A smart move is not to allow Feats at all in your game. The words "optional" are splashed all over the sections of the sourcebooks wrt to Feats. There is good reason for that.
This is generally terrible advice. Without feats, 5e is probably the single most linear edition of the game. Once you have your class and subclass picked, you pretty much are set on a railroad, where you only have spell selection (which not every class gets, and some only get limited options) and multiclassing to customize your character.
I agree with you about feats, I just have to disagree with this. Almost everything before 3e was zero-choice except for spells. (2e's late addition of kits and maybe the late 1e addition of actual skills are the main exceptions.)
I have to disagree. In 2e, every level-up I had to choose which new weapon proficiencies to acquire since weapons weren’t all just grouped together as either “simple” or “martial,” and which nonweapon proficiencies to place my points into because there was no such thing as a standardized PB. I had “choices” to make every time I leveled up.
Ah yes, the choice to take specialization in glaives only for the GM to announce that he's rolled up a +2 guisarme as loot.
My DM was nice and let us change specializations on level-ups for that very reason. But ideally one waited to specialize until they had found their “signature weapon.” Then you ran with that one for as long as you could until you found a better weapon of the same type. The rest of your weapon proficiencies were there for the golf bag.
Back to the feats and specifically those the OP asked about. As others have said, neither is really OP and the Mage Slayer one is really a win-win. You can add enemies or shift tactics a little and you can "feed" the PC some casters off and on to make them feel good about the feat choice. When my players take a feat or set up their character to do "a thing" that's a little special, I try to make sure an opportunity arises that allows "the thing" to be done. It may be simply adding an enemy as fodder for the PC to blow up, or you might toss in a handful of melee trash to replace the suddenly slain Wizard.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
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My DM was nice and let us change specializations on level-ups for that very reason. But ideally one waited to specialize until they had found their “signature weapon.” Then you ran with that one for as long as you could until you found a better weapon of the same type. The rest of your weapon proficiencies were there for the golf bag.
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Back to the feats and specifically those the OP asked about. As others have said, neither is really OP and the Mage Slayer one is really a win-win. You can add enemies or shift tactics a little and you can "feed" the PC some casters off and on to make them feel good about the feat choice. When my players take a feat or set up their character to do "a thing" that's a little special, I try to make sure an opportunity arises that allows "the thing" to be done. It may be simply adding an enemy as fodder for the PC to blow up, or you might toss in a handful of melee trash to replace the suddenly slain Wizard.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.