Prerequisite: The ability to cast at least one spell
When you gain this feat, choose one of the following damage types: acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder.
Spells you cast ignore resistance to damage of the chosen type. In addition, when you roll damage for a spell you cast that deals damage of that type, you can treat any 1 on a damage die as a 2.
You can select this feat multiple times. Each time you do so, you must choose a different damage type.
Elemental Adept: A Force of Nature
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Everyone loves an elementalist. There’s something about turning the powers of nature into a force you can manipulate however you please that appeals to us. Elemental Adept is supposed to be a supporting feat to let you live that fantasy: command winter with sheer cold, fire with brilliant flames, acid with horrifying destruction. Instead of meaningfully acting as a boon for these concepts, Elemental Adept feels like a trap that leads to a character with less interesting decisions to make, and fewer environments where they can really showcase their chosen theme to its fullest.
There are only two effects baked into Elemental Adept: damage dice that roll 1s for spells cast of the chosen type are upgraded to 2s, and you ignore any creatures resistance to your chosen damage type.
Upgrading rolled results from 1s to 2s will be most effective with smaller dice sizes in large quantities. Fireball is an easy example where you’re getting about as much as you can ask for from these words; it rolls eight d6s for a third level spell. As the second smallest die, d6s have a one in six chance of rolling a one, meaning slightly more than one die on average per Fireball is getting upgraded. For an entire feat, you’re bumping your average damage up in the most menial way, and at best, increasing your minimum damage dealt by eight. That’s nowhere close to where you want to be for a feat.
Ignoring resistance sounds amazing, especially in environments where you’re going against creatures with frequent resistances to your chosen damage type. As a pyromancer, taking Elemental Adept for fire damage when going into an arch located on the plane of fire feels like an excellent choice. The reality of games centered in the even the most volatile of spaces is you’re DM will present a wide breadth of enemies to battle you. In those same environments, many creatures you’d expect to have some form of defense against a damage type will be immune to said damage type, meaning once again in the best case scenario, you’re probably ignoring resistance from a handful of encounters per arch. The real problem is the alternative is asking you to deviate from your fantasy and make somewhat interesting choices. Not only does this offer you more interesting choices to make to have a character capable of navigating diverse fights in diverse ways, it offers you interesting narrative moments. A necromancer focused around acid damage taking Fireball can mix explosive chemistry into their core fantasy, maintaining the feeling of the flesh melting acid wizard while picking up a tool that can still let them be a big spell damage dealer against acid resistant enemies.
On top of that, if you indiscriminately cast Fireball in every encounter because the handful of fire resistant enemies aren’t to you, your character will start to feel incredibly repetitive. Damage resistance is a tool DMs can lean on to offer other players moments to shine, or ask you to answer a problem in a different way than you regularly do. Elemental Adept says “naw, I’d rather keep answering the same way as often as I possibly can”. That isn’t a particularly engaging way to play for me at least.
I really hate this feat. Elemental Adept promises players it’ll help them play their avatar of lightning or conduit of the ice god, but in reality offers up such a tiny boon that you’re better off just taking an ability score improvement to your spellcasting score. Elemental Adept is a trap that eats a valuable resource for players, and gives them next to nothing in return. Stay clear of it . Friends don’t let friends take Elemental Adept.
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.
