Best Feats for Mastermind Rogue 5e
by Prince Phantom
I’m gonna say it. This is the worst subclass in 5e. If ever there was a subclass that best represented the Gravity Falls “wow, this is worthless” meme, this would be it. You get one feature. Just one. The help action as a bonus action. That’s it, that’s the whole subclass. Oh there’s more words you say? No there isn’t, those are all ribbon features, aka abilities that exist mostly for flavor and provide little to no mechanical power or are so niche that they might come up once in your average campaign.
Even the 13th level feature which lets us redirect attacks is so niche and difficult to set up that you are actively making your character worse by trying to be in melee to take advantage of it, or you are just forcing your ally to take the hit instead of you, which is only situationally useful if you could make the attack hit your barbarian friend or something similar. This means our feat selection is probably going to look a lot like a subclassless Rogue, but we’ll see if there’s any amount of synergy we can squeeze out of this desert well.
Best Feats for Mastermind Rogue 5e
Crossbow Expert/Sharpshooter (ASAP): Okay, lets talk about how good the help action as a bonus action is when compared to making an attack with that same bonus action. The main use for the help action in combat is to grant advantage to an ally to hit a specific target. This only works if that ally targets the enemy you tell them to, and only gives advantage on their first attack. This means that this strategy severely falls off past level 5 when the characters who would be most interested in making attack rolls are now attacking multiple times. There are builds that want to focus on one big attack each turn, and if one of those builds is in your party, you maybe could justify skipping Crossbow Expert. The ironic part is that the obvious class that wants to do that is the Rogue, and you’re unlikely to have a second Rogue in your party. This means that the vast majority of the time, attacking with your bonus action and getting another chance at sneak attack if you missed your first attack is mathematically much better than using the help action. Yes, this does mean that the only interesting ability that our subclass gives us is outclassed by a feat most of the time. Do with that information what you will.
Gunner (Lv 4): If you want to commit to the help action as your bonus action every turn, this is a good feat to take after Sharpshooter to increase your damage, assuming access to firearms of course. It also helps that this removes the disadvantage from firing within 5ft, which means we will likely be in range of melee enemies more than we would like to be. Yet another reason why you should just take Crossbow Expert (or just play a better subclass).
Eldritch Adept: Mask of Many Faces/Actor (Lv 8 & 10): I have exhausted all possible options and found exactly zero mechanical synergies that have applications in combat. This forces me to turn to feats that enhance our ribbon feature or just recommend generically good feats like Lucky. I’m going to choose to do the latter, as we already have a list for generically good feats for Rogues on this website. That being said, man Master of Deceit is a terrible ability. We can mimic the speech PATTERNS and ACCENT of a creature we observe for one minute, but not their actual voice. That’s not just a bad faith reading of the feature, look at the Actor feat. That feat clearly gives the ability to copy the actual voice. Disguise Self at will is pretty situationally useful, but in the right campaign it can come up quite a lot. Actor lets us take the form of someone we know and convincingly pass ourselves off as them, even to people who know that person well. The sad thing is that this combo of feats doesn’t actually improve our 3rd level ability, it outright replaces it and renders it useless. Any character can technically take these two feats and have the same result, and Warlocks don’t even need two feats to pull it off, just take Actor and Mask of Many Faces as an invocation. Darn it! I tried to improve a ribbon feature and even that didn’t work! This subclass is infuriating.
Alert (Lv 8): If you do have a party member that it is very beneficial to use the help action every turn to give them advantage, it’s very important that you go before them in initiative order so you can start doing that right at round 1. There, I did it, I found an actual synergy. Is it a good one? No. Will it apply to 95% of parties? No.
Honorable Mention: Moderately Armored: So I could keep listing feats like Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster that are generically good for Rogues, or if you want, I could tell you about how to build a Strength based Rogue. Optimally, we would have a level in Fighter for armor and weapon proficiency, but I’m assuming you don’t want to do that. We can sneak attack while attacking with our Strength if we attack with a finesse weapon like a rapier. Moderately Armored then lets us keep our Dexterity at a 14, instead pumping our Strength as high as we can. The benefits of this is that we have a higher AC (max 19 instead of 17), we can grapple and shove more effectively… and that’s about it. Yeah this is much more a gimmick than a good build. Some multiclassing is definitely needed before I would consider this a sound strategy, but hey, it is an option. Maybe take some Barbarian levels for Rage and Reckless Attack guaranteeing sneak attack every turn? Also this concept is not unique to this subclass, but all the other ones have much more interesting things to talk about and this list needed a bit of spice.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
