Double-take Feats

[Burley]

This isn't a thread about feats that you can take twice. Silly.

This is a thread for those feats that most people glance over, not realizing the feats potential. Give a feat, a description and the book it's from.

A good example (In My Opinion):

Elusive Target from Comp. Warrior: Gives you three new uses for you Dodge feat.
1) Negate Power Attack damage from the person you dodge against (but they still take the -to hit)
2) If you're flanked, the flanker you declare your dodge against automatically misses and is forced to roll their attack against the other flanker, who is treated as flat-footed (Yeah, it would force a rogue to sneak-attack his flanking buddy)
3) You provoke an AoO by moving out of your opponents threatened area and, if they miss their AoO, you get a free trip attempt (which they don't get to counter-trip if you fail)



Okay, now you. (Also, note that I use "In My Opinion". We all have things that are awesome to us, or have been, or always seemed to be. We don't like when people tell us how our feats aren't that cool...)

[Zincorium]

For the longest time, power attack was in this category. Most people only viewed it as something you took to get cleave. It's only later, when people realized that to-hit was easy to improve but damage was hard, that power attack started to get noticed. It doesn't surprise me that there may be others.

[Azerian Kelimon]

Shock trooper. Seems weak if, like Mr Corium says, you consider PA weak, but put the two of them together and...

*Evil grin*.

And if you can get enlargement, of course Improved Trip is good.

[Person_Man]

Tower Shield Prof: Fighters get it for free. Very helpful at 1st level, though you should generally chuck it by 3rd level.

There are many, many others, depending on what you want to do.

[Frosty]

I've always thought Shock Trooper is Strong, and Elusive Target to be situationally good depending on the build. Maybe I just didn't get itno DnD early enough :p

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Shadow Blade, from ToB. Dex to damage while in a Shadow Hand stance and wielding a Shadow Hand weapon. About on the level of Weapon Finesse, they combine well, but not too overpow...Is that a spiked chain I see there? And Combat Reflexes? A stance that grants concealment for moving? Long story short, I can build a 6th level Rogue that gets Sneak Attack any time he moves 10 ft. And has 5 AoOs a round. It takes work, but that build eliminates one of the main problems for lockdown builds.

[tyckspoon]

Shadow Blade, from ToB. Dex to damage while in a Shadow Hand stance and wielding a Shadow Hand weapon. About on the level of Weapon Finesse, they combine well, but not too overpow...Is that a spiked chain I see there? And Combat Reflexes? A stance that grants concealment for moving? Long story short, I can build a 6th level Rogue that gets Sneak Attack any time he moves 10 ft. And has 5 AoOs a round. It takes work, but that build eliminates one of the main problems for lockdown builds.

I'm pretty sure everybody who has looked at it recognized how useful Shadow Blade could be as soon as they saw it. Weapon Finesse has been wanting a Dex-to-Damage partner since forever. It doesn't hurt that the prereq feats for non-Shadow Hand-using Martial Adept characters (Martial Study, Martial Stance, IIRC) are also self-evidently good choices.

How about the shield feats from PBH2 and.. a few other sources I don't remember right now? It runs contrary to the received wisdom of 'Two-handed weapon good, get an animated shield if you absolutely must have a shield bonus', but there are enough good shield-centered feats to put together a very effective build.