You have achieved a penetrating precision in combat, granting you the following benefits:
Increase your Strength or Dexterity by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Once per turn, when you hit a creature with an attack that deals piercing damage, you can re-roll one of the attack’s damage dice, and you must use the new roll.
When you score a critical hit that deals piercing damage to a creature, you can roll one additional damage die when determining the extra piercing damage the target takes.
Piercer: Deeper Penetration
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
As with most of the feats that give you a +1 to an ability score, the vast majority of this feat’s power is in flipping an odd score to an even one for that sweet, sweet +1 modifier. Got a 17 Dex, and are in the market for a feat? Are you finding yourself frequently wielding a Halberd? Then do I have a feat for you!
Piercer isn’t splashy, nor is it game warping levels of power. It is a giant quality of life upgrade for your damage dice, though, and can supplement Sentinel and Polearm Master builds that have an odd Dex score without needing to fully commit to an ability score improvement. Because those builds tend to attack with Strength (with pikes or halberds), this means you’ll need to want an AC bump if you’re using medium or light armor, or really want to better skill checks and Dex saves. That’s the main home here for Piercer; the brutal critical effect you’re getting is fine, but not all that impactful for the most part, and builds not specifically leveraging at least a d10 piercing damage weapon probably don’t care enough about the rerolls to justify this.
A few expectations might be long ranged characters wielding longbows; if Sharpshooter isn’t for you, or you already have it, this can empower your shots by offering you a reroll once a turn. Rogues don’t care that much about that, as most of their damage is in their sneak attack dice, and you aren’t running into that many cases where you’re going to have an odd ability score to turn even, so these builds are likely few and far between. If you are playing a variant human ranged fighter or something similar, maybe this can find a home on your sheet. A ranger or two might find it's worth it.
When using these kinds of features, consider your average roll, and reroll below that frequently. You’ll get burned every once in a while when you turn a 3 on a d10 into a 1, but for the most part if you don’t think you’re killing what you’re hitting, and have rolled below average, spend the reroll. The math behind it isn’t that complicated, either. If you’ve got a 5 on a d10, five results are better than that, four are worse, and one is the same. You’re more likely to get as good or better with a reroll, so you probably want to. It's a 60% chance for equal or improvement. The lower you get, the better your odds of matching or improving your dice gets. If you’re making a lot of attacks, consider lowering that threshold earlier and raising it as your attacks go one, as rerolling a 1 has a much higher total numerical impact than rerolling a 5, but if you don’t reroll you’re wasting the feature, so don’t hold on to it too tightly. Use it often.
Piercer will feel like a better Savage Attacker for exclusively piercing weapons. I don’t love Savage Attacker, but this comes with a bump to your Dex and a little crit bonus for your multi-attack crit fishing builds. If you’re going for a piercing weapon build, which there are a handful of, this feat can be a great boon should you also be getting a +1 to all of your Dexterity checks, saving throws, and attacks with it.
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