Mr.Lute's page

There are multiple feats that really, really need to be fixed.

For instance, Two Weapon Fighting being a chain.

Why. Just why. Make it one and done.

Or combat expertise tree-and in general, all of the various "you don't take attacks of opportunity while doing X" feats. They severely limit how and when people do anything actually interesting in combat, without a clear reason for them existing. Tons of monsters cheat and aren't subject to them, multiple classes cheat and aren't subject to them, why doesen't everyone with serious martial training cheat and not be subject to them? Why do you need eight feats to effectively utilize tripping, bull rushing, etc.?

Feat taxes were always a terrible idea, and this merely exaggerates it.

Power attack is also a problem. As is Weapon finesse. Required feats for most builds or useless.

In fact, I have problems with every single feat chain for martial fighting. Fighters get 20 feats! But, if they do anything more interesting than swing a sword, four or five of those are locked into making their fighting style work to begin with. It's fake, stupid, and exaggerates the disparity between martial classes and casters. Casters generally get interesting tricks online with every single feat, rather than enabling their casting at all.

Some of it is okay-I don't include most Archery feats there because they tend to be at least somewhat situational and might not be what you want for your archer-but a ton of them are strictly always useful and strictly always improvements.

If I was fixing it, here are the list of my changes.

Combat expertise acts as the "improved" version of every single combat maneuver, instead of it's (rarely if ever used) current capacity. No opp attacks for trying a Maneuver, that's what the feat represents in it's fundamental and immediate capacity. The greater versions are switched for the improved ones elsewhere.

Same story with the Power Attack dependent ones. There are specifics to work out, but this massively improves the validity of using maneuvers in combat and allows more improvisational fighting.

At level 1, most full martials or heavily attack dependent 3/4 ones gain a limited selections of free feats (a-la unchained Rogues), either Power attack, Point-Blank, Weapon finesse, or Two-Weapon fighting, depending on what the class is supposed to do. Many classes already get this, but this fills in the gap. It's in addition to everything else, and Fighters can choose between any of those.

Two-Weapon fighting gives you the iterative attacks as part of it at appropriate level.

If there aren't enough useful feats after that, then this is an issue with the creativity of content. But just looking around, there are tons of things fighters could do-intimidate builds, branching off into item creation, saves, things like Eldritch Heritage, any number of interesting feats that would be viable without oppressive feat taxes. At current, every single one of them is a trap if a feat tax feat is avaible at your level.

Compare Pathfinder to 5e. Play that. Come back. Tell me there isn't a problem with how Pathfinder does feats. I dare you. 5e is simplified, has less depth, etc., but DEX builds aren't inherently disadvantaged, feats are fun rather than tedious and it rarely feels like I'm forced to do something to make my character function. It does, in fact, still "tax" you in limited ways, but those ways are built into the the class instead of teasing you with all these wonderful feats you're not allowed to get.

The rest of the OP's complaints, regarding feats that make it appear that you can't do things which you thought you could, generally has to do with either the feat being actually worthless, or the feat being nearly worthless, or the feat doing something different. In his example, the parley feat is a "reliable" parley with creatures that aren't virtually compelled to fight, basically, as opposed to a simple DM call if they are open to diplomacy being used. It contains too many caveats, but it's at least supposed to work like that.

This is a really badly worded ability.

I think the intention is probably "select one weapon type..." since all the other Advanced Weapon Training abilities seem to work on weapon types, and so do Weapon Focus and Sacred Weapon. However I can definitely see a really strict RAW reading of it meaning a singular weapon.

I agree, basically, but wanted to make sure.

The real issue with martials and spellcasters is and always has been the odd obsession dnd has with sitting still, at least until 5e. What that edition did, better or worse otherwise, that drastically helped the spellcasting/non-spellcasting balance, is *let Martial's move and use their main trick*. Which is to hit things really well. Spellcasters don't waste a turn doing piddling "semi-spells" and moving. It also largely fixed summoning rules.

If you wanted to balance that without butchering the rules, spellcasters would need to take an action to ready their spells for a combat, and can only cast a cantrip or similar ability in that round. Feats can modify this is the same way that a fighter can occasionally build to get a free attack in the first round. Surprise would need to be re-worked (or become uber deadly for wizards) as well.

Notably, archer Martials tend to compete with most spellcasters in practice in combat because they can can reliably attack just like spellcasters can reliably cast. The exceptions involve high level summoning rules, which don't work at all and god save anyone who can twist their mind to think they do.

Out of combat, the issue is with there simply being too many clutter spells that work too reliably to solve problems the rest of the party could solve with skills, and most DM's not effectively punishing spellcasters who frivolously spam spells to solve mundane problems (via sleep deprivation mostly). And spellcasters getting more skills than martials due to INT determining skills

My fix is that all martials should have higher skill progression given that they have more free time to learn them, which would also limit people being shoe-horned into playing pure skill monkeys, particularly with unchained rogue (which should still have a net advantage) being a decent combat class now.

At least, that's my take on it. More feats aren't needed because martials typically get free feats as a class feature anyway. Plus, spellcasting feat trees are separate from martial feat trees and can't really mix. And we need some variation in spellcasting feats to have valid spellcasters, and with this plan you kill that by making them choose between five or so feats, which means they take the five or so feats that every spellcaster takes.

While there are broken spellcasting feats that need to be nerfed because, again, they break the game entirely (G&+ D$%n whoever let the summoning spam buff get to this point) but it's a unique, case by case, basis. With your plan, we have a similar spellcaster problem instead.

The other element of the fix is to use the archetype and (For fighters) weapon/armor training class features.

The Weapon Mastery ability "focused weapon" feature says that the fighter "select one weapon for which he has Weapon Focus and that belongs to the associated fighter weapon group. The fighter can deal damage with this weapon based on the damage of the warpriest's sacred weapon class feature".

This applies to *all weapons of that type*, not just *a singular example*, right? I.E. I choose "Daggers" not "This really special Dagger I found earlier"? That's how Warpriest's Sacred Weapon works, so I'm fairly certain that's how this works, but...

I have a really interesting build I want to vet, but this is a central part of it.