Alright. It has bugged me forever that every class that gets Wild Empathy and a lot of the classes that Handle Animal are Wisdom-based and have little reason to pump their Charisma. Their Cha could very well be less than 10. Wild Empathy is already fairly weak as your bonus is low compared to the DCs.
Animal Empathy
You understand the minds of beasts.
Prerequisite: Handle Animal 1 rank or Wild Empathy class feature
Benefit: You can use your Wisdom modifier on Handle Animal skills checks and Wild Empathy checks you make, instead of your Charisma modifier. If you have the Wild Empthy class feature, you can also use all of your class level to determine the result of a Wild Empathy check, not just those of those that have the Wild Empathy class feature. Finally, If you are trained in Handle Animal, you gain a +3 bonus to your Wild Empathy checks as though you were "trained" in it.
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wild empathy should just use wisdom...
Design Manager
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Since most classes that have Wild Empathy have an animal companion, it's generally a really bad idea to dump your CHA below 10 anyways, since Handle Animal is CHA based and you could end up with a chance of your animal companion failing to perform even trained tricks on command. +4 AnC bonus +4 for 1 rank and class skill -1 for 8 Cha = +7 modifier, or a 10% chance that you fail the simple DC 10 task of commanding your AnC to perform a trick it knows, and an 85% chance you fail the DC 25 check to push your own animal companion.
If the animal companion is wounded, including nonlethal damage, the DCs increase by 2, meaning that there's now a 20% chance your animal companion fails to perform a trained trick, and you'll only be able to push it on a natural 20.
If you're starting your game above 1st level that's different of course. Honestly if I were going to fix it, rather than adding a feat tax, I'd probably just house-rule Handle Animal and Wild Empathy to be Wis based. I know lots of people who are amazing with animals but wouldn't be described as "charismatic", and instead it's their self possession and intuition that seem to be the main factors, which are Wisdom attributes anyways.
Agree with Ssalarn. Though at the same time I'm wondering if we really need more reasons for people to pretend Charisma doesn't exist.
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Trade-offs are a good thing. This game needs more characters with abilities based on multiple attributes, not less of it.
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Design Manager
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Trade-offs are a good thing. This game needs more characters with abilities based on multiple attributes, not less of it.
Eh, debatable. Druids and Hunters have a lot of places they want to put their ability score points, and really any "gishy" or martial character is generally going to be tight on their points as it is. I don't think it's particularly problematic as it stands; you don't really need to pump Charisma, you just need to not dump it. If you tend to crank the difficulty of your encounters up and play at higher mechanical optimization levels though, you may find yourself spread pretty thin.
Well I completely agree that the two abilities should be based off of Wisdom, but they aren't. I don't mean to give people a reason to dump Cha, but this feat hardly gives a power boost anyways. There are dozens of "better" choices. As a matter of fact, the original wording used Wis in addition to Cha, so a Cha penalty would still apply. Apparently I should have stuck with that.
Benefit: You can add your Wisdom modifier to Handle Animal Skill checks and Wild Empathy checks, in additition to your Charisma modifier. If you have the Wild Empathy class feature, you can use all of your class levels to determine the result of a Wild Empathy check, not just those that grant you Wild Empathy.
Or alternately:
Benefit: You gain a +4 bonus on Wild Empathy checks.
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Design Manager
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Well I completely agree that the two abilities should be based off of Wisdom, but they aren't. I don't mean to give people a reason to dump Cha, but this feat hardly gives a power boost anyways. ****
Which is a big part of why it'd be better to just houserule the abilities to work off of Wis. Feat taxes that don't do anything but band-aid problem mechanics are just a terrible way of going about fixing things. It's like the difference between charging a Rogue a feat to sneak attack someone in a dark alley, and rewriting Rogue in Unchained so the ability just works right in the first place. Or modify the feat so that it provides a real benefit in addition to the band-aid.