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I'm starting to build a personal list of Feats and other build items that seem incredibly underpowered or situational at best. For a min-maxer, these would never be chosen. For players more interested in flavor, taking them seems to represent a significant loss in balance or effectiveness.
Battle Assessment was my most recent choice.
As some point out, as written, this seems like information that would be gathered from an appropriate Recall Knowledge check against the enemy type. Oh - that's a Water Elemental? My Arcane (or whatever) knowledge tells me that they tend to be immune to Sneak Attack, Criticals and fire-based attacks are severely weakened.
Furthermore, most DMs I've played with freely share combat-related strengths and weaknesses of enemies as we play (we see that cold doesn't seem to do much against an enemy after the first relevant strikes). Even general knowledge of an enemy is going to increase over time - we've fought Zombies before and slashing weapons didn't seem to be as effective...
Finally, many enemies simply have no special weaknesses and saves are sometimes nearly equivalent.
I think Battle Assessment should keep the effects as written - after all, why make two checks to determine this stuff - but also should add a situational or conditional attack or damage bonus for the combat given a successful check. The Rogue, after considered study, has found a 'chink in the armor' of an enemy warrior, granting the party +1 conditional attack bonus for the duration of the combat or Lvl rounds or whatever.
A Critical Success might even grant both attack and damage bonuses.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
John
Battle Assessment lets you use perception in place of all possible recall knowledge checks. Further, recall knowledge rolls typically gives you the most well known identifying fact about the creature; requiring a critical success for less well known information such as weaknesses. This means that your Battle Assessment is not only replacing 4 skills, but also giving you the equivalent of a critical success.
It may not be for everyone, and in a mixed party you aught to have a full collection of identifying skills, but I'd say its pretty useful.