Misdirection Tactics vs. Natural 20's

[Sphen86]

This hasn't become an issue yet, but I wanted to get some feedback before it did. I've recently taken misdirection tactics as a feat (as evidence by the subject) and want to know what people think of the situation of using it to negate a critical hit. Natiral 20's are supposed to be an automatic hit. But the wording of the feat states that by rolling a Bluff over the attack roll, the attack misses.

Personally, I'm in the frame of mind that misdirection tactics wins over a crit in the situation (with a high enough die roll, of course). But I'm obviously biased towards this cool feat that I took. I can't find any errata on it, and a search of the rules boards came up empty. Does anyone know if there is an official ruling? Has anyone used it in their game before? Or seen it used at a con (or other such thing)?

[blahpers]

No errata necessary. The feat doesn't care how it came about that a character would be hit by a melee attack, only that the character would be hit. Once that happens, the feat comes into play. If the character succeeds at their bluff check, the hit is changed into a miss.

[Volkard Abendroth]

There are quite a few things in game that will turn a natural 20 into a miss.

This happens to be one of them.

[Dave Justus]

The Deflect Arrows feat is the most common negate a hit ability, being in the CRB and also having lineage back to previous editions.

While I still don't know of a particular rule or faq that states directly natural 20s are not some sort of special class of hit that can't be negated, searching on that feat will provide evidence that it is commonly agreed that a natural 20 can be negated just fine.

Basically though auto-hit does not mean that the hit is something that can't be negated, it just means that it is a hit regardless of the target AC vs attack bonuses calculation.

[Heis]

First off, since this this misdirection tree it’s rewritten every Rogue I’ve tried to build. MisTac came be really useful on it’s own, but it just seems right to follow through with MisRed and MisAtt.

About your original statement, however, the only problem (that’s not a problem) is that Misdirection Tactics is just more likely to piss melee characters off, because there’s no limit to how often you can use this feat in a round. ...but that’s it. MisTac surely forces hack-n-slash characters to work harder to hit you, but that’s not really your problem. There are still more than a few ways to cause damage without relying on melee attacks.

[willuwontu]

Heis wrote:

there’s no limit to how often you can use this feat in a round

Quote:

you can attempt a Bluff check with a DC equal to the foe’s attack roll as an immediate action.

It's an immediate action, you can't make those more than once when it's not your turn. So you can only use it once a round at most.