Best Feats for Crown Paladin 5e
by Prince Phantom
Coming to us from the oft-maligned Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, the Oath of the Crown is easily overlooked for a number of reasons. Its appearance in the aforementioned book alone is enough for many players, but its actual features don’t scream amazing like some other Paladin Oaths do. However, to ignore this subclass is a grave mistake, as while tossing the SCAG into the trash is a good rule, this is the exception to that rule.
While yes the majority of our features are just fine, the real power of this subclass hides in the expanded spell list: Spirit Guardians. This one spell alone is good enough that it’s still viable when we get it at 9th level, and is worth building our entire character around. Our channel divinity even helps the spell, keeping enemies from fleeing too far for us to keep them in the area of the spell. Feat selection will look pretty standard for a Paladin with a few extras thrown in to help with Spirit Guardians.
Best Feats for Crown Paladin 5e
Polearm Master/Great Weapon Master (ASAP): These two feats form the backbone of your typical combat flow as a melee Paladin, providing a massive increase to damage thanks to adding a bonus action attack, more reaction attacks on average and a big increase to average damage each hit. I would say that this Paladin might be a good candidate to go more defensive with just Polearm Master and a spear and shield, as Spirit Guardians is going to massively help us with our damage output, holding a shield will increase our AC and protect our concentration, and this Paladin doesn’t have an amazing way of negating the -5 from GWM.
War Caster (Lv 8): Most Paladins don’t really need this as they don’t find themselves concentrating on spells round after round, but with Spirit Guardians on our list, we need the extra help. This also gives us the ability to cast a spell as an opportunity attack, and with Polearm Master we get an opportunity attack whenever someone walks within our range, meaning we can cast something like Command in place of an attack and force our target to flee, wasting their turn entirely!
Tough (Lv 12): Our 7th level feature allows us to take the damage of an attack and redirect it from an ally to ourself, allowing us to spread the damage from enemies out and prevent any one party member from being focused down. While we can’t reduce this damage in any way, we can increase our own health pool in anticipation of taking more hits for our team.
Inspiring Leader (Lv 12): This functions in a very similar manner to Tough, but provides extra HP for the whole party. I’d probably take this over Tough, at least at this level, assuming your party doesn’t already have a team-wide source of temporary HP like an Artillerist or Twilight Cleric (or someone else with this feat).
Sentinel (Lv 12): If you’d like to stick with offensive feats, Sentinel allows us to more easily keep enemies in the area of our Spirit Guardians and away from our friends.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 16): This is a good final step in protecting our concentration, and if you set your Con to an odd number, this will round you up and give you more HP as well.
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