New feats? Yup, it has them too, plenty. And unlike a lot of supplements, I’ve found the feats in here to be fantastic! All kinds of feats, broken down into general feats, ceremony feats, combat form feats, divine feats, heritage (for sorcerer types) feats, metamagic feats, and tactical feats.
A couple nice feats: Combat Familiar allows your familiar to deliver touch attacks without provoking attacks of opportunity, arcane toughness allows your caster to expend a spell slot as your hp goes below 0 to heal as many hp as the spell level expended, and Master Manipulator to gain 2 new diplomacy actions (captivating speech and trap of words).
Lots of spellcasting feats, lots of feats for those who want to focus on uses for their turn undead, lots and lots of different combat options. The PHBII has feats for your barbarian, feats for your sorcerer (specifically feats that allow you to claim celestial or infernal backgrounds), feats to make you better at summoning, basically a huge amount of feats for your character to choose from.
The huge amount of feats, separated into categories to help you to focus on what you are interested in, allows your character to focus in ways that many always wanted to, but had trouble doing. I really think a large number of these feats are going to become very standard for many players, especially the ones that like to create theme characters.
[Editor’s note: Despite how many times he mentioned arcane-type feats, there “really” are combat feats in there too]
Rebuilding Your Character
Feats, class options, these are the things I found I could make the most use of right off the bat. Oh, wait, you’re lvl 14 and not likely to gain a new level any time soon to take advantage of these new options? Chapter Eight can help you! Chapter Eight provides extensive rules on how to “Rebuild Your Character”. Many people won’t like this chapter, or at least I don’t think they will.
Essentially the idea is that characters are constantly changing and adapting to the situations around them. Via either training or special quests, a character gains the ability to change out skills, feats, class features, even levels.
Now I know some of you just thought “What a load of bull, how can you explain Johnny suddenly not knowing how to cast fireball anymore because he switched his lvl 5 wizard level out for lvl 1 of fighter”. Come on, a few of you thought it, right? Well, the chapter says that the rules presented ensure that the changes remain within reason and do not upset the story that has already been created by each character’s deeds in the campaign.
For me, I think its pretty reasonable that people could change their mind about a feat, spell, or what have you. Perhaps the group has switched to a long and grueling undead campaign after a few levels worth of fighting giants. Wouldn’t it make sense that after a long time facing undead repeatedly, that maybe your ranger no longer is the skilled giant killer you originally made him to be, instead maybe now a specialist at defeating the undead? Makes sense to me anyways…