Please tell me ASI is not that good

[Reformatio]

I feel like I could make more interesting builds if I forego Ability Score Improvement.
I fell besides Tavern Brawler, Savage Attacker, Sharpshooter and Alert I always go for ASI.

Skills like Sentinel, Lucky, War Caster, etc. seem interesting; however I am used to increasing my ability points.

[Raz]

Elemental Adept: Fire, to have your Fire damage ignore Fire Resistance is a must for Fire mages since Lightning/Cold mages can just soak their targets to get rid of resistances and make them Vulnerable.

Heavy Armor Master: -3 to any Physical damage that is Non-Magical which is most of what you face in the game when it comes to those types. Stacks with the damage reductions from other sources, and your own Resistances for those three types.

Resilient Constitution: Gives you proficiency in Constitution and when paired with the next Feat, means you'll near never drop Concentration with the few ways you will is if hit with Prone, Knock Out, Sleep, Paralyze.

War Caster: Advantage on Concentration saves is a godsend for a Spirit Guardian build, or a Sorcerer that twin casts Haste. Nothing kills your momentum like losing Haste on two party members.

Lucky can be handy. Getting Advantage on your Attack Rolls, on Saving Throws, and on Ability Checks three times a day can be very useful.

Martial Adept: Mostly for Battlemasters to give them more Superiority Dice. Extra Maneuvers is a bonus.

Mobile: Can be useful for hit-and-run tactics, especially if your party composition includes Mages who blanket the battlefield in Difficult Terrain.

Polearm Master: Very nice when parking a frontliner near the mages and some warrior tries getting at Gale but then gets their ankles sliced off, stopping them in their tracks. Works wonders with Sentinel as well.

[Mike Garrison]

Problem is, ASI *is* quite good. It's not always the best choice, but it's usually the safest choice.

Tavern Brawler is, IMO, so busted OP that I never use it.

Alert is kind of busted too, because +5 was supposed to be 25% of the range of possible initiative scores, but for BG3 it is 125%, meaning it's essentially an "always go first" bonus. However, it's not on my personal list of "too OP to be fun", so I often take it.

If you have three feats to work with, it's hard to argue against two of them being ASI. But maybe you only take one and go for a couple of the stronger other feats.

If you have four feats to work with, like fighter, then you can still hit 20 in one stat and also get a couple of other feats.

What's hard is if you have a class that wants two attributes maxed out. Or if you want to multiclass and you don't have three feats to work with.

[Trolleur_Durden]

ASI is good in a vacuum, but in a game where you have a very easy access to elixirs of strength setting your Str to 21 for like, forever, ASI is definitely not the way to go for any character relying on Str.

[Mike Garrison]

Originally posted by Trolleur_Durden:

ASI is good in a vacuum, but in a game where you have a very easy access to elixirs of strength setting your Str to 21 for like, forever, ASI is definitely not the way to go for any character relying on Str.

True, of course, for STR. STR is the only stat that is true for, however.

(With items you can get 18 DEX and 17 INT in Act 1. 19 STR if you count the stool leg, but that does restrict you in a weapon slot. In Act 3 you can get 23 CON and 23 STR. But the STR gloves are mutually exclusive with the DEX gloves.)

And you don't *have* to be a PED doper. I find the game to be both playable and fun if I never drink a strength elixir the entire game.

[Mander]

ASI / Great Weapon Master are imo, the best feats you can pick. The former, because it also empowers your character outside combat (checks).
The latter for an extra attack for every martial class per turn on kill. It even works well for hybrids melee class (pact of the blade warlocks).

Are there any alternatives as good? Imo, no.

[HoneyDrake]

Originally posted by Raz:

Elemental Adept: Fire to have your Fire damage ignore Fire Resistance is a must for Fire mages since Lightning/Cold mages can just soak their targets to get rid of resistances and make them Vulnerable.

A single coating (Arsonist's Oil) covers that "issue", if lightning/cold mages can soak their enemies, another character can coat their weapon (like using a Bard who can easily hit multiple targets, split arrrow, etc.). Also it doesn't reroll a dice if you hit a 1, it just counts as a 2 instead.


Hands down: I did use Alert a lot when I started to play this game. Having the ability to go first makes encounters a joke in most situations and if you are not meta-gaming because you replay the game like mad you will also avoid traps, ambushes, etc. in certain maps.

Ability Improvement is, for a reason, important. Weapons scale based on your proficiency, your hit rate heavily improves, etc.

If you are abusing elixirs, yes you will not care about Strength and other stats.
But otherwise you will be forced to take any options to increase your AS as much as you can on any character which tries to be offensive.

Edit: and like someone else said, this is more of an RPG than combat simulator, AS means easier checks, too.

[Raz]

Originally posted by HoneyDrake:

Originally posted by Raz:

Elemental Adept: Fire to have your Fire damage ignore Fire Resistance is a must for Fire mages since Lightning/Cold mages can just soak their targets to get rid of resistances and make them Vulnerable.

A single coating (Arsonist's Oil) covers that "issue".

Except that oil is bugged to hell and back and Larian never fixed it, nor have modders been able to fix it, so no, that doesn't fix anything.

Originally posted by Trolleur_Durden:

ASI is good in a vacuum, but in a game where you have a very easy access to elixirs of strength setting your Str to 21 for like, forever, ASI is definitely not the way to go for any character relying on Str.

Yes and no. It eats up your only Elixir options when we have Elixirs like Bloodlust, some other STR builds like Colossus, then the Hybrids who love having strength but also Spell Save DC would want Battlemage as that +3 Acuity is until Longrest and even if you get hit twice to remove all three stacks, on your next turn you get all three back.

In general, definitely, Hill Giant is goated, there is still many times where I had to maul over if the Bloodlust was going to be better or not, and has been.

[Fitness Lauch]

Originally posted by Raz:

Heavy Armor Master: -3 to any Physical damage that is Non-Magical which is most of what you face in the game when it comes to those types. Stacks with the damage reductions from other sources, and your own Resistances for those three types.

People are sleeping on that feat. Add that Grym armor to that and have a cleric give you warding bond (or use blade ward) and every attack which hits for less than 10 damage gets negated entirely. It also gives +1 strength which is nice to have.

[Kamuizin]

ASI shouldn’t even be a feat, but a given bonus when anyone hit lvl 4, 8, 12, 16 and 19 in 5e.

This, canonically, is locked behind class levels (what Larian simulate with being feat locked) and change it for overall character level would be a much better choice than what was done.

Larian just took something that was free on level up and locked it behind a feat cost. Sum that with races being deprived from their natural ability bonus and penalties, and you have a very screwed level up system.

What is done is done, but i strongly disagree with what Larian did here.

[Apollyon]

ASI is the optimal choice.

[Raz]

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

Originally posted by Raz:

Heavy Armor Master: -3 to any Physical damage that is Non-Magical which is most of what you face in the game when it comes to those types. Stacks with the damage reductions from other sources, and your own Resistances for those three types.

People are sleeping on that feat. Add that Grym armor to that and have a cleric give you warding bond (or use blade ward) and every attack which hits for less than 10 damage gets negated entirely. It also gives +1 strength which is nice to have.

I gave this setup to Lae'zel + the Skinburster to get Force Conduit for another -7 from damage on top of Fire Shield. Enemies refused to attack Lae'zel at all, and couldn't attack Shadowheart because of Sanctuary.

[sumdumbum]

RAW in 5e locks ASI behind individual class level. This is to make multiclassing harder. There was a problem in 3.5e where you could get low hanging fruit from several classes and combine them into something busted and they dont want that to happen again.

Something else you may notice is that there are far far fewer weapons in 5e than in 3rd ed. They removed entirely weapons crit threat ranges and multipliers, as well as all exotic weapons. Kukri, weapon chain, dual sword / axe, shuriken, broadsword.

Making people choose between an ASI and a feat is another of these reactions to 3.5, where in you could have many feats, and you were expected to remember all of them and sometimes that can be difficult when you literally have like 10+ of em. Not to mention all the damage added and attack added bonuses combined with their multiattack system having different attack bonuses could be kind of a pain in the ass.

The times Ive DM'd for 5e, Ive always given stat increases based char level and a feat as well because having to choose between them is lame.

[seeker1]

As I generally use feat mods, in many of those mods it's not an either/or choice between ASI and the other things conferred by the mod. If you want to stick strictly to some 5E Feats that Larian didn't incorporate, you'll want to look at Essential Feats (Nexus) and FeatsExtra (now at mod.io). Many of those feats include an ASI along with whatever else the feat confers. (And that's 5E rules, BTW, not a homebrew.)

[Trolleur_Durden]

Originally posted by Mike Garrison:

Originally posted by Trolleur_Durden:

ASI is good in a vacuum, but in a game where you have a very easy access to elixirs of strength setting your Str to 21 for like, forever, ASI is definitely not the way to go for any character relying on Str.

True, of course, for STR. STR is the only stat that is true for, however.

(With items you can get 18 DEX and 17 INT in Act 1. 19 STR if you count the stool leg, but that does restrict you in a weapon slot. In Act 3 you can get 23 CON and 23 STR. But the STR gloves are mutually exclusive with the DEX gloves.)

And you don't *have* to be a PED doper. I find the game to be both playable and fun if I never drink a strength elixir the entire game.

The issue is that, from a pure gameplay perspective, str can be used with every melee weapon, which means that Str elixirs work for rogues, monks and even melee-oriented warlocks. And the fact that the best bow until late act 3 is the titanstring bow allowing you to add your Str modifier to your ranged attacks makes it good on archers too. All in all, in BG3, ASI is mainly relevant for spellcasters imo.

[Fitness Lauch]

Originally posted by Raz:

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

People are sleeping on that feat. Add that Grym armor to that and have a cleric give you warding bond (or use blade ward) and every attack which hits for less than 10 damage gets negated entirely. It also gives +1 strength which is nice to have.

I gave this setup to Lae'zel + the Skinburster to get Force Conduit for another -7 from damage on top of Fire Shield. Enemies refused to attack Lae'zel at all, and couldn't attack Shadowheart because of Sanctuary.

Did try Skinburster out as well but I've found it to be overkill and used something else instead. There's also a shield in act 3 which also applies force conduit, gave it to Shadowheart (who is a life cleric with heavy armor master) and put warding bond on everybody with helm of balduran and the gloves which apply blade ward on heal. She negates most damage the party gets and the little damage she takes gets outhealed by helm of balduran and that legendary mace.