Top 10 Most Powerful Feats in DnD 5E

in this video we'll be going over the best feats just generally the best ones in all situations but mainly combat because that's what people care most about when it comes to the best feats and at number 10 we have observant a feat that's not actually super useful in combat at all observant gives you a total of three benefits one of them is an asi increase where you can choose to increase your intelligence or wisdom by one which already makes it a great choice as a feat if you just want to take it for a half feet for its stats it also has a pretty niche use where it allows you to read people's lips as long as they're speaking a language as you can understand and then finally it gives you a plus five bonus to your passive perception and passive investigation scores now passive scores are a thing in the official rules but mostly people only ever care about passive perception as passive perception is probably one of the most used skills in the game and getting a plus 5 bonus to that is huge so what exactly is passive perception used for well passive perception is what determines if your character notices secret trapped doors traps enemy parties while traveling and is the number enemies have to beat if they want to sneak up on you if you have a high enough passive perception you can't really fall for traps inside of a dungeon and you'll pretty much always notice secret doors if you're just walking through it normally it's an incredibly overpowered stat to have a high stat of and it can completely trivialize a lot of official content so with a plus five assuming the character who has observant has a wisdom score of 20 this one feat would allow them to have a passive perception of 20 and a 20 passive perception basically makes you immune to most traps and ambushes in the game or at least in official content i play a lot of wizards of the coast modules and adventurous league documents and the only thing that a passive perception of 20 wouldn't help you with is in some of those tier 4 dungeons that are meant for you know around level 17 and up players although that's assuming no proficiency in perception once you add your proficiency bonus if you take one of the many ways to gain proficiency in perception this could allow you to go up to crazy levels of passive perception on the most extreme example if you're a tier 4 party you'll have a proficiency bonus a plus six so with observant and a 20 wisdom that's 26 passive perception and if you're an expert in it that's 32 passive perception basically if you really want to piss off the dm and completely trivialize all other dungeons this is the skill to pick because you know a feat is powerful if it's strong enough to annoy a dm because also remember when you perform a stealth roll all you have to do is roll higher than your enemy's passive perceptions and if you have an incredibly high passive perception that can be very difficult for anything to sneak up on your party although the reason this skill is at number 10 is because this feat is not useful in combat a plus 5 to a really good out of combat skill is amazing but it won't help you do more damage well besides the point to your end or wisdom i will say though the ability to read lips has come in handy at quite a few occasions where a couple of the players who have taken this skill in some of my games so even that part of the feed is good and the rest of it it just barely makes it to the top ten lists when compared to some of the probably overpowered ones they're gonna be at the higher spots on this video and at number nine we have alert this is another one like observant where it gives you a really powerful bonus to a pretty useful skill this time a plus 5 bonus to your initiative you also gain the ability to not be surprised while you're conscious and makes it so creatures can't gain advantage on attack roles against you if you can't see them which means invisible targets don't gain advantage when they battle you now at first glance it might seem like the reason this one's on this list is for that plus five two initiative but really the powerful feature about this feat is the ability to not be surprised losing the first round of combat because you're surprised can be devastating in some situations i personally lost a character due to a surprise round and as long as you're not asleep this feat will prevent that from happening this is another one of those where it's super annoying to a dm if a player has this feat which of course means it's a really good feat to have but also we round back to that plus five to initiative this can make sure you go first in initiative order pretty frequently if not all the time and if your entire party has the alert feet they'll basically all go before any of your enemies can because none of them can roll as high as someone with alert i remember running an epic level campaign where basically everyone had this feat and most of the bosses would be at half health by the time they took their first round in combat while already out of legendary resistances and as long as a single person has alert in your party it's very easy for them to just warn everyone else if you're about to be surprised that way you really don't have to worry about surprise rounds as long as at least one person has alert although i should mention this isn't guaranteed that the rest of the party can't be snuck up on if your dm has a group sneak up on you by coming out of the ground or jumping off the walls right next to you you wouldn't reasonably have enough time to alert the rest of your party to avoid all of them being surprised as based on the rules of surprise it is possible for some party members to not be surprised while others are during that first round of combat now unlike observant alert does have some combat uses because of the plus 5 bonus to initiative which is why it takes a slightly higher spot although both of these feeds kind of serve a similar purpose so you want to not be surprised by something and have a combat bonus then alert is the one to take although if you want to be incredibly useful outside of combat and want to increase your wisdom or intelligence score by one then observant is a better choice and at number eight we have magic initiate this is a feat that allows non-spellcasters to learn how to cast three spells two cantrips and one first level spell but there are some restrictions to the spell you can only pick spells from a single class so you have to pick which of the spell casting classes you want to choose and then you're only allowed to pick your two cantrip spells from that class's list of spells and the first level spell you pick has an extra feature to it where you're able to cast it at least one time per day without having to use a spell slot which basically means a non-spellcaster gets to use it and a spellcaster gets an extra use of it and if you're a non-spell caster the best spell to pick for this feat is the fine familiar spell this is just kind of the best level one spell to cast if you can only cast a single spell per day as it gives you a familiar that doesn't have a duration so you just keep it as long as you're able to keep it alive and has a whole bunch of combat and exploration utility as long as you pick the owl as your companion during combat you can have the owl go in and give you the help action and then fly out without getting hit thanks to its flyby ability which will give you advantage on your attack if you're able to control the familiar before around in combat or to give advantage to someone else either way you're using the al to give advantage to something which is useful it's also really useful for scouting out a hit as the owl has a bonus to its stealth score has keen hearing in sight which gives an advantage on most of its perception checks and of course has the ability to fly which means it's real easy to keep it out of danger because flying is really good in dnd and then of course for your two can trips you can just take two of the really useful wizard can trips like press vegetation or firebolt if you want damage didn't really matter but if you want to pick the best cam trips i would suggest watching my video on the top 10 best cam trips or maybe the video on the top 10 best level one spells both of those very good videos to watch if you choose to take magic initiate and magic initiate is taken a lot because having access to one spell per day is just incredibly useful in a whole bunch of different glasses even if you don't take it in order to pick find familiar sometimes just having an extra use of shield for that plus 5 ac bonus can be pretty useful or picking up healing words you can always have access to an emergency heal and in case a party member goes down and etc etc and at number 7 we have polar master this is a feat which only works while you're building one of the four pole arm-like weapons where it has two benefits to it the first one is it allows you to use your bonus action to attack with a pole arm by using the opposite end of it after you've attacked normally with it this extra attack is only a d4 for its damage dice though and only deals bludgeoning damage which basically means it hits about as hard as a dagger although it still gains all of your other bonuses to it so when you add in your ability modifiers and special properties of the weapon and proficiencies it's a pretty nice extra attack especially at lower tiers of play where martial classes don't really have a way to use their bonus action to deal damage most of the time and the other ability of this feat makes it so when you have a pole arm it increases the range of your opportunity attacks to the range of that weapon and the reach of most pole arms is about 10 feet so this makes polar master incredibly good for a tank-like character to have if they combine it with another feed called sentinel which has the effect that if he hits someone with an opportunity attack their speed is reduced to zero for the rest of that turn so polar master can basically allow you to stop creatures from going into the back line to attack a squishy spell cast or a ranger and this is mainly why polar master is taken to be comboed with sentinel and with the amazing reach polar master is really easy to almost always get off an opportunity attack with this combo while also getting extra damage in the early tiers of play thanks to that bonus action attack it gives you the only reason i pull our mastery not towards the top of this list even though it's a very often taken feat is because on its own it's not really as strong as a lot of the higher spots and it's mainly comboed with another feat in order to reach its full potential anyway but on its own it's still good enough to make the list if only at the number seven spot in at number six we have crossbow expert this feat has three beneficial features of it one of it allows you to ignore the loading qualities of the crossbow if you're proficient with them which basically means you're able to multi-tag with them it allows you to not have disadvantage with the ranged attack rules if a hostile creature within 5 feet of you and if you use your attack action with a one-handed weapon you can use your bonus action to attack with a hand crossball you are holding so just like with polar master it gives you a bonus action attack and a hand crossbow hits for 1d6 damage so they're not half bad and just like with polar master crossbow expert gives classes who focus on ranged attacks a bonus action attack at early levels which is incredibly powerful of combo with sharpshooter which can allow you to add 10 extra damage to your ranged attacks in fact the crossbow expert sharpshooter combo is probably one of the highest damage dealing things you can do in tier 1 levels of play if you have a way to gain two feats early and most people who use bose will try to get these two feats anyway now there is some complications with this feat and the bonus action attack since even though you ignore the loading properties of a weapon you still need a free hand in order to put the ammunition into the weapon in the first place so you can't just dual wield two hand crossbows well you can but you'll only be able to fire them once before you have to drop one of them in order to reload the loading property is different from the ammo property and the ammunition rule specifically states that you need a free hand in order to load a weapon so what you could do is just have like a whole bunch of hand crossbows already pre-loaded in a bag of holding and then just keep pulling them out so that you can dual wield that way otherwise you only get this bonus action one time a fight normally unless you drop the weapon in your other hand in order to reload and then use your one free item interaction to pick it back up or if you ask your dm really nicely to allow you to do it and ignore the ammunition rules and crossbow expert is one of the most commonly picked up feats on characters who use ranged attack roles but not for its ability to bonus action attack with the crossbow it's actually the second part of the effect that's super useful because you see it doesn't specify that it only works with crossbows so having crossbow expert makes it so any ranged attack role doesn't have disadvantage if there's a hostile creature in front of you which means you can use this in order not have disadvantage on spell attack roles if you're trying to attack them in melee and there are some classes that like to get into melee with their spells and attack roles so crossbow expert is commonly taken if they don't want to have disadvantage under those roles because of that effect crossbow expert is just a useful skill to have on pretty much any class that specializes in ranged attack roles regardless if you ever use a crossbow or not and at number five we have elven accuracy this is a feat that can only be taken by elves or hat valves and gives you two benefits one of them is an ability score increase for one of your four different asis basically anything except constitution or strength then it has another one where if you have advantage on attack role that uses dexterity intelligence wisdom or charisma you're allowed to reroll one of those dices once now what this means is normally when you have an attack with advantage you're able to roll two dice to then pick whichever one is higher with elven accuracy you then pick the lower of those two rolls and then re-roll it which essentially allows you to have super advantage as you're able to roll three separate dice in order to pick the highest rather than two so if you really want to hit someone with an attack roll that uses one of those four ability scores as a modifier helping accuracy is definitely going to help you hit stuff in fact elven accuracy is commonly banned in most games because of its supposed overpoweredness with the ability to increase your chance to hit even though if you do the math it only provides about a 10 extra chance to hit for example if you only need to roll a 10 in order to hit a target you have a 55 percent chance of rolling a 10 or higher with advantage you have an 80 chance and with super advantage provided by elven accuracy then you have a 91 chance which is only 11 percent more to that advantage it does still increase your chance to hit for sure but it's not as drastic since you already have a higher chance to hit because of the advantage itself but this really comes into play when you're trying to min max the numbers and the fact that it gives you more chances to crit normally you only crit on a roll of 20 and some classes like the fighter champion can quit when they roll in 18 to 20. so being able to roll three dice and then pick whichever one crit is the best way to use elven accuracy because with elven accuracy in playing a fighter champion your chance to crit from advantage goes from 25 to almost 50 percent so if you want to maximize your ability to crit you definitely want to take elven accuracy assuming you have a way to reliably gain advantage otherwise normally it only increases your chance to hit by about 10 percent which is like having an extra plus two to your attack roll whereas having advantage is like having a plus five still a strong fee don't get me wrong just not so strong that it's band worthy like a lot of dm's do with it and at number 4 we have warcaster funny enough this is probably one of the most pick feeds in the game where what this does is you can only pick this if you have the ability to cast at least one spell then it gives you advantage on constitution saves to maintain concentration which is excellent for any class that regularly uses concentration spells which is a lot of spell casters it allows you to perform the somatic components to spells even if you have a weapon or shield in both of your hands and it allows you to cast spells if a creature provokes an attack of opportunity from you as long as the spell has a casting time of one action and only targets one creature and warcaster is comboed very well with crossbow expert so that you can blast them with a ranged attack in melee range or if you're playing some kind of battle mage you could use spells like booming blade or just use a touch range spell like shock and grasp or inflict wounds this is an excellent way to be able to cast spells outside of your turn so part of the reason this feat is so commonly taken is because all three of its features are incredibly useful being able to gain advantage on concentration saves is huge because remember with constitution saves if you're concentrating on a spell and you have to perform one of the saves if you take damage the dc of that is 10 or half the damage whichever is higher so most of the time you're trying to beat a constitution safe of a dc-10 and having advantage on that saving throw gives you about an 80 chance to pass it whereas normally you only have a 55 chance assuming no other constitution modifiers which is usually not the case it's usually higher than that also being able to actually cast spells while holding a weapon or shield is useful for a whole bunch of classes not just battle mage like characters like a cleric who wants to hold a shield or a paladin or something because you do need a free hand in order to perform somatic commodants and a lot of spells have a somatic component it basically means just like waving your hand in order to do whatever the spell requires of it otherwise if you want to cast a spell and your hands are occupied you can basically only perform verbal component only spells and there aren't a lot of spells which only have verbal components most of them have a somatic component as well and of course being able to use spells outside of your turn with your opportunity attack is huge even if you're limited to only spells that target one creature this can let you use stuff like inflict wounds which is one of the hardest hitting level 1 spells and has a touch range this could turn your cleric into one of the highest damage dealers in the group at early tiers assuming you get off that one attack of opportunity basically if you cast spells this is a great feat to take as it kind of covers all the bases depending on what kind of spell caster you are if all you care about though is the ability to have advantage on constitution saves for your concentration and you don't think you'll ever use the other two features then instead you could take the resilient feat and just pick constitution which will give you proficiency in that saving throw although even then you can double up with resilient constitution and warcaster to make it so you're both proficient in constitution saves and have advantage on them for their concentration checks and at number 3 we have sentinel this is a really good feat to take on frontline fighters if you want to make sure you stop creatures from trying to go to the backline or just move away from you what it does is if you hit a creature with an opportunity attack that creature's speed becomes zero for the rest of the turn this isn't a grapple that they can escape from either they just lose the rest of their movement also if the creature tries to disengage to run away from you you can still use a reaction for an opportunity attack as with this feat you can just now ignore the disengage action which is kind of huge with sentinel creatures literally cannot get away from you without getting a chance to attack them unless they teleport or something and also if a creature within 5 feet of you attacks a different target other than you you can use your reaction in order to attack them so if an opponent stays close to you and attacks anyone but yourself it'll basically make sure your reaction is always used for some kind of attack with sentinel your reaction is almost never going to go to waste and it's even more deadly of combo with polar master which increases your reaction range to 10 feet and it can also be coupled with warcaster in order to cast spells and reduce their speed to zero this is incredibly good especially to come with polar master to just shut down anyone from running away or to stop creatures from running into your backline and there's lots of rounds in which martial classes will probably never use the reaction but with sentinel you're almost always guaranteed to attack something with it which is why it's incredibly good and super annoying for dm's if a character has his feat and they're fighting an important npc that you want to get away it's really hard for a creature to run away from someone with sentinel unless you just straight up teleport or incapacitate them first and at number 2 we have a dual spot with sharpshooter and great weapon master both of these feats kinda do the same thing so i thought i would just combine them together sharpshooter has three benefits to it one of them is you don't have disadvantage on attacks that are made at long range your weapon attacks also ignore all but full cover and if you're going to make a ranged weapon attack with something that you're provisioned with you can choose to take a -5 penalty to the attack roll in order to deal 10 more damage and this ability is not once per turn or require any kind of resource so you can just add this 10 extra damage to all of your attacks which is super deadly at early levels for the average damage a person can put out in one turn if optimized and rested is around 10. especially if combo was something like crossbow expert and getting two sharpshooter attacks per turn now great weapon master has two benefits one of them is pretty niche where if you score a critical hit or reduce a creature to zero hit points with an attack you can then make a melee weapon attack as your bonus action and its other effect is if you're going to make a melee attack with a heavy weapon that you're proficient with you can choose to take a minus 5 penalty to attack roll in order to add 10 damage to that attack assuming it lands of course so it's exactly like sharpshooter except it can only be used on weapons with a heavy property and set a sharpshooter which can be used on any arranged weapon attack now both of these feats are excellent some of the best feats you can take on a character who has a melee weapon or a ranged weapon because having a plus 10 damage to your attacks is kind of overpowered even at high tier levels of play when your chance to hit is so high that a minus 5 penalty is almost negligible just having an extra 10 damage to all your multi hits is just gonna add up over time so the downside to these two feats is supposed to be that minus 5 penalty which is technically a 25 less chance to hit but a lot of builds can just increase their chance to hit through a whole bunch of skills they take anyway and some classes can just give themselves advantage and if you have elven accuracy in addition to that then the minus five penalty is not really a big deal like an eleventh level samurai fighter for example they have an ability to use their bonus action to give them advantage on all their attack roles so if they attack with their turn and they use action search to attack again having great weapon master or sharpshooter would allow them to deal 60 extra damage that turn with all those multiple attacks all at advantage and no other feed can really give them that much extra damage great weapon master and sharpshooter are so much better than all the other feats when it comes to increasing your damage that it seems kind of intentional in order to allow them to keep up with spell casters who are absolutely bongers at higher levels a high level spellcaster can kind of win any encounter by themselves because of just how versatile those high level spells can be so if these two feats are so overpowered how could anything possibly beat them with the number one spot and at number one we have lucky lucky is the feat which gives you three luck points and whenever basically something happens that requires you to roll a d20 you can spend one of your luck points after the dice is rolled but before you know the result in order to roll an additional d20 and then choose one of those dice to use for that roll although it's not every single d20 it works on attack rules ability checks saving throws or attack roles made against you you can spin a luck point in order to make it so your opponent has a lower chance to hit you and here's the thing with the luck points it doesn't just allow you to reroll the dice it allows you to roll an additional one and then choose whichever of those two d20s you want to use so you can use lucky to basically give yourself advantage in all but name which is a distinction that matters for certain things like being able to use elven accuracy if you use lucky on one of your attack rolls you basically have advantage because you're rolling two d20s but you don't technically have advantage so you wouldn't be able to activate the features of elven accuracy for example and here's one other thing about lucky that is completely broken if you have disadvantage on a roll that means you roll two d20s and then pick whichever is the lower the result but if you then use the lucky feet on this disadvantage roll it will allow you to roll an additional d20 and then pick any of the three results of the dice that you want which turns disadvantage into super elven accuracy advantage as you don't have to pick the lowest of the three results you can pick any of them this actually makes it so you can use disadvantage to your advantage by intentionally having disadvantage on attack roll like maybe attacking with a ranged attack in melee so that you can have a super advantage on instead if you use a luck point and this is an intended use of lucky and it's even confirmed in a sage advice as shown by this tweet that i'll have on screen they justify it by saying that luck shines on those who are at a disadvantage so it's an intentional design choice the only downside to using lucky on disadvantage like this is that you still technically have disadvantage on that attack which means you won't be able to activate stuff like sneak attack or other features that don't work if you have disadvantage so you can kind of see why lucky is number one on this list this feat is kind of broken and is commonly banned in a whole bunch of games because of how strong it is in fact lucky and elven accuracy are two of the most commonly banned feats at home games even though elven accuracy isn't anywhere near as overpowered as lucky is it allows you to turn disadvantage into super advantage it allows you to have a chance to succeed at very important roles and it allows you to impose disadvantage on your opponents by forcing them to pick one of two bad results so it basically does it all it's an excellent tool for how to combat it's an excellent tool in combat it's great if you want to survive a saving throw or to make an attack have a lower chance of hitting you there isn't really a class where lucky is bad on and it kind of just makes everyone better if you do have it and since it's so universally good at everything especially since it gives you three luck points at that it would still be good even if you only had one luck point per day that it kind of easily takes number one spot on this list or i guess not easily because sharp shooter and great rabbit master are both really good as well the top two spots are three of the best feats in the game alright and that's the list if you want to see which is the worst feats in the game i would highly suggest watching the video on that and of course the video and the best spells for cantrips and level 1 spells for magic initiate all of that will be linked at the end of the video [Music] you

Channel: TheD&DLogs

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Keywords: D&D, Dungeons and Dragon, s Dungeon & Dragons, D&D Beyond, DnD, Wizards of the Coast D&D, Heroes Campaign RPG, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, rule, rules, d20, d12, d10, d8, d6, d4, DM, PC, tips, tricks, advice, guide, dice, book, PHB, VGTM, dungeons and dragons, 5th edition, best, overpower

Id: rVpwBwxnLxQ

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021