Talk:Tactical Deflect Projectiles (3.5e Feat)

Ratings

	Eiji-kun likes this article and rated it 3 of 4.
	Deflect Arrows as a tactical feat, using attack penalties (since its now an opposed attack roll) as a balancer for stronger and stronger effects. I like this, pretty neat. inb4 "Deflect Arrows is the strongest thing ever, because muh immunities".

	Ghostwheel opposes this article and rated it 0 of 4.
	Taking just this feat can effectively make ranged-focused characters useless, especially when taken by an enemy. Imagine the same feat but against melee attacks. This also has the potential to completely hose martial adepts. It should either be an immediate action, or be at VH level.

It require an opposed attack roll, PCs typically have higher attack rolls than NPCS. While it true that monsters typically have higher attack rolls than PCs but it very rare that they get to select their own feats, and the higher attack roll is usually due to immense strength (such as dragon) and thus have low dex and thus low use for this feat. I also cannot see how this even hose martial adepts, who every rarely fight at range. --Leziad (talk) 00:31, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Feats are one of the easiest and most modular ways to tune monster power. If the PCs can take it, NPCs and monsters should be able to as well. You should look at anything for a certain power level not only from the perspective of it being used by the PCs, but also by those they will face. Furthermore, why should this feat not have a melee counterpart? Why should you only be able to take it to basically neutralize ranged threats? That seems quite silly. And it's because there are a number of martial disciplines (albeit homebrew) that focus on ranged attacks. It was more those that I was referring to, who make a singular ranged attack for massive damage, and if that attack is neutralized, they are made useless that round. Lastly, this uses your full attack bonus on every hit, while enemies will have to take iterative penalties. Taking a -5 to the attack for every time it would be used is probably a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough as it presents a single feat that has the potential to make an entire archetype of characters useless. --Ghostwheel (talk) 00:50, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't make it useless not anymore than evasion make blasting useless, 99.9% of all monsters you will face in your career won't have that feat (unless you play a Wuxia game I guess). Also if we bring homebrew content in the discussion there a LOT more material around. Now does it make the PC too strong against ranged attackers? Perhaps, but it is a game where we have stuff like cleric who steamroll pretty much an entire type and rogues who practically ignore everything reflex. I do not even remotely see how this completely negate an archetype, not anymore than vermins making beguilers useless or undead making rogues useless. --Leziad (talk) 01:01, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Improved evasion is incredibly hard to get, as opposed to a single feat that has just one prerequisite. The point is that if there are ranged characters on the board, this feat makes the game less fun for them if they need to target the person with this feat. If there aren't any such characters, then this feat is a slot wasted and is useless. Bringing clerics into this conversation is silly as this is meant to be H-level. As for rogues, I'm fine with each character being "almost" immune to abilities that target one save as long as characters who target them have different save-targeting abilities (if they rely on those) making combat more tactical. However, if you have no other recourse (as ranged characters tend to not have), then, as I said, this feat makes the game less fun for them. And yes, I would argue that undead make vanilla rogues (without ACFs) useless and make the game not fun for them, same for vermin and characters that use enchantment spells virtually exclusively. Neither is good for the game because it makes it less fun. I think it's self-evident why this is bad. --Ghostwheel (talk) 01:56, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Evasion is a 2nd level ability, improved evasion is really good but mostly just icing on the evasion cake. Also i highly disagree on undead making rogue completely useless, it just somewhat annoying. Plants, ooze and undeads are usually found at lower levels with and become much rarer past 10th (of course there are still vampire and liches, but those are hardly common). This feat isn't even outright immunity, there is a roll involved. You need to invest 2 feats (combat reflexes and the feat itself) and a high dexterity to fully benefit from it and even then you need to roll. Sure combat reflexes is useful on some build, but eating up your AoOs to deflect ranged attacks so there a trade off.

Archers have plenty of ways to deal with someone with this feat: Such as using +1 siege arrow or a siege bow (homebrew) or catch the offender while flat-footed (can't deflect attacks while flat footed) which is easy if you snipe or become invisible. If you fight multiple creatures you could always target someone else, or use exploding arrows aimed at it square. If you are dedicated at ranging fighting you HAVE ways to bypass stuff that ruin you day like wind wall or total cover. If you really need the guy dead a wand of true strike will make you attack essentially undetectable. This is not immunity, in fact this is very very far from immunity. It more like a saving throw.

And to answer your question, yes, there probably should be a melee version of deflect arrow, in fact I made one. I didn't make a melee version of this feat because I couldn't find interesting tactical maneuvers to go along with it. The argument that it make the game less fun is also fully subjective, I like to find ways around counter and not having tom mindlessly roll to hit. If anything even as an archer I like to find ways around hard counter like wind wall (or just accept that I can't target this dude and move one) as long as it doesn't happen every combat. So no, I do not think this make the any game less fun. Sometime you need to accept that your pyromancer can't fireball the conjured fire elemental minions, he can still target the wizard who summoned them though.

This does not make ranged attackers useless unless every enemies you face have access to this feat and have a higher attack bonus, these kinds of things are taken care of by natural diversity of encounters. If for some reason you play a game where ranged attackers are like... the only enemies (I dunno some god banned melee weapons or something), disallowing this feat and deflect arrows (as well as other variant) is perfectly understandable. But this is more like a DM banning rogues and clerics because this is a undead-centric campaign, it special cases that do not need to be represented in the balance system. --Leziad (talk) 02:20, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

	Spanambula favors this article and rated it 4 of 4!
	More options is good, and makes for more strategic battlefield thinking, as opposed to the plain old "nyah, nyah, you missed me."

Attack Bonus to AoO

Would feats/abilities that increase you Attack of Opportunity attack rolls increase your attack rolls to deflect? I know that they are not technically an AoO but since they cost an AoO and they they are basically a reactionary action I thought that it could apply. Amdillae (talk) 01:37, 28 August 2015 (UTC)