Hello adventurers! Welcome to my spellbook and thank you so much for checking out the 79th episode of our feat series. Today we’re going to be taking a look at the slasher 5e feat once again found in the tasha’s cauldron of everything and this one i actually stumbled well, i didn’t really find it anywhere but i thought of a very interesting meta.
That might actually emerge as a result of this feat at least i hope so. That being said, i feel like some DM’s are likely gonna have a problem with it. But personally i think it’s great, but we’ll talk about that later. If you’d like to check out the full feat series by the way you can do so by clicking on the dnd feats. In any case let’s dive right into its description.
Description
First and foremost you get plus one to either strength or dexterity. You’ve learned where to cut to have the greatest results, 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 slashing damage, you can reduce the speed of the target by 10 feet until the start of your next turn. When you score a critical hit that deals slashing damage to a creature, you grievously wound it. Until the start of your next turn, the target has disadvantage on all attack rolls.
Is this not like one of the coolest feats we’ve covered so far! If you’re kind of unfamiliar with tasha’s there’s three main damage type oriented feats that were added in. The first is crusher feat 5e, and then after that it was piercer feat 5e and now we’re dealing with the best slasher feat in dnd 5e. I think slasher is the best one as far as i can tell.
Now i know a couple of you are like but you can use crusher with the monk and to that i say i understand that. But just give me a couple minutes here and i’ll explain a little bit more why even with that being the case slasher is still the bomb. Now let’s dive into the walkthrough so we kind of understand what we’re talking about a little bit better.
Walkthrough
So really simple plus one to strength or dex. Once per turn: When dealing slashing damage reduce the speed of the target by 10 feet until the start of your next turn. And when you crit: until the start of your next turn, the target has disadvantage on all attack rolls.
Also check out this 5e least played class.
So this actually serves a couple different purposes between a one and two. So once per turn effect reduction of 10 feet does two things for you. Firstly, it makes it harder for them to get away if you strike them and they’re running away from you. Secondly it makes it easier for you to get away if they’re the one chasing you..which is really nice. Overall it also potentially buys your party more time to arrive your current location or kind of just stalls everyone.
It’s really interesting and then the feature when you score a critical hit really nice simply because once again it not only protects you but protects your party members so both of them kind of serve multiple purposes, which is really nice and that’s what you want to see out of a feat.
Especially if you’re foregoing an ability score improvement however you also do get that plus one to strength or dex so if you’re a martial based character or a combat orientated character you’re likely going to see benefit from either of those anyways so this is just really strong. Now let’s move on to my personal thoughts here.
Thoughts
So hear me out guys! Tabaxi, Monk i think this you could very well and very easily build a meta around this feat. Using the tabaxi, monk as a platform. So the tabaxi in case you don’t know they do have a feature called cat’s claws and it does a couple things gives you a climbing speed of 20 feet which is so sweet.
But aside from that what we’re going to be talking about is the fact that their claws are now considered to be natural weapons. And they deal 1d4 plus your strength modifier neat and that’s fine and everything but what’s really cool is they’re dealing slashing damage and the monks class ability if you want to look at it like that is that you deal more damage with unarmed strikes the higher level you are.
There’s kind of a way to cheese it using one of the feats 5e we’ve covered in the past but overall you deal slashing damage as a point i’m making and because of that this feats applicable it doesn’t really say anywhere that you need to be dealing slashing damage with a weapon only that you need to make an attack that deals slashing damage which due to cat’s claws your unarmed strikes would and seeing as how the monk is based around unarmed strikes at least for the most part there are like there are subclasses that are based around more magical influences or even weapons in the case of the kensei monk but we won’t be getting into that for this example.
In any case i just think it’s dope, i think it’s really cool idea, i think it could be really fun. I had a character based off of sly cooper back in the day just reskinned the tabaxi and i might have to revisit that concept to see if i could get some more usage out of this.
Tabaxi’s also really pride themselves on movement mobility. So the 10 feet reduction that this deals once per turn could be really useful on that kind of a cat and mouse game in both directions. And then since you’re a monk and you’re making so many attacks, the odds that you score a crit are actually pretty good and imposing disadvantage onto your enemies is always a good thing. So overall i just think it’s a really strong build, really strong concept. Also check out dnd steel defender 5e ideas.
Conclusion
That being said, let me know what you think of slasher down beneath in the comments section. Be sure to mention any thoughts, questions, comments or concerns you have regadring it or any build ideas also let me know what you think of mine.
I don’t know how it would play just a concept but it seems like it’d be really fun. That being said though, thanks for checking out this article guys really appreciate it i hope you have a great day and as always happy adventuring. Also check out sleep spell 5e explained and also 5e feats ability scores.