Prerequisite: Proficiency with heavy armor
You can use your armor to deflect strikes that would kill others. You gain the following benefits:
Increase your Strength score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
While you are wearing heavy armor, bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage that you take from nonmagical attacks is reduced by 3.
Heavy Armor Master: Can’t Touch This
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
For those of you out there wanting to be even thicker as your plate wearing paladin tank, Heavy Armor Master may be for you. Out the gate you’re getting a Strength score bump; really good if you’re taking a 15 or 17 up one, otherwise basically moot. The real meat of this feat is in the second line of text: reducing a flat three damage from all non-magical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage is super interesting. Not usually that powerful, but it can absolutely make you feel like an invincible slayer surviving inside an unending mob of monsters bearing down on you.
Like most flat modifiers, Heavy Armor Master's damage reduction scales with the quantity of attacks it applies to. Twenty kobolds stabbing a paladin with spears will eventually bring it down… unless each of those 1d6+1 damage spears are dealing 0-4 damage instead of 2-7. This can take the consistent two-three hits you’re receiving around from 10ish damage down to 4 or less. Sometimes you’ll wade into a swarm of angry tiny insects who deal instances of 1 damage literally unscathed because of Heavy Armor Master. That’s pretty sick.
Against larger threats, it’ll feel similar to Tough. A lot of upper tier monsters still have “mundane” weapon attacks, meaning you’re often still reducing damage from mult-attacks with it. This functions as three times the quantity of applicable reduced hits bonus hit points. Tough gives you HP that works against all damage at a flat rate (twice your level), Heavy Armor Master gives you “HP” equal to the number of times you’re hit before dropping from these kinds of attacks.
This isn’t a revolutionary feature, and some tables care about it a lot more than others. Picking it up at 4th level can feel incredible as a lot of monsters you’re still facing are poking you with 1d8+2 longswords and 1d4+1 daggers. It's usually overkill, especially with characters that are rocking ACs in the high teens/low twenties, but if your objective is to feel unkillable by the masses, this simple mechanic works wonders for it.
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