Increasing feats?

[Godskook]

Ok, in my proposed houserules thread, I mentioned the ability to grab additional feats at teh cost of XP, which was responded to by:


5: The extra feats will be VERY powerful for casters, especially people who want to qualify quickly for certain PrCs. It probably won't matter nearly as much for most melees, though Rogues will appreciate it, as will Factotums. But this will benefit Shadowcraft Mages and similar builds a great deal, while Fighters will be even more useless.

And I've been trying to figure *how* that is the case. From what I've seen both in theoretical and more practical cases, feat supply seems to have more impact the less you rely on full-casting to defeat your enemies. For instance, Treantmonk's guide lists, on average, lists just about 8 feats per basic-build-style in the beginning, which pretty much implies that a god wizard only needs as many feats as he's given, making more superfluous. On the other hand, the barbarian handbook lists over 20 generally good ones, while the fighter handbook lists even more, before even determining what kind of fighter you're playing. Hell, I've heard it said that all you need for a powerful Druid is Natural spell feat and then smart use of non-feat related things(Spell choices, wildshape options, etc).

Before commenting, here's a few thoughts:
1.I know about Psychic Reformation and Chaos shuffle. Consider the ability to rewrite what feats players acquire to be either banned or so heavily DM-adjudicated as to prevent it from being a point of concern.
2.I know that as a rule, classes that grant bonus feats are not as strong as classes that grant better things instead. However, that's not the discussion. The discussion is about if adding 10 additional feats to martial classes(Ranger, Warblade, or Rogue) would have more or less impact than adding 10 additional feats to pure-casters(Wizard, Cleric, or Druid).
3.A Gish kinda blurs the lines in this question. However, when it comes to Gish builds, consider it this way, does additional feats more readily boost their combat prowess, or their mystical might?

[magic9mushroom]

The reason a guide would only list 8 or so feats is because you only get 8 or so feats. Feats are incredibly useful for casters, especially metamagic-stacking monstrosities.

[Tyndmyr]

And I've been trying to figure *how* that is the case. From what I've seen both in theoretical and more practical cases, feat supply seems to have more impact the less you rely on full-casting to defeat your enemies. For instance, Treantmonk's guide lists, on average, lists just about 8 feats per basic-build-style in the beginning, which pretty much implies that a god wizard only needs as many feats as he's given, making more superfluous. On the other hand, the barbarian handbook lists over 20 generally good ones, while the fighter handbook lists even more, before even determining what kind of fighter you're playing. Hell, I've heard it said that all you need for a powerful Druid is Natural spell feat and then smart use of non-feat related things(Spell choices, wildshape options, etc).

Basically, because fighters get a pile of feats. Many other melee chars get feats or feat like abilities too. A two level fighter dip is great for a melee character for this reason. For a caster, a two level fighter dip is suicide, since it wastes caster progression and the feats available are...sucky for casters.

Also, most TO craziness tends to involve heavy feat usage. PrCs tend to involve feat requirements, often meh ones like Iron Will. Minimizing this feat usage is the main virtue in Master Specialist.

Let's put it this way...the fighter already has a pile of feats. What's he going to do, pick up another couple damage? Branch out into grappling as well as tripping? Yay, now he has two ways to get similar status effects. Ten feats would enable him to basically pick up another feat chain...then a few substandard feats because all the good stuff is taken.

Your caster, on the other hand, now can tack on Mailman shenanigans on to whatever other build he has, with ease. Or if a kobold/otherwise able to access epic feats, he can now quicken, empower, and maximize all spells, up to level 9, for free. With a feat left over for something fun, like epic spellcasting.

Your fighter does the same basic stuff a fighter does. Your wizard now has the abilities of another wizard.

[sonofzeal]

I agree. Much like equipment, casters benefit from them but non-casters need them. A Wizard can do almost all his nastiness with just spells, and feats are a nice little extra he can pick up. A warrior-sort relies on feats as his bread and butter.

I'm playing a multiclass Monk (yes, a monk) right now with 13 feats, and another 10 on his "pick this up ASAP" list. The last full-caster I played, I had trouble filling out his basic 7 feat slots. Anecdotal, I know, but anecdotal is about the best data we can get on a question like this.

[faceroll]

He's got ToS & some pretty heavy metamagic limitations in effect, so kobolds & mailmen don't exist.

Regardless, more feats are always nice for non-caster builds. A fighter with 20 feats at level 7 will be really awesome. A fighter with 20 feats at level 20 is less awesome. Most prcs, melee included, require you to burn a bunch of feats on sucky stuff like doge, toughness, or weapon focus. Giving fighters extra feats lets them get into stuff like that faster, and still be able to have long feat chains.

[Tyndmyr]

Great extra caster feats. Compare them to fighter feats.

Fiery Burst: Never be without a way to burn people up. Ever again.

Searing Spell: Ignore all those pesky resistances to fire. What, immunity? No, no you're not.

Invisible Spell: No visible effects from the spell. This is a personal favorite. Think about it. Invisible walls of fire. Invisible prismatic wall. Invisible walls of iron or adamantine for your windows. Invisible illusions, making those with see invisibility expose themselves, and your DMs mind break when he looks at true seeing and tries to figure out what happens.

Initiate of Mystra: Is that an anti-magic field? Great, I don't care. Better yet, I'll persist one on me, then walk around nuking out of it, laughing wildly.

[faceroll]

Great extra caster feats. Compare them to fighter feats.

Fiery Burst: Never be without a way to burn people up. Ever again.

Searing Spell: Ignore all those pesky resistances to fire. What, immunity? No, no you're not.

Invisible Spell: No visible effects from the spell. This is a personal favorite. Think about it. Invisible walls of fire. Invisible prismatic wall. Invisible walls of iron or adamantine for your windows. Invisible illusions, making those with see invisibility expose themselves, and your DMs mind break when he looks at true seeing and tries to figure out what happens.

Initiate of Mystra: Is that an anti-magic field? Great, I don't care. Better yet, I'll persist one on me, then walk around nuking out of it, laughing wildly.

Ok, let's go the other way- no one gets any feats, ever.
Who's hurting more?

[Greenish]

Ok, let's go the other way- no one gets any feats, ever.
Who's hurting more?Those without spells. Fighter is NPC class now.

[Godskook]

@Tyndmyr, I should probably mention my standing houserule on the metamagic subject:

"In order to cast a spell with metamagic, you must be able to cast the spell without the aid of reducers. Reducers include most effects that allow you to cast a spell from a lower level slot than you would otherwise be able to cast it from, with the two current exceptions of the Sudden metamagic feats and metamagic rods."

I doubt metamagic related shenanigans are going to pop up at my table.

[Sinfire Titan]

Ok, let's go the other way- no one gets any feats, ever.
Who's hurting more?

Again, everyone but casters. Even without Natural Spell, the Druid likely has enough long-term buff spells to not need to cast during combat.

[Boci]

@Tyndmyr, I should probably mention my standing houserule on the metamagic subject:

"In order to cast a spell with metamagic, you must be able to cast the spell without the aid of reducers. Reducers include most effects that allow you to cast a spell from a lower level slot than you would otherwise be able to cast it from, with the two current exceptions of the Sudden metamagic feats and metamagic rods."

I doubt metamagic related shenanigans are going to pop up at my table.

Still a big help. Free metamagic on lower level spells is powerful.

[lsfreak]

The problem is that melee often have about 5-8 really worthwhile feats, and are then scrounging around for things that really make a difference. Even if they do get more feats, it's for stuff they won't be doing most of the time, like grabbing archery skills just-in-case. There just aren't that many melee feats that cross over well to multiple types of fighting.

Casters, on the other hand, have to restrict themselves to 8-ish feats out of the 25 or so really, really good ones.

[FishAreWet]

Martial characters need feats to perform. Standstill, Leap Attack, Shock Trooper, Combat Reflexes. Getting these feats allow them to specialize, and therefore, win.

Casters like feats. They help. They cover up holes and exponentially increase power.

Want a better fix for feats? Grant feats at level 1 and for every 3 BAB. And drop Druids and Clerics to poor BAB. And ban Divine Power :smallyuk:

[magic9mushroom]

Great extra caster feats. Compare them to fighter feats.

Fiery Burst: Never be without a way to burn people up. Ever again.

Searing Spell: Ignore all those pesky resistances to fire. What, immunity? No, no you're not.

Invisible Spell: No visible effects from the spell. This is a personal favorite. Think about it. Invisible walls of fire. Invisible prismatic wall. Invisible walls of iron or adamantine for your windows. Invisible illusions, making those with see invisibility expose themselves, and your DMs mind break when he looks at true seeing and tries to figure out what happens.

Initiate of Mystra: Is that an anti-magic field? Great, I don't care. Better yet, I'll persist one on me, then walk around nuking out of it, laughing wildly.

You forgot the really dirty trick of Invisible Solid Fog + Invisibility/Greater Invisibility on yourself.

[Tyndmyr]

@Tyndmyr, I should probably mention my standing houserule on the metamagic subject:

"In order to cast a spell with metamagic, you must be able to cast the spell without the aid of reducers. Reducers include most effects that allow you to cast a spell from a lower level slot than you would otherwise be able to cast it from, with the two current exceptions of the Sudden metamagic feats and metamagic rods."

I doubt metamagic related shenanigans are going to pop up at my table.

So, if you have access to an unusually high number of feats, you use the occasional sudden metamagic feat or rod for the high level spells, and merrily abuse reducers on the lower things.

I mean, you don't need to quicken all your spells anyhow...you still have a standard action every turn that you may as well use.

Invisible spell is what, +0 IIRC? Your house rule does nothing to prevent the fun and games there. As magic says, it enables a wild variety of dirty tricks. Heck, just collecting the +0 metamagics is a pretty viable strategy with plenty of feats around, and the only reason the sudden metamagics are considered bad is because of a general shortage of caster feats. I'd consider them quite useful if that limitation is removed.

If you're going down this route, I suggest a steep xp discount for any feat on the fighter bonus feat list. This will, in general, help the least optimized people most, as those who tend not to trawl for great feats are more likely to grab stuff off the handy reccomended list.

[Fiery Diamond]

Great extra caster feats. Compare them to fighter feats.

Fiery Burst: Never be without a way to burn people up. Ever again.

Searing Spell: Ignore all those pesky resistances to fire. What, immunity? No, no you're not.

Invisible Spell: No visible effects from the spell. This is a personal favorite. Think about it. Invisible walls of fire. Invisible prismatic wall. Invisible walls of iron or adamantine for your windows. Invisible illusions, making those with see invisibility expose themselves, and your DMs mind break when he looks at true seeing and tries to figure out what happens.

Initiate of Mystra: Is that an anti-magic field? Great, I don't care. Better yet, I'll persist one on me, then walk around nuking out of it, laughing wildly.

I cannot find Initiate of mystra on the Wizards feat database. How many of these are actually WoTC material?

Edit: Invisible Spell is +0?! What the heck were they thinking?! It should be +3 at least!

[Myou]

I cannot find Initiate of mystra on the Wizards feat database. How many of these are actually WoTC material?

Initiate of Mystra is a Faerun feat and official WOTC material. Go WOTC.

[Tyndmyr]

I cannot find Initiate of mystra on the Wizards feat database. How many of these are actually WoTC material?

Edit: Invisible Spell is +0?! What the heck were they thinking?! It should be +3 at least!

IIRC, PGtF has initiate of mystra. I'd have to check though...it could also be faiths and pantheons or some such.

Invisible spell is from cityscape. And yes, it's awesome.

All of the feats quoted are official WOTC, I believe. Searing Spell is from Sandstorm. Fiery Burst is from...wherever all the reserve feats are from. Complete Mage IIRC.

[Greenish]

Edit: Invisible Spell is +0?! What the heck were they thinking?!Fireball. Invisible Fireball deals the same amount of damage, on the same area, of the same type, with same ref1/2 DC, hence +0.

That might actually be how they value metamagic and other stuff. :smallconfused:

[Tyndmyr]

Fireball. Invisible Fireball deals the same amount of damage, on the same area, of the same type, with same ref1/2 DC, hence +0.

That might actually be how they value metamagic and other stuff. :smallconfused:

They probably figured that, like Spell Thematics, it was a nice, fluffy feat with no real mechanical impact. It'd be totally worth it as a +3 metamagic.

This is why Rope Trick is second level, and extend is only a +1 metamagic. Which, btw, with added feats, is a metamagic that every wizard worth a damn will take. Fell drain is likely also interesting. Six hit die tops, right? I presume hit die is capped along with actual levels. So, fell drained magic missile, sudden quickened fell drained magic missle. Oh look, that squad of goons facing us are now level 4s. Yawn.

[Godskook]

@Tyndmyr, let's see if I can sum up your arguments(Summary in bold):

1.Some situational and/or limited-use feats: Sudden Metamagic and Reserve feats basically. In general, neither are strictly 'great' for casters. If adding 10 feats makes casters take these more often, I count this as a 'win' and consider adding 20 instead.

2.A *REALLY* broken regional feat. I doubt IoM ever gets put on any character sheet meant for actual gameplay. It is definitely banned in ToS(even listed *before* Pazuzu in the banlist, too).

3.Feat-combos that involve less than 4 total feats to use and wizards already use. Sure, there's interesting things you could do with invisibility and invisible metamagic, but you're talking about something that wizards and sorcerers already do all the time. Can you bring more than 8 feats to bear in one of these hypotheticals(without the last 10 being entirely superflous?)

4.Searing spell. Ok, this one I *really* don't get you worrying about. Sure, its a metamagic. Sure it can be made 'free'. But all it does is help blaster wizards in a way that is primarily fluff-based because when you come right down to it, a more optimized blaster would just grab Archmage's elemental mastery so they could change elements on the fly as needed.

On review, your arguments demonstrate that yes, casters are powerful. On the other hand, they do it with too few feats to be relevant to my question. How would a caster having 18 feats be able to bring significantly more to bear than a caster having only 8 feats?

[Tyndmyr]

@Tyndmyr, let's see if I can sum up your arguments(Summary in bold):

1.Some situational and/or limited-use feats: Sudden Metamagic and Reserve feats basically. In general, neither are strictly 'great' for casters. If adding 10 feats makes casters take these more often, I count this as a 'win' and consider adding 20 instead.

Both are quite nice. They are considered less optimal traditionally for a caster for one major reason. As casters attain higher levels, they get a giant pile of spells, and thus, reserve feats become marginalized, and 1/day metamagic becomes less useful in relation to your spell reserve. However, your limitations on metamagic make these comparatively more valuable.

At lower levels, they are quite useful. They get ignored because most early feats are put into qualifying for PrCs, and anything left over gets put into pulling off a specific combo.

Sudden Quicken, in particular, is amazingly powerful and flexible. It just doesn't get taken because nobody can spare the prerequisite four feats to get there.


2.A *REALLY* broken regional feat. I doubt IoM ever gets put on any character sheet meant for actual gameplay. It is definitely banned in ToS(even listed *before* Pazuzu in the banlist, too).

Sure it does. Leadership does, and that's broken as hell. It's equally broken for nearly anyone, though. I guess you *could* solve the issue by banning everything high powered, but that's work intensive.


3.Feat-combos that involve less than 4 total feats to use and wizards already use. Sure, there's interesting things you could do with invisibility and invisible metamagic, but you're talking about something that wizards and sorcerers already do all the time. Can you bring more than 8 feats to bear in one of these hypotheticals(without the last 10 being entirely superflous?)

Having multiple combos is better than being reliant on one. Fell Drained wide-area spells are handy, along with traditional snowcasting abuse. It's possible currently, but it requires a decent assortment of feats to pull off, limiting the usefulness of the character in other regards.

Sure, melee get multiple combos too, but wizard combos tend to lead to no-save deaths, or destruction of cities. A fighter combo means he's good at tripping people.


4.Searing spell. Ok, this one I *really* don't get you worrying about. Sure, its a metamagic. Sure it can be made 'free'. But all it does is help blaster wizards in a way that is primarily fluff-based because when you come right down to it, a more optimized blaster would just grab Archmage's elemental mastery so they could change elements on the fly as needed.

Nope. You change elements of whatever you want to use to fire. Energy substitution[Fire] being the traditional way to do this. Thus, EVERYTHING you cast ignores resistances for two feats, and only fire immunity even slows you down at all(even then, not much). Blasting can be quite effective if you pump damage a bit, and ensure that it always gets through. This is basically what Cindy/mailman builds revolve around. Your limitations on metamagic change how this is accomplished, but with giant piles of feats, it's still quite possible.

For example, CL boosters are widely considered awesome for blasting, but getting significant CL boosting tends to be feat intensive as well.


On review, your arguments demonstrate that yes, casters are powerful. On the other hand, they do it with too few feats to be relevant to my question. How would a caster having 18 feats be able to bring significantly more to bear than a caster having only 8 feats?

Well, they could pick up a few crafting feats, effectively doubling their WBL.

Normally, this gets skipped because it takes at least one of the precious 8 feats. Still, find something on the fighter bonus feat list equivalent to Craft Wonderous Item....

[Godskook]

Sure it does. Leadership does, and that's broken as hell. It's equally broken for nearly anyone, though. I guess you *could* solve the issue by banning everything high powered, but that's work intensive.

Except ToS did it for us.


Nope. You change elements of whatever you want to use to fire. Energy substitution[Fire] being the traditional way to do this. Thus, EVERYTHING you cast ignores resistances for two feats, and only fire immunity even slows you down at all(even then, not much). Blasting can be quite effective if you pump damage a bit, and ensure that it always gets through. This is basically what Cindy/mailman builds revolve around. Your limitations on metamagic change how this is accomplished, but with giant piles of feats, it's still quite possible.

1.Cindy uses a variant of chaos shuffle of some sort(I found the build, but not an explanation, so I don't know how he did it). If you can get a non-shuffled version, it might be relevant, but as far as I can tell, she isn't.

2.Mailman doesn't bother with searing spell or energy substitution.

[Tyndmyr]

Except ToS did it for us.

ToS does have a nice ban list. However, they did not balance for an extra ten feats for every class, so while they no doubt pegged the worst offenders, they did not attempt to ensure that for every possible number of feats, everything is completely balanced.


1.Cindy uses a variant of chaos shuffle of some sort(I found the build, but not an explanation, so I don't know how he did it). If you can get a non-shuffled version, it might be relevant, but as far as I can tell, she isn't.

This was necessary because the Cindy build is feat intensive. You are making the same end result possible without a chaos shuffle at all.


2.Mailman doesn't bother with searing spell or energy substitution.

The point is that cindy/mailman revolve around making damage nearly impossible to avoid. Once you guarantee a no-save hit, there is no difference in any number of damage greater than the target has. There are simply dead targets, and not dead yet targets.

Searing spell, energy substitution, and other fun contributing feats is another way of acheiving this same goal. It's not a matter of duplicating the build, it's a matter of getting the same power of those builds via the giant loophole of massive numbers of bonus feats.

[Godskook]

This was necessary because the Cindy build is feat intensive. You are making the same end result possible without a chaos shuffle at all.

Right. That was a 'can't see the forest' moment on my part.

[Tyndmyr]

Right. That was a 'can't see the forest' moment on my part.

No worries. Chaos shuffle is only really abusive because of the possibility of trading off stuff like location granted feats(allowing infinite feats for...sitting somewhere and casting a spell daily) or trading in racially granted feats(elves being the obvious one). If you limit it to just a form of retraining...its not such a big deal.