You can prepare and deliver deadly poisons, gaining the following benefits:
When you make a damage roll, you ignore resistance to poison damage.
You can coat a weapon in poison as a bonus action, instead of an action.
You gain proficiency with the poisoner's kit if you don't already have it. With one hour of work using a poisoner's kit and expending 50 gp worth of materials, you can create a number of doses of potent poison equal to your proficiency bonus. Once applied to a weapon or piece of ammunition, the poison retains its potency for 1 minute or until you hit with the weapon or ammunition. When a creature takes damage from the coated weapon or ammunition, that creature must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution saving throw or take 2d8 poison damage and become poisoned until the end of your next turn.
Poisoner: Prick Your Poison
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
I have not been kind when talking about poisons in 5e; mechanically there are some sound ideas there, but with how tiny the list is and how few character options readily get access to them or weaponize them with features, it's hard to say they’re well thought out. Poisoner does something admirable in delivering a small, all in one poison-tipped assassin feeling in a feat sized package.
First, Poisoner makes poison usable in combat. Not needing to waste an action applying something with only a minute duration turns what was a waste of action economy into a meaningful opportunity. Now, it's an expensive opportunity for some, while others will find it near free. 50 gold per use is enough to make the economy in your world matter, especially when it's attached to pseudo-smite effects. I would much rather see it just offer a set number of poison uses per short or long rest to keep it consistent, but with where it's at, you’ll probably be around five or six uses in the early tiers per adventure, and quite a bit more than that in the upper tiers.
Having all of these makes playing rogues, rangers, barbarians, and fighters more engaging. Now, you have interesting decisions to make that involve using your poisons. Them being all or nothing is kind of bogus, as is the flat DC 14 save, but should you actually deal the bonus damage, you’re inflicting the poison condition which can have a massive impact on a fight in all tiers.
Ignoring resistance to poison damage is a nice bonus, but ultimately not the major reason you’re taking this. Elemental Adept offers you the same ability for other damage types, with a slight damage up tick, and I’m not ranting or raving about that. Where the bulk of the power is here is opening up martial characters toolboxes to include something else. It gives you a new bonus action and effect to empower your attacks. More choices tend to lead to more dynamic and rewarding encounters.
Despite how much I like what it's doing, it's not doing it in that powerful of a way. It doesn’t scale with anything; it is at its best at first level if you’ve got some gold to dump into it, and only will get better slightly when you get a windfall of cash to burn on more uses. Beyond that, the later the game gets, the worse a DC 14 check is, the less impactful 2d8 damage is. A lot of upper tier creatures are immune to the poison condition outright, and while it can have a bigger impact on creatures who make more attacks and ability checks, it doesn't matter a whole lot when those creatures are adding +8 or +9 to their Con saves. Poisoner can deliver on the fantasy at lower powered tables in the mid tiers, but is steeply gated by the gold cost. Some groups will find it unusable, others might find a rogue just takes a week, 1,000 gold pieces, and now has twenty uses to do with as they please that make most of their attacks simply better. I’m hoping in the future, poisons can get expanded on, simplified, and made consistent table to table. For now, it’ll help satisfy a fantasy, but isn’t going to change the game or be an integral part of most characters.
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