bully for you, you have a +4, but you just rolled a 3 so go check Twitter or something, it's gonna be a minute. 18 Dex AND the Alertness feat, sure, you'll consistently be higher in the order, but is that going to turn a hard battle to an easy one? Most of the time, no.

And yeah I just forgot about Crossbow Expert. Could throw it on there as a pretty impactful feat. But it'd still look like
GWM, SS, Fey Touch w/ SB (solid case for it)
PAM, CBE, Skill Expert (maybe, maybe not)

[x3n0n]

By itself, probably none. Arguably SS and GWM because of how much damage potential they have, but even then paladins with smite or rogues hitting a crit can easily surpass that, and that doesn't take a feat at all. But if I take your words literally, turning a challenge into a cake walk - that's far more impacted by the die, or idiosyncratic interactions between some random class ability and the threat the party happens to be facing. A cleric using Turn Undead trivializing a group of zombies, for instance.

My point is that feats are simply not as impactful as all that. They're fun and make your character feel more unique and do make stronger characters, but on the level you seem to be talking about? No. Not even close to that strong. Multiclassing, absolutely. But not feats.

Having a high dex has only a marginal impact on your place in the initiative order. The dice mean far more than 18 Dex. Bully for you, you have a +4, but you just rolled a 3 so go check Twitter or something, it's gonna be a minute. 18 Dex AND the Alertness feat, sure, you'll consistently be higher in the order, but is that going to turn a hard battle to an easy one? Most of the time, no.

And yeah I just forgot about Crossbow Expert. Could throw it on there as a pretty impactful feat. But it'd still look like
GWM, SS, Fey Touch w/ SB (solid case for it)
PAM, CBE, Skill Expert (maybe, maybe not)

I think I should have gone back to my earlier version of the question: if an adventure (of multiple days with some of those adventuring days having more than 8 encounters) is challenging but beatable for many featless no-multiclassing parties, what feats are likely to make that adventure too easy?

The feats you named would all be either on my list or on my watchlist.

Are concentration saves just not as impactful as I think they are?
Given a Con of +2, most PHB casters have at least a 35% chance of losing concentration with every instance of damage, regardless of character level.
Either War Caster or Resilient (Con) makes that chance much lower, making it that much more likely that a single spell (like web or conjure animals or hypnotic pattern) can trivialize an encounter (saving action economy and slots).
It feels like that's the kind of thing that can easily keep a caster's slots relevant for an entire adventuring day when they would have otherwise run out much earlier.
(Thus, War Caster and Resilient would be on my watchlist.)

Am I off base?

[Mellack]

I don't think any feat will trivialize encounters in any long-term fashion. Occasionally, a PC will have just the right ability or the right rolls to end an encounter easily. That might be a lucky crit/smite or it might be having speak with animals prepared, or it might be having the actor feat. When it works out for the PC, congratulate them and move on. I haven't seen resilient to be that big a deal. It helps consistency, but a caster can still lose concentration. I think you might be over-estimating the change the feats have. I have found that magic items given out can have a far greater impact than feats.

[Telok]

Personally, playing casters, I always take Lucky early. Resil:Con is like a level 12+ feat. Lucky, for me, works just as well and can be used to negate crits or try to make other important saves. 3/day is plenty for my play styles of different casters.

Notably though, due to non-scaling off-class saves & the trend of save DCs to generally increase as levels go up, I also tend to prioritize having 2 different save boosting reactions or pre-buffs. Usually trying to pick one up in tier 1 from class/spell, and another in late tier 2 or early tier 3. It helps that many of those also work on ability checks.

[Skrum]

(Thus, War Caster and Resilient would be on my watchlist.)

Am I off base?

I don't entirely disagree with you directionally, but I do think you're overestimating the impact of relatively small numerical changes. Spell concentration is indeed very important, and battles can swing around it. So Resil: Con., taken at let's say 8th level, gives prof to a caster on their Con saves, boosting it by 3. So assuming a 14 Con, they now have a +5 instead of a +2. Against a generic concentration check of 10, that means for the feat to be impactful, they need to roll a 5, 6, or 7 (roll less than that and Resil: Con isn't enough to save, and higher than that and they'd save without it). That's only three numbers. So on any given concentration roll, there's a 15% chance the feat makes the difference. Considering "not getting hit at all" is the primary method of defense for casters, you'd have to then figure out how many concentration checks they are likely to make in a battle, then reduce it by some percentage to determine how many of the concentration checks are incredibly integral to the outcome/difficulty of the battle, and then finally multiply it by .15 for the likelihood the feat is what makes the difference.

So there's a lot of assumptions in that, but I feel very safe saying there's quite a slim chance, like less than 1-2%, that the feat is going to make the difference in a very important roll in any given battle.

Now, War Caster is somewhat more impactful. If you really want to invest in making Con checks, it's the better option. But the same basic math still applies. Adv. is worth ~+5, statistically speaking. So, that 15% chance is now a 25% chance. Well the rest of the equation is still the same. So now maybe we're looking at 2-3%. Worth noting that the gap between them closes as you gain levels, but 5th-8th level is a solid place to consider because a lot of games are in that range.

Well what if you take both! Now you're looking at a net +8. 40% more likely. So maybe now there's a....idk, 6-8% chance in any given battle that you succeed on the check thanks to your feats that had you lost it, the battle becomes much harder. Honestly that sounds about right. Of course, a caster that took Resil: Con and War Caster probably has a spellcasting modifier that's 2 lower than the character that just took ASI's, so....they're probably worse off, on net. Having a 20 in your casting stat instead of a 16 makes you 10% more likely to succeed every single time you cast a spell (whether it's making an attack roll or an enemy rolling a save). Lower than the 40% chance the feats make a difference on a given concentration check, but you're gonna cast WAY more spells than you're going to make concentration checks.

That's why I say very few feats are going to be that impactful. GWM or SS are the only strong cases because 1) their numerical bonuses are quite large, 2) they synergize with existing class features, like Reckless Attack and Fighting Style: Archery, 3) they can be used every turn. All that ramps up their impact significantly.