Soul of the Storm Giant 5e
Prerequisite: 4th Level, Strike of the Giants (Storm Strike) Feat
You’ve manifested the tempest magic emblematic of storm giants, granting you the following benefits:
Ability Score Increase. Increase your Strength, Wisdom, or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Maelstrom Aura. As a bonus action, you surround yourself with an aura of magical wind and lightning that extends 10 feet from you in every direction but not through total cover. The aura lasts until the start of your next turn or until you are incapacitated. While the aura is active, you have resistance to lightning and thunder damage. In addition, attack rolls against you have disadvantage, and whenever another creature starts its turn within the aura, you can force the creature to make a Strength saving throw (DC equals 8 + your proficiency bonus + the modifier of the score increased by this feat). On a failed save, the creature’s speed is halved until the start of its next turn. 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
Soul of the Storm Giant gives you an odd little bonus action feature. Halving creatures’ speed when they’re already on top of you isn’t great, but in tandem with the imposition of disadvantage, you’ve got a no-win situation setup to force enemies into attacking you in a suboptimal fashion.
What I think makes this an option to consider is the ability score bump. If you can get from an odd to an even score with this, you’re getting a bonus to one of your modifiers, which is a big deal. The aura on its own is kind of like a limited-use version of the Dodge action, but in place of getting advantage on Dex saves, you get the slow and resistance to two niche damage types.
If this didn’t require Strike of the Giants, I’d be pretty happy with that. But this requires you to commit to another mediocre feat, and Strike doesn’t even come with an ability score bump. They do play nicely together as features you want to space out, as both serve the primary purpose of giving enemies disadvantage on attack rolls. In a vacuum they play pretty well together and paint a clear picture of a character whose whole deal is making enemies struggle to hit them back. The reality of it is spending two feats you’d also want to commit to build dependent feats with no limit to their uses like Polearm Master or Great Weapon Master when you also really want to get to that 20 Strength leaves me ultimately struggling to find room on any character sheet for both of these features together.
If you like the thematics, both give you enough stuff to do that you won’t be embarrassed to have them, but I don’t foresee many going for these without fantasy being the primary objective.
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