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TLDR: Getting an heritage feats for free is great, but it only shows how little useful stuff there's left in Ancestry feats.
First of all, I like the ancestry changes in 1.4 and I do realize that it's a first draft and will be improved and build upon.
That said, I'm currently playing a Halfling Wizard in a homebrew campaign. We just hit level 3 and expect to play into very high levels, probably up to 20. I'll freely admit that I chose Halfling for mechanical reasons. The ability boosts fit my concept perfectly and since I want to be a crafter, Halfling Luck is extremely valuable to me.
When I created the character, I noticed that the Halfling had too few useful feats. I could barely find enough feats I wanted (or rather "tolerated") to consider the Ancestry but decided to grid my teeth and pick one or two that aren't great or even good.
Along came 1.4. Now I get one of the "not completely useless" feats for free (Keen Eyes). I also get another "almost useful" feat from my heritage (Plucky, though I might go with low-light vision). With lucky halfling being my 1st level feat, that leaves me with:
- Attentive: Sorry, but this one's so ridiculously situational that I don't even know why it was ever printed.
- Distracting Shadows: Still not sure how I feel about the Stealth rules, but this could be useful for rogue-ish characters. It has no value for my Wizard who is not even trained in stealth.
- Sure-Footed: Not bad, but still situational. Slightly better than the Steady Balance skill feat, which I'd pick up if I have nothing better to pick.
- Titan Slinger: I'm not even proficient with slings. And I don't want to be.
- Unfettered: Surprisingly, this one's actually useful!
- Weapon Familiarity/Trickster: I got strength 8. I can barely carry my spell book and my formula book at the same time. There's no way I'm carrying or using any weapons.
Oh, and then there's the new Ancestry feats coming with the update:
- Guiding Luck: Rerolling a Perception or attack roll by spending a once per day ability that could also allow me to succeed on a save? How often is that gonna be a good idea? Once per campaign? Not worth a feat.
- Irrepressible: Not completely useless but critical fails on saves is what I'd use my Luck on.
- Weapon Expertise: Weapons are still useless to me.
So, I'm down to one useful ancestry feat and one I'd end up taking because literally everything else is useless. I know Wizard is not the most fitting choice for a Halfling but even for most other classes I'd have trouble finding Ancstry Feats I actually want, much less enough of them so it feels like I'm actually making a choice rather than picking the least terrible.
I can do similar lists for most of the ancestries. Notable exceptions are (of course) humans, and maybe elves.
So please, consider an overhaul of the ancestry feats. If not for the playtest, then at least for the final release.
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Oh, as it currently stands I'm totally picking up Adopted, possibly even right now at level 3 (haven't done the level up yet).
But that's a band-aid at best and a feat tax at worst. I should be able to play any ancestry and fill my feat choices with feats for that ancestry without half of them feeling useless or never coming up because they are too situational.
Effects to negate CritFails or upgrade success tier are gravy of this system, and it's almost funny how they're all ignored when discussing common dynamics that they would interact with. No character can have all of this, but many if not most characters will pick up some of them.
Upgrading results is great, sure. I'd definitely get Plucky, but I get it basically for free now. Crit failing a save against an emotion effect will rarely come up more than once per day, so Lucky should in most cases protect me from that. And on average re-rolling is much better than turning the CritFail into a Fail, especially when you upgrade a Success to a CritSuccess.
My specific character also happens to have high Wis (16) so crit-failing will saves shouldn't happen often. This can be a completely different story for other characters, of course.
I'd be much more willing to get Sure-Footed for climbing if it would upgrade CritFails because I'm not much of a climber with Strength 8. But having no chance to fall while climbing would be a bit much.
Lucky is just 1/day
I know. But how often do you critically fail a save against an emotion effect in a single day?
And irrepressible also turns success to crit success (which is quite important for emotional spells, since most do have effects even on a success)*, not only crit fail to fail.
That's not quite true. It only upgrades Success to CritSuccess. If you happen to have the Gutsy Halfling Heritage (which does exactly the same), Irrepresible instead upgrades CritFails to Fails, because it would have no effect whatsoever otherwise.
But if your problem is that you want to upgrade success to crit success (through gutsy) and you have remaining ancestry feats, why not pick a different Heritage and simply pick irrepressible?
Irrepressible doesn't come before level 9. And the other heritages are much much worse than Gutsy. The lowlight one is decent but since I don't sneak around and the rest of the party needs light anyway (all humans), there's not much for me to be gained.
I think the higher ancestry feats need to cover a few more niches.
One idea would be ancestry feats that require a specific ancestry and class - and give some class related benefit. Kind of like the old racial favored class bonus.
I think the higher ancestry feats need to cover a few more niches.
One idea would be ancestry feats that require a specific ancestry and class - and give some class related benefit. Kind of like the old racial favored class bonus.
I like the idea, but I don't want my players choice of ancestry to be dictated entirely by which favored-class feats they get (the way PF1 characters were dictated by stat boosts when using point-buy).