Keenness of the Stone Giant 5e
Prerequisite: 4th Level, Strike of the Giants (Stone Strike) Feat
You’ve manifested the physical talents emblematic of stone giants, granting you the following benefits:
Ability Score Increase. Increase your Strength, Constitution, or Wisdom score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Cavernous Sight. You gain darkvision with a range of 60 feet. If you already have darkvision from another source, its range increases by 60 feet.
Stone Throw. As a bonus action, you can take a rock and make a magical attack with it. The attack is a ranged spell attack with a range of 60 feet that uses the ability score you increased with this feat as the spellcasting ability. On a hit, the rock deals 1d10 force damage, and the target must succeed on a Strength saving throw (DC equals 8 + your proficiency bonus + the spellcasting ability modifier) or have the prone condition. You can use this bonus action a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Keenness of the Stone Giant has a ton of little things really going for it. The ability score bump makes the cost of obtaining this fairly low so long as you’ve got an odd score you want to increase. Cavernous Sight will always provide you some amount of extra vision, and while not the most exciting ability in the world, can contribute to builds that want to revel in darkness. Stone Throw, then, carries a lot of weight as an ability you’ll want on a lot of characters that don’t have a great place to consistently put their bonus action, as it functions as a limited-use version of a Spiritual Weapon that drops things prone. That’s all pretty good, but not really build defining.
And that’s fundamentally the problem I think with Keenness. It doesn’t really go on any specific character sheet. It's not something that gets me excited to build towards, and looks more like a setup feat I’d take as a prerequisite for something else. Instead, it's the payoff for taking Stone Strike. I could see many melee characters chucking a rock prior to engaging an enemy to knock them prone and set up their subsequent attack rolls. That seems pretty solid, but is it something you take over Great Weapon Master or Polearm Master? Probably not.
Having to commit to Stone Strike, what I think is one of the worst of the options at most tables in most encounters, makes this an even tougher sell. Still, if you want to chuck rocks at people and get a meaningful advantage for doing so, this absolutely provides that with a bit of passive utility with a slightly expanded Darkvision. It's not the best, but I could see some people enjoying the fantasy enough to justify going for it, and having a perfectly fine time chucking a rock at something before running it down.
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