As I've read on the charger feat, it uses a dash action to move in (consuming 10 feet and must be a straight line for charger feat to work) for an increase of +5 damage to hits. Since majority of the classes when hitting level 5 (An example would be Rogue tactics of "Move in, Hit it with sneak attack, and Cunning Action to move out" and classes with Extra Attack) would make this feat worthless, is there any way for this feat to shine?
Normally, you can't move twice your speed and make any attacks at all.
With the charger feet, you can move twice your speed and still make one attack or shove. And if at least 10 feet of that movement is in a straight line immediately before you make that attack or shove you normally couldn't, you get bonus damage or can push your target further than normal.
So the way for this feat to shine is simple: need to move further than your speed on a regular enough basis to get the bonus attack (the big benefit of the feat), and remember to make the last bit of the move a 10-foot straight line toward your target so you get a little extra boost.
So if your melee character is frequently dashing around in combat, Charger might see some use. Note it also takes up your Bonus action for the actual attack so you might see some action economy problems.
Example:
Barbarian - I move, go into a Rage and then Dash up to the bad guy & smash him mightily.
DM - You can't; Raging takes up your Bonus action.
Necroing an old thread. But the greatest way to optimize the Charger feat is to combine it with the Mobile feat. The Mobile feat lets you move out of an opponents melee range without provoking opportunity attack, but only if you've attacked them that turn. If you initiate an attack with the charger feat, you can then move out of the opponents melee range and charge at them on your 2nd turn and retain all the benefits of the Charger feat.
I've used this method with one of my Barbarian/Monk characters to do ludicrous amounts of damage during 1v1 fights.
EDIT: Made corrections pointed out by ratwhowouldbeking.
Necroing an old thread. But the greatest way to optimize the Charger feat is to combine it with the Mobile feat. The Mobile feat lets you move out of an opponents melee range without provoking opportunity attack, but only if you've attacked them that turn. If you initiate an attack with the charger feat, you can then move out of the opponents melee range and charge at them a 2nd time and retain all the benefits of the Charger feat.
I've used this method with one of my Barbarian/Monk characters to do ludicrous amounts of damage during 1v1 fights.
You can only use the secondary ability of the Charger feat when you do the dash-bonus first ability, and thus use up your bonus action. You won't be able to attack more than once per turn with this feat. Unless you meant on the following turn?
Necroing an old thread. But the greatest way to optimize the Charger feat is to combine it with the Mobile feat. The Mobile feat lets you move out of an opponents melee range without provoking opportunity attack, but only if you've attacked them that turn. If you initiate an attack with the charger feat, you can then move out of the opponents melee range and charge at them a 2nd time and retain all the benefits of the Charger feat.
I've used this method with one of my Barbarian/Monk characters to do ludicrous amounts of damage during 1v1 fights.
You can only use the secondary ability of the Charger feat when you do the dash-bonus first ability, and thus use up your bonus action. You won't be able to attack more than once per turn with this feat. Unless you meant on the following turn?
Thank you for the correction, yes I did mean on the following turn. The Mobile feat would let you move safely away from the target after the attack with your remaining movement, and allow you to do another run on the following turn. This is especially useful when combined with classes/spells that grant you extra movement speed. As this allows you to stay out of the opponents melee weapon range if they have less movement than you.
I mean hey, Savage Attack at least will usually pick you up at least 2-3 damage per round, every round, all day long! That adds up!
Durable, on the other hand, really only means that you can't roll less than a [probably 3, 4, or 5] on your [probably d10 or d12] Hit Die. Considering average rolls on those die are already above that thresshold, it really doesn't do much.
lets say your character is a centaur scout/barbarian/monk/war caster cleric/whatever. And you have the charger Feat. Meanwhile there is a Fighter Cavalier in your group, that uses you as his mount. If you push the enemy out of the range. They can attack it with a lance, or whip, or some other reach weapon, while it’s 10 feet away to Mark it to where when it closes back in it has disadvantage on attacks. That target the centaur or others not cavalier, as long as within 5 feet of cavalier. Similarly, if your cavalier is a PAM Sentinel Combo, this allows for some “even more cheese” PAM Sentinel Cheese combos.
if the vote is useless vs undiscovered potential. My vote is undiscovered potential.
I don’t even think you need the centaur to do sentinel and PAM cheese with Charger either.
anyway you slice it: charger has usefulness, if you use it right, but campaigns with less straight areas to “juggernaut rush through” is harder.
I don't how understand how you think this is cheese. For the cost of a feat, your action and your bonus action you get to either shove 10 feet or +5 damage. The damage part you would just be better off taking great weapon master and its 10 damage instead of 5. For the shoveing 10 feet...... i mean once you have 2 attacks you can just shove 2 times for 5 feet each and not waste a feat. A level 3 open hand monk can for 1 ki atttack 2 times and push an enemy 15 feet. I am failing to see what the charger feat accomplishes that isnt already a present mechanic in a class. The reason i think it sucks is it saps up all your action economy
I hate rewarding thread necros. But I suppose in this case it's reasonably all right.
One hobby of mine, when I'm fiddling with the nightmarish homebrew editor for jollies, is trying to fix bad feats in a way that feels like it could've - or, indeed, should've - been the original wording of the feat. Charger was one of my first projects and the one I struggled with the longest, which is funny given how simple the fix ended up being. The idea is cool - get really good at football-tackling people or using the momentum of a heavily armored man behind an axe to deal more damage. Plenty of people would love that, but as stated the execution is awful.
I don't publish my homewbrew without cause, most of the time, but in this case the solution I wound up at was worded as follows:
"You've practiced putting your momentum to use and can strike especially hard when given room to wind up. You gain the following benefits
When you use your action to Dash, you can use a bonus action to make one melee weapon attack or to shove a creature.
Once per turn, if you move at least 10 feet in a straight line immediately before making a melee weapon attack or shove attempt against a creature, you gain a +5 bonus to the attack's damage roll if it hits. A shove instead pushes the creature up to 10 feet away from you, if it succeeds."
The only change I ended up making to make the feat feel good was to decouple the extra damage/shove distance from the dash-to-attack ability. I figured that someone trained with this style of combat would be able to build up a decent head of steam given any opportunity to move ten feet before hitting someone. You can still gain a bonus attack when you Dash, but now characters with a bonus-action Dash - or even characters that don't generally Dash unless it's just to cover ground, like barbarians or monks - can use heightened mobility and smash-and-dash tactics to gain extra damage or shove distance without wasting their entire turn to do it. They still have to set it up and find space to move, but if they can do that, they can get some bonus damage for doing it.
If folks like the idea and want to toy with it, I can flip this one public after a cleanup pass. I'm reasonably confident in my Charger rework, though some of the other stuff I've got done is less solid. Turns out game design is harder than "just make everything OP and let the DM deal with it!" Who knew. Certainly not the Internet, that's who.
A flat +5 to damage is too good if you aren't sacrificing action economy for it, especially at low tiers. GWF/Sharpshooter give +10, but require you to take a pretty massive -5 to hit to earn you that. This costs you... nothing, since movement is really only useful for moving in the first place. As written, you can get a higher damage single attack by sacrificing your multiple-attack Attack Action. This feat would be feat tax, no melee character could justify not taking your version.
The extra damage bonus is limited to once a turn, so no stacking it on several attacks out of a multiattack, and if you want to bounce in and out of melee combat with a single target to get that damage turn over turn, you need to either have an ability to disengage freely (Mobile, Fancy Footwork, or bonus-action disengages) or offer whatever target you're bouncing off of constant AoOs.
The way I see it, if you're taking multiple feats to try and work a particular gimmick into your repertoire (i.e. Mobile and Charger YuRevised, in this case), then that gimmick is clearly a big part of your character build and deserves to be a little spicy. Could be that I'm wrong, though. I'd think the fact that absolutely no one who knows anything about D&D takes base Charger, even as a flavor freebie with Variant Human, demonstrates that it's not worth its cost in its current guise, however.
I'm just saying, there's no other comparable feat that just gives you flat damage every round without requiring you use up an action or take some sort of penalty. GWM/Sharpshooter require you to take a -25% chance to hit and is the closest. Every time you use GWM/Sharshooter there's a cost; with your rewrite, there's only a cost to using Charger if you do it in a direction which provokes OA's, and even then, with another Feat that cost is entirely negated.
Not saying Charger isn't an under-performing feat, but this overtunes it. If you're set on keeping it that way, dropping it down to +2 damage to be on par with Dueling might be a step in the right direction, the +5 of the original feat is far too much if you've unlocked the ability to perform between 1-4 more attacks per round than the feat originally contemplated.
To be fair, Dueling is also a fighting style that adds its damage to every single attack you make - no question, no penalty, no restriction save weapon type. The fact that feats like Great Weapon Master, Sharpshooter, and Polearm Master exist at all and are as overpoweringly popular as they are tells me that feats which are absolutely mandatory must-picks for their respective weapons/combat styles is perfectly okay and expected. Nobody in the history of D&D who has any clue what they're doing has ever played a polearm user that does not take PAM. It's simply not done. If that's a perfectly acceptable 'feat tax', I'm confused as to what 'feat tax' means in this case. PAM defines an entire character build/combat style. Are feats not allowed to do that?
A +2 bonus once a turn (remember, this is once a TURN, not per attack) is anemic and not worth a feat slot. Honestly, even the +5 feels weak and situational, and my players seem to agree. I've made my revised versions of many of these feats available to my players, and none of them have yet selected this new Charger. Shield Master YuRevised has been taken twice; Charger, nunce.
The 'penalty' to Charger YuRevised is having to find a way to get the ten feet of windup. In tight quarters that may not be possible, or it may sharply restrict target choice. It also either requires a secondary complementary feat or specific class/subclass choices to avoid constant attacks of opportunity.
GWM and Sharpshooter are good, but they require a specific sort of weapon (heavy weapons, ranged weapons), and their cost (less likely to hit) directly balances out their reward (more damage on the hit). Your feat is weapon agnostic (any melee weapon), and the cost (move 10 feet) in no way cuts against the reward (more damage on the hit). On any round in which one can move, your Charge is always a good choice, because it costs nothing; a character with GWM or Sharpshooter still has to perform cost/benefit analysis. A character with PAM has a choice, because there may be other uses for their Bonus Action they'd rather take; your charger doesn't require you to choose between using your move for one thing or another thing, moving into melee and moving into melee in a way that activates the feat are one and the same. For every other feat of this sort, there's something you're giving up (to hit chance, or an action you could use for something else), and the feat as-written fits that theme (do you want to make the attacks you normally have available, or use your Action+Bonus Action to charge and make one strong attack?). An always-on +2 damage every time you move requires you to give up nothing, requires no decision making in combat, and fits every single character concept. Every single melee Fighter would take your Charger, and probably every other melee character of every other class as well, no matter what. It doesn't define or limit itself to a playstyle, other than "make melee attacks."
I can't find a link to the interview or article, but in the leadup to 5e, one of the design elements that they emphasized was moving away from static +1's to hit, damage, or AC in feats. Its fine to provide these in class features (a la Dueling), but not providing them as feats similar to Weapon Focus from prior editions is something that was a very clear design concept by te writers. For what it's worth, you can hear that philosophy echoed in the Design Workshop article on Feat design here on dndbeyond.
This is getting sidetracked into a conversation that would be better off in homebrew, but anyway, you asked for feedback, take it or leave it.
As I've read on the charger feat, it uses a dash action to move in (consuming 10 feet and must be a straight line for charger feat to work) for an increase of +5 damage to hits. Since majority of the classes when hitting level 5 (An example would be Rogue tactics of "Move in, Hit it with sneak attack, and Cunning Action to move out" and classes with Extra Attack) would make this feat worthless, is there any way for this feat to shine?
Normally, you can't move twice your speed and make any attacks at all.
With the charger feet, you can move twice your speed and still make one attack or shove. And if at least 10 feet of that movement is in a straight line immediately before you make that attack or shove you normally couldn't, you get bonus damage or can push your target further than normal.
So the way for this feat to shine is simple: need to move further than your speed on a regular enough basis to get the bonus attack (the big benefit of the feat), and remember to make the last bit of the move a 10-foot straight line toward your target so you get a little extra boost.
So if your melee character is frequently dashing around in combat, Charger might see some use. Note it also takes up your Bonus action for the actual attack so you might see some action economy problems.
Example:
Barbarian - I move, go into a Rage and then Dash up to the bad guy & smash him mightily.
DM - You can't; Raging takes up your Bonus action.
Necroing an old thread. But the greatest way to optimize the Charger feat is to combine it with the Mobile feat. The Mobile feat lets you move out of an opponents melee range without provoking opportunity attack, but only if you've attacked them that turn. If you initiate an attack with the charger feat, you can then move out of the opponents melee range and charge at them on your 2nd turn and retain all the benefits of the Charger feat.
I've used this method with one of my Barbarian/Monk characters to do ludicrous amounts of damage during 1v1 fights.
EDIT: Made corrections pointed out by ratwhowouldbeking.
You can only use the secondary ability of the Charger feat when you do the dash-bonus first ability, and thus use up your bonus action. You won't be able to attack more than once per turn with this feat. Unless you meant on the following turn?
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
Thank you for the correction, yes I did mean on the following turn. The Mobile feat would let you move safely away from the target after the attack with your remaining movement, and allow you to do another run on the following turn. This is especially useful when combined with classes/spells that grant you extra movement speed. As this allows you to stay out of the opponents melee weapon range if they have less movement than you.
If you are going to use two whole feats for mobility, then you ought to be pretty damn good at mobility.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Charger is the worst feat in all of 5e dnd. Why ake it be so shitty?
That's a funny way to spell "Savage Attacker".
The Forum Infestation (TM)
I mean hey, Savage Attack at least will usually pick you up at least 2-3 damage per round, every round, all day long! That adds up!
Durable, on the other hand, really only means that you can't roll less than a [probably 3, 4, or 5] on your [probably d10 or d12] Hit Die. Considering average rolls on those die are already above that thresshold, it really doesn't do much.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
I think charger feat could be used tremendously.
lets say your character is a centaur scout/barbarian/monk/war caster cleric/whatever. And you have the charger Feat. Meanwhile there is a Fighter Cavalier in your group, that uses you as his mount. If you push the enemy out of the range. They can attack it with a lance, or whip, or some other reach weapon, while it’s 10 feet away to Mark it to where when it closes back in it has disadvantage on attacks. That target the centaur or others not cavalier, as long as within 5 feet of cavalier. Similarly, if your cavalier is a PAM Sentinel Combo, this allows for some “even more cheese” PAM Sentinel Cheese combos.
if the vote is useless vs undiscovered potential. My vote is undiscovered potential.
I don’t even think you need the centaur to do sentinel and PAM cheese with Charger either.
anyway you slice it: charger has usefulness, if you use it right, but campaigns with less straight areas to “juggernaut rush through” is harder.
I don't how understand how you think this is cheese. For the cost of a feat, your action and your bonus action you get to either shove 10 feet or +5 damage. The damage part you would just be better off taking great weapon master and its 10 damage instead of 5. For the shoveing 10 feet...... i mean once you have 2 attacks you can just shove 2 times for 5 feet each and not waste a feat. A level 3 open hand monk can for 1 ki atttack 2 times and push an enemy 15 feet. I am failing to see what the charger feat accomplishes that isnt already a present mechanic in a class. The reason i think it sucks is it saps up all your action economy
i saw my buddy lots of times change a 2 or 3 to a 9 0r 12. At 2 attacks you are going to get way more out of savage attacker
I use it with my moon Druid. No one is ever out of attack range, and they’re going to take 5 extra damage.
I hate rewarding thread necros. But I suppose in this case it's reasonably all right.
One hobby of mine, when I'm fiddling with the nightmarish homebrew editor for jollies, is trying to fix bad feats in a way that feels like it could've - or, indeed, should've - been the original wording of the feat. Charger was one of my first projects and the one I struggled with the longest, which is funny given how simple the fix ended up being. The idea is cool - get really good at football-tackling people or using the momentum of a heavily armored man behind an axe to deal more damage. Plenty of people would love that, but as stated the execution is awful.
I don't publish my homewbrew without cause, most of the time, but in this case the solution I wound up at was worded as follows:
"You've practiced putting your momentum to use and can strike especially hard when given room to wind up. You gain the following benefits
The only change I ended up making to make the feat feel good was to decouple the extra damage/shove distance from the dash-to-attack ability. I figured that someone trained with this style of combat would be able to build up a decent head of steam given any opportunity to move ten feet before hitting someone. You can still gain a bonus attack when you Dash, but now characters with a bonus-action Dash - or even characters that don't generally Dash unless it's just to cover ground, like barbarians or monks - can use heightened mobility and smash-and-dash tactics to gain extra damage or shove distance without wasting their entire turn to do it. They still have to set it up and find space to move, but if they can do that, they can get some bonus damage for doing it.
If folks like the idea and want to toy with it, I can flip this one public after a cleanup pass. I'm reasonably confident in my Charger rework, though some of the other stuff I've got done is less solid. Turns out game design is harder than "just make everything OP and let the DM deal with it!" Who knew. Certainly not the Internet, that's who.
Please do not contact or message me.
A flat +5 to damage is too good if you aren't sacrificing action economy for it, especially at low tiers. GWF/Sharpshooter give +10, but require you to take a pretty massive -5 to hit to earn you that. This costs you... nothing, since movement is really only useful for moving in the first place. As written, you can get a higher damage single attack by sacrificing your multiple-attack Attack Action. This feat would be feat tax, no melee character could justify not taking your version.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Hm, think so?
The extra damage bonus is limited to once a turn, so no stacking it on several attacks out of a multiattack, and if you want to bounce in and out of melee combat with a single target to get that damage turn over turn, you need to either have an ability to disengage freely (Mobile, Fancy Footwork, or bonus-action disengages) or offer whatever target you're bouncing off of constant AoOs.
The way I see it, if you're taking multiple feats to try and work a particular gimmick into your repertoire (i.e. Mobile and Charger YuRevised, in this case), then that gimmick is clearly a big part of your character build and deserves to be a little spicy. Could be that I'm wrong, though. I'd think the fact that absolutely no one who knows anything about D&D takes base Charger, even as a flavor freebie with Variant Human, demonstrates that it's not worth its cost in its current guise, however.
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm just saying, there's no other comparable feat that just gives you flat damage every round without requiring you use up an action or take some sort of penalty. GWM/Sharpshooter require you to take a -25% chance to hit and is the closest. Every time you use GWM/Sharshooter there's a cost; with your rewrite, there's only a cost to using Charger if you do it in a direction which provokes OA's, and even then, with another Feat that cost is entirely negated.
Not saying Charger isn't an under-performing feat, but this overtunes it. If you're set on keeping it that way, dropping it down to +2 damage to be on par with Dueling might be a step in the right direction, the +5 of the original feat is far too much if you've unlocked the ability to perform between 1-4 more attacks per round than the feat originally contemplated.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
To be fair, Dueling is also a fighting style that adds its damage to every single attack you make - no question, no penalty, no restriction save weapon type. The fact that feats like Great Weapon Master, Sharpshooter, and Polearm Master exist at all and are as overpoweringly popular as they are tells me that feats which are absolutely mandatory must-picks for their respective weapons/combat styles is perfectly okay and expected. Nobody in the history of D&D who has any clue what they're doing has ever played a polearm user that does not take PAM. It's simply not done. If that's a perfectly acceptable 'feat tax', I'm confused as to what 'feat tax' means in this case. PAM defines an entire character build/combat style. Are feats not allowed to do that?
A +2 bonus once a turn (remember, this is once a TURN, not per attack) is anemic and not worth a feat slot. Honestly, even the +5 feels weak and situational, and my players seem to agree. I've made my revised versions of many of these feats available to my players, and none of them have yet selected this new Charger. Shield Master YuRevised has been taken twice; Charger, nunce.
The 'penalty' to Charger YuRevised is having to find a way to get the ten feet of windup. In tight quarters that may not be possible, or it may sharply restrict target choice. It also either requires a secondary complementary feat or specific class/subclass choices to avoid constant attacks of opportunity.
Please do not contact or message me.
GWM and Sharpshooter are good, but they require a specific sort of weapon (heavy weapons, ranged weapons), and their cost (less likely to hit) directly balances out their reward (more damage on the hit). Your feat is weapon agnostic (any melee weapon), and the cost (move 10 feet) in no way cuts against the reward (more damage on the hit). On any round in which one can move, your Charge is always a good choice, because it costs nothing; a character with GWM or Sharpshooter still has to perform cost/benefit analysis. A character with PAM has a choice, because there may be other uses for their Bonus Action they'd rather take; your charger doesn't require you to choose between using your move for one thing or another thing, moving into melee and moving into melee in a way that activates the feat are one and the same. For every other feat of this sort, there's something you're giving up (to hit chance, or an action you could use for something else), and the feat as-written fits that theme (do you want to make the attacks you normally have available, or use your Action+Bonus Action to charge and make one strong attack?). An always-on +2 damage every time you move requires you to give up nothing, requires no decision making in combat, and fits every single character concept. Every single melee Fighter would take your Charger, and probably every other melee character of every other class as well, no matter what. It doesn't define or limit itself to a playstyle, other than "make melee attacks."
I can't find a link to the interview or article, but in the leadup to 5e, one of the design elements that they emphasized was moving away from static +1's to hit, damage, or AC in feats. Its fine to provide these in class features (a la Dueling), but not providing them as feats similar to Weapon Focus from prior editions is something that was a very clear design concept by te writers. For what it's worth, you can hear that philosophy echoed in the Design Workshop article on Feat design here on dndbeyond.
This is getting sidetracked into a conversation that would be better off in homebrew, but anyway, you asked for feedback, take it or leave it.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.