Text for the feat Discipline Expertise:
"Choose a class you have at least one level in. You can a +2 competence bonus to checks with the skills associated with maneuvers available to that class".
If I'm interpreting this correctly that means that the Warlord, which has access to Golden Lion, Primal Fury, Scarlet Throne, Solar Wind, and Thrashing Dragon gets +2 Acrobatics (Thrashing Dragon), Perception (Solar Wind), Diplomacy (Golden Lion), Sense Motive (Scarlet Throne) and Survival (Primal Fury)?
How is this not completely better than core rulebook feats such as Deceitful (+2 to bluff and disguise. If you have 10 or more ranks, the bonus increases to +4) or Skill Focus (+3 to a skill, if you have 10 or more ranks this bonus increases to +6)?
The Core Rulebook feats require you to be level 10 and have 10 ranks in those skills to get a total of +4 to two skills or +6 to one skill. Discipline Expertise lets PoW classes get a total of +10 spread across 5 skills at level 1.
Would you folks consider this balanced (specialization in 1-2 skills vs broad skill increases across the board)?
Presuming your interpretation is correct, I think its balanced. Broad, but minor skill increases vs Single/double skill increases that scale at later levels.
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Path of War has always had a stated design goal of raising the floor in comparison to Paizo content. Skill Focus and similar feats have always been pretty unimpressive. Discipline Expertise may be better, but that doesn't make it broken.
It is the same way that a Warlord is straight up better than a core Fighter.
+2, even across a variety of skills, is not a game breaker. You can get +3 to every CHA based skill in the game by investing 4,000 gold. (Circlet of Persuasion.)
Also, I found that you need some sort of bonuses to make counters which put skill checks vs attack rolls worth using. Even with max ranks, class skill, and a primary stat, if you've got a decent AC for your level an enemy attack roll which would hit tends to be pretty high. Your odds of failure become high enough to just use boosts instead.
If a player wants to use this feat to improve their Acrobatics score rather than Boots of Elvenkind to increase it even further, who cares?
Ooh, good point about path of war classes geared to be a bit more powerful than core martial classes. Thanks a lot for the advice :)
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I always thought the "+2 to 2 skills" feats were among the weakest feats written, so I for one support something better.
My DM refers to the "+2 to 2 skills" as "feat traps" that will put you on a path to suboptimal (unoptimized) play. I get a bit tired of seeing them repeatedly as prerequirements for so many prestige classes when there's so many more interesting feat choices that you could grab. I do like how Dreamscarred Press made the Path of War classes incorporate skills directly into their combat effectiveness by having skill checks for some maneuvers/counters. In this sense Discipline Expertise directly gives you a minor combat buff to every maneuver that you could perform that requires a skill check.
Something I noted was that the text for Discipline Expertise does not say whether you can take it multiple times, so I would assume that you can only take it once.
Most of the Path of War classes are a little skill-starved (4 + INT is the most common) so I suppose Discipline Expertise could go a long way to assisting PoW classes be useful in out-of-combat situations. If a low-level skill monkey rogue had access to this feat they might be able to get a bit crazy, but I guess the +2 to 4-5 skills is only a significant boost at lower levels.
Don't forget that feats like deceitful don't have a bonus type, while discipline expertise does. Discipline expertise uses the same bonus type that magical skill items use in fact.
Just because I did editing on the book, the mangled quote shall not stand. <Grin>
Anyway, remember that this is a competence bonus. Doesn't stack with things like bardic song. Even then, I suspect it might have been intended to apply to one discipline, but I'm not the author.
Discipline Expertise [General]
You are quite adept at the use of your available discipline’s associated skills.
Benefit: Choose a class you have at least one level in. You gain a +2 competence bonus to checks with the skills associated with maneuvers available to that class.
ok, thanks. Yeah, I'm having a bit of a difficult time keeping all the improvement types types (dodge, deflection, competence, etc) straight from Path of War, and it seems like the authors use non-stacking buff types as a way of preventing players from breaking classes. Thanks for the clarification :)