Born of Two Worlds

Are the benefits of being, say, a half-elf or a half-orc really as valuable as Natural Ambition (extra class feat) or General Training (extra general feat)?

The half-elf benefits, for example, seem underwhelming. I am skeptical that people would prioritize them over empowering their class.

Hard to say without having seen all the feats in question, but half-elf definitely isn't bad. Upgrading humans to low light vision (or probably dark vision for half orc) would have been one helluva feat in PF1, since vision was about the biggest limitation on humans. Training in a skill is more valuable now-- it saves you an ability boost on intelligence for example. And everyone likes extra movement speed.

This is on top of providing future access to 3 ancestries worth of feats while retaining everything that makes humans so flexible. It looks pretty strong to me. The big drawback is what Arachnofiend brings up: not getting something more interesting until level 5.

I wonder if this means that orcs will have Orc Ferocity in PF2 instead of Ferocity.

Disappointing but not surprised.

The feat itself seems balanced and on par with other ancestry feats at first level, but... it's a funnel, a chokepoint, a barrier.

This could work much better if we had two ancestry feats at level 1, but as it is, it's awkward. I like that there are Orc and Half-Elf specific feats but it doesn't sit right with me overall.

Oh you're right, it's powerful. If anything, it's a feat that does three to four feats' worth of lifting (movement speed, extra trained skills, and two extra lists of ancestry feats to take are all things that you could get with various types of feats), so it's a powerful trade to take, but a more restrictive one. In a world with two ancestry feats like people in this thread have been suggesting, I would imagine the half-ancestry feats would not need to give so many more benefits than other choices, either, since you would not be having to consider them against your favorite ancestry feat from the two parent ancestries (if you don't take a feat from the half-ancestry itself).

EDIT: Captain Morgan got up a solid analysis of the same information in a post above this!

Half-elf doesn’t get anything interesting from their feat. Elf gets cross-class cantrips or the ability to choose any one skill as trained each day. Human gets a second domain, a familiar, counterspelling, or anything else their class offers. Half-elf gets a fixed skill rank and elf’s movement. And I get that later on, you get more choices, but it’s frustrating to significantly worsen half your levels to improve the other half. (Okay, it’s a 40/60 split if you go all the way to 20.)

This would be one of those more straightforward "fixing things that had gotten too out of hand without going too far into left field."

Great job :)

So long as I get to have a character with horns, hooves, and a prehensile tail at a minimum I'm good with however the mechanical framework happens to be.

Basically give me wild and crazy classic tieflings (ala Planescape and Pathfinder so often) and the wilder strains of Pathfinder ganzi in 2e and I'm good to go, because let's face it, do you really think that I'm going to play much beyond tieflings or ganzi over the next decade? Not unless there's support for half-faerie dragons or something equally snowflakey that's right in my standard wheelhouse. :D

Hi everyone! As Jason mentioned here, we are going to be removing any references to spoiler information from these blog threads, generally without notice (I wanted to give notice this first time because you might not have seen that other thread). This is to allow the designers to continue commenting in blog threads, as you can see in Jason's explanation in the link. As Jason says in that thread, we won't be moderating light spoilers in any other threads but the blog threads.

Not really a fan of this idea and what may come from it.

The Dandy Lion wrote:

The feat itself seems balanced and on par with other ancestry feats at first level, but... it's a funnel, a chokepoint, a barrier.

This could work much better if we had two ancestry feats at level 1, but as it is, it's awkward. I like that there are Orc and Half-Elf specific feats but it doesn't sit right with me overall.

Oh you're right, it's powerful. If anything, it's a feat that does three to four feats' worth of lifting (movement speed, extra trained skills, and two extra lists of ancestry feats to take are all things that you could get with various types of feats), so it's a powerful trade to take, but a more restrictive one. In a world with two ancestry feats like people in this thread have been suggesting, I would imagine the half-ancestry feats would not need to give so many more benefits than other choices, either, since you would not be having to consider them against your favorite ancestry feat from the two parent ancestries (if you don't take a feat from the half-ancestry itself).

Yup, I noticed the feat itself is definitely more flexible and higher tuned. I can tell that thought was put into how to make it work as a tax.

I think I'd prefer the feat being weaker and getting two at generation, but I'm willing to try it as it is during the playtest. I hope the orc one gets weapon proficiency as an option at least!

gwynfrid wrote:

Arachnofiend wrote:

How can anyone genuinely like this? The half-ancestries effectively don't get an ancestry feat until level five. Do any of you people actually play half-orcs or are you just happy that the ancestry is so strongly discouraged by the mechanics now?

Several reasons:

- We haven't seen the half-orc heritage feat yet. For all I know, it may well include all the options to replicate most of what matters in the PF1 half-orc build you're after.
- This may be solved if full Orc becomes an ancestry of its own.
- If neither of these pan out, then I'll join the choir of those who're asking for 2 ancestry feats at level 1.

Extrapolating from the half-elf feat, the half-orc feat will give two of orcish, trained in intimidate, and darkvision (probably extra HP to mirror the extra movement speed to round things off). You know what's definitely not going to be on that list? Proficiency in the falchion, because that will be in Orc Weapon Familiarity. A feat that half-orcs won't be able to take until level five, and doing so will lock them out of all other ancestry feats until level ten.

OK, I see where you're coming from. I don't want to go this far in extrapolating a prediction, myself. But you may very well be correct. I guess I'll have to wait for another 9 days and read the full rules about ancestries and weapon proficiencies. It will be time to offer playtest feedback then.

Hey there all,

So we went back and forth a number of times on how the half-elf and half-orc were going to work in the Playtest. This version gave us the flexibility we wanted at the right cost.

The heritage feats to be a half-elf or half-orc make you better than human, in small but meaningful ways. Opening up both Ancestry lists really does allow you to make a character that is the best of both worlds, which is a pretty big benefit. We played around with only giving partial lists, but it was too restrictive and made the future of ancestry feats complicated and fraught with pitfalls.

We have heard folks call for an additional ancestry feat at 1st and it is something we will consider, but until you have had a chance to play with the whole ruleset and get a sense of how it flows, I am not going to spend much time on it right now.

Anyway.. thanks for having some patience with us on this one. This is a tricky topic and one that we are going to be sure to take the time to get it right.

I'm looking forward to either myself or somebody in my group to give this a try!

Oh you're right, it's powerful. If anything, it's a feat that does three to four feats' worth of lifting (movement speed, extra trained skills, and two extra lists of ancestry feats to take are all things that you could get with various types of feats), so it's a powerful trade to take, but a more restrictive one. In a world with two ancestry feats like people in this thread have been suggesting, I would imagine the half-ancestry feats would not need to give so many more benefits than other choices, either, since you would not be having to consider them against your favorite ancestry feat from the two parent ancestries (if you don't take a feat from the half-ancestry itself).

Well, it's still a Heritage Feat and could only be taken at 1st level, and those are presumably a tad more powerful due to their limitation.

But yeah, it could be less powerful. Personally, I'd vastly prefer that to not having an actual Ancestry Feat choice as a 1st level Half Elf or Half Orc.

As others have echoed, I do think this penalizes the halfbreeds. Yes, you may *want* some of these abilities, but the other racial abilities feel stronger. I'd agree with what others have said, perhaps 2 race feats at first level, one of which must be a heritage feat.

The Dandy Lion wrote:

The feat itself seems balanced and on par with other ancestry feats at first level, but... it's a funnel, a chokepoint, a barrier.

This could work much better if we had two ancestry feats at level 1, but as it is, it's awkward. I like that there are Orc and Half-Elf specific feats but it doesn't sit right with me overall.

Oh you're right, it's powerful. If anything, it's a feat that does three to four feats' worth of lifting (movement speed, extra trained skills, and two extra lists of ancestry feats to take are all things that you could get with various types of feats), so it's a powerful trade to take, but a more restrictive one. In a world with two ancestry feats like people in this thread have been suggesting, I would imagine the half-ancestry feats would not need to give so many more benefits than other choices, either, since you would not be having to consider them against your favorite ancestry feat from the two parent ancestries (if you don't take a feat from the half-ancestry itself).

EDIT: Captain Morgan got up a solid analysis of the same information in a post above this!

I'm having trouble buying this one. It feels like I'm getting two things, and the option to eventually get access to one other race's abilities (since I'd already have access to one of them just for being a Human). Well, one and a half, since I guess there are Half-Elf specific feats, but still, I don't get to even think about those until level 5, and that needs to compete with the Human and Elf ones.

I totally buy that picking up vision and movement (for example) is awesome, but it feels like a kick in the teeth that you can't actually get either a real human feat or a real elf feat at the beginning. Waiting 4 whole levels is an enormous amount of time before you get the payoff.

Mark Seifter wrote:

The Dandy Lion wrote:

The feat itself seems balanced and on par with other ancestry feats at first level, but... it's a funnel, a chokepoint, a barrier.

This could work much better if we had two ancestry feats at level 1, but as it is, it's awkward. I like that there are Orc and Half-Elf specific feats but it doesn't sit right with me overall.

Oh you're right, it's powerful. If anything, it's a feat that does three to four feats' worth of lifting (movement speed, extra trained skills, and two extra lists of ancestry feats to take are all things that you could get with various types of feats), so it's a powerful trade to take, but a more restrictive one. In a world with two ancestry feats like people in this thread have been suggesting, I would imagine the half-ancestry feats would not need to give so many more benefits than other choices, either, since you would not be having to consider them against your favorite ancestry feat from the two parent ancestries (if you don't take a feat from the half-ancestry itself).

Yup, I noticed the feat itself is definitely more flexible and higher tuned. I can tell that thought was put into how to make it work as a tax.

I think I'd prefer the feat being weaker and getting two at generation, but I'm willing to try it as it is during the playtest. I hope the orc one gets weapon proficiency as an option at least!

Yeah, and I totally get where you're coming from on that as well. It's good to acknowledge that the sheer amount of stuff you get from the feat is partially due to the fact that that's all you get right now and you have to wait for the best of the three lists, such that there won't be a surprise if the extra goodies were significantly smaller in such a situation. Still, we need to test out how character building works thoroughly before moving forward. I've seen some of you guys post persuasive and well-reasoned ideas on that topic, but it also has to be balanced against the fact that it's one more thing you have to pick to build your 1st level character, so we're going to need to see data as well.

As to orc weapons. Yes, definitely!

Interesting.

As others have echoed, I do think this penalizes the halfbreeds. Yes, you may *want* some of these abilities, but the other racial abilities feel stronger. I'd agree with what others have said, perhaps 2 race feats at first level, one of which must be a heritage feat.

Going by the heritage feats we've seen, I'd say the half-blood ones are definitely stronger than the average.

The problem from my perspective is the bottleneck, not the merit of the feat itself, which honestly is a legit couple of features to represent the racial difference.

I think I’d much prefer the reverse of this?

Half-elf and half-orc are ancestries with their own base stats and feats. They can’t take anything but half-elf options. However, they have a heritage feat for a stronger connection to their ancestry, which grants what we see here, and allows access to the parent ancestry/ancestries. People like me, who just want to play a half-elf or a tiefling focused on being a half-elf or tiefling (or in my case, focused on a particular fiendish heritage) can do so, without losing any of the present functionality.

I'd agree with what others have said, perhaps 2 race feats at first level, one of which must be a heritage feat.

For the record, as one person advocating two Ancestry Feats at 1st level, I wouldn't restrict it like this. I might say no more than one Heritage Feat (though I'm not sure how much of an issue this is), but I certainly wouldn't make a Heritage Feat mandatory.

And if your setting has half-elves and half-orcs where the other parent isn't human, say half-orc/half-dwarf characters, you can just allow the half-orc feat for dwarf characters and the rest of the work is already taken care of.

Ah yes, I am looking forward to convincing GMs to let me play as a Dwork, a Orcling, a Gnorc, a Gobbork, and maybe even the dreaded Orf.

Hard to say without having seen all the feats in question, but half-elf definitely isn't bad. Upgrading humans to low light vision (or probably dark vision for half orc) would have been one helluva feat in PF1, since vision was about the biggest limitation on humans. Training in a skill is more valuable now-- it saves you an ability boost on intelligence for example. And everyone likes extra movement speed.

This is on top of providing future access to 3 ancestries worth of feats while retaining everything that makes humans so flexible. It looks pretty strong to me. The big drawback is what Arachnofiend brings up: not getting something more interesting until level 5.

I continue to remain skeptical about the strength of half-elf ancestry, for example, as I examine the 1st-level character sheets over in ENWorld.org. Class feats like the fighter's Sudden Charge and the wizard's Widen Spell seem like major, build-defining options, thus, gaining an extra class feat would be more build-defining than spreading fingers into minor, auxiliary benefits.

Gaining access to other ancestry feats might not be a meaningfully strong benefits if humans can use their ancestry feats to pick up more class feats anyway and/or equally-strong benefits anyway.

Also, Orc Ferocity is terribly inconvenient if it requires saving your reaction for it.

I would also suggest that the ancestry feats should be gained more often at low levels. So that you become well-defined quickly and by 10-12 or so you've almost reached the limit of expressing your racial potential. Say, 2x at first level and then one at 3rd, 6th, 10th, 15th (and maybe 20th) each.

I'm woefully disappointed in this. I'd like the half-folk to actually have their own identity, like they used to. Mix it up somehow, but still let them be their own thing.

I guess I understand the whole "if every ancestry is nothing but feats, getting the best of two lists for free is too good". (To me, that seems like an issue caused by stripping ancestries down to just ability score modifiers, a speed stat, and an HP base... something else that worried me.)

So, yeah. This is one of the bigger disappointments of the new system. And given how many people are okay with it, I guess it's what we're going to get.

I dunno. I guess half-elves and tieflings will still exist in other games.

Other than tradition, I don't really see why these heritages are human locked? Why not just open the floodgates and let all of the human-like humanoids interbreed? Just make half-ancestry feats for dwarves, halflings and gnomes and let anyone be half-anything else.

Sure it says you can get GM permission, but why even require that?

This feels more robust and intuitive than the current system. I like!

I join the choir of two ancestry feats, but was already there before tbh

My players and me rarely play those kinds of half-bloods but I still like this a lot.

First off I really like the options it opens up for other mixed heritage, aasimar, tiefling etc. it always felt weird to just pick it and have nothing of the original race other then looks.
(We ended up custom building our mixed heritage using the ARG)

Secondy, as GM I think this makes it easier to build some npcs - and it will me surely now and then remind me of the option to build a half-blood

Actually, I'll admit that I should wait to consider it in the context of the other ancestries... with the present "buy your PF1 ancestry back one feat at a time for your first ten levels" system, I guess the other ancestries might not be any better off.

tivadar27 wrote:

I'd agree with what others have said, perhaps 2 race feats at first level, one of which must be a heritage feat.

For the record, as one person advocating two Ancestry Feats at 1st level, I wouldn't restrict it like this. I might say no more than one Heritage Feat (though I'm not sure how much of an issue this is), but I certainly wouldn't make a Heritage Feat mandatory.

The main thing I would want to look at (as mentioned on the first page) is what type of feat (heritage or ancestry) the human ones for grabbing an extra class/general feat. Allowing a human to grab two bonus class feats at level one (using the two ancestry feats at level one variant) feels definitely too overpowered (said without a full analysis of the options....) which is why if restricting to one heritage/one ancestry at level 1 works, I could get behind that variant. (Or if Natural Ambition can't be stacked, that might be enough.)

Gaining access to other ancestry feats might not be a meaningfully strong benefits if humans can use their ancestry feats to pick up more class feats anyway and/or equally-strong benefits anyway.

Humans can spend one ancestry feat to gain one additional 1st level class feat. It's quite useful and my humans tend to take it as one of their ancestry feats most of the time, but a hypothetical half-elf Ezren, for instance, could probably wait on Widen Spell until 5th level when he has fireball, which is a point in time when it's even more beneficial to have Widen than at 1st.

Captain Morgan wrote:

Hard to say without having seen all the feats in question, but half-elf definitely isn't bad. Upgrading humans to low light vision (or probably dark vision for half orc) would have been one helluva feat in PF1, since vision was about the biggest limitation on humans. Training in a skill is more valuable now-- it saves you an ability boost on intelligence for example. And everyone likes extra movement speed.

This is on top of providing future access to 3 ancestries worth of feats while retaining everything that makes humans so flexible. It looks pretty strong to me. The big drawback is what Arachnofiend brings up: not getting something more interesting until level 5.

I continue to remain skeptical about the strength of half-elf ancestry, for example, as I examine the 1st-level character sheets over in ENWorld.org. Class feats like the fighter's Sudden Charge and the wizard's Widen Spell seem like major, build-defining options, thus, gaining an extra class feat would be more build-defining than spreading fingers into minor, auxiliary benefits.

Gaining access to other ancestry feats might not be a meaningfully strong benefits if humans can use their ancestry feats to pick up more class feats anyway and/or equally-strong benefits anyway.

Also, Orc Ferocity is terribly inconvenient if it requires saving your reaction for it.

I see your point, but you've also then got to weigh the action cost of those feats. Take Sudden Charge for example. It is really good, and might look way better at first glance. But it also precludes you from using any sort of double action ability or another action with the Open trait, and it has to be used for your first attack that round. If you start your turn next to an enemy and your first action takes them out, you can't sudden charge to the next enemy 30 feet away but your half elf can stride and strike. That's the advantage of a passive benefit.

That doesn't necessarily make it as INTERESTING a choice, but it is mechanically competitive.

Honestly it's not that I'm inherently against this approach, but I question how it fulfills what seems a primary goal you had set:
"it would be easy enough to just list the feats from both parents (plus some unique options), but that quickly led to cherry-picking the best of both"
Yet that's exactly what we got, right?

I'm not clear on the "physiological" qualification, is it saying for Feat purposes you are physiologically identical to Elfs/Orcs AND Humans? (Thus there can be no actual pure Elf or Orc only physiological Feats?) I do think this can be toned down by simply hinging "Physiological" Feats on SPECIFIC relevant abilities, meaning at the least if you only take the Half-Elf/Orc Feat once, you may miss out on some of these, which seems intuitive. I think another good way to distinguish "Halfs" from parent races is saying all the general race pre-req Feats (physiological or cultural) they qualify for (this could even include race-specific Skill feats etc) will treat them as having a lower level, whether 1/2 level or -X modifier, to reflect the benefit they gain from cherry picking from both sides. ...Relatedly, I think more Human Feats need to be tagged "Physiological", which system seems biased against given Humans are the base-line norm. But even stuff like Clever Improviser (just example, not strictly advocating this particular ability) could be seen as aspect of Human brain/soul, and I think more (not ALL) of their abilities and Feats being "physiologically" tagged will help balance stuff like Adopted.

I would also wonder about "Halfs" elaborating the specific Human (or Elf) Heritages further. If your Human side is Tien, or Mwangi, or whatever, how does that work? Other characters would normally make Lore check to discern that background right? What happens with you? It seems like excluding this side of things (at least as far as Feats) is part of balancing (in exchange for cherry-picking access to race Feats), but I feel that removes alot of what could be valuable distinctions between one Half-Elf and another Half-Elf. Forcing "generic Human - generic Elf/Orc" status seems like a let-down, and this being the "only" means to balance cherry-picking seems like it will also "force" design decisions on "generic" vs specific Heritage Feats' power levels (in favor of latter).

IMHO "Halfs" should be able to choose ONE normal Human/Elf/Orc Heritage that they count as/ can be recognized as, and would be limited to Feats from this pool, other than "generic" Human/Elf/Orc Feats which they would apply level penalty towards qualifying for. In other words, they would be able to count as "Tien" or "Belkzen Horde" or whatever re: "cultural" Feats, but would need to make a choice about this, not cherry pick from everything at each level... But I don't see a reason not to let them have "full level" access to these Feats since they are making exclusive decision (albeit from slightly broader range than normal Humans/Elves/Orcs), also considering as they spent one Heritage Feat on being "Half-Elf/Orc" they would always have one less Heritage Feat from this group than non-"Halfs" could potentially have. (or 2 less if they take the "Half" Feat twice to get full ability package) If they do choose a Heritage from Orc/Elf side, it might be reasonable to specify that their Human heritage is visually discernable to the extent it normally is from other Humans, even if they don't primarily "culturally" identify here. EDIT: And automatically gaining relevant Language would go along with this choice (not sure if that removes need for language option in "Half" feat, probably OK to leave that even if many wouldn't need it).

Actually, I'll admit that I should wait to consider it in the context of the other ancestries... with the present "buy your PF1 ancestry back one feat at a time for your first ten levels" system, I guess the other ancestries might not be any better off.

This is a fair point - ancestries in general are quite barebones at level 1.

Humans can spend one ancestry feat to gain one additional 1st level class feat. It's quite useful and my humans tend to take it as one of their ancestry feats most of the time, but a hypothetical half-elf Ezren, for instance, could probably wait on Widen Spell until 5th level when he has fireball, which is a point in time when it's even more beneficial to have Widen than at 1st.

Is that always limited to 1st level Feats, or can they use it at later levels to gain higher level Feat?

Really not liking this.

Hope the next reveal is Orcs and Humans... though I doubt orcs will ever be on the CRB

Humans can spend one ancestry feat to gain one additional 1st level class feat. It's quite useful and my humans tend to take it as one of their ancestry feats most of the time, but a hypothetical half-elf Ezren, for instance, could probably wait on Widen Spell until 5th level when he has fireball, which is a point in time when it's even more beneficial to have Widen than at 1st.

Presumably, however, humans have other ancestry feats to take, and gaining access to other lists is not as great a benefit as it seems.

A half-elf wizard could wait until 5th level for Widen Spell, but a pure human wizard could have Widen Spell at 1st level and then a different and equally useful class feat at 5th level.

I do not see how minor auxiliary benefits are supposed to compete with actual improvements to class specialties.

Hey there all,

So we went back and forth a number of times on how the half-elf and half-orc were going to work in the Playtest. This version gave us the flexibility we wanted at the right cost.

The heritage feats to be a half-elf or half-orc make you better than human, in small but meaningful ways. Opening up both Ancestry lists really does allow you to make a character that is the best of both worlds, which is a pretty big benefit. We played around with only giving partial lists, but it was too restrictive and made the future of ancestry feats complicated and fraught with pitfalls.

We have heard folks call for an additional ancestry feat at 1st and it is something we will consider, but until you have had a chance to play with the whole ruleset and get a sense of how it flows, I am not going to spend much time on it right now.

Anyway.. thanks for having some patience with us on this one. This is a tricky topic and one that we are going to be sure to take the time to get it right.

How exactly does a half-orc benefit from being able to pick from two lists? It's impossible to even do that until level ten. If you're like me and want multiple orcish features then it's likely that you'll never pick a human feat at all and would have been much better off if it was possible to just play an orc (which I generally can't do because half-orcs have long been considered the acceptable alternative by Paizo and other D&D-esque developers).

I have a suggestion that may seem redundant but may well due to keep both the modularity of the current half-ancenstry proposal, and those who feel that turning an entire identity into a feat feels like a disservice:

Keep half-elf and half-orc as feats that require a base ancestry (human, elf, orc) to access.

But then also give both half-elves and half-orcs their own page in the Races chapter alphabetically.

These two entries will be shorter, and somewhat redundant, but will be a spelled out example of what these two ancestry feats unlock options-wise, and may contain all the specific half-elf and half-orc ancenstry feats therein.

This way, at the cost of some page count, people can still turn to the Half-elf or Half-orc page and treat this ancenstry like any other, without sacrificing system modularity.

I see your point, but you've also then got to weigh the action cost of those feats. Take Sudden Charge for example. It is really good, and might look way better at first glance. But it also precludes you from using any sort of double action ability or another action with the Open trait, and it has to be used for your first attack that round. If you start your turn next to an enemy and your first action takes them out, you can't sudden charge to the next enemy 30 feet away but your half elf can stride and strike. That's the advantage of a passive benefit.

We have seen passive class feats already. Anyone taking Natural Ambition would do well to pick up a passive, yet build-defining class feat for the sake of action economy.

Again, it is directly improving the build for a class vs. minor auxiliary benefits.

Really not liking this.

I was on the fence at first but after a second inspection it doesnt bother me anymore. I just hope they dont go crazy creating one hybrid ancestry after the other.

tivadar27 wrote:

I'd agree with what others have said, perhaps 2 race feats at first level, one of which must be a heritage feat.

For the record, as one person advocating two Ancestry Feats at 1st level, I wouldn't restrict it like this. I might say no more than one Heritage Feat (though I'm not sure how much of an issue this is), but I certainly wouldn't make a Heritage Feat mandatory.

Yeah. Same. Forcing everybody to be a half race would be sooo weird.

So I like the Heritage Feats, and they’re even really strong actually. But I can see what people mean when they don’t like it.

The choice is being made for you what feat to take. And one specific feat given to you is so much less than being able to pick from a bunch of feats.

I can see 2 Ancestry Feats at level 1 pretty easily. No restrictions to one having to be a Herotage Feat though. Again. That’s weird. It might end up a popular house rule later on.

Mark Seifter wrote:

Humans can spend one ancestry feat to gain one additional 1st level class feat. It's quite useful and my humans tend to take it as one of their ancestry feats most of the time, but a hypothetical half-elf Ezren, for instance, could probably wait on Widen Spell until 5th level when he has fireball, which is a point in time when it's even more beneficial to have Widen than at 1st.

Presumably, however, humans have other ancestry feats to take, and gaining access to other lists is not as great a benefit as it seems.

A half-elf wizard could wait until 5th level for Widen Spell, but a pure human wizard could have Widen Spell at 1st level and then a different and equally useful class feat at 5th level.

I do not see how minor auxiliary benefits are supposed to compete with actual improvements to class specialties.

No, that is not the case. It's a one-time feat, not one you can take again. It's in the first sentence of my post in the quote.

If I'm not mistaken elves get low light vision, 30' speed, Elf language, AND a ancestry feat at 1st level.

A half-elf...can choose two of those three, with the option to pick Diplomacy instead, and in the (distant) future has a broader array of choices, but does NOT get a separate feat at 1st level.

That's pretty terrible!

If I'm not mistaken elves get low light vision, 30' speed, Elf language, AND a ancestry feat at 1st level.

A half-elf...can choose two of those three, with the option to pick Diplomacy instead, and in the (distant) future has a broader array of choices, but does NOT get a separate feat at 1st level.

That's pretty terrible!

Yep! Essentially, half-orcs and half-elves are paying two feats to receive the absolute basic abilities that they are entitled to. Possibly even more!

It was said by another poster earlier in this thread that heritage feats are the new Combat Expertise and they were absolutely right.

How exactly does a half-orc benefit from being able to pick from two lists? It's impossible to even do that until level ten. If you're like me and want multiple orcish features then it's likely that you'll never pick a human feat at all and would have been much better off if it was possible to just play an orc (which I generally can't do because half-orcs have long been considered the acceptable alternative by Paizo and other D&D-esque developers).

Look, if you just want to be an Orc and don't care about Human stuff, actually being an Orc should ALWAYS be better. Orcs are fully playable in P1E, just because they aren't in "player focused" product (which many players do in fact need, for Summons etc) doesn't change that. I do have issues with their approach here, which I believe can be addressed within over-all framework they have chosen, but expecting "Halfs" to serve your desire for "Fulls" which happen to be marginalized by convention is distorting the issue and undermining distinctive nature of "Halfs" and "Fulls".

I like the mention of Adoptive Ancestry. Confirmed we can make especially tall dwarves!