Summary
When it comes to leveling up your character inDungeons & Dragons, selecting feats is a great way to improve your character concept and give yourself a host of new abilities to try out. Feats can range anywhere from fighting style feats to more generalized feats that give players stat advantages. However, not all feats are as good as the rest.
So, if you’re a Dungeons & Dragons player and you’re trying to decide what feat to take, ensure you avoid the ones on this list at all costs. Here are some of the worst feats in Dungeons & Dragons.
Prerequisite
Character Creation
When you take this feat at character creation, you gain a bonus to damage with your attacks. Whenever you hit a target with a weapon attack, you can roll two damage dice and use either roll against the target, thus potentially increasing your damage.
Ultimately, there’s nothing horrible about this feat. But, it really just all comes down to the dice. You could use this feat as many times as you want, which is great. But, at the end of the day, it can be super frustrating to waste a feat turning three damage into four.
Level 4+
With this feat in tow, you gain a bonus to your Strength or Constitution (your choice), can push enemies when you attack them with Bludgeoning attacks, and can potentially impose advantage on subsequent attacks. Individually, these are all pretty good bonuses.
However, the push ability only allows you to move creatures five feet, meaning at most, you might dodge one opportunity attack, and you can’t knock them prone. Two, the advantage attacks only come into play if you score a Critical Hit on your previous attack, so that’s never a guarantee of anything. Compared to a lot of other general feats, this one is just a bit underpowered.
Level 4+, Medium Armor Training
Most of the armor feats range from mid to bad, in my opinion. That’s because, most of the time, if your class and character concept is suited to wearing armor, that will already be a part of your class features. For example, fighters are already able to use Heavy Armor without the need for a feat.
This can be helpful for classes like barbarians, who don’t naturally have proficiency with heavy armor. However, ultimately, this feat is only going to be helpful for a specific type of character. However, the bonus to Strength or Constitution can be nice.
Once again, this feat is so hyper-specific that most of the time it just doesn’t feel worth it. When you take this feat, you gain an advantage on attack rolls against any unmounted creature in melee range while mounted. Your mount also gets buffs to resisting damage with Dexterity throws, and can force attacks to hit you instead of your mount.
While all of these abilities are fine to good, again, this is really only going to apply to a super-specific character typewho already has a mount. Subclasses like cavalier can synergize well with this ability, but ultimately, unless you’re deadset on having a mount, this isn’t going to be worth it.
When you take this feat, you gain a bonus to your Strength or Dexterity and can reroll piercing damage. However, you must use the new roll when you do so. Additionally, you can roll extra damage on criticals with piercing damage.
Again, nothing is technically wrong with this feat, but compared to some of the others you’re able to take, this one just feels a little underwhelming. Plus, there’s not much in the way of character flavor with this feat. How do you even roleplay extra piercing damage? You can’t.
With the Slasher feat, you can reduce the speed of creatures by ten feet when you attack them with slashing damage. You can also impose disadvantage on enemy combatants when you score Critical Hits with slashing damage, which is good.
However, again, compared to a lot of other feats, the slasher feat is relatively specific. Plus, its best feature only works on criticals, which is no guarantee. Overall, I would recommend avoiding feats where the abilities only work under certain conditions, like hitting targets with a certain type of damage or on a critical hit.
Level 4+, Dexterity or Constitution 13+
When you take the Speedy Feat, your overall speed increases by ten feet, and whenever you take the Dash action, difficult terrain doesn’t cost extra movement. Plus, opportunity attacks have a disadvantage against you.
The disadvantage of opportunity attacks is far and away the best part of this feat, so it’s nothing to sneeze at. However, the problem with this feat is that it sort of works against itself. You have buffs to speed, meaning it’s easier to get away from opponents, yet its best feature has to do with opportunity attacks, which obviously only come into play in melee range. The function of this feat can feel somewhat counterintuitive. Though it’s probably one of the better ones on this list overall.
Fighting Style Feature
This feat is incredibly simple. When you take the Blind Fighting Style feat, you gain Blindsight within a range of ten feet. This means that you can still attack creatures within ten feet of you, even if you’re blinded. This is great. However, Blindisght doesn’t work against Total Cover, which is a bummer.
Plus, this is really only going to work if you’re primarily a melee combatant. There’s not a lot of universal appeal to this feat,so long-range fightersor rangers probably shouldn’t take this feat. Honestly, the best class to take this feat would be monks, who don’t naturally gain Fighting Style feats, meaning they can’t always meet the prerequisites required.
When you take this feat and make an Unarmed Strike against another creature, you can deal Bludgeoning damage equal to 1d6 plus your Strength modifier as opposed to the normal damage for your Unarmed Strike. Plus, if you don’t have weapons, this becomes a d8. You can also deal 1d4 damage to an enemy while Grappled.
This is all well and good, but again, it feels a bit hyper-specific. How often are you in combat and not wielding weapons? Not that often. Ultimately, this is really only going to be helpful if your character is suddenlyambushed or caught off guard.
If you have this feat, whenever you make a ranged attack with a Thrown weapon, you gain a +2 bonus to the damage on your roll. This is obviously going to be a great feat for combatants who have thrown weapons; however, there are some obvious problems with this.
First of all, if you don’t have a magic weapon that returns to you when thrown, you’re really only going to be able to do this once or twice, depending on the number of thrown weapons you have. Thrown weapons in general in Dungeons & Dragons always felt a little circumstantial to me. If you’re taking Fighting Style Feats, you’re far better off looking elsewhere on the list.
