You are practiced in the art of crushing your enemies, granting you the following benefits:
Increase your Strength or Constitution by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Once per turn, when you hit a creature with an attack that deals bludgeoning damage, you can move it 5 feet to an unoccupied space, provided the target is no more than one size larger than you.
When you score a critical hit that deals bludgeoning damage to a creature, attack rolls against that creature are made with advantage until the start of your next turn.
Crusher: My First Crush
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Crusher is a bit baffling to me; for a feat that is supposed to embody the smashing hulk character who thrives when bludgeoning baddies to bloody pulps with a massive club, Crusher does functionally nothing to satisfy that fantasy. It's weird. If your goal with taking the Crusher feat is to get better at Crushing things, the best element of it is the Strength score bump. That’s disappointing.
That being said, as it is a feat with an ability score improvement stapled onto it, the other text doesn’t need to be that good for you to consider it. Crusher gives you probably just enough to justify grabbing it over something like Athlete, but doesn’t quite hit the same mark as Heavy Armor Master. It doesn’t have the equivalent feel of Slasher, which embodies cutting a hamstring or wounding for an advantage, but probably is marginally better, as granting all of your allies advantage on all kinds of attack rolls for free when you crit can be a solid ability to just have stapled to your maul.
I think the characters that want this probably are using a maul, and probably don’t need it, but it's the best remaining option over just a regular ability score increase should you have a 17 in Strength you’re looking to improve. Those characters would already have needed to take Great Weapon Master before ever considering this, and would need to not want the unkillable feeling Heavy Armor Master helps facilitate. You also have to weigh just how much you like mauls. Slasher, like I said, has a slow, which I think is around as meaningful on a melee character as the 5 foot shove is, but a much better critical effect, and just asks you to use a greatsword instead. That’s a one to one comparison, the only difference being the damage type.
On faster characters the knock back can feel like a free disengage, which is pretty sweet. Critting can expose weakness, lining up more hits. I want this feat to feel more destructive, really help sell the vandal or siege beast fantasy. Where it is now, it's a fine feat if you’re looking to turn an odd Con or Str into an even one for the modifier improvement if you’re already using a maul and already have Great Weapon Master. Nearly every other bludgeoning damage weapon is going to be worse than a comparative slashing or piercing weapon, save maybe the quarterstaff on some crit-fishing Sentinel builds, but you can do things that turn you into an immovable bulwark of death with Sentinel, and this gets you nowhere near that.
If you don’t need the +1 in either score, you definitely don’t want this feat.
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