Hello adventurers! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking 75th episode of our feats series. Which means we’re on the home stretch ladies and gentlemen, after this i believe you only have six more to do heck yeah. Oh man it’s a good feeling. In any case that aside we’re going to be talking about piercer 5e feat today and this was added in the tasha’s cauldron of everything book and it follows a similar theme with a couple of these feats that it kind of affects certain damage types in certain ways. If you want to checkout the list of official 5e feats in its entirety you can do so by clicking on the following link. In any case let’s dive right into piercer feat dnd 5e by first going over its description.
Description
So out of the gate here you get a plus one to strength or dexterity your choice.
You have achieved a penetrating precision in combat, granting you the following benefits: Increase your Strength or Dexterity by 1, to a maximum of 20. Once per turn, when you hit a creature with an attack that deals piercing damage, you can reroll one of the attack’s damage dice, and you must use the new roll. When you score a critical hit that deals piercing damage to a creature, you can roll one additional damage die when determining the extra piercing damage the target takes.
Very interesting stuff! Kinda reminds me a little bit of the reckless attack feature as well as savage attacker. That being said however is it good, is it bad! I think relative to a lot of the other damage augmenting feats it is i don’t know i think it ranks towards the bottom to be completely honest. Although extra damage is nice and the potential to roll a higher number is nice as well.
And it is more consitent, it’s once per turn so that’s nice as well. So i suppose i don’t know i’d have to actually see it play tested certainly the more attacks you make, the more opportunities you’re gonna have to get a lower number and then re-roll that so maybe it’s best suited for classes that deal with multi-attacks so fighters, paladins that the more martial classes. In any case lets move on to its walkthrough.
Walkthrough
So this is a relatively simple feat plus one to strength or dexterity once per turn you can re-roll a damage dice when dealing piercing damage and when you crit you roll one additional damage die when determining the extra piercing damage.
Really simple not too much to keep track of just make sure you’re only rolling once per turn and not once per attack and then you’ll be a-okay. Now let’s quickly move on to my personal thoughts here.
Thoughts
When compared with crusher feat 5e and slasher feat 5e i feel like piercer kind of just falls a little short. I’ll explain why….so crusher you gain control right you can push them five feet which doesn’t sound like a lot but based on what’s in the environment or what spells or effects are currently active that can be quite a decent shift and slasher we haven’t gone over it yet but so spoiler warning i guess but a slasher reduces a speed and it imposes disadvantage.
So it’s one of those things where in comparision to those two i do feel like this is slightly lackluster. In addition to that safe to assume using the math that savage attacker has the damage increase isn’t all that great overall. You know once again if you’re making multiple attacks and you really whiff hard on one of them there’s the potential to do a lot better, however it’s really only one role right.
Conclusion
In any case i don’t know maybe i’m overlooking a pretty significant build here. let me know down beneath in the comments section, be sure to mention any thoughts, questions, comments or concerns you have as well as any build ideas or cool stories and as always i hope you all have a wonderful day and of course happy adventuring.