D&D (2024) 75 Feats -- not nearly enough

[Micah Sweet]

No, I don't.

Dividing 75 by 3 choices (assuming backgrounds with feats,) I would need to play 25 characters to 11th level. How long does. When D&D was my primary game, it took the usual group about a year of sessions to reach level 20, so let's say 6 months for level 11. It would take about 12 years of playing D&D and intentionally choosing different feats every time to get through 75.

In the current iteration of 5E, given that feats compete against ability score adjustments, there are only a few feats that most people I've played 5e with even consider taking. Those few tend to be the ones that are so good that, even for someone who doesn't min-max, it is obvious those feats should be taken, as the others tend to mean actively hurting your character's abilities.

The importance of those choices are highlighted even more by their rarity.

It could be the case that D&D 5.24 has made vast changes to the structure of feats and feat selection.

I'm vaguely aware (I think) that some feats will be leveled now. Hopefully, the good feats aren't hidden behind a chain of requirements that aren't wanted. If so, that would mean missing multiple ability score increases, just to get one feat; in that case, I feel that more people would be inclined to just take the ability score increases.

Also worth noting: players other than you might appreciate options you would never get to personally, and they should have what they like too.

 

[Argyle King]

Also worth noting: players other than you might appreciate options you would never get to personally, and they should have what they like too.

Certainly, there should be choices that appeal to other players.

At the same time, players who want those choices shouldn't be required to hamstring their character to get them.

The game is structured in a way that characters are expected to have a certain level of ability by a certain point in the game. It is my belief that juxtaposing choices a player would like to make against the desire to have ac adequately functional character isn't much of a real choice.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Certainly, there should be choices that appeal to other players.

At the same time, players who want those choices shouldn't be required to hamstring their character to get them.

The game is structured in a way that characters are expected to have a certain level of ability by a certain point in the game. It is my belief that juxtaposing choices a player would like to make against the desire to have ac adequately functional character isn't much of a real choice.

How hard is it to make an adequately functional character? I feel like it's near impossible to NOT do.

 

[Argyle King]

Thinking more...

Instead of trying to balance feats against ability score increases, this is what I would do:

Have ability score increases be attached to levels or tiers of play, similar to how they were built into 4E's leveling.

Remove all +N Ability feats. Feat selection occurs at the usual levels.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Certainly, there should be choices that appeal to other players.

At the same time, players who want those choices shouldn't be required to hamstring their character to get them.

The game is structured in a way that characters are expected to have a certain level of ability by a certain point in the game. It is my belief that juxtaposing choices a player would like to make against the desire to have ac adequately functional character isn't much of a real choice.

I think that assumption is much more fuzzy than you make it out to be here. Adequately functional can mean many things.

 

[Argyle King]

How hard is it to make an adequately functional character? I feel like it's near impossible to NOT do.

It's also not difficult to pick things that sound cool and then later realize that you're noticeably behind everyone else at the table.

 

[Argyle King]

I think that assumption is much more fuzzy than you make it out to be here. Adequately functional can mean many things.

Fuzzy? Sure

Though, I imagine that effectively taking a -1 to to everything my character should be good at (possibly multiple times) falls somewhere in YNt ballpark of inadequacy.

 

[tetrasodium]

Let’s be fair: character options don’t all have to be the optimal choice in combat.

While true, that's not addressing the point I was making

Some are there to make players get features that help them bring their character to life.

This feels like you are moralizing through a roleplay vrs rollplay sort of jab or you are not making a clear enough point to see how it has anything to do with the post you quoted.

And whatever WotC will do, optimizers will only recommend a handful. That’s what optimizers do.

In fact you are so far from the point I'm not even sure how to explain where you got lost.

I'm not an optimizer by any stretch of the imagination. Could you tell me what you mean by "build level specialization"?

This I can explain & it's not entirely an "optimizer" issue, despite the implications of post 219, the problem is a rotten core design that was created from the quest for simplicity & efforts at eroding niche protection. I'll get back to this after covering your other questions though☆.

I agree that many of them are awful - in both directions. (In that some of them are too good and most of them are too... not good.)

Did you see the playtest versions of the feats? I think many of them were MUCH improved. I expect another pass at balance before publication, though.

But yeah, I agree with @Sulicius above. There's nothing WotC can do to stop optimizers from suggesting that, say, 5 feats are better than all the rest. That's what they do. The closest WotC will ever be able to get is to have optimizers argue over which 5 feats are best, and/or admit that the margin between "top 5" and the next tier is low. (Assuming WotC manages to pull off anything that resembles balance parity).

As usual, we will have to see the final form these Feats take.

I did see the playtest versions of feats, did you see the spoilered links in my sig where I even talk about some of them? There is very little if anything in those feats or the classes & spells that makes room to do anything about why the problems with 5e feat nonchoice exist for many classes

☆Back to your question about build level specialization question, hopefully I can cover all of the bases. In short there is the rot problem at the core. What was once the result of choices in things like spell selection equipment & feats was largely moved out of forking paths of specialization into more general areas of design space like the spells themselves & base classes. Although I think his videos tend to oversimplify certain things in order to arrive at a desired result, dndunoptimized made a video recently talking about good spells vrs bad spells

Spoiler: here

The video is long & the selected spells are focused exclusively on the questionable metric of damage. The specifics in it are not the point I'm making

What is lacking in that video is any attention towards how something like a glass cannon/blaster & a "god wizard" distinguish themselves from one another in ways that might make other spell choices solid options or how the raw damage comparison depends heavily on this & that to really unlock the potential. That's taken to such a degree that I can confirm that he doesn't even mention class or subclass beyond "two wizards". With so much moved out of branching specialization to a general default in the class or spell there's no room or reason to specialize. You can see how clear that is in the way that video doesn't even try questioning the value of spells like web slow & so on, why would it when the game's math is designed for PCs of such a low bar as ones deliberately unoptimized with no feats & no magic items.

If you go back to 3.x you can quickly see how significant the loss is by quickly comparing the kinds of feats that casters are likely to find valuable based on the niche of their build. Now 5e ran far from that state where a feat made a big difference in the path a PC's niche takes even if Alice & bob are both playing the same class to different ends.. Instead now you have many classes who are left with a choice between a couple feats that are really designed for someone else like warcaster with two out of its three bullet point features being designed for a melee weapon using melee ranged gish & resilient con because might as well or resilient con then warcaster. While that comparison is most obvious for casters across those two editions it's still pretty much a stark nonchoice even for 5e's better served melee builds when you look at how visceral it was.

Sooooo.... If wotc's not going to be expanding the venn diagram of valid niches for feats to slot into beyond "bob uses a pole arm" "Alice uses a greatsword" & "Dave uses a longbow" it's really not going to matter much to jump from 42 to 75 feats if the 33 new ones are trash tier "I don't have anything else for my first feat, might as well be this" or further padding the options for builds that already differentiate themselves through feats

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's also not difficult to pick things that sound cool and then later realize that you're noticeably behind everyone else at the table.

In 5e? Like when is this an issue?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Strange how they've never been really consistent with this. Back in the Xanathars says, we learned that the hexblade didn't meet the 70% threshold but got in anyway, and that the Shadow Sorcerer was less popular than ALL of the elemental sorcerers but they got cut. I just don't think WotC is the perfect decision making machine many people pretend they are.

The Hexblade is a special case. No one really likes it or wants it - what they want is and was an actually working Pact of the Blade. To enable melee warlocks. But WotC messed up the blade pact, making it awful, and their "basically no errata" policy didn't let them fix it so they pseudo-patched by way of subclass.

75 feats is already too many, IMO. At least half of them are rarely taken as is. Rules bloat for the sake of a few more niche options is not good, IMO.

"At least half of them are rarely taken" because of poor balance. We've seen a lot of what they are doing to some of them. Savage Attacker and Skilled, the textbook examples of bad feats, are unchanged - other than being First Level Feats and the best in class at what they do (weapon damage and more skills respectively). People are going to take both.

I would look it like this:

Before adding more feats, how about they balance the ones they've already got?

They are. In addition to making feats first level feats they are rebalanciing. They are either nerfing or taking away the synergies of the "big four" for weapon wielders. Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter are both getting their Power Attack switched out for other abilities; this doesn't change the "default" power of both feats played naively but means they aren't seriously OP with accuracy buffs (GWM gets a 1/turn extra damage buff for example which just takes one hit which is probably more powerful when you don't have advantage or a very easy target while Crossbow Expert allows dual wielding not machine gun fire for hand crossbows and doesn't work with Sharpshooter) and Polearm Master no longer works with one handed weapons. So the auto-picks are trimmed back. On the other hand they've buffed feats like Shield Expert, Charger, and Skulker significantly.

As you say, from the perspective of perhaps not a minmaxer but at least someone not oblivious to power levels, this would easily count as adding 20-30 feats to the pool of acceptable candidates, itself greatly enrichening the selection process.

Which is why they have in the playtest.