So I was just looking at the rogue's reliable talent feature, and it just occurred to me that it can apply to initiative rolls with the UA rabbitfolk's hare trigger feature. So, naturally, I thought of the swashbuckler's rakish audacity feature for even more initiative shenanigans.

Here's the wording of reliable talent and hare trigger respectively, for clarity:

Reliable Talent: By 11th level, you have refined your chosen skills until they approach perfection. Whenever you make an ability check that lets you add your proficiency bonus, you can treat a d20 roll of 9 or lower as a 10.

Hare Trigger: You add your proficiency bonus to your initiative rolls.

So, at 11th level when you get reliable talent, you have a bonus of +12 to initiative and you count initiative rolls of 9 or lower as 10, meaning you can't possibly roll lower than a 22 on initiative. At 20th level, your initiative bonus is +16, meaning you can't roll lower than a 26. Is this really necessary? No. Is it amusing? Totally.

Yeah, Watcher Paladins get this, too.  But as broken as official release stuff often is, UA is routinely *worse*.  Finding a broken UA combo is usually trivial.  Looking at you, Dhampir Barbarians.

I do not think this is broken.  Usually getting 25 on initiative is tne same as getting 45. The most you can get out of it is you always go first on initiative, a nice feature not not game breaking. 

Never said it was broken, it's just amusing that reliable talent can actually work on initiative.

This is really amusing. Nice find. I wouldn't be surprised to see Hare Trigger make the cut to the final product either. I think I'd take this down the Arcane Trickster path though. Can pick up Gift of Alacrity as a initiative boost if desired and has a rather scary payoff for high initiaitve with its Magical Ambush boosted spells. Your swash build could also pick up Gift of Alacrity through Fey-Touched if you wanted to get really silly with it.

I feel like this is perfect for assassin. Assassin wants to go first so they can proc their Assassinate feature. With such a high minimum initiative, this feature will be fairly easy to proc almost every combat, if not every single combat.

My first thought was Rabbitfolk Wizard of the War Magic school. Spellcasters benefit a lot from going first. War Wizards already add INT mod to initiative rolls.

Swashbuckler (CHA), war mage (INT), chronurgist (INT), and gloom stalker (WIS) would all have the same sort of effect. I would say swashbuckler works the best for it though because of the reliable talent thing, though.

Quote from temery2383 >>

So I was just looking at the rogue's reliable talent feature, and it just occurred to me that it can apply to initiative rolls with the UA rabbitfolk's hare trigger feature. So, naturally, I thought of the swashbuckler's rakish audacity feature for even more initiative shenanigans.

Here's the wording of reliable talent and hare trigger respectively, for clarity:

Reliable Talent: By 11th level, you have refined your chosen skills until they approach perfection. Whenever you make an ability check that lets you add your proficiency bonus, you can treat a d20 roll of 9 or lower as a 10.

 

Hare Trigger: You add your proficiency bonus to your initiative rolls.

 

So, at 11th level when you get reliable talent, you have a bonus of +12 to initiative and you count initiative rolls of 9 or lower as 10, meaning you can't possibly roll lower than a 22 on initiative. At 20th level, your initiative bonus is +16, meaning you can't roll lower than a 26. Is this really necessary? No. Is it amusing? Totally.

 Throw in the Alert Feat for +5, and if you have an Artificer in the party they can also use a reactionary Flash of Genius , since that affects Ability checks, for a bonus of their INT Modifier.