TheDungeons & Dragons2024 Player’s Handbookintroduced new ways of categorizing the feats available to player characters. Feats, which grant some ability or passive buff that functions independently of the character’s class, are now separated into general, origin, and fighting style feats, as well as epic boons. These new categories have level and stat requirements that were not present in the 2014 version of the TTRPG and change the way that players build their characters. This is primarily due toall characters now getting an origin feat at level one.
Each character gets an origin feat determined by their background, which connects in some way to the character’s previous experience and makes each player character more distinct.There are ten origin feats to choose from linked to the sixteen character backgrounds, ranging in utility and strength. Players may wonder which of these feats could be considered the best or most powerful for certain character builds, and which options are better avoided.
10Musician Has Its Uses, But Is More Limited Than Other Options
A Lackluster Performance From This Feat
The musician feat gives players the ability to use instruments and musical power to inspire their allies. They gain proficiency with three instruments of their choice, and upon completing a short or long rest,can perform a song that gives allies heroic inspiration. Heroic inspiration lets players choose to re-roll a d20 check after making it, and is quite useful.
Unfortunately,many parts of this feat conflict with the skills that characters will already be able to getin other ways. Of course,bards already get instrument proficiency, making half of this feat almost useless for them. And humans already get heroic inspiration at the end of each long rest. There are cases where this will be a good feat, especially if non-bards just want to be able to play instruments, but its strength is limited given how easy it is to emulate its effects.
9Alert Suffers From Comparison To Its Predeccesor
A Feat Players May Want To Sleep On
Alert is a tragedy, given how much worse it is than its 2014 version. The old feat granted a +5 bonus to initiative and immunity to being surprised. Now,alert grants characters an initiative bonus equal to their proficiency bonus, and allows them to swap initiative with a willing ally at the start of combat.
While the surprised condition used to effectively take a creature’s turn away, it now only inflicts disadvantage on initiative rolls.
The bonus to initiative will be lower than it once was for almost the entire time a player is using a character, until they reach very high levels.The loss of surprise immunityis a big dealas well, though with the new rules around surprise making it much less deadly, even that wouldn’t save this feat. And as for initiative swapping, while there are some niche circumstances when it could be handy, letting players hold their turn to go after one another is already something a lot of DMs allow by default.
8Savage Attacker Is Often More Trouble Than It’s Worth
A Buff To Damage Rolls That Can Bog Down Combat
Saavge attacker sounds like a great feat for martial characters, but often ends up letting them down. The feat works essentially the same as it once did in the2014 PHB.When the player rolls damage for a weapon attack,they can choose to re-roll the dice for one attack per turn and take whichever result they want, almost always whichever is highest. In theory, this buffs how much damage characters like fighters and rogues can be doing on their turns.
D&D: Every Feat In The 2024 Player’s Handbook
Feats are a fun way to spice up characters in Dungeons & Dragons, and the 2024 Player’s Handbook offers a lot of options across several categories.
But in practice, the damage increase from this feat leaves a lot to be desired. The factit can only be used once per turnmeans you are often re-rolling just one dice, a 1d8 for a longsword, for example. If players roll a 1 on the dice, there’s a good chance they’ll increase their damage by 2 or 3 by re-rolling. But on higher initial rolls, the odds of the second roll being the same or higher than the first drop quickly. This is a feat that gets worse at higher levels, as well, as martial characters get extra attack, and won’t want to slow down combat just for a possible 1 or 2 point damage increase.
7Crafter Presents Some Unique Options For Creative Players
Those Missing The Artificer Should Give This Feat A Try
Crafter is not a good feat for min-maxxers or optimized builds. What it is great for isexpanding on the options players have in terms of equipmentand giving clever players some creative ways to use their tools. The feat gives characters three new tool proficiencies and the ability to use those tools to craft certain items during a long rest.
While the artificer did not receive updated rules like the other classes in the2024 Player’s Handbook, it is still compatible with those other classes with its existing rules. Whether the artificer will receive an update for the new rules is unknown.
The items are all mundane, like ladders, torches, and clubs, butcareful thinking could let players plan out ways to use this stuff to great effect. The items fall apart after a day, so they won’t last forever, but this gives players an easy way to temporarily get some gear they are short on. The feat also comes with a20% discount on buying nonmagical items, but the usefulness of that will be heavily dependent on the campaign setting.
6Skilled Is As Helpful As It Is Bland
Nothing Too Exciting, But Powerful Nonetheless
The skillful feat is very straightforward,giving players three new skill and/or tool proficienciesfor their characters. Skill checks are probably the most common type of check inD&D, and getting some better checks is always a good thing. But this feat just feels boring in comparison to some of the other options, which grant new actions or ways to use skills.
For a character that wants to focus on being a jack of all trades, or wholacks a particular proficiencythey want, this feat can fulfill that need.While this feat is bland, it will always be at least somewhat helpfulfor any player to take. One more issue here, however, is that, from background to class choice to even certain spells, there are a lot of ways to boost skill checks that don’t require a feat. Because of that, this option feels fairly watered down.
5Tavern Brawler Provides Great Buffs For Certain Builds
This Feat Is Not For Everyone, But Definitely Makes A Difference
Tavern Brawler is a really fun feat that is great (and almost required) for any unarmed build, monk or not. The monk is, of course, the most popular choice for players going unarmed, but this feat makes using other classes with that build viable.It lets characters deal 1d4 + strength bludgeoning damage with unarmed strikes, and re-roll unarmed strike damage if it is a one.
D&D: All Monk Subclasses In 5e & 2024 PHB, Ranked From Least To Most Powerful
Monks are a very polarizing class in 5e due to the ki system and subclasses, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great builds for them.
That first part of the feat doesn’t help monks, but the second part definitely does. With small damage dice for their attacks, monks will likely roll a lot of ones, and re-rolling those will almost always improve damage output. But that’s not all tavern brawler does: it gives characters improvised weapon proficiency andlets them push enemies with an unarmed strike while still hurting them. Improvised weapons are a whole can of worms that will depend on your DMs style for their usefulness, but moving enemies around is always powerful.
4Healer Sees Minor Improvements From Its 2014 Inspiration
A Good Support Option For Any Character
The healer feat is good for a support character to take, but even better for a non-support character to take. It gives players options for healing and saving their party members without magic or spell slot use. The feat letscharacters use a healer’s kit and one of an ally’s hit dice to let that ally recover a few hit points. Furthermore, characters with this feat re-roll ones on healing dice when healing themselves or another creature, which means they will rarely heal for the minimum amount.
The changes made to this feat from its 2014 version are great. In that version, creatures couldn’t benefit from the healing more than once per short rest. Now, the only limit is how many hit dice they want to expend. And there-roll feature means this feat is also good for characters thatalready have healing spells, since it will slightly buff the amount that they heal by.
3Lucky Is Still Great, Even With A Debuff
Influence The Luck Of The Game
Many veteran players ofD&Dlikely know that lucky was one of the most broken feats in the game. And luckily,the feat has received some downgrades in this newPHB. Those changes did not change the fact that it is one of the most powerful feats players can take. The feat grants characters “luck points,” which they can expend to gain advantage on a d20 check they make or give an enemy disadvantage on an attack roll.
Dungeons & Dragons 5e: What Feats Are The Most Useful & Why
D&D has a wide range of feats for players to pick from. Harmless skills can be powerful boosters when paired with the right character’s asset list.
The old version of lucky let players choose to re-roll after seeing the initial result, which was more powerful. But this new version still allows players to alter the luck of the game’s dice rolls, one of its most important aspects. Plus,the number of luck points they get scale with their proficiency bonus, which means many characters will eventually surpass the 3 luck point limit of the original feat.
2Tough Buffs Up Any Character Who Needs More Durability
You Can Never Go Wrong With Extra Health
Tough is another simple feat, which grants a powerful passive buff.Players gain two hit points for each level they already have, and continue to gain an extra two at every level-up. With this buff, characters can quickly outpace the average hit point maximum of their class at any given level, especially classes with smaller hit dice.
Tough is great for survivability, and gives players a lot more of a margin of errorbefore they lose their character. Much like skillful, it is a little bland in that it does not give the player anything to do actively. Buttough is a feat that will be helpful in any situation, no matter the character’s class, origin, or the campaign they are in. It is always better to have more hit points than less.
1Magic Initiate Lets Anyone Experiment With Spellcasting
A Great Feat For Casters And Martials Alike
Magic initiate is a feat with a great deal of versatility in its own right, lettingplayers choose one of the spellcasting class’s spell lists to gain some magic powers from. Players pick a list and get two cantrips from it, as well as one first-level spell. They use the ability score that the class they took the spells from would use, and they can cast the first-level spell once per day without using a slot.
The different backgrounds in the2024 Player’s Handbookspecify which class the player needs to take spells from. For instance, the sage much choose the wizard list.
This feat is amazing, and opens up so many options forDungeons & Dragonsplayers to choose from. Martial classes can get a taste of magic from this feat, as well as a spell like shield, and casters can get a bit more versatility for choosing their spells. The new version of this feat also adds some great alterations to its rules.The first-level spell chosen can be swapped out for another from the same list at each level up, meaning players can experiment with different choices, and they can use existing spell slots to cast that spell as well.
