You've learned where to cut to have the greatest results, 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 slashing damage, you can reduce the speed of the target by 10 feet until the start of your next turn.
When you score a critical hit that deals slashing damage to a creature, you grievously wound it. Until the start of your next turn, the target has disadvantage on all attack rolls.
Slasher: Tear Them a New One
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
If you’re a Strength based character with a melee weapon, chances are it does slashing damage. Slasher, then, is an easy inclusion on most of said character sheets whenever you want to bump up your odd Strength score to an even one for that sweet, sweet +1 to your Strength modifier. Beyond that, Slasher doesn’t offer you THAT much; a ten foot slow once a turn is neat, but not particularly useful on melee weapons, and while the critical hit effect is great, it won’t be happening often enough to really sell me on what is happening here.
All the big ticket weapons that tend to be the best in their respective lane deal slashing damage (for Strength builds). Glaives and halberds deal 1d10 slashing damage for Polearm Master builds, greatswords deal 2d6 slashing for Great Weapon Master builds, longswords give you a 1d8 slashing weapon for the sword and board defensive builds, and handaxes are the d6 slashing thrown weapon of choice, or if (for some reason) you really want to lean into the versatile trait. If you aren’t specifically looking for a weapon’s aesthetic, and you want to be hitting with Strength, chances are you’ll be dealing slashing damage.
While thrown handaxes might seem valuable to stick a -10 speed penalty onto, their short range of 20/60 makes it challenging to actually eat actions by forcing dashes. Polearm Masters might be able to get away with this over Sentinel, especially if it’s giving them an extra +1 to hit and damage, because occasionally something will run out of speed when you intercept it at range, which is nifty. That’s probably the best case use for Slasher, but I don’t think that has a ton of merit when you consider just how many other feats Polearm Master builds tend to want.
Crit fishing builds (builds looking to make as many attacks as possible with as many ways of upping their critical chances) probably want higher damage critical effects, but if you’ve got a spare feat on your fighter in the upper tiers, or again, want to get an even Strength score, Slasher is a nice upside. Those builds tend to focus on just outright killing whatever comes in contact with them, but for when they don’t smash something into a bloody pulp in one turn, detracting from its returning blows seems decent. Not really entirely what the build wants to do, but something to consider.
Slasher is largely inoffensive, and probably only justifies its place on your sheet when the ability score improvement makes a big difference. There will be a corner case circumstance here and there where the speed reduction has a big impact, and an occasional random crit on a big bad can feel like an even larger swing in the parties favor than just a regular crit would. Beyond that, there are a handful of martial feats to improve play patterns that are WAY better than this. Those are probably what you should be spending your feats on.
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